Home schools: How do they affect children?
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By Bridget Murray
Monitor Staff
It started out as a few parents teaching their children the basics in the living room instead of sending them to public school. But Americans' growing dissatisfaction with the public education system has catapulted the home-schooling movement into a major educational phenomenon.
During the 1980s, states and educators officially sanctioned it, instead of dismissing it as a passing fancy of societal dissenters. Today, about 900,000 children are schooled at home, up from 300,000 in 1990 and just a handful 30 years ago, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association.
A small body of research indicates that home-educated children do as well academically as their school-educated peers, boosting the movement's popularity. On standardized tests such as the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, home-schooled children score on average in the 77th percentile, considerably above national averages.
But the home-education boom has been accompanied by increasing skepticism from psychologists and other educators. Many psychologists are concerned that the practice denies children social and educational opportunities unique to traditional schooling. They fear that home-schoolers are trying to protect children from becoming adults.
'We have to rear kids for the culture they will live in,' says child-and-adolescent psychologist Neil Bernstein, PhD, a consultant for the Virginia public schools.
Parents who home-school tend to have attended or graduated from college. Most have three or more children and an average annual income of $25,000 to $50,000, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association. Many are Christians and Mormons, but atheists, libertarians and liberals also comprise their ranks.
Most states have adopted formal policies on home-schooling, many mandating 180 four- to five-hour days of instruction a year in mathematics, reading, writing, history and science. Several states also require standardized tests to ensure that children are learning enough. To help out, a slew of companies now offer home-schooling textbooks and curricula. Parents see multiple benefits from home education including:
Home-schoolers believe their approach improves children's relations with adults, and that through it, they can control who their children associate with and keep them from a peer culture that leads to premarital sex, drugs, alcohol, swearing and laziness.
'I saw the drug deals and the bad behavior and the making out that goes on in schools and I said, 'No thank you',' says Kimberly Schumm of Manhattan, Kan., who seven years ago began home-schooling her five young children, ages 3 to 15.
A lack of religious and moral teaching in public schools is a major concern for many home-schoolers.
'We are reclaiming our kids and bringing values back to America by loving them,' says home-schooler Leslie Hladik, who lives outside Albuquerque, N.M., with her husband, Bill, a nuclear pharmacy professor at the University of New Mexico. She uses Seton Home Schooling, a Catholic curriculum, to teach honesty, obedience and altruism along with reading, writing and arithmetic, to their five children, who range from age 2 to 13.
Hladik believes the public schools undermine such values. She withdrew her children from school when she heard about other children insulting them and making lewd sexual comments.
'The schools annihilate kids' sense of values,' says Hladik.
For example, Linda Condalora chooses to home-school her two children, 11 and 13, so that she can closely monitor their progress. Her daughter was ahead of the class when she first entered public kindergarten, but by first grade she became bored and hated school.
'Because her needs weren't met, she went from self-assured to withdrawn,' says Condalora. 'I felt I could do better.'
Her efforts have been worth it, she says. Both children score in the top percentile on standardized tests, and her son is working at a level two grades ahead of his peers.
Whereas children of busy, disengaged parents are more likely to experiment with drugs or alcohol, children whose parents are engaged in their education are more confident and succeed better at school, research shows. In fact, a recent study of 20,000 high school students by Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg, PhD, found that parental disengagement contributes to low academic achievement.
While psychologists acknowledge that home-schooling, shields children from base attitudes, substance abuse and violence, they note that all youth will eventually encounter such aspects of society. Most psychologists believe that parents can help teachers tackle such problems, rather than keeping their children out of school. Increased parental support for schools would ultimately benefit society more, they say.
Also, home-schooling may draw out students' strengths, but it can fail to advance children in their weak areas, says psychologist Sydney Moon, PhD, a professor of gifted education at Purdue University. She bases her conclusion on a 1995 case study of an 11-year-old boy in home education who lagged behind socially and mathematically.
However, a 1986 study by psychologist Mona Delahooke, PhD, of the California School of Professional Psychology, showed no differences between the academic achievement of children taught at home and at school. Delahooke gave such standardized tests as the IQ to 28 children being home-schooled and 32 children attending private school in San Marino, Calif. Both groups scored the same.
But Delahooke still has reservations about home-schooling's sheltered nature. Specifically she and other psychologists are concerned about the:
'What if parents are teaching a narrow view that goes against what society values?' Rayburn wonders. 'The school is more apt to represent what society as a whole values.'
School encourages children to cooperate with each other and teaches socialization skills such as self-control, accountability and timeliness, says Bernstein. In school, children learn that there are consequences for being late and failing to turn in homework. They learn to respect others, wait their turn, share their textbook and check impulses to shout out the answer, Bernstein says.
Finding adequate collegiate and professional training can also prove difficult, Bernstein notes. Standardized tests and college-entrance examinations help, however there are no guarantees that home-schooled children will gain acceptance into college. Practically all colleges accept applications from home-schooled students, but their criteria for accepting students is subjective and varies according to individual cases, notes research analyst Linda Knopp of the American Council on Education. For example, American University in Washington, D.C., admits some home-schooled students, but finds that judging their applications is difficult because 'there are not set standards,' said Steve Pultz, the university's director of admissions.
Psychologists point to an enormous need for outcomes research determining the affect of home education on students' chances for success later in life.
'My concern is that home-schooling may only tap into one part of a person's emotional and intellectual growth,' says Bernstein. 'We must ensure that we're raising children to be complete people.'