Homeschooling goes under the microscope in new Peabody research

Homeschooling goes under the microscope in new Peabody research

news.vanderbilt.edu/2012/11/homeschooling/

Nov 12, 2012 – Homeschooling goes under the microscope in new Peabody research. In a first-of-its-kind analysis, Peabody researcher Joseph Murphy ...

Homeschooling goes under the microscope in new Peabody research

by Jennifer Wetzel | Posted on Monday, Nov. 12, 2012 — 4:36 PM

More than 2 million children in the United States are now homeschooled, up from only 15,000 40 years ago, but little research has been done on the academic and social outcomes of this student population. In a first-of-its-kind analysis, Vanderbilt University researcher Joseph Murphy examined home schooling from its inception in the 1970s to today in order to better understand this growing social movement and what it means for education.
Home schooling is greatly understudied because it is difficult to capture data, Murphy says. Because homeschoolers are not included in typical school district data or federally required exams and are also scattered around the country in nearly as many households as there are students, it is challenging to evaluate the impact of this education alternative.
Murphy’s research focuses on the history of the homeschooling movement in America, its exponential growth, the people who comprise the homeschool population and the impact of this educational path on the student and society.
The findings of his three-year study are culminated in the newly released book, Homeschooling in America.

These movements tend to be highly ideological and everyone has a belief and ideology. The book strives to move beyond that to actually understand what is happening and why it’s happening.”“The purpose of the book is to offer an informed understanding of the movement,” said Murphy, the Frank W. Mayborn Professor and Chair in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development. “These movements tend to be highly ideological and everyone has a belief and ideology. The book strives to move beyond that to actually understand what is happening and why it’s happening.”

While Murphy found that religion and values are the No. 1 reasons parents choose to homeschool their children, these are not the only motivations. Disgruntlement with schools and personal family needs are also common reasons, followed by parents who feel they can better educate their kids than the public school system.
A common worry is that children who are home-schooled will not be socialized, but Murphy found that most of these students have very rich social networks. Academically, he says, it is more difficult to get answers, although statistically, as many home-schooled students attend college as their traditional public school peers.
“Homeschool students are successful and they don’t perform worse than other students or seem to be disadvantaged in any way,” Murphy said. “If you have one teacher dedicated to one or two children, it’s a success equation, and so it doesn’t surprise me [homeschooling] works.”

Joseph Murphy (Vanderbilt)

Murphy has long researched the notion of opening the education system to market and customer forces through avenues that make education more client and customer sensitive such as charter schools and school vouchers. Homeschooling, he says, is the most radical example of privatization of schooling because it takes the entire cost off the public payroll and places it solely on the parent.
Murphy says homeschooling has become a competitor in the school choice marketplace, but he does not think the trajectory will continue to rise.
“One of the things that will cap homeschooling is that some 90 percent of these families take a parent out of the wage earning sector,” Murphy said, noting that up to 95 percent of homeschool teachers are full-time mothers. “There can only be so many people who give up their jobs to stay home, so that is a natural capper to growth.”
The wild card, he says, is technology, which could enable more students to “school at home,” but this option is actually a threat to homeschooling because online schooling is currently dominated by public schools. Although there is not much data on this, Murphy predicts that in the future, more homeschooling parents will elect an online option funded by local school systems that allows them to keep their kids at home while offsetting cost to local schools.
Meanwhile, Murphy says parents are increasingly willing to invest the kind of time and energy it takes to homeschool, even though research that examines the outcomes of home schooling is in very short supply.
Contact:
Jennifer Wetzel, (615) 322-4747
jennifer.b.wetzel@vanderbilt.edu

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Homeschooling goes under the microscope in new Peabody research

My own experience of homeschooling my 3 oldest children from 1980 to 1985 was a positive one. We went with Oak Meadow School because even in Mt. Shasta, California where we lived then Home Schooling was an iffy legal decision at that time. By putting our kids on Independent Study we legally started out on the right footing to begin with. Then what we noticed with the kids then 5, 6 and 8 years of age was they went from the public school mentality of "parents as the enemy" to a Home schooling mentality which is usually "We are all on the same team learning and having fun together learning new things."

So, because my wife and I were then 32 years of age and building our own home on remote land where 7 feet of snow at one time was the norm during parts of the year then, it became a lot of fun teaching our kids about nature and skiing and sledding and mountain climbing, swimming in mountain lakes and traveling with them. 

Our oldest son got into the Audabon Society through his Grandmother. At one point we went to Lava Beds National Monument and on the way there he said, "Oh. There's an Immature White Pelican!" At the time he was 9 and we just laughed at him until we got back to our home and looked up the bird at on the bird book with pictures and it actually was "an immature white pelican" that we as adults couldn't believe lived several hundred miles inland in On Tule Lake, California.

Flash Forward 32 years since then my present wife and I drove by their in the summer and noticed that there were many White pelicans there. I looked it up on my Iphone through the phone internet and realized that there is a special breed of White Pelican that actually lives in the Tule Lake area year around because they like it there even though it can get very cold there.

But mostly in regard to home schooling it was a great deal of fun bonding with the kids through wilderness outward bound types of adventures from skiing to river rafting to swimming in pristine mountain lakes in the summers, to getting caught in freak snow storms on the mountain in August and September to all the amazing things that make childhood (and adulthood) memorable.

At this point all three children have one or more college degrees each.