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That sounds good in theory but research seems to suggest that homeschoolers overwhelmingly perform better on every single metric. Although I'll grant that there may be data bias in that smarter and more devoted parents are more likely to homeschool.

https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:te....




I just quickly checked its references: two journals that compromise a big chunk of the cited sources have very low impact factors.

Unless they are using a diff. metric for education journals or they are relatively new, I would not consider this a reliable report

1. https://www.resurchify.com/all_ranking_details_2.php?id=7414

2. https://academic-accelerator.com/Impact-Factor-IF/Peabody-Jo....

3. https://www.scijournal.org/articles/good-impact-factor#:~:te....

This is a better study: https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S010...


To be fair, it seems obvious that the education industry (those journals) would have a bias against homeschooling. Getting published by people who hate your message is just not likely.


Do academia (universities) and high/elementary school have such loyalty to each other? I thought that most colleges were quite friendly to homeschooled students.


Academia is (perversely) not incredibly enamored with novel systems from my experience. My theory was that it has something to do with most of the tenured professors being old and stubborn.


People who teach future teachers would have a vested interest, and they would be the ones running the education journals.


> That sounds good in theory but research seems to suggest that homeschoolers overwhelmingly perform better on every single metric.

Being homeschooled and unschooled myself, I got to see that first hand in other families. But I don't think it actually means that homeschooling/unschooling is universally better: plenty of people try it, find it doesn't work for them, and quit.

My best guess is it increases the variance of results more than the average, with some kids doing very well on it, and some very poorly. While that's good for society, it doesn't mean one can entirely replace the other.


> plenty of people try it, find it doesn't work for them, and quit.

This seems like it would lend itself to selection bias - only people for whom homeschooling is a good fit continue to pursue it.


Exactly my point!

Homeschooling/unschooling very likely works well for some (I think it worked well for me). But that doesn't mean it would work well on average.


Control for socioeconomic status and homeschooled kids tend to do worse in STEM subjects. Even your link which mostly doesn't control for SES and therefore is very biased says this. Therefore you can't say that it is better on every metric, if you think that STEM is important then homeschooling is bad.

> Qaqish (2007), on the other hand, examined the ACT math scores of college-bound students and found, while controlling for background variables, that the conventionally schooled performed slightly better than the home educated.




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