Joie de vivre wrote:
No, what home-school parents do (in general) is provide their kids a crappy "education",
There are exceptions, but those rare successfully educated home-schooled children are products of unique situations. They are not the norm.
Okay: I took this at face value but, as a Reaganomanic, I sought to "trust but verify, so I popped "homeschool statistics" into Google, and checked the first two links.
Here is what I found:
From a 1997 study of 5,402 homeschool students entitled "Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America":
Among 8th graders, homeschoolers, on the average, outperformed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects. Students homeschooled two or more years scored between 86th and 92nd percentile.
Neither race nor money spend made any difference.
The second hit notes that The National Center for Education found that parents who home school had higher levels of education. The average income of homeschool families vs. non-homeschool families were the same (probably because only one parent works).
So, large studies seem to contradict your observations.
Some other interesting findings (from other Google hits):
92 percent of superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable and deprived of proper social development. (How would they know?)
"Many teachers also believe that successful home instruction by uncredentialed parents undermines their expertise and jeopardizes their jobs."
Here's a good one:
Standardized test results for 16,000 (!) home educated children, grades K-12, were analyzed in 1994 by researcher Dr. Brian Ray. He found the nationwide grand mean in reading for homeschoolers was at the 79th percentile; for language and math, the 73rd percentile.
54.7% of homeschoolers achieved individual scores in the top quarter of the population, more than double the number of conventional school students who score in the top quarter.
And: "The 2219 students reporting their homeschool status on the SAT in 1999 scored an average of 1083 (verbal 548, math 535), 67 points above the national average of 1016. In 2004 the 7858 homeschool students taking the ACT scored an average of 22.6, compared to the national average of 20.9."
Wow. And I hear they're pretty good at Spelling and Geography Bees, too!