Last year Garvin Thomas of NBC Channel 11 interviewed Janine and I about our response to a court ruling in California which seemed to outlaw homeschooling. (You can still watch the video.)
Then the next day Janine was on the front page of our local paper!
Maybe we are going to get our second fifteen minutes of fame.
Greg Toppo of USA Today just contacted me about a recent report on the status of education in America. The Condition of Education 2009 was recently released. (Note it is a large PDF file of over six meg and 359 pages.) Greg pointed me to pages 15 and 135 which focus on homeschooling.
Greg summarized the report in his article Report: Homeschooling more widespread.
There are a couple fascinating trends in the report:
1) The biggest surprise to me was the demographics of boys to girls. There are almost three girls being homeschooled for every two boys. Any have an idea why?
2) Homeschooling continues to grow. The study found that in 2007 there appeared to be 1,500,000 million children being homeschooled, almost twice what it was in 1999.
3) The percentage of number of parents who are homeschooling for religious reasons has climbed to 36%. It use to be that there were three main reasons, religious, academic and school environment. They all had about the same percentage. Now the other two reasons are 21% and 17%.
I'll try to dig through the report a bit more when I have some time.
Now it is off to a meeting.
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7 comments:
My theory on why fewer homeschooled boys is:
1) Boys tend to be wilder/louder/more active/harder to manage than girls and it can take a toll on mom (I speak as the mom of four very active boys and one very gentle girl!)
and
2)Sports- In many areas homeschoolers just don't have the same sports opportunities that the public schools offer.
Sandy, both of those ideas make some sense.
It is interesting that the mix use to be almost 50-50. I wonder what has changed in the last ten years?
Larger families in general have a disproportionate number of girls, and families who homeschool tend to have a higher-than-average number of children.
Another issue is that far more boys than girls are in special education. Parents may feel less confident in their ability to teach a special needs child at home. Or they may want to keep receiving all the allied services like speech therapy, OT, etc. through the district.
Kuddos to you and your blog for the great quotes.
Interesting. I wrote about this report and the USA Today article earlier today and you were not in the article. I just reread the link and now your there and the article has been editted a bit to include your quotes.
I read the portion of the report that this article was based on and wrote up a few of my findings on my blog. The boy girl disparity may have something to do with the fact that boys tend to like favor team sports which draws many parents to put them in public schools as they grow older.
All in all, I found the report somewhat inconclusive. Especially as it defined homeschoolers. To get solid numbers are difficult because reporting varies from state to state and thank God it does. I'd hate to report or do some of the things other states do.
What is the ratio of boys:girls in public school I would also wonder? Are there just more girls out there?
In the homeschool families I have contact with, if one or more of the children go to public school, it's most likely the boys. They tend to overall be more active and not sit there nicely and do a workbook. I've heard moms say they just can't teach their boys. Ironically, an active boy needs to be at home more where they can be active a bit more and not just sit at a desk for hours and hours every day.
In my case, the academic short comings of our local schools is one of the major reasons we home school. However, I generally avoid giving that as a reason for our choice because it is offensive to my nieghbors who find the schools adequate for their children. I have plenty of other reasons, so I offer them up instead.
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