The Homeschooling Phenomenon

About a month ago, lights illuminated the stage at the Hyatt in Washington, D.C., 275 children sat waiting, listening and hoping.

Under the lights and in the glare of the ESPN and ABC cameras, they weren’t just children; they were spellers, heroes and competitors. They sat poised before their turns. In front of the microphone, they let the nation glimpse their personalities as they worked their words. Scrawling on hands and arms, tracing on the back of name tags or silently contemplating the next letter.

Whatever their technique, the same smile appeared as they completed their task correctly. Elated, they took one step closer to gaining the honor associated with the title of Scripps National Spelling Bee champion.

The winner, 13-year-old Kerry Close of Spring Lake, N.J. took home the title in the 20th round by correctly spelling “ursprache,” which is defined as “a parent language, especially one reconstructed from the evidence of later languages.” In her fifth and final Bee, Close beat out 13 top finishers.

A seventh-grader named Jonathan Horton made that field of 13. But Horton, who tied for sixth and took 27th in 2005, was a little different from the others. He was the lone homeschooled competitor of the final 13. Keeping consistent with the field of 275, Horton’s place in the championship rounds equaled the distribution of homeschooled competitors in the Bee. The 2006 field included 196 public school (71.28 percent), 37 home school (13.45 percent), 26 private (9.45 percent), 13 parochial (4.73 percent) and 3 charter students (1.09 percent). Of 2005’s 273 spellers, 63.37% were public-schooled, 12.45% were homeschooled, 13.92% were private-schooled, 9.16% were parochial-schooled and 1.1% were charter-schooled.

Both sets of statistics are far from representative of the distribution in the United States. According to the latest report on homeschooling from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Parent and Family Involvement Survey of the 2003 National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES) estimates “approximately 50 million students ages five through 17 with a grade equivalent of kindergarten through 12th grade.”

Homeschooled children accounted for 1,096,000 or 2.2 percent. Despite an increase between the 1999 NHES (1.7 percent) and the 2003 survey, the percentage in the 2006 Scripps field dwarfs the national numbers.

A question rises with all of these statistics. Why don’t the numbers match? Or possibly more importantly, are children being homeschooled because they aren’t challenged in public schools?

Mark Egan, Director of Federal Affairs for the National School Board Association has an answer. Egan said there are several possibilities for the inconsistency in the numbers. One is that parents of homeschooled children are more apt to participate in the Bee and other competitions like it to help facilitate some activity outside of the home and with other children of a similar age and maturity level.

But it still leaves the question of the educational value of home school versus public school. According to the 2003 survey “31 percent of homeschooled children had parents who cited concern about the environment of other schools, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure, as the most important reason for homeschooling and 30 percent had parents who said the most important reason was to provide religious or moral instruction (table 4). While these were the two most common responses, another 16 percent of homeschooled students had parents who said dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available at other schools was their most important reason for homeschooling.”

Tia Natasha-Elizabeth Thomas, an 11-year-old who tied for 22nd, made her third straight national finals appearance in the 2006 Bee. Thomas’ mother, Pamela, oversees her studies at their home in California.

“She’s always been really advanced; she’s always been very bright,” Pamela said. “We don’t just homeschool for academic reasons. We homeschool for character reasons as well. But we are in charge of the molding of her education and I think that’s a good thing.”

Samir Patel, another homeschooler and a favorite to win the 2006 Bee, took 2nd, 27th and 3rd in the last three finals. This year, he tied for 14th after missing “eremacausis.” His mother, Jyoti Patel, serves as his teacher and Bee coach.

“As he’s getting older, it’s becoming harder to do everything at home,” she said. “So I will send him out for his Spanish classes and his literature classes. I send him off periodically for science, depending on what sciences we are doing, but I typically keep the math, the history and the English at home.”

Read more about National Spelling Bee contestants and homeschooling in The Homeschooling Decision.

Trevor Hayes is an intern with Accuracy in Media, Accuracy in Academia’s parent organization.