Prince Vogelfrei: People say smug shit like this while not doing the tiniest bit of research on homeschooling outcomes which beat public schooling in every standardized test category. California makes everyone do tests, we have the data. But what does the truth matter when superiority is to be had.
California does not, in fact, require that home schoolers take a standard exam and we do not, in fact, have this data.
There are two states that require testing exclusively (other states have alternative options to an exam) and those are Oregon and South Dakota. To my knowledge no one has made a concerted effort to actually use these data to answer this question in a statistically valid way. One complication is that they are using these tests to force children back into public school if they do especially poorly. Given that some portion of these children are probably performing poorly due to more innate factors and not wholly educational neglect, this artificially inflates the home schoolers’ scores, because any low performing students are removed. But in theory, this can be modelled—it’s just that no one has done it yet.
The reality is we simply do not have any studies that show either is clearly better. Erik Hoel has more to say on this.
California does not, in fact, require that home schoolers take a standard exam and we do not, in fact, have this data.
There are two states that require testing exclusively (other states have alternative options to an exam) and those are Oregon and South Dakota. To my knowledge no one has made a concerted effort to actually use these data to answer this question in a statistically valid way. One complication is that they are using these tests to force children back into public school if they do especially poorly. Given that some portion of these children are probably performing poorly due to more innate factors and not wholly educational neglect, this artificially inflates the home schoolers’ scores, because any low performing students are removed. But in theory, this can be modelled—it’s just that no one has done it yet.
The reality is we simply do not have any studies that show either is clearly better. Erik Hoel has more to say on this.