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AKRON, Ohio (AP) - Home schooling is growing in popularity in the United States with almost no oversight and little accountability, leaving the power to educate and raise children solely to parents, the Akron Beacon Journal reported Sunday.
The U.S. Department of Education estimated in July that about 1.1 million children are home schooled, or about 2 percent of the nation's 53 million children ages 6 to 18.
The number is growing 10 times as fast as the general school-age population, the department estimated.
At it's heart, home schooling is a parental rights movement, driven by a growing dissatisfaction with public schools, the newspaper reported as part of a seven-part series. Some home-schooling parents maintain their right to raise their children is God-given.
Albert Gotch said he turned to home education after public school officials in Kansas, one of the places the family lived before moving to Louisville, east of Canton, attempted to tell him how to be a parent.
"Some of it crossed the line,'' he said.
Gotch also knew his children were bright, even gifted in certain subjects.
"We were thinking we could do as well or a better job,'' he said.
His children, Lucy, 17, and Sally, 13, are top-notch in math and science. They excel in other areas, too, and their scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills prove it.
Each year, the Gotch children take a full battery of Iowa tests. But only a few states require that home-schooled children be tested and Ohio is not one of them.
Local school superintendents and school officials know little about home-schooled children in Ohio. The state knows even less and is not alone.
Census data make it impossible to know the number of home-schooled children because forms do not ask for that information.
For a movement heading into its third decade, research is paltry.
The U.S. Department of Education study was the first to use a random national survey of 12,000 households with children.
Five years earlier, the National Center for Education Statistics, working with home-school advocates, conducted a survey of known home schoolers. The findings, released in July 2001, have been used to help define the movement.
Home-schooling families are more likely than the general population to be white, and the parents tend to be better educated and have more children; household incomes are similar.
The report was based on limited surveys, and no one knows if the sample was representative of the home-schooling community.
While the triumphs of home schooling outnumber the tragedies, the evidence is anecdotal for both. There is no genuine government effort to collect information and study the phenomenon.
Researchers told the newspaper that the academic world has been reluctant to study home schoolers because a large number of families resist outside contact and prefer not to answer questions.
Friction exists between home schoolers, who see their movement as a fundamental parental right, and the social workers, school officials and others who try to monitor the children.
James Muchmore, a Western Michigan University professor, has studied the home schooling movement and, without pointing fingers at either side, believes it is emerging as a polarizing issue.
"It is becoming almost like the abortion issue and gun control - those perennial issues with fanatics on both sides who don't trust each other one bit,'' Muchmore said.
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