More about educational attainment

I have mentioned that self selection has been a bit of a devil, both here and in the USA, when it comes to looking at the academic achievement of children educated at home. In recent years, a new way of looking at the situation has emerged, one which is objective and enables us to check the attainment of home educated children against those who have been taught at school. Best of all, it does not depend upon self selection, at least not directly. The only problem is that this information is restricted to America.

Americans wishing to gain admission to colleges and universities sit either the SAT or ACT test. In the last few years, students taking these two tests have been specifically asked whether or not they have been home educated. The results of these tests have, as with other tests, shown home educated students to be ahead of those who attended school, but with a far narrower margin than has previously been claimed by some researchers. On the ACT college entrance test, for instance, it is possible to score from one to thirty six. Schooled students average about twenty one, while those who have been home educated come in at just under twenty three. The individual components however are revealing. In reading, the home educated are greatly ahead of average, they are roughly level in science and slightly behind in mathematics.

The slightly higher score for home educated teenagers is almost entirely due to their having a richer vocabulary and being more fluent readers. When other academic areas are looked at, they are either dead level or a little behind their schooled peers. These data from colleges throw up another statistic which may perhaps be significant. The proportion of home educated students actually taking the SAT and ACT tests for college entrance is lower than expected, given the numbers of home educated children in the Unites States. In other words, it looks as though home educated children are less likely than those who have attended school to apply for a place at college or university. This might mean that overall, children educated at home tend to be academically behind schooled children and that those who apply for college are a minority. It might equally well mean of course that they are starting businesses, writing or working at more creative and satisfying jobs and see no need to go to college or university. We can only guess about that.

Home education organisations in America are not happy with the assertion that home educated children are less likely to apply for college and seek to explain it by suggesting that some home educated children seek to conceal the fact when they apply to college. It is said that they might do this because they are afraid of prejudice. This is possible but unlikely. Some universities actually give preference now to such students. Of course, the tests taken by those wishing to go to college or university are also in a sense self selected; only those who feel that they wish to study at college take them. There are some difficulties with accepting these data at face value. We have no idea how long those who said they were home educated were actually taught at home. It could have been a year or it might have been from birth; we simply don't know. It is not hard to see how this could distort the figures.

The statistics from the SATS and ACT tests are interesting. They seem to show that home educated children who wish to apply for higher education are at least as accomplished generally as the children who have been in school. To that extent, it is an endorsement of home education, albeit not a dramatic one. More work is needed though to find out why home educated children are apparently less likely to apply for college or university in the first place. I have a suspicion that something of this sort is likely to be happening in this country before too long. The DCSF feasibility study, which I have mentioned before, looks to me as though it could lead to the gathering of this sort of information here, which would be very interesting.