Several years ago, our family received a brochure from a local private school, authored by a gentleman whose doctoral credentials in the field of education were prominently displayed.  The good doctor explained,

“There is a misjudgment among some circles that a teacher does not need to be university trained or carry the appropriate credentials. . . unqualified persons should not perform brain surgery.”  

Such statements imply that the education of a child is a highly technical affair that must not, under any circumstances, be placed under the purview of an uneducated parent.  Ergo, whatever you do, don’t try this at home!” 

Never mind the data collected over the last 25 years by those who study the homeschooling movement where this sort of thing is done at home!  

Back in the last 1990′s the Rudner study found homeschoolers scoring head and shoulders above their counterparts from public and private school.  It wasn’t until last year that Dr. Brian Ray from NHERI, conducted another significant study on the academic performance of home educated students in this country. To tell you the truth, many leaders were a little nervous about what he would find, since the movement has changed dramatically over the last ten years.  In this new study, Dr. Ray included a wider variety of testing services, and covered a sample size in excess of 12,000 students.  Amazingly, Ray found that the homeschooling is performing substantially better than they did 10 years earlier!   The results are contained in the chart below.

Average Percentile (National Average – 50 percentile)

	2009 Ray Study	1999 Rudner Study
Reading	89	85
Language	84	73
Math	84	77

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