Home Schooling Goes Mainstream

= feature story about the growing popularity and contribution of home schooling in the education sphere.

Article: Milton Gaither, Education Next, Home Schooling goes Mainstream, 2008

URL = http://media.hoover.org/documents/ednext_20091_10.pdf

Snippets:

"From 1999 to 2003, the number of home-schooled children grew by 29 percent; among minorities, home-schooled children increased by 20 percent despite a modest decrease in home schooling among Hispanics.

Home Education is now being done by so many different kinds of people for so many different reasons that it no longer makes much sense to speak of it as a political movement.

Survey research has revealed a heterogeneous population of home schoolers and higher rates of minority home schooling than expected. Economist Guillermo Montes’s analysis of data from the massive 2001 National Household Education Survey found that 70 percent of respondents cited a nonreligious reason as the top motivator in their decision to home school. Home schoolers whose motivations are primarily religious have certainly not gone away, but they are now joined by those whose reasons range from concerns about special education to bad experiences with teachers or school bullies to time-consuming outside activities to worries over peanut allergies.

A 2004 study of the home-school admissions policies of 72 colleges and universities found that home schoolers were generally happy with the way they were evaluated and universities were happy with the performance and graduation rates of the home schoolers they admitted." (http://openeducationnews.org/2008/11/21/home-schooling-goes-mainstream/)