Another large study demonstrates that homeschooling is far superior to public schooling… and the performance gap appears to be rising along with the number of homeschoolers :
Drawing from 15 independent testing services, the Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics included 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states who took three well-known tests—California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and Stanford Achievement Test for the 2007–08 academic year. The Progress Report is the most comprehensive homeschool academic study ever completed.
Overall the study showed significant advances in homeschool academic achievement as well as revealing that issues such as student gender, parents, education level, and family income had little bearing on the results of homeschooled students.
The biggest difference was in reading, where homeschoolers outperformed their public school counterparts by a 39-point margin. Overall, the difference in average scores was 86 to 50. Now, there’s almost surely an amount of self-selection that gives the homeschooled an advantage but that can’t explain away the huge size of the performance gap, especially given the way it shows up even when the parents are poor and uneducated.
Technology has drastically changed numerous occupations, and we are clearly fast approaching the time that it will eradicate the outdated nineteenth-century agragrian concept of “teaching” large groups of children when they’re not needed in the fields.