A recent report in Education News states that the number of children being educated at home rather than in public schools is growing seven times faster than the enrollment of children in traditional academic settings each year.
Breitbart is reporting that parental dissatisfaction with the nation’s public school system is causing an ongoing surge in the number of children who are being educated at home. Although homeschooled children represent only four percent of all school-aged children at the present time, that number increased 75 percent since 1999 and is expected to keep on growing.
“Any concerns expressed about the quality of education offered to the kids by their parents can surely be put to rest by the consistently high placement of homeschooled kids on standardized assessment exams,” the report states.
“Data shows that those who are independently educated typically score between 65th and 89th percentile on such exams, while those attending traditional schools average on the 50th percentile. Furthermore, the achievement gaps, long plaguing school systems around the country, aren’t present in homeschooling environment. There’s no difference in achievement between sexes, income levels or race/ethnicity.”
Concerns about homeschoolers missing out on social opportunities afford to public school students has also been found to be without merit.
“According to the National Home Education Research Institute survey, homeschoolers tend to be more socially engaged than their peers and demonstrate ‘healthy social, psychological, and emotional development, and success into adulthood’,” Breitbart reports.
This high achievement level has caught the attention of recruiters from some of the best universities in America such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford and Duke Universities which all actively recruit homeschoolers.
“Home-educated children matriculate in colleges and attain a four-year degree at much higher rates than their counterparts from both public and private schools,” the report states.
The good news for parents is that they can give their children the best education available and do so for a fraction of the cost of educating a child in public school. Homeschooling costs about $500-$600 per year per child compared to $10,000 per year for public school students.
The report goes on to say that researchers such as Dr. Brian Ray “expect to observe a notable surge in the number of children being homeschooled in the next 5 to 10 years. The rise would be in terms of both absolute numbers and percentage of the K to 12 student population. This increase would be in part because…[1] a large number of those individuals who were being home educated in the 1990’s may begin to homeschool their own school-age children and [2] the continued successes of home-educated students.”
Homeschooling looks like it’s here to stay!
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