Home schooling has burgeoned over the past few years.  (I recently wrote about this phenomenon.)  It has been amplified primarily through the efforts of an advocate, Dr.Brian Ray (PhD in Science Education).  He publishes studies routinely touting the benefits of the process, claiming that students outperform public schools by 15 to 25 (or 30) percentage points.  (He does [or did] educate his eight kids at home.)

(By the way, Oregon State University [from which he was granted the PhD] refused to allow him to study home schooling for his dissertation.  He still collected data for his own use.)

The benefits Ray cites for  home  schooling  include the smaller classes, more adult feedback, no bullying, among others.  He also cites the results on tests- but most students don’t take them, since there is no requirement to do so. The results he cites are for white students with parents holding a college degree, but 41% of home schooled kids are not white and 56% of the parents lacked a degree- and 21% fell below the poverty line.Nevertheless, Ray’s  reports are cited by judges in child custody cases (when there are disagreements about home-schooling), and by state legislators who remove regulatory roadblocks to home schooling.

Sounds perfect, no?  Well- no.

Just like Dr. David Neumark and his reporting on wage gains that he claims destroy the restaurant business (all studies of which arise from his own  lobbying groups), it seems that Brian Ray follows a similar path.  Except the lobbying groups are not his own but rely on the Home School Legal Defense Association, with some 90000 members.  And, that group supplies Ray with selected results with which he can report.

The problem is that home schooling is tough to study.  Not only because testing is not uniformly available, but because of the variation in home schooling curricula and processes used across America.

The bottom line is that home schooling works in some cases and not in others.  That is usually because parents sometimes simply ignore whole subjects in their lessons or don’t follow a structured pattern of education. (These are often the case when one’s home school is faith-based.)

By the way, one of the biggest opponents of Ray’s research is his daughter- Hallie Ray Ziebart- who complains her curriculum was devoid of math lessons.  (These claims are echoed  echoed by two of her siblings.)