Families and educational freedom: the case for home-schooling

What do American Presidents George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt, Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and writer Agatha Christie have in common? These famous luminaries in their respective fields of endeavour were the beneficiaries of home-schooling through their childhood years.

The concept of home-schooling seems to evoke a range of negative stereotypes, including a negative picture of parents with either extremist religious beliefs, or with no real commitment to their children’s education, who lock their offspring away and place them at educational, social and perhaps even physical risk. However, as I will explain, not only are the home-schooling stereotypes unfounded, but this model of educational provision represents the ultimate in freedom and parental power in education, both qualities that are severely lacking, particularly in government school systems.

What is home-schooling?

In simple terms, home-schooling can be defined as the education of school-aged children at home rather than in a government or non-government school. Even so, this definition does not adequately capture the potential flexibility and range of alternative education models that home-schooling can provide. These can range from child-led, interest-based learning to more traditional classroom models with professional teachers, distance learning arrangements, co-operative teaching arrangements between parents, commercial learning centres, online courses and subject-specific tutors providing services.

The private sector and non-profit organisations can also play key roles in home-schooling by providing a range of educational goods and services such as textbooks, counselling services, playgroups and support groups, lending libraries, historical societies and museums, tour groups and so on.

While there is no single home-schooling model for all families, there is one common thread applicable to all - that parents assume the primary responsibility for the education of their children, rather than delegating that responsibility to a school, and through it, to a state or territory education minister.

A profile of home-schooling: international and Australian perspectives

There is some evidence to suggest that home-schooling is already an important form of educational provision for children and is growing at a significant rate. In the United States, a 1999 study by the Federal Department of Education estimated that the number of US home-schooled children ranges from 500,000 to 750,000. The Homeschool Legal Defence Association, a key advocacy body in the US, suggests that the number of home-schooled children may be up to 2.1 million from kindergarten to Year 12 (K-12) in 2002-03. According to the National Home Education Research Institute, the home-school sector is growing at a rate of up to 15 per cent a year.

In Australia, it is estimated that there are approximately 15,000 home-school families with around 26,500 students. The Australian Christian Academy Home Schooling program alone has approximately 1,500 families enrolled with 3,600 students. The 2003 Queensland Government Home Schooling Review report (pdf file 388KB) suggests there are 1,474 home-schooled students in that state who were recorded under state dispensation guidelines, while in 2000 a NSW Board of Studies paper estimated that there were over 1,400 registered home educators in NSW.

While it is clear that there are significant numbers of families engaging in home-schooling education, it is likely that the available international and Australian data understates the extent of home-schooling. In particular, there is some evidence to suggest that there are significant numbers of children whose parents choose home-schooling outside existing government regulatory frameworks.

A number of Australian and overseas studies have also analysed the underlying reasons for some families to choose the home-schooling path for their children. These include:

• Ability to tailor academic programs to individual children and their needs, and to harness their natural abilities and talents;
• greater parental involvement in the education of children, enabling families to transmit moral and ethical values to children;
• strengthened family relationships, including between parents and children and between siblings, and a wider variety of social contacts, including friendships with children and adults of all ages and backgrounds; and,
• the ability to provide a more relaxed environment for children to learn and grow up in.

Other important issues influencing the extent and growth of home-schooling relate to strongly held convictions that parents (and not government) hold the primary responsibility for the education of children. There are declining levels of confidence in government school systems, which are replete with discipline problems in classrooms and in the high student to teacher ratios. There are also concerns about inefficient central bureaucracies, “dumbed down” forms of curricula fashioned by educational fads and a lack of responsiveness and flexibility towards parental concerns and local student educational requirements.

Myths and facts about home-schooling

As suggested above, there appears to be a range of negative perceptions surrounding the home-school model of education. These are often used to justify governmental actions to regulate, and perhaps eliminate, home-schooling. Some of the persistent criticisms levelled against home-schooling are as follows:

Myth: Home-schooling delivers inferior academic outcomes for children, compared to conventional schooling

There is now substantial evidence overseas that home-school students are succeeding academically. A comprehensive US study by Lawrence M. Rudner of 20,760 home-schooled students in 1998, using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, demonstrated that these students out-scored their school counterparts in every subject and at every grade level by as much as 41 percentile points.

In a 1997 study Brian Ray, from the National Home Education Research Institute, showed that the academic achievement levels for home-schooled students, on average, was significantly above that of government school students in the areas of language, reading and mathematics.

There are also some individual examples which demonstrate the levels of academic excellence attained by students taught at home. Home-schoolers were placed in the top three in the 2000 US National Spelling Bee. A home-schooler, Christopher Paolini, wrote a bestselling novel, Eragon, at the age of 15. Prestigious American universities such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton select home-schooled students on the basis of test scores and a portfolio of work.

Myth: Home-schooling deprives children of attaining socialisation skills that are available only in conventional school settings

Contrary to conventional expectations, those children who are home-schooled also tend to enjoy significant levels of social interaction outside home and school. Michael Farris in the Wall Street Journal, March 5, 1997, found 98 per cent of home-schooled students are involved in two or more “outside the home” activities each week, and William Mattox in USA Today, February 3, 1999, showed the average home-schooled student is regularly involved in more than five social activities including afternoon and weekend sport, music, neighbourhood play, church groups, part-time employment and voluntary work.

There is also evidence to suggest that home-schooled students are not impeded in terms of their emotional development. In studying actual behaviour of children, a famous 1992 study by Larry Shyers found home-schooled children in the US demonstrated significantly higher self-esteem ratings than their conventionally schooled peers, and that these children had consistently fewer behavioural problems. Linda Montgomery found in her 1989 study that home-schooled students tended to show higher levels of leadership skills than their schooled counterparts.

Myth: Home-schooled children are more physically at risk than children in conventional schools

It is certainly not at all clear that home-schooling increases the likelihood that various forms of child abuse will materialise within the home. Indeed, there is no evidence, reputable research or judicial data that supports this proposition. Matters of abuse and neglect are covered by the relevant state and territory child protection legislation, and in the absence of credible information suggesting otherwise, there should be a presumption that home-schooling parents are as committed to providing the requisite love and care for their children as in other families. Home-schooling is a conscious choice of parents. It entails significant investments of time, energy and family resources and so it would appear unlikely that the average home-schooling family would engage in actions that would jeopardise the educational development of children.

Clearly, international research cannot be directly applied to the Australian context. However, it does nonetheless provide some evidence of the positive educational and social outcomes of home-schooling for children.

State and territory regulation of home-schooling

In a school education environment where government and non-government schools predominate, home-schooling represents the ultimate manifestation of freedom, privatisation and parental power in education. Home-schools provide the greatest potential to provide education, which is adaptable and responsive to its consumers, and acknowledges the rightful position of parents as the primary providers of education for their own children.

In previous editions of On Line Opinion, I have illustrated the detrimental implications for school choice that arise from the dual (and contradictory) role of state and territory governments. On the one hand they are owners and operators of government school systems. On the other they are funding providers and growth regulators for non-government schools and other educational providers.

More specifically, I have outlined the impacts arising from the refusal of State Labor Governments to permit greater operational freedoms for government schools, their moves to restrict the autonomy of non-government schools (including their capacity to engage private sector funding and services), as well as the impact of a lack of genuine student-centred voucher funding arrangements for a "competitive playing field" amongst the different types of schools. This policy stance prevents the development of a genuine market approach in the school education sector and works to the advantage of substandard public schools and teacher unions, yet to the detriment of students and their parents.

Along with control over government and non-government schools, the reach of state regulations is gradually being extended into the home-school sector. In all states except Victoria the respective education legislation states that it is the responsibility of the minister for education (and not parents) to provide for the education of children. Further, under state regulations, if parents wish to home educate during the compulsory schooling years they must seek the permission of their state government to do so, typically through a registration or dispensation process.

This allows states to identify home-schools, and serves as a regulatory “back door” to impose a range of conditions on home-schooling environments. These potentially include conformity to state curricula, testing and evaluation standards and for individual home-schools to report regularly to education departments on their activities and student outcomes. It requires that the parent providing the home-schooling is a registered teacher, and allows officials to monitor a home-school as they see fit.

In essence, the states are increasingly responding to the challenge provided by the home-school movement to its education monopoly by systematically undermining and co-opting parents by establishing “government home-schooling” programs. In attempting to regulate truly independent Australian home-schooling out of existence by making them operate more like conventional government schools, the states and territories are once again demonstrating their willingness to encroach on school choice options and, in the particular case of home-schooling, familial educational freedom and independence itself.