Homeschools outshine public schools. J.D. Tuccille writes:
In 2014, SAT “test scores of college-bound homeschool students were higher than the national average of all college-bound seniors that same year,” according to NHERI.
“Mean ACT Composite scores for homeschooled students were consistently higher than those for public school students” from 2001 through 2014, according (PDF) to that testing organization, although private school students scored higher still.
By contrast public school kids “bombed the SAT” reports Bloomberg.Mixed, but generally disappointing results since then have education experts worry that many public school graduates are unprepared for either higher education or the workforce.
No wonder colleges not only welcome, but actively recruit, homeschooled applicants.
But what about the impact of DIY education on the larger world—say, the development of “parallel societies“ that Germany cites as grounds for banning the practice? We should be so lucky—homeschoolers seem inclined to create better societies.
“Students with greater exposure to homeschooling tend to be more politically tolerant—a finding contrary to the claims of many political theorists,” reports research published in the Journal of School Choice. Defined as “the willingness to extend civil liberties to people who hold views with which one disagrees,” this finding of greater political tolerance among the homeschooled has important ramifications in this factionalized and illiberal era.
“In other words,” writes author Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform, “members of the very group for which public schooling is believed to be most essential for inculcating political tolerance (i.e., those who are more strongly committed to a particular worldview and value system) actually exhibit at least as much or more tolerance when they are exposed to less public schooling.”
[J.D. Tuccille, “Homeschooling Produces Better-Educated, More-Tolerant Kids. Politicians Hate That,” Reason, January 22]
