What People Get Wrong about Homeschoolers
Is everyone fit to homeschool?
The short answer is an obvious no. But the real answer is far more complicated. Who exactly is fit to homeschool is a more controversial question, and the answer is increasingly that far more people than you might think are equipped to do this, and to do it excellently.
Researcher Anthony Bradley recently took to X to share a graph showcasing abysmal literacy rates across the country, arguing that the statistics rendered the argument that “anyone can homeschool” laughable. The most obvious reason Bradley’s argument falls short is that in far too many places, public schools are the very ones that have failed students and led to low literacy rates. Going back to these schools to solve the problem they created can’t be our only option. But the second reason Bradley is wrong is that he simply doesn’t understand what the average homeschooling family looks like today.
Modern parents considering homeschooling no longer have to ask themselves if they are necessarily more qualified than a professional teacher to school their children. While in too many school districts the quality of teaching is so low that practically anyone could clear the very low bar of teaching better than the system could, in other districts the teachers are qualified and competent. They are also specialized and educated in the field in which they teach. Parents who nevertheless still choose homeschooling are not hubristic. They understand that the resources available to them will more than bridge the gap between their own teaching skills or education level and what their child would receive at even the best of public schools.
YouTube alone is filled with millions of hours of educational content from the top schools in the country. You can take Harvard courses online for free. Khan Academy has entire courses in science, math, computer programming, and SAT and LSAT prep all for free. There are entire textbook PDFs online for some curricula. And that’s just the free stuff. Curriculum in any subject and in any education style—from classical to Montessori to Common Core—is available for purchase from reputable groups across the country and even beyond. Co-ops allow homeschool parents to access the specialized skills of other homeschool parents in a controlled environment. Gone are the days when homeschool parents had limited options. Today, it seems like the public schooled kids are the ones dealing with too many boundaries in their education.
Education quality is merely one of many reasons parents may choose homeschooling. Bullying concerns, religious motivations, disagreements with the politics of their school district, and many other reasons also animate the decision to homeschool. Parents now have the resources available that can allow them to make a decision to homeschool for the above reasons without having to worry that they will need to sacrifice academics for them.
Often, the success of homeschooling students isn’t merely due to their parents educating them better, but due to the parents being able and willing to access a better education for them. The success of homeschooling children looks like the mother’s ability to hire a tutor who aligns with her religious values for her son who is gifted in math, despite never excelling in that subject herself. It’s the ability for parents to give their children the classical education they never received, raising children who can read Latin whether or not they know it themselves. It’s the special needs child getting the pacing and quality of education that her parents want for her, without the father having to put his day job on hold and get a Special Ed degree to educate her better than most public schools would.
The statistics on homeschooling speak for themselves. Homeschool students score 15 to 25 points higher on average than public school students on standardized tests. When comparing the scores of black homeschool students with black public-school students, the former scored between 23 and 42 percentile points higher than the latter.
The statistics also show that homeschool students still excel whether or not they are homeschooled by parents with a low amount of formal education. A parent being a “certified teacher” had no impact on education quality, according to another study. In other words, there’s something about the form of home education itself that allows less well-educated, less well-certified parents to raise highly educated children.
There’s no way the parents of these academically excellent students in homeschool statistics were simply Einsteins themselves. Indeed, for many homeschool parents, they were a product themselves of the broken system from which they now remove their children. The resources available to these parents, along with the abysmal record of public schools, are big reasons why scoffing at the idea that “anyone can homeschool” is misguided.
