Rudner conducted a study in 1998 that included 20,760 students in 11,930 familes. He found that in every subject and at every grade level (K-12), "home school students scored significantly higher than their public and private school counterparts." Some 25 percent of all home school students at that time were enrolled at a grade level or more beyond that dictated by their age. According to the study, the average eighth grade homeschooler was performing four grade levels above the national average.
Nevertheless, some homeschooling families are still reluctant to submit to standardized testing because it would be an indirect method for the state to gain control over the curriculum. If homeschoolers were required to pass standardized tests geared to public school curricula, is it not inevitable that their families would have to alter their curricula to teach to those tests?
Don't just assume the Bryants are being stubborn and unreasonable. This is a freedom issue. Why shouldn't the Bryants or any other parents be free to make their own curricular choices? We've seen the extent to which the educational establishment influences public school curricula, often in directions that many parents -- not just homeschooling ones -- would consider repugnant.
Most homeschool parents -- at least Christian ones -- understand what the education establishment has known for a long time but won't often admit: that there is no such thing as values-free education. With the banning of Christian values and their replacement with humanistic ones in the public school system, we have witnessed the adoption of bizarre ideas having little to do with academics and everything to do with social engineering, directly resulting, ultimately, in the corruption of educational quality.
As more parents opt for homeschooling, public schools will grow increasingly nervous. Homeschooling's financial impact on public schools can be significant. If thousands of students are homeschooling in a school district, it stands to lose millions of dollars in revenue. And with every additional homeschooled student, the public education monopoly is eroded a little further, and control over children's academic and social development shifts away from the state and back to the family unit.
So despite homeschooling's outstanding academic track record, we can expect persistent opposition from the establishment, sometimes reaching the point of policemen and social workers at homeschoolers' homes threatening to snatch away their children.
But we can also be sure that homeschooling families will continue to resist this oppression. They deserve our support, because they are fighting over the most fundamental rights of a free society: the right to raise and educate children as they see fit. They are carrying the banner of liberty for all of us.