> > <a href="[
www.hslda.org]; target="_">[
www.hslda.org];
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<br>> > I've debated this topic before with some hard-core home schooling proponents. While I'm generally favorable towards home schooling, I don't think it's the silver bullet many people do. I would argue that certain traits (which are beneficial to a child's educational development) are disproportionately present in the home schooling population compared to the general non-home-schooling population. Namely:
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<br>> > 1. Home schooling families are <i>by definition</i> willing to devote significant time and effort toward their children's education. This is much less common among the general non-home-schooling population.
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<br>> > 2. Home schooling families are almost exclusively two-parent homes, by virtue of the fact that one parent has to be the primary earner while the other does the home schooling. Contrast this with the overall population, where many children are being raised in single-parent homes.
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<br>> > 3. While home schooling families aren't especially wealthy, they are disproportionately *white*. White students tend to do better on most measures of academic achievement. (Even when financial situation is taken into account). The rebuttal to this is that home-schooled students who are NOT white still outperform their non-white non-home-schooled counterparts.
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<br>> > 4. Home-schooled students are often compared to *public school* students, instead of to entire set of non-home-schooled students (which would include kids who attend private schools). If the goal is to compare home schooling to "non-home-schooling" then private school students should be included.
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<br>> > My suspicion is that if you compared home-schooled students to non-home-schooled students who come from two-parent households where there's a high level of parental involvement in the child's education that the diference in performance would be much, much smaller, if not non-existent.
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