I don’t know for sure, but I imagine many teachers don’t agree with homeschooling. After all, they had to get a four year college degree to teach. They have to take classes on a yearly basis. They must wonder, “How can Little Timmy’s Mom be a teacher, without these qualifications?” That’s why the Chicago Tribune article entitled Commentary: What changed this teacher’s mind about home schooling is so interesting. David McGrath, an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage, wrote the article. The article concludes with:
In the past 15 years, I’ve known of over a dozen home-schooled students in my college freshman and sophomore classes. All were competent in social interaction, and all had already developed their own methods of inquiry for independent learning.
While my experiences are anecdotal, clinical studies have arrived at similar conclusions, such as the one conducted by Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute. His study of 11,000 home-schooled students found they scored higher, on average, than public school students on national standardized tests by a whopping 37 percentile points.
An estimated 1.8 million students are home-schooled in the United States, often for religious reasons, or for insulation from schoolyard problems such as bullying. But the best reason may be that they get a better education.
