Home Schooling: An Alternative School Choice

Abstract

1. Introduction Whether it is due to the global economy, the information age, or other factors, the external constraints on public schools are changing. Parental choice regarding school enrollment is increasing for a variety of reasons. The choices outside the public system are increasing due to publicly financed vouchers, private scholarships, and increased incomes. In addition, both courts and legislatures have required school reforms. In response to these mandated reforms and to the changing environment more generally, public schools have introduced their own reforms by offering a variety of special programs in the form of magnet schools, charter schools, and increased choice among the traditional public schools. Households are exercising another form of school choice that has been ignored almost entirely in the literature. Scholars have not examined systematically households' decisions to educate children at home, or to home school. Given that approximately 1.5 million children are estimated to be educated at home, this is a significant type of schooling. The home school issue raises many questions. Are the families who choose to home school doing so because of dissatisfaction with public schools or because of religious preferences, or are other factors driving the home school movement? The answers are important because they are related to the fundamental question of what determines a household's choice of school type and the potential impact of public policy on this choice. In this article, we build on the existing school choice models to extend the options to include public, private, and home schools. We then test the implications of the model with two original data sets. First, with data from the Kentucky Department of Education, we create a panel of district-level data over five years to examine the factors that contribute to a family's choice to home school. We then test the model's hypotheses utilizing district-level data for 10 additional states.' Departments of Education provided data on the number of home-educated students in each district. The states represent diverse policy perspectives with respect to the degree of regulation of home schools. The empirical results suggest that the decision to home school depends on the expected quality of schooling the home unit can produce relative to that available from alternatives. More specifically, our results indicate that women's educational attainment helps explain home school enrollment, that greater heterogeneity of income within a public school district increases home enrollment, and that stricter regulations decrease home school enrollment. 2. Homes as Schools Throughout history, families have chosen to home school their children. In the 17th and 18th centuries in the United States, some wealthier families hired private tutors to educate their children, but the majority of parents trained their children at home.2 Famous students from these early arrangements include Albert Einstein, Amadeus Mozart, George Washington, and John Stuart Mill. In our country's early history, home education was, in part, due to the lack of available alternatives. The passage of compulsory education laws created a wealth of public schools and the choice to home educate almost entirely faded away with strict truancy laws. Today, home education is an increasingly popular educational choice among parents. For the most part, the little that is known about those who home school is anecdotal or based on surveys by advocacy groups for home schooling. There is some evidence suggesting that the resurgence of home schools as a modern form of school delivery came about during the antiestablishment period of the 1960s. More recently, journalists have portrayed home schooling as the alternative preferred by large numbers of fundamentalist religious households. One thing that has been consistently found in all studies of home education is that the growth has been strong. …