Homeschooling up!

WASHINGTON Aug. 4, 2004 — For more and more students, homeroom has become a room at home. Almost 1.1 million students were home-schooled last year, a 29 percent increase since the last government survey in 1999. The growth comes as more parents, frustrated with traditional schools and limits on curriculum, say they would rather handle lessons themselves.

The estimated figure of students taught at home comes from parent surveys. The results were released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department.

Parents offered two main reasons for choosing home schooling: 31 percent cited concerns about the environment of regular schools, such as drugs, lack of safety and negative peer pressure; 30 percent wanted the flexibility to teach religious or moral lessons. Sixteen percent said they were dissatisfied with academic instruction at other schools.

“There’s potential for massive growth,” said Ian Slatter, spokesman for the National Center for Home Education, which promotes home schooling and tracks laws that govern it.

“Home schooling is just getting started,” he said. “We’ve gotten through the barriers of questioning the academic ability of home schools, now that we have a sizable number of graduates who are not socially isolated or awkward they are good, high-quality citizens. We’re getting that mainstream recognition and challenging the way education has been done.”

In perspective, the 1.1 million home-schooled students accounts for a small part 2.2 percent of the school-age population in the United States, young people age 5 through 17.

Slatter said the new figures accurately reflect the growth of home schooling but underestimate the number of children involved; his group says it is 2 million.

Please feel free to leave a comment under the posting, or sign my Spiritbook (guestbook). You can chat with me on the tag board to the right!