Homeschooling in the United States: A review of select research topics

narrative review drawing on the author's 2013 comprehensive survey with Kunzman, updated

US home-schooling research literature, 1980s-2017

The independent counterpart to Ray's reviews, by the historian who wrote the only book-length scholarly history of US home education. Narrative, not pooled, and explicit about which studies it distrusts and why. Its own limitation is that it inherits a literature with almost no causal designs, so its conclusions are conclusions about a weak evidence base.

Four findings carry the topic. (1) On study quality: the achievement literature "has been impacted by" five HSLDA-funded Ray studies recruiting volunteers "with promises made that the research will be used for homeschooling advocacy", self-reported scores from parent-proctored tests compared against national averages; Ray's 2010 sample was 95% Christian, 91.7% white, 97.7% married, 80% stay-at-home mothers, 45.9% earning over $80,000. Rudner 1999 was "conceived and commissioned by HSLDA" and is "perhaps the most misrepresented research in the homeschooling universe". (2) A replicated CONTENT asymmetry: home-schoolers do relatively better on verbal and relatively worse on mathematics, corroborated across Frost & Morris 1988, Wartes, Ray 1997, Rudner 1999, Belfield's SAT analysis, Qaqish's ACT analysis and Coleman's state-data review. (3) The overall effect largely disappears under background controls: Belfield's analysis of all 6,033 self-identified home-schooled 2001 SAT takers found "there is not a large gap between the scores across school types" once family background was controlled, and Ray's own studies "consistently find no relationship between academic achievement and the number of years a child has been homeschooled" — which contradicts Rudner's duration dose-response. (4) Parental background matters enormously WITHIN home-schooling: Belfield found greater score variance by family background among home-schoolers than among schooled students, and Boulter's longitudinal sample of 110 children whose parents averaged only 13 years of education showed achievement DECLINING the longer the child was home-schooled. Gaither also flags the unexplained anomaly that every large representative sample that happens to capture home-schoolers (Green-Hennessy 2014; both Cardus Education Surveys) finds them UNDER-performing.

High and explicitly named: the review's central methodological complaint is that the headline studies do not control for race, SES, marital status or parental education, and its central substantive finding is that the advantage shrinks toward nothing when they are controlled.

Reaches the same bottom line as Kunzman & Gaither's two comprehensive surveys and as the independently-authored Valiente 2022 and Carlson 2020: the achievement literature cannot support a causal claim. The verbal/maths asymmetry is the one finding in this literature that has genuinely replicated across independent samples and methods.