HSLDA | Home Education Across the United States

Home School Legal Defense Association--25 Years of Serving the Homeschool Community

Featured Studies

Home Schooling Achievement
Reporting relevant data about the results of home schooling in a brief and easily accessible manner.

Home Schooling Works!
Findings of an independent study by Lawrence M. Rudner, Ph.D., Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation. (1999)

Home Education Across the United States
Study on home schooling, conducted by Dr. Brian D. Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute. (1997)

Links to other studies

Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream
Home schooling is an effective alternative to the public school system (2001)
(PDF)

Home Schooling on the Threshold
A Survey of Research at the Dawn of the New Millennium by Dr. Brian Ray. (1999)

What About the Gender Gap in Academics?

When segmented by gender, test scores for home schoolers reveal that boys are slightly better in math (the 84th percentile versus the 79th percentile), and girls are somewhat better in reading (the 88th percentile versus the 87th percentile). Public school student performance in math follows a similar pattern, but public school boys’ reading scores are markedly behind girls’, the 43rd percentile versus the 58th percentile — a 15 point difference (Figure 7.0).

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Footnote: * See Ray (1997) for more detail about the non-equal-interval nature of a simple percentile scale which has distortion especially near the ends of the scale.
** Public school achievement data are for eighth grade based on tables from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research & Improvement, National Center for Education Statistics (1996, November). National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) trends in academic progress [trends report and appendices]. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
Home school data are for grades K-12.

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Home School Foundation
www.homeschoolfoundation.org