Attitude Shift Toward Homeschooling
This study is a couple of years old, but I found the results to be interesting.
In 1985, when the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll first asked whether the homeschooling movement was a good or bad thing for the nation, 73 percent of respondents disapproved and only 16 percent approved. By September 1997, the disapproval rating had fallen to 57 percent and approval had risen to 36 percent. The September 2001 poll (Rose and Gallup 2001) shows a 54 percent disapproval rating and a 41 percent approval rating.
In the 1999 Kappan poll, respondents were asked what public-school services should be made available to homeschoolers and what standards should be applied to measure their achievement (Rose and Gallup 1999). The public enthusiastically supported provision of special-education courses for disabled children (92 percent), opportunities for homeschooling teachers to participate in teacher-development activities (80 percent), and opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities (74 percent) and in driver’s education (73 percent). A slight majority favored provision of transportation services (53 percent).
Of course, studies show that 1/3 of all studies don’t hold up.
