Issues Related to Estimating the Home-Schooled Population in the United States with National Household Survey Data

摘要

Home schooling in the United States has become a topic of interest to education policymakers, administrators, and the general public. Currently, published estimates of the number of children who are home schooled vary by hundreds of thousands of children and are of uncertain reliability. Informed discussions of home-schooling policy are compromised without accurate estimates of how many children are educated at home and whether the proportion of children who are so educated is changing. Estimates of the number and proportion of students who were home schooled derived from two sets of national survey data from the mid 1990s the October 1994 Current Population Survey Education Supplement (CPS:Oct94); and the 1996 National Household Education Survey, Parent and Family Involvement/Civic Involvement component (NHES:96, PFI/CI)also vary. The point estimates of the number of children ages 6 to 17 who were home schooled ranged from 345,000 in CPS:Oct94 to 636,000 in NHES:96 (figure A). Taking estimated sampling variance into account, the 95-percent confidence interval around the CPS:Oct94 point estimate ranges from 287,000 to 402,000, and the 95-percent confidence interval from 515,000 to 757,000 around the NHES:96 point estimate. According to CPS:Oct94, 0.8 percent of children were home schooled, and according to NHES:96, 1.4 percent of children were home schooled.