Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

The Home School Legal Defense Association commissioned a study to determine whether homeschooled graduates are succeeding as adults. Mike Smith talks about this research on today's Home School Heartbeat.

Mike Smith:
With us this week is Dr. Brian Ray, the head of NHERI (short for the National Home Education Research Institute). Thanks for joining us, Brian.


Dr. Ray:
I'm glad to be here, Mike. Thanks a lot.


Mike:
Brian, NHERI has conducted many studies on the homeschool movement, and the latest study is Homeschooling Grows Up. What's the purpose of this study?


Dr. Ray:
Well, since homeschooling reemerged in the late '70s, there's been a lot of research on academic achievement and so forth, but there have been no real definite big, large-scale studies on people who are adults who were homeschooled.


So our main purpose was to find out what they're doing, how they're doing, in terms of success measured in many ways. And people want to know, of course, how will they do in the real world, or will they be socialized, or will they be completely isolated from the rest of their colleagues once they become adults? So we wanted to find out how they're doing in terms of many things such as occupation and income and civic involvement—those kinds of things. So it was really to get a grasp of the final "what's the proof of the pudding" regarding the homeschool movement.


Mike:
Well, thank you, Brian, for being with us, and thank you for all the research you've done on homeschooling in the past. And our listening audience, please join us next time when we'll talk more about homeschooling growing up. And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.