Homeschooling in the United States: 2012. NCES 2016-096
Author: Redford, Jeremy
Date: 2016-11-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Home Schooling,Educational Attainment,National Surveys,Student Characteristics,Elementary Secondary Education,Parent Participation,Statistical Analysis,Context Effect,Curriculum,Online Courses,Course Selection (Students),Mathematics Instruction,Science Instruction,Parent Role,Family Role,Student Experience

Since 1999, the National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES), conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the Institute of Education Sciences, has collected nationally representative data that can be used to estimate the number of homeschooled students in the United States. This report provides estimates of the number, percentage, and characteristics of homeschooled students in the United States in 2012 and provides historical context by showing overall estimates of homeschooling in the United States since 1999. It also provides homeschooled students' learning context by examining reasons for homeschooling, sources of curriculum, parent preparation for homeschooling, students' online course-taking, and math and science subject areas taught to homeschooled students during home instruction. Estimates of homeschooling in 2012 are based on data from the Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey (PFI) of the 2012 NHES. NHES data are designed to measure phenomena that cannot be easily measured by contacting institutions such as schools but are efficiently measured by contacting people at their homes. The target population for the PFI survey is students in the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, age 20 or younger, who are enrolled in kindergarten through grade 12 or are homeschooled for equivalent grades. The NHES:2012 included two surveys related to parent and family involvement in education: the PFI-Enrolled survey and the PFI-Homeschool survey. The PFI-Enrolled survey asks questions about various aspects of parent involvement in education of students enrolled in a public or private school, such as help with homework, family activities, and parent involvement at school. For homeschooled students, the PFI-Homeschool survey asks questions related to the students' homeschooling experiences and the reasons for homeschooling. The 2012 survey was administered from January through August of 2012, by mail. Questionnaires were completed by the parents of 17,563 students, including 397 homeschooled students reported in the PFI-Homeschool questionnaire. In this Statistical Analysis Report, students are considered to be homeschooled if their parents reported them as being schooled at home instead of at a public or private school for at least part of their education and if their part-time enrollment in public or private school did not exceed 25 hours a week. Students who were schooled at home primarily because of a temporary illness are also excluded, resulting in an analytic sample of 347 students. In 2012, the estimate of the total number of homeschoolers includes these 347 students and a weight-adjusted number based on 303 students whose parents completed the PFI-Enrolled questionnaire and marked that the students were schooled at home instead of at school for some classes or subjects (see technical notes for details). When weighted to include homeschoolers reported on both the PFI-Homeschool and PFI-Enrolled questionnaires, data represent the experiences of approximately 1,773,000 homeschooled students ages 5 through 17 with a grade equivalent of kindergarten through grade 12 in the United States, which is NCES's most accurate estimate of the true number of students who were homeschooled in 2012. The unadjusted number of homeschooled students is 1,082,000. Estimates in this report are produced from cross-tabulations of the data, and t-tests are performed to test for differences between estimates. All differences cited in the text of this report are statistically significant at the p &lt; 0.05 level. No corrections were made for multiple comparisons. As a result, an increase in Type I error is possible. Type I error is the observation of a statistical difference when, in fact, there is none. The following are appended: (1) Standard Error Tables; (2) Technical Notes; and (3) Implementing the Homeschool Estimates Adjustment.