| Parents can also believe that homeschooling does just as good a job as other schools. Because they don't list that their motivation was that they can do better than a public school does not mean that they believe they will do worse. Consider the case of someone sending their child to a French immersion school. Most would not say that the immersion school is better than all other schools, but that doesn't mean they believe they believe it is worse. Likely they are sending their children there because they want them to learn to speak French fluently, not because they believe other schools are worse. Here's a more recent study from the US Department of Education: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/TableDisplay.asp?Tabl... This 2003 study is considered to be far superior to the 1999 one cited for reasons discussed in this article: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/parentsreasons.asp For example, on the 1999 study two flaws listed are "when faced with an open-ended question, parents may not have recalled or responded with all of the reasons for homeschooling that were applicable to their situation" and "parents were not specifically asked to report their primary reason for homeschooling". As you can see the 2003 study addresses these procedural errors and breaks out factors cited at all separately from those cited as primary concern. The most listed factor for both was environmental factors in other schools, meaning "safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure". This was a concern of 85.4% of families, and the most important factor for 31.2%. Dissatisfaction with academic quality of other schools was a factor in 68.2% of families, but a primary reason in only 16.5% Regarding the assumptions made previously that any included component of religious or moral instruction implies isolationism and a lack of socialization, that claim is not supported by studies. |