Satisfaction with Special Education Services: Homeschooling, Public Schooling, and Private Schooling
Hello, , from NHERI and Dr. Ray.
The Context
I was talking with a doctoral student from a European country just the other day. She
now lives in an east coast state, teaches in a public school, and is studying homeschoolers in America. In the nation from which she comes, very few families homeschool.
She knew very little about home-based education before recently moving to the United States. And she was very skeptical that just ordinary parents – who are not certified teachers – can effectively teach children. She is changing her mind fast based on what she is
seeing and otherwise experiencing with homeschooling families.
This educator’s preconceived biases and notions are not uncommon. Most of us must admit that we have preconceptions that we bring to many, if not most, topics. Along these lines, virtually all of us Americans have known and experienced only institutional classroom schooling with professional teachers for six generations. With that, many people, in the United States and
elsewhere, are oblivious to the possibility that normal everyday parents, without teaching degrees or State-issued licenses, might be able to do a good job of teaching children.
Such ignorance of the possibility of parental instructional aptitude might be even greater when the topic of teaching extends to select groups of children. One might concede that a non-certified parent can effectively teach a “normal” child but what about a
“special needs” child or one with disabilities?
Along these lines, scholars Cheng, Tuchman, and Wolf[1] recently conducted a study to “… shed additional light onto the issue of whether homeschooling can be [sic] viable means for providing adequate special education services” (p. 10). To do so, they compared “…
levels of parental satisfaction with special education services for families who homeschool their children to families who send their children to traditional public schools, public charter schools, Catholic private schools, other religious types of private schools, or nonreligious private schools” (p. 10).
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Methods
The researchers’ data came from the National Household Education Survey that is regularly collected by the US Department of Education and comprises
nationally-representative U.S. households (n = over 17,000). In their analysis, they examined approximately 2,000 households who had children with disabilities.
Parents responded to a series of survey questions including whether they have a student with disabilities and in which school sector (i.e., homeschool, conventional public school, public charter school, Catholic private school, religious non-Catholic private school, or
non-religious private school) the child receives his or her education. Parents also responded to four different items to indicate, “… on a scale of 1 through 4, their satisfaction level with various dimensions of the special education services their child is receiving. Higher values signify greater satisfaction levels” (p. 11). The researchers only included homeschool families that reported receiving services from a local school district, another local government health or social agency, or a
formal health care provider, and did not include those that provided special education services on their own to their own children.
Findings
This is what Cheng, Tuchman, and Wolf found, simply put:
Our results indicate that parents who homeschool their
children with disabilities are more satisfied with special education services than parents who send their students to public or Catholic private schools. (p. 12)
Of course, they offered many detailed statistics and nuances to flesh out this summary. For example:
… column 1 shows comparisons of satisfaction with the communication parents receive from
their providers. Parents who homeschool their children with disabilities are 0.16 scale points more satisfied than similar parents in public charter schools with the communication they receive from their respective service providers. These homeschooling parents are also 0.40 and 0.25 scale points more satisfied with the communication that they receive relative to parents in Catholic and traditional public schools, respectively. However, parents who have students with disabilities in religious,
non-Catholic private are 0.08 scale points more satisfied with the communication that they receive than their homeschooling counterparts. (p. 12-13)
They found similar patterns regarding parental satisfaction with the teacher
or therapist providing special education services. That is, homeschool parents are more satisfied with this aspect of their special-needs services than parents whose
children attend conventional public, public charter, or Catholic private schools.
Parents who practice home education are also more satisfied with their provider’s ability to accommodate the needs of their child with disabilities that those who use conventional public, public charter schools, and Catholic schools for their children with special needs.
Fourth, and in a similar
pattern, parents who homeschool are more satisfied with their provider’s commitment to help their students with disabilities than families who have selected Catholic schools, public charter schools, and traditional public schools for their child.
Conclusions
Overall, the scholars found that homeschool parents are more satisfied than parents who
send their child to public and Catholic schools with the special education services that they are receiving. At the same time, they found homeschool parents to be less satisfied than parents who send their child to religious non-Catholic private schools with those services.
Following is the core of their conclusions:
Assuming that parental
satisfaction is an indication of quality, the results suggest special education services offered to parents who homeschool are not worse than services offered to parents in a variety of school settings. This finding undermines concerns that homeschooling is not a viable means to serve students with disabilities. Such results are also consistent with prior research which finds that students with disabilities are at least as effectively served in a homeschool setting as they would be in a
traditional public school setting … (p. 15)
Cheng, Tuchman, and Wolf are careful to explain the limitations of their findings and conclusions. They also offer several insights about shades of ambiguity in their findings that are well worth reading.
These researchers’ findings may surprise the person who brings petrified presuppositions to the table of
educational possibilities, but they will not shock the person who begins to understand the potentials of parent-led home-based education. That is because homeschooling typically involves much individualization of curriculum and instruction to meet the child’s particular strengths, weaknesses, and needs, high levels of adult-child/teacher-student interaction, small student-to-teacher ratios, relatively large amounts of academic engaged time,[2] and generous amounts of social capital.
--Brian D. Ray, Ph.D.
National Home Education Research Institute
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Endnotes:
[2] Duvall, Steven F.; Ward, D. Lawrence; Delquadri, Joseph C.; & Greenwood, Charles R. (1997). An exploratory study of home school instructional environments and their effects on the basic skills of students with learning disabilities. Education and Treatment of Children, 20(2),
150-172.