For More and More Pupils,
'School' Is Spelled H-O-M-E
by
Charity Vogel
Reprinted from The Boston Globe
Washington - When they're not taking 'MMMbob" to the top of the charts, music group Hanson does it.
Jaci Velasquez, the 17-year-old Christian music star who won a best new artist award, has been doing it since fourth grade.
And Rebecca Sealfon, the 13-year-old from Brooklyn who won this year's National Spelling Bee, knows all about it: home-schooling, that is. In fact, 16 other students in the spelling bee studied the same way Sealfon did.
But the home-schooling movement is bigger than a few big names. The number of students learning at home -and not in a classroom - is increasing across the country, including in Massachusetts, specialists say.
More significantly, the movement is no longer viewed as an offbeat niche composed of loners, deeply religious families, or families who want to avoid what they consider poorly run public schools. And though home-schooling isn't yet considered mainstream and certainly still has plenty of detractors, it is gaining more acceptance.
Kathleen Smith of Athol, Mass. who taught her two sons at home for five years, said public reaction to her children's education has changed dramatically in that time. "People are more accepting. They aren't as shocked by it now," she said. "For a while, when you said you home-schooled, people thought you were a really Christian person, and now they know it's not (necessarily) like that.
"Now I find that more people are jealous. They're like, 'Wow, I wish I could do that! How can you do that on one salary!" she said.
There are now an estimated 1.23million homeschooled students in the country, up from between 3300,000 and 500,000 in 1990, according to a book-length study published last month by Brian Ray, president of the Oregon-based National Home Education Research Institute.
The study, based on data from 1,657 families, including 14 from a Massachusetts, showed that home-schooling is "the fastest growing educational alternative," Ray said. "It appears that it's been growing at a rate of about 15 percent a year. And that growth hasn't slowed down, as far as we can see."
In Massachusetts where home-schooling is legal and, like most states, does not require parents to have an advanced degree - exact numbers of home-schoolers are not kept, said Jan Feldman, an educational specialist for the state Education Department. Home-schoolers are grouped with the state's 130,000 private school students, she said.
But according to the Massachusetts Home Learning Association, based in Marston Mills, the number of home-schoolers in the state is on the rise.
"When I started five years ago, there were only about 20 home-schooled kids in the school district," said Smith, the Athol mother of two and a member of the organization. "Now, it's about 90 kids."
Susannah Sheffer, editor of the Cambridge-based magazine "Growing Without Schooling" and author of several books on the subject, said the lack of concrete numbers of home-schooled students is frustrating. "The typical joke is: 'How many home-does it take to change a light bulb? Estimates vary.'"
The movement's growth can be seen in less tangible ways, Sheffer said.
But Edward Doherty, president of the Boston Teachers Union, cautioned that the growth of home-schooling in the area has not reached noticeable levels in the public school system yet.
"To the best of my knowledge, it hasn't been an issue in Boston. Maybe it's an issue in other parts of Massachusetts," Doherty said. "But we don't feel we're losing inner-city kids to home-schooling."
That may be because home-schoolers are most likely to be children in two-parent, single-income families, according to Ray, the Oregon researcher. And usually the mother stays home full-time to teach.
Home-schooled students, on average, out perform public school students by 30 to 37 percentile points in standardized achievement tests, Ray said, and the home-schoolers' scores stay between the 90th and 90th percentiles regardless of whether the parents have high school or college diplomas.
While the educational establishment may be slow to accept home-schooling, its supporters say, the general public is not. It's been shown, "Guess what? They're not all doing it for religious reasons." Sheffer, the magazine editor, said. "That's not new. But the understanding of that is new."
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