About 1.5 million kids across the United States of America are successfully homeschooled each year. In every state, no matter the amount of regulation, there are those who claim that more government regulation is necessary. In reality, this is not the case. There are also those who constantly assert that parents, especially non-teacher-certified parents, are not competent enough to educate their own children. Again, this is false.
States with low regulation- those who do not require any parent contact with the state- do not detract from the learning experiance of home-schoolers. In fact, homeschoolers in high regulation states achieve the same percentile ranking on basic skills tests as those in low-regulation states- 86. Obviously, regulation does not equal performance.
In the area of homeschoolers' academic performance, they consistently rank in the 80th percentile of public school students- and that is only the average score. The amount of money spent by parents on homeschooling has little affect on the quality of education. In fact, parents spend an average of $546 on homeschooling to produce these scores, while public schools spend over $5,000 dollars per pupil, achieving very inferior results.
As stated in the opening paragraph, many critics say that parents cannot teach well unless they are certified. Actually, a certified parent only produces results three percentile points higher than non-certified parents- no real difference there. How about education level? When categorized according to their father's education level, homeschoolers only do 8 percentile points worse when their father did not graduate from high school, as opposed to those whose fathers graduated from college. There is even less difference as far as mothers are concerned: 5 percentile points worse, for the same gap.
Then there is the infamous socialization argument: "Kids aren't socialized when they are homeschooled." Reality debunks that argument as well; the average number of activities for students outside of the home is 5.2, and over 98 percent have two or more. As these figures demonstrate, home schoolers encounter many types of people, at least as many as public schoolers.
There are all sorts of stereotypes about home schoolers, ranging from "they are sheltered", to "they perform poorly", to "they are just fanatic kooks." The reason that most home-schooling parents home school their children is not to shelter them, or make sure that they score well, but because homeschooling works better than public schooling. The biased opinions of alarmists should not force home schoolers to quit or submit to the same regulations as public schools.
All of the statistics used can be found at: http://nche.hslda.org/docs/study/ray1997/17.asp
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