School home - Feature

Education Next, Winter, 2001 by Christopher W. Hammons

Fearing conformity, violence, secularism, or simply bad teaching, more and more parents are taking their children's education into their own hands. And more and more of their children are entering the nation's finest institutions of higher education. Can home schoolers handle college life?

IN RECENT YEARS, home schooling, once considered a method born more of religious zealotry than a concern for academics, has captured a surprising amount of positive attention. This is due in no small part to the success of home schoolers at the nationally televised Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. This year, 13-year-old Sean Conley of Anoka, Minnesota, became the third winner of the annual spelling bee in the past five years to have been home schooled. The previous year had been a sort of coming-out party for home schoolers: Eight of the finalists had been home schooled, with the top three slots all going to home schoolers. The winner of the 2000 spelling bee, 12-year-old George Thampy of Missouri, was also first runner-up in the 2000 National Geographic Bee. An astounding 10 percent of the 2001 spelling bee contestants were home schooled, even though home schoolers make up no more than 2 percent of the student population. Sean Conley's parents seem to have favored an approach high on self-discovery, cal led" unschooling" in some quarters of the home schooling movement. "Basically, home schooling lets me learn whatever I want," Conley told Scripps Howard. "There are a lot of different ways to home school, and the way that I did it, my parents didn't necessarily teach me. They taught me some things, but a lot of things I just learned on my own."

Home schooling is a small but fast-growing movement that includes, but is certainly not limited to, an eclectic mix of Christian fundamentalists, aging hippies, and inner-city minorities chastened by highly dysfunctional public schools. Their motivations range from conservative concerns about the values taught in public schools to more liberal worries that public schools stress conformity over creativity. Stereotyping is no longer possible in a movement that is just as likely to include Creationists as it is avid fans of Howard Gardner's theories of multiple intelligences. In fact, the standardized-testing binge in many states may be the largest source of new converts to home schooling.

In the political arena, home schoolers, faced with repeated efforts to bring them within the regulatory reach of local, state, and federal governments, have developed potent defensive strategies--to the point that home schooling has become an almost invincible part of the U.S. education system. For instance, during the 1994 reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, California congressman George Miller offered an amendment that would have required all public school teachers to be certified in the subjects they teach. As reported by political scientist Morris Fiorina in The New American Democracy, advocates of home schooling such as the Home School Legal Defense Association were convinced that this might require home schoolers to obtain formal certification in order to teach their children at home. The word was quickly spread via electronic communications, and Congress was soon deluged with attacks on the amendment. Within a few days Congress received more than half a million commun ications from enraged home schoolers and their ideological allies. A floor amendment to kill Miller's proposal added statutory language that exempted home schooling from the legislation; it passed 424-1. For good measure, the Democratically controlled Congress then passed another amendment declaring that the legislation did not "permit, allow, encourage, or authorize any federal control over any aspect of any private, religious, or home school." In another demonstration of home schoolers' political clout, Congress, by unanimous consent, declared Oct. 1-7, 2000, National Home Education Week.

The exact number of students schooled at home is difficult to pin down, but estimated growth is rapid (see Figure 1). In 1990, the federal government estimated that some 300,000 students were being home schooled. Just six years later, Patricia Lines of the U.S. Department of Education put the number of home-schooled children at approximately 700,000 during the 1996-97 school year, potentially increasing to 1 million by 1997-98. In 1997, Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute estimated the home-schooling population during the 1996-97 school year at 1.15 million and predicted it would rise to at least 1.3 million by 1999-2000. The most recent survey, released in August 2001 by the Department of Education, estimated that 850,000 children--1.7 percent of all K-12 students nationwide--were being home schooled in the spring of 1999, noting that the total could range from 700,000 to 1 million students,

Two years later, let's use a conservative estimate of 1 million students during the 2001-02 academic year. This still represents a large swath of students carved out of the public school system--twice the total number of children attending charter schools and about a quarter of the nation's private school population.