A study can find that one group of homeschoolers scored higher or lower than a group of public school students. The harder question is what caused the difference. Families choose homeschooling, so the groups may differ before either education begins. That makes a score comparison less conclusive than the headline often suggests.
Why the research is hard to read
Some studies report that homeschoolers score well on standardized tests. These studies are real, but many rely on volunteer samples, test only families who agreed to take part, or were funded by homeschool advocacy groups. Families who homeschool tend to differ from other families in income, parent education, and motivation, and those factors also predict test scores. So a high average does not show that homeschooling caused it.
Studies that report poorer results run into the same problem in reverse. States also collect different data, and many require no testing or reporting at all, so there is no complete record of how homeschooled children do. Any single national number, in either direction, rests on whoever happened to be counted.
One study, and what it can tell us
A 2011 study by Sandra Martin-Chang, Odette Gould, and Reanne Meuse compared 74 children aged 5 to 10 in two Canadian provinces. Researchers tested the children themselves. The 25 children using structured homeschooling scored higher than the 37 public-school children; exploratory results for 12 children using unstructured homeschooling were lower.
Those differences are worth examining, but the families volunteered, the groups were small, and the study did not randomly assign children to an education. It describes these children and arrangements, not what switching schools would cause for your child.
A larger study that followed teenagers into adulthood
A 2021 study in PLOS ONE by Ying Chen, Christina Hinton, and Tyler VanderWeele took a different approach. It used the Growing Up Today Study, a group of more than 12,000 children of nurses who answered surveys for years. The researchers recorded which kind of school each teenager attended, adjusted for many family, economic, and health differences, and then looked at outcomes in young adulthood. That design did not recruit families because they homeschool, and it tracked the same people over time, which most homeschool research does not.
Compared with teenagers in public school, those who were homeschooled later volunteered more often, reported more forgiveness, and attended religious services more often. They were also less likely to finish a college degree, and the authors found a possible higher risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. The limits matter: only 187 of the participants were homeschooled, every mother was a nurse, and the study shows associations, not causes. It cannot say whether homeschooling produced these differences or whether the families who chose it already differed in ways the survey did not capture.
What outcomes matter for a family
- Academic growth. Is the child learning at a rate that fits them, in the subjects that matter?
- Well-being. Is the child curious, calm, and sleeping well, or dreading the day?
- Social life. Does the child have friends and regular contact with other people?
- College and work. Will a transcript and evidence of real work hold up?
- Family load. Can the adults sustain the plan?
Different families weight these differently. A child who is thriving in a good school may not need to leave. A child who is bored, anxious, or falling behind may do better at home. Both choices can work.
What a comparison can help you notice
Look at a normal week in each setting. How much of the day is spent learning versus waiting? Does your child get feedback on mistakes? Can they spend more time on what they find hard? Do they do any work they are proud of? Those answers matter more than a statistic from other people's children.
Time itself is an outcome that studies rarely measure. A child who rides a bus for 40 minutes each way spends 80 minutes a day in transit, which over a 180-day school year comes to 240 hours. Add homework that spills into the evening and the minutes between classes, and two settings that look equal on a report card can give a child very different amounts of time for sleep, reading, practice, or rest. The reverse can also hold: a home day without structure can lose just as many hours to drifting.
What the school label does not decide
Colleges and employers mostly look at records: transcripts, grades, test scores, and work. A homeschooled student with a clear record is in a stronger spot than one with thin documentation, and the reverse is also true. Those records help a college or employer judge the work; they are not the whole outcome.
How we measure your child's progress
To start your child where they actually are, we write a placement test for each subject: 25 questions, or 12 for younger learners. It adapts as your child answers. Each subject starts on its own, so a child can begin in the middle of fourth-grade math and the beginning of fifth-grade reading.
We grade everything your child submits as soon as they submit it, so grading never lands on you. When your child gets something wrong, we help them work through it, and projects come back with feedback they can revise from. The saved work shows how your child's understanding develops through the year.
In high school, we turn that work into a transcript with courses by year, letter grades, credits from estimated instructional hours, and a GPA. Academic work is only part of the decision, though. Health, friendships, and how the whole family's week runs matter too, and no curriculum report measures those.
