In 2008 more than 2 million U.S. students were home-schooled. This most recent poll, provided by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) proves that since 2003 the number of home-schooled students has more than doubled. The National Household Education Surveys, NHES, says 850,000 students were home-schooled in 2003. In fact, home-schooling is steadily increasing at a rate of 15 percent per year.Now, that's great news! With growth rates like that, government-run schools start lacking students in some 10-12 years time. Maybe even earlier, considering that home-schooling parents tend to have more children than the average family. And, in a generation's time, people will be looking back wondering how could they tolerate an all-pervasive state-run education system that was consuming so much and offering so little in return.
This expansion occurred for multiple reasons. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 88 percent of U.S. home-schoolers chose to home-school because of public school environment; 83 percent favored home-schooling to provide religious and moral instruction; and 73 percent wished to provide a better quality of academic instruction.
Although Maggie Nitzberg, the brand manager for Calvert School, agrees with these reasons, she adds, “I think there is less and less trust in the public school system.”
Some colleges search for home-schooled students to admit to their school. Nitzberg says it’s because home-schoolers work extremely well independently. Although Scottsdale Community College does not seek out previous home-schoolers, it receives several. For the fall of 2009, Michael Cornelius, the Director of Advisement at Scottsdale Community College, found that the average freshman GPA was 2.54 while the average GPA for home-schooled students enrolled was 3.46.
I wish someone ran the same survey here in Canada. It would be interesting to see how many Canadian children are being independently schooled. Most likely, the number won't be proportional to the US, it would probably be much lower but hopefully - it will be in the six digits, or - very close to that. After all, home-schooled young people are becoming quite noticeable here too.
How do you figure out that your co-worker was home-schooled? He has the best handwriting than everybody else in the office. :)
4 comments:
haha, about the handwriting. I wish that were true! I homeschool(ed) both my boys (21 & 10) and bless their hearts, some males are just not that talented when it comes to handwriting no matter how hard I worked or how many different approaches I took with them. Both are very artistic though, which baffles me. You'd think handwriting would feel like an art form to them, but, alas, no.
I understand that not everyone has the talent, still... You go through a bunch of timesheets, some of which could be quite challenging even to the famous Egyptologists and then you see one with the calligraphic handwriting. You check the last name, just out of curiosity and you figure out that the guy with the neat handwriting happens to have the same last name as the homeschooling Catholic family you've heard of. Later you ask the co-worker if he happens to know such and such and the answer is - yep, these are my parents :)
I home educate our children in Alberta and came to your site through a search on the verses to O Canada thanks for your 07/01/2007 post on that. There have been studies on Canadian Homeschoolers hslda.ca is a good source of info and also CCHE whose 15 year study synopsis is found at http://www.hslda.ca/cche_research/2009StudySynopsis.pdf
Ruth
My husband and I home educate our children in Alberta and I know there have been studies done in Canada on home-education here. CCHE has recently releases the results of a 15 year study; see the following link http://www.hslda.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=60&Itemid=81
Ruth
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