Saturday, February 04, 2006

Homeschooling in the United States: 2003, Statistical Analysis Report

The federal government has released a 54 page report on homeschooling. Here is the executive summary. Here is the complete report, a 510 KB PDF file.

This report is based on a survey by the National Household Education Surveys (NHES) program done in 2003. We need to be careful about some of the conclusions on homeschooling in this report for out of the 12,000 children surveyed, only 239 were homeschoolers. Statistically you have a low confidence rate when the sample size is so small relative to the total population, 239 homeschoolers surveyed versus over a million families who homeschool.

Another room for error is that of those approached, only 54% responded. Maybe a large majority of those who didn't respond are homeschoolers.

Given reasonable concerns for the accuracy, the report still has some value. In skimming through the survey I didn't see anything earth shaking. They believe homeschooling is growing at 5% to 6% a year. Based on the survey it appears about 2.2% of the children in The United States were being homeschooled in 2003, as compared to 1.7% in 1999.

The survey asked parents about their reasons for homeschooling. There was no surprise here. About 85% were concerned about the environment of other schools. A second major reason, for 72% of the parents, was a desire to provide religious or moral instruction. The third major reason, 68%, was dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools.

If you are interested in data about homeschoolers you might also want to check out Brian Ray’s Home Educated and Now Adults. This was a survey of about 5,000 homeschoolers. My wife and I greatly enjoyed this book.

(Hat tip: Izzy at The Homeschooling Revolution, update 70.)

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