
How American Homeschoolers Measure Up - JWLong
http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/
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HarryHirsch
_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.

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sxp
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)

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goggles99
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.

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kd0amg
_compare them to equivalent private schools_

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?

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bryanlarsen
Individual instruction should increase test scores by about 2 standard
deviations[1] but the linked results are only about 1 standard deviation above
normal.

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem)

~~~
nwhitehead
Interesting link!

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.

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georgeoliver
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.

~~~
benmanns
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.

[0]
[http://www.fastexas.org/study/exec/exhibits/ex7.php](http://www.fastexas.org/study/exec/exhibits/ex7.php)

~~~
tsotha
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.

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normloman
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.

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tsotha
If we knew how to fix education, we would have done it years ago.

~~~
HarryHirsch
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.

~~~
tsotha
>We know what works, a look at Finland is sufficient. The subject has been
studied.

You're right, the subject has been studied. All we need to do now is replace
our children with Finns.

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Tichy
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?

~~~
kd0amg
_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").

~~~
ericb
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.

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dsr_
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.

~~~
jb510
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.

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thedufer
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.

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bedris
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.

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hollerith
Could someone add "[infographic]" to the title?

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stephengillie
The statistics details are listed below the image.

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rietta
Interesting statistics! I was homeschooled by my mother and feel that it was
instrumental in shaping my path into both computing and entrepreneurship.

~~~
rietta
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!

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lifeformed
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.

It should be a bar graph instead.

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jrs99
Even $500 is too much for a homeschooled child. In today's world a superior
education costs probably around $0.

~~~
lotharbot
Does that superior education involve a computer? There's your $500.

~~~
jrs99
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.

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habosa
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.

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mythealias
It could also be that they are from low income family group.

