I have a lot of sympathy for where homeschoolers are coming from, but some of the data points here seem poorly thought out. For example, the "[average] homeschool family spends $500/child/year". What about the lost opportunity cost when parents forego paid work for homeschooling? Naturally it's not as simple as that (think of all the time you get to spend with your kids), but still.
You raise a good point. I did some research to see the general percentage of public education costs are dedicated to payroll. According to [0], payroll + capital + debt service accounts for 84.2% of education costs in Texas, which are costs that homeschoolers cover in foregone salary, home costs, and mortgage interest.
The home costs and mortgage interest need to be paid anyway, so it's really only the opportunity cost of the parent. On top of that there are employment costs the homeschooling parent will avoid by not holding down a job - things like transportation and wardrobe.
That said, most homeschoolers I know spend a lot of time and money making sure their children have opportunities to socialize with other kids, which is something you get for free with public schooling.
Now that I am back at my computer (I posted the parent from my phone), let me add a bit about my personal experience being homeschooled.
For me personally, being homeschooled was excellent and I am thankful that my mother made the sacrifices that she did for my sisters and me.
My perception of regular school is that a pupil's daily schedule as a student is very much dictated and regimented with little freedom for self-direction.
As a homeschooler, this was not so for me. After my mother had taught me to read and write, I had a good deal of freedom to do my work when I wanted to do it as long as it got done. This is very similar to the results-only work environments that work so well in the software industry. I was in such an environment by the time I was 9 or 10 years old.
As for politics, from the time I was 11 or so I was a bit of an A.M. talk radio junky - much to my dad's dislike. I was able to listen to the radio throughout the day while working on my school. This most certainly shaped my verbal debate skills and made the political science classes in college way more fun.
The flexible schedule is also what enabled me to start teaching myself computer programing starting at 14 years. I devoured every computer book that I could find at the county library. I wrote lots of code, including a full invoicing and accounting system for my lawn care business using nothing but QBASIC in DOS 5. By my junior year in high school I was already doing web development for corporate clients and I started a web hosting business before graduating high school. The first contract that I ever signed, on the day after my 18th birthday, was a merchant agreement so that I could accept credit card payments for the business.
My education was not entirely directly from my mother either. The homeschooler community where I grew up was quite strong. There are schools designed around homeschoolers where the student is enrolled for various classes - math, science, classical logic, foreign languages, etc. I took all of these classes. The best part was that I had class all day, but only two days per week. This freedom is what let me market and build the Internet business that I had then.
There are many paths that education can take. My experience was that of being homeschooled within a Christian community and then going on to study computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In my personal experience, the whole homeschool process was a highly effective educational environment. It was not until my freshman year at Georgia Tech that I felt constrained by class schedules and having to show up everyday at certain times. However, I adapted well enough even to that and went on to earn both a bachelor and a master degree.
It worked out wonderfully for me and despite being a less common path, it made all of the difference!
Individual instruction should increase test scores by about 2 standard deviations[1] but the linked results are only about 1 standard deviation above normal.
I think the explanation is that homeschool parents are not providing "tutorial instruction" to their children most of the time (that's the 2 sigma effect). I don't know of good statistics of actual parent behavior but from my homeschool readings it seems like parents often provide something like "reinforcement", "cues and explanations", and "student time on task". Those are 1 to 1.2 sigma effects.
Nice - although I have to wonder. It says "96% understand politics, vs 60% of non-homeschoolers". What would be the corresponding quotas for evolution theory?
Also it would be good to have a comparison of pupils from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Otherwise "homeschooler" might just be a proxy for well-off parents?
It says "96% understand politics, vs 60% of non-homeschoolers". What would be the corresponding quotas for evolution theory?
Further down, the text version says, "Consider politics and government too complicated to understand (4.2% / 35%)." I'm not sure how much to trust self-assessment here, and that phrasing makes it sound like this isn't even as strong a result as the infographic claims ("that isn't too complicated to understand" does not imply "I myself understand it well").
I agree. Self-report is fairly consistently a horrible measure in terms of accuracy across the board (this is a known problem in psychological testing). Even worse, any estimation of one's own competency is suspect considering how the Dunning Kruger effect would bias self-assessment estimates.
the average homeschooling family spends $500 per child and year, the average public school spends $9953 per child and year
When you see this kind of statistics you immediately ask yourself who wants what from you and why. Of course the school district is more expensive, they have to maintain their buildings, transportation, and have to offer up remedial services by law. Most of all, they have to pay the teachers' wages, and the opportunity cost for the parent not taking work outside the home isn't counted.
I suspect that the $500 figure does not account for the wage that the parent(s) would be making if they were working. Defining a number that would be good to compare is probably quite difficult because different people would spend different amounts of time, so maybe an average amount of time, average salary of parents, and standard deviation for both would be more accurate (but also much harder to find). Take it with a grain of salt.
There is also the opportunity cost of homeschooling. By homeschooling, the parent is reducing their ability to work full-time or part-time so they are losing money. So the true cost for the parent would be something like $20/hour * 5 hours a day * 200 days a year ~= $20k. (Adjust the numbers as you see fit)
Are you saying that this opportunity cost somehow offsets the difference between the $500 and $9,963 It really does not make up much of a difference. An average homeschooling parent does is homeschooling two kids. Average class size it 24. Divide your $20k by 12 = 1,600. There is still a large deficit difference.
If you want more of a comparison of how wasteful (non efficient) and ineffective public schools are - just compare them to equivalent private schools. They turn out better test scores and spend around 25% that of public schools per student.
Which ones do you consider "equivalent"? Private schools that are the default choice of school for their area and aren't allowed to be selective about what students they admit/retain?
This is the data point I questioned as well in the infographic. Without more info from the original survey as reference this stat as meaningless.
I certainly hope that any parent would have earned far more than $10k working the same hours they spent teaching.
To be valid you'd really need to do a total accounting of time and costs. The means lost income by the parent offset by time not lost due to driving to/from school and such.
Agreed! That misinformation-graphic is full of fallacious information. Just alone the bias of asking homeschooled children whether they think their homeschooling was beneficial; there are so many reasons why there would be a positive bias built in that totally pollutes the data. One top of that, you compare costs but don't provide an adequate cost structure for the fixed and variable costs of the home that the homeschooling is being conducted in??? It's all just trash, and, ironically, poorly reflects upon homeschooling if that is what comes of it.
Ignorance is bliss, just like unsettlingly blissful homeschoolers.
This is a tiny piece of information from a very large and interesting graphic, but it scares me that ~1% of homeschool teachers didn't graduate high school. I'm not saying a high school dropout can't be very intelligent, I'm just not sure they're the best substitute for a public education.
They surveyed homeschooled students about their experience when they were grown up, but they neglected to ask the same of public school students, so it's hard to compare. And as someone already mentioned, the price of $500 doesn't include the money lost when both parents aren't working.
That said, I'd homeschool my kid if i had any. But not everyone can afford to do so (single parents, the poor). So instead of applying band-aids like homeschooling to our national education problem, lets fix public education once and for all.
We know what works, a look at Finland is sufficient. The subject has been studied.
Here's what's worrying: instead we got No Child Left Behind, we got the attendant testing, and no one has drawn any conclusions from all the testing that would have made an improvement to public education. If there were any you'd see them by now.
The only hypothesis that's left is that there is no political will to improve public education.
I'm surprised they failed to measure students up taking into account household income, or parental education, or any of a number of other important factors. This seems like the most obvious statistic to look at, and they don't even mention it.
I'd like to see these data normalized against parental income, education level, etc. My hypothesis is that there wouldn't be much difference in academic performance for homeschooled vs. non-homeschooled students. In other words, my guess is that having parents with some financial means who place on emphasis on education is what drives academic performance, not whether the child spends their day in a classroom or their house.
it is convenient to own a computer, but if you really can't afford it, you can get an old computer for pretty cheap nowadays or even a new one shouldn't cost you 500. Or, if you are broke, you can try the library or try to get a free computer somehow. A lot of people at my church donate their used computers to people who need them. Homeless people go to the library and use the computers all the time. It's not as convenient, but definitely possible.
That's if you use a computer. My opinion is that you do not need a computer, just a library card to a decent library. Or access to a local college library. I feel that the library is still the best place to get a free education.
I'd like to see the data correlated against religious adherence.
In my experience there is a strong bimodal distribution: one group does it because they don't want their kids exposed to the secular world until they are adults, and the other group is dissatisfied with the quality of the educational facilities available in their area.
Me too. I certainly know far more people that home school their kids to comfortably raise them either without religion or non-traditional spirituality. That probably has more to do with where I live and my circle of friends though than I'd think is representative of the country and I fully suspect plenty of parents are home schooling to raise their children with strong religious dogma. This seems weird to me though since so many parochial schools exist in the US.
That "pie chart" in the middle is horribly confusing. A pie chart is to show proportions of a whole, yet the slices are an arbitrary amount of equal-sized descriptors. Even more confusing is the word "percentile" stamped on top of it, causing some confusing about the numbers, making it seem like "87th" should take up 87% of the pie.
37 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 94.6 ms ] thread[0] http://www.fastexas.org/study/exec/exhibits/ex7.php
That said, most homeschoolers I know spend a lot of time and money making sure their children have opportunities to socialize with other kids, which is something you get for free with public schooling.
For me personally, being homeschooled was excellent and I am thankful that my mother made the sacrifices that she did for my sisters and me.
My perception of regular school is that a pupil's daily schedule as a student is very much dictated and regimented with little freedom for self-direction.
As a homeschooler, this was not so for me. After my mother had taught me to read and write, I had a good deal of freedom to do my work when I wanted to do it as long as it got done. This is very similar to the results-only work environments that work so well in the software industry. I was in such an environment by the time I was 9 or 10 years old.
As for politics, from the time I was 11 or so I was a bit of an A.M. talk radio junky - much to my dad's dislike. I was able to listen to the radio throughout the day while working on my school. This most certainly shaped my verbal debate skills and made the political science classes in college way more fun.
The flexible schedule is also what enabled me to start teaching myself computer programing starting at 14 years. I devoured every computer book that I could find at the county library. I wrote lots of code, including a full invoicing and accounting system for my lawn care business using nothing but QBASIC in DOS 5. By my junior year in high school I was already doing web development for corporate clients and I started a web hosting business before graduating high school. The first contract that I ever signed, on the day after my 18th birthday, was a merchant agreement so that I could accept credit card payments for the business.
My education was not entirely directly from my mother either. The homeschooler community where I grew up was quite strong. There are schools designed around homeschoolers where the student is enrolled for various classes - math, science, classical logic, foreign languages, etc. I took all of these classes. The best part was that I had class all day, but only two days per week. This freedom is what let me market and build the Internet business that I had then.
There are many paths that education can take. My experience was that of being homeschooled within a Christian community and then going on to study computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In my personal experience, the whole homeschool process was a highly effective educational environment. It was not until my freshman year at Georgia Tech that I felt constrained by class schedules and having to show up everyday at certain times. However, I adapted well enough even to that and went on to earn both a bachelor and a master degree.
It worked out wonderfully for me and despite being a less common path, it made all of the difference!
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem
I think the explanation is that homeschool parents are not providing "tutorial instruction" to their children most of the time (that's the 2 sigma effect). I don't know of good statistics of actual parent behavior but from my homeschool readings it seems like parents often provide something like "reinforcement", "cues and explanations", and "student time on task". Those are 1 to 1.2 sigma effects.
Also it would be good to have a comparison of pupils from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Otherwise "homeschooler" might just be a proxy for well-off parents?
Further down, the text version says, "Consider politics and government too complicated to understand (4.2% / 35%)." I'm not sure how much to trust self-assessment here, and that phrasing makes it sound like this isn't even as strong a result as the infographic claims ("that isn't too complicated to understand" does not imply "I myself understand it well").
When you see this kind of statistics you immediately ask yourself who wants what from you and why. Of course the school district is more expensive, they have to maintain their buildings, transportation, and have to offer up remedial services by law. Most of all, they have to pay the teachers' wages, and the opportunity cost for the parent not taking work outside the home isn't counted.
If you want more of a comparison of how wasteful (non efficient) and ineffective public schools are - just compare them to equivalent private schools. They turn out better test scores and spend around 25% that of public schools per student.
I don't believe you. Proof?
Which ones do you consider "equivalent"? Private schools that are the default choice of school for their area and aren't allowed to be selective about what students they admit/retain?
I certainly hope that any parent would have earned far more than $10k working the same hours they spent teaching.
To be valid you'd really need to do a total accounting of time and costs. The means lost income by the parent offset by time not lost due to driving to/from school and such.
Ignorance is bliss, just like unsettlingly blissful homeschoolers.
That said, I'd homeschool my kid if i had any. But not everyone can afford to do so (single parents, the poor). So instead of applying band-aids like homeschooling to our national education problem, lets fix public education once and for all.
Here's what's worrying: instead we got No Child Left Behind, we got the attendant testing, and no one has drawn any conclusions from all the testing that would have made an improvement to public education. If there were any you'd see them by now.
The only hypothesis that's left is that there is no political will to improve public education.
You're right, the subject has been studied. All we need to do now is replace our children with Finns.
That's if you use a computer. My opinion is that you do not need a computer, just a library card to a decent library. Or access to a local college library. I feel that the library is still the best place to get a free education.
In my experience there is a strong bimodal distribution: one group does it because they don't want their kids exposed to the secular world until they are adults, and the other group is dissatisfied with the quality of the educational facilities available in their area.
It should be a bar graph instead.