Homeschoolers Out-Perform Public Schoolers on the ACT

Hard evidence on homeschooler performance

This guy looks like he took the ACT in the ‘90s. Wonder if he was homeschooled. (Art by Duane Hanson. Source.)

Hi everyone,

In light of all of the chatter about homeschooling in the media in the past few years, you may or may not be aware that finding and interpreting hard data on homeschoolers is actually quite challenging.

As you may know, I’m currently wrapping up initial revisions on my book on the history of homeschooling, and I can confirm that trying to access and then properly analyze and compare homeschooling demographics and performance data involves a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. There are a whole lot of apples ‘n’ oranges and then random things like car fenders thrown in there in terms of various surveys, reports, etc. and the information they collect. It’s not standardized and lots of questions are neither asked nor answered, for many reasons (some of them quite understandable).

Anyway, sociologist and longtime homeschool researcher Brian Ray and his colleagues have done some good work on homeschool performance in small-scale studies over the years, but it is difficult to get a sense of homeschooling educational achievement overall (for a variety of good reasons). In response to a question at a recent Conference on Faith and History panel in which I participated, I had the idea of checking to see if any of the most popular college-entrance exams had made data available comparing homeschoolers’ scores to those of other students. This is only one metric, but I thought it might be revealing. And lo and behold, the ACT (at least — I still am looking for data on the SAT and have also reached out to the CLT) did issue a report on this in 2020.

You can view the report here, but the main take-away is that in 2005-2019, homeschoolers’ composite ACT score was significantly above that of public schoolers (and slightly below that of private schoolers).

This is very interesting, but not because it proves that homeschooling is better than public schooling. When comparing alternative education performance to public school performance, there are always going to be questions about self-selection and levels of student and parent motivations among the alternative ed families that will complicate the analysis — so we’d need more in order to prove this argument.

What it does indicate, however, is that homeschool students who take the ACT have not suffered academically, on average, from not attending public schools. This is a crucial point because so much of the alarmism about homeschooling argues that homeschooling keeps children away from the great education at your average public school — that homeschooling amounts to educational neglect when compared to public schooling.

But it clearly has not hurt these ACT test-takers to be kept from public school academics, as measured by the standard set by public school performance on the same exam. Homeschoolers have done just fine.

As long as public schools, on average, perform poorly their duty to provide an adequate academic education to students, how can we presume that homeschoolers as a category would be better off academically from attending them? This argument against homeschooling (or for its high regulation by the very same state departments of education that regulate these public schools) does not hold water in the face of emerging evidence.

What are your thoughts?

Warmly,

Dixie