Home-Schooled Children Tend to Score Higher on Tests

Your article on home schooling asserts that Alaska is alone among the states in allowing parents to home-school their children without notifying governmental authorities. ("Making the grade?", Sept. 13.) That is incorrect.

According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, which keeps close tabs on state regulation of home education, Alaska is one of 10 states that imposes no burden on parents to notify the state if they want to home-school their children -- no paperwork, no phone call, no notice of any kind. Most of the other states have only a low or moderate level of home-school regulation. No state forbids it.

Your article implies that Alaskans could sleep easier at night if state bureaucrats tracked and monitored all home-schooled children. Why should that be the case? A recent national study showed that home-schooled children, on average, are scoring 37 percentile points higher than public school students on standardized achievement tests. Are conventionally schooled children benefiting from being constantly monitored, tracked, graded, grouped, labeled, shuffled and reshuffled by agents of the state?

-- Robert Holland

Senior Fellow for Education Policy

The Heartland Institute