This repository is written by someone who thinks homeschooling is a good option and wants more families to have a workable model for it. That is a reason to be more careful with the claims, not less. An advocacy document that overclaims gets dismissed in one sentence, and takes everything else in the repository with it.
It does not claim better academic outcomes than conventional school. One student, one programme, no control group, no counterfactual. Nothing here can distinguish the effect of the method from the effect of the family, and a sample of one cannot support a causal claim about anything.
It does not claim the research literature supports homeschooling’s superiority, because it does not. The most comprehensive review of the field — Kunzman and Gaither’s survey — finds no clear evidence of aggregate achievement gains or losses attributable to homeschooling, and no evidence of help or harm on socialization. Their reason is not hostility to the practice; it is that the available studies are too weak to conclude anything in either direction.
That assessment is not confined to critics. NHERI — the National Home Education Research Institute, the field’s leading pro-homeschooling research body — states in its own fact sheet that research designs to date do not conclusively show that homeschooling causes the positive outcomes it reports, and that one hypothesis is that the findings reflect the demographics of the families who choose it.
The reason the headline achievement studies get discounted is specific and worth understanding before citing any of them: the five large studies conducted under HSLDA sponsorship between 1990 and 2010 relied on samples of homeschoolers recruited for the purpose, with volunteers submitting their own test scores. No random sampling, no controls for family background. Anyone arguing the other side knows this. Citing those numbers uncritically is the fastest way to lose a reader who was otherwise persuadable.
Four things, all of them checkable:
06-time-and-coverage.md.Point 4 is the one that matters most, and it is the one the literature keeps asking for.
Every critique of homeschool research names the same four defects:
| Defect | This programme |
|---|---|
| Self-selected samples | Still true. N=1, and the family chose this. Unresolved. |
| Self-reported test scores | Resolved. An accrediting body grades and records. |
| Method not transparent | Resolved. The whole operating model is published. |
| No controls for family background | Still true. Unresolved. |
Two of four, which is two more than most published accounts. The point of this repository is not to settle the question. It is to be the kind of account that could be checked.
Stated before the results exist, so there is nothing to select afterwards:
| Measure | Source | When |
|---|---|---|
| Grading-period averages, all eight subjects | Accrediting body’s report card | Each period |
| Scores shipped vs scores returned | Both report copies | Each period |
| Working hours per school day | Daily pacing log | Continuous |
| Reading rate against comprehension | Timed quizzes | Each timed quiz |
| Schedule slip: planned date vs actual | Tracker | Daily |
| Standardized test results, when sat | Test provider | As scheduled |
Scores are reported whether they are good or not. A worked example already in this
repository: a timed reading quiz returned 80, ten points below the same student’s result a
week earlier at an identical reading rate. The student was tired. That is recorded next to
the number, and the automated flag was rewritten so it stopped asserting a cause the data
did not support — see 05-metrics.md.
If this repository only ever showed good results, it would be the same artifact as the studies above, and worth the same.
The honest summary is that the research cannot tell you whether homeschooling will produce a better outcome for your child, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What it can tell you is that there is no established harm, and that family background appears to matter more than the schooling mode.
So the decision is not “is homeschooling better.” It is whether you can run an operation of this size — a compliance programme with hard deadlines, assessment integrity rules and a signature attesting you followed them — alongside whatever else your life contains.
That is a question about operational capacity, which is answerable. This repository exists so you can see the actual shape of the job before deciding.
06-time-and-coverage.md.