http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2...c8DFeZPejviqz3GzpBafggd&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1'Hybrid' Home Schools Gaining Traction
Education Week
By Sarah D. Sparks
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Education policymakers and researchers have largely ignored the tremendous growth in home schooling, particularly among these sorts of “hybrid” home-schoolers willing to blur the pedagogical and legal lines of public and private education, said Joseph Murphy, an associate dean at Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University and the author of Home Schooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement. The book, an analysis of research on the topic, is being published this month by Corwin of Thousand Oaks, Calif.
“Historically home school was home school, and school was school,” Mr. Murphy said. “Now … it’s this rich portfolio of options for kids.”
Menu of Choices
Baywood Learning Center in Oakland, Calif., a private school for gifted students, has offered hybrid home-schooling programs for the past three years. The school has a la carte classes on individual subjects once a week, as well as a multiage class that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays to cover core academics. Director Grace Neufeld said demand for the latter has grown 50 percent in the last year, to about 40 students ages 4 to 17.
“Parents usually design a patchwork quilt of different classes and activities for their children,” she said. “What I see is they sign up for various classes being held in various locations like science centers or museums or different places. They also add things like music lessons, art lessons, sports, or martial arts.”
Similarly, more home-schooling parents are developing formal co-ops, like the Inman Hybrid Home School program in Inman, Ga. Founder Holly Longino, a former health teacher at Carver Middle School in Inman, left public teaching to home-school her four children, but last year started the group classes a few times a week with five students and a handful of retired public school teachers. The teachers provide video lectures for students to use as well as in-class projects. Ms. Longino said some parents also take their children to courses at the local college and science museum, but would never consider forming a charter school.
“There’s a lot of freedom in home schooling,” she said. “I don’t ever want to be a school, because I don’t want to lose the parental control we have.”
Diversifying Population
With the modern schoolhouse only in place since the late 1800s, home schooling is hardly a new idea. But the number of home-schoolers has more than doubled since 1999, to more than 2 million as of 2010, representing nearly 4 percent of all K-12 students, according to Mr. Murphy’s book. More than 90 percent of the families are two-parent, one-salary homes, and the mother continues to be the most likely parent to stay home.
While conservative religious parents, predominately Protestants, still comprise the majority of home-schoolers, there has been an increase in the number of moderate and liberal families choosing to teach at home, and concerns about the social environment of schools, including bullying and teaching practices, have now edged out religious values (31.2 percent to 29.8 percent) as the top reason parents teach their children at home, according to Mr. Murphy.
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A 2005 study by Clive R. Belfield, an assistant economics professor at Queens College, City University of New York, found students identified as home-schooled by the studies performed significantly better on the SAT college-entrance test than did public school students, even after controlling for differences in family background and other characteristics.
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The paper by Belfield is "Home-Schooling in the US"
http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP88.pdf . According to Table 3, homeschooled students scored about 40 points higher on the SAT verbal than their demographics would predict, and scored 1 point lower on the SAT math.
