Are there a lot more home-schooled high school students, or are they just conveniently mislabeled dropouts? You decide.
More than 22,620 Texas secondary students who stopped showing up for class in 2008 were excluded from the state’s dropout statistics because administrators said they were being home-schooled, according to Texas Education Agency figures.
But that’s where the scrutiny of this growing population seems to end, leaving some experts convinced that schools are disguising thousands of middle and high school dropouts in this hands-off category.
While home-schooling’s popularity has increased, the rate of growth concentrated in Texas’ high school population is off the chart: It’s nearly tripled in the last decade, including a 24 percent jump in a single year.
“That’s just ridiculous,” said Brian D. Ray, founder of the National Home Education Research Institute. “It doesn’t sound very believable.”
Texas’ lax documentation and hands-off practices make it impossible to know how many of these students are actually being taught at home. It also opens the door to abuse of the designation, which could help school districts avoid the sanctions that come with high dropout rates, experts said.
It’s not a particularly hard question. It’s also a reminder of the stark differences in how the two gubernatorial candidates view and approach the issue. We can’t get a handle on this problem until we understand the scope of it a lot better than we do right now.
It should become apparent over time what’s going on when you compare rates of college entry between the home-schooled high-schoolers and their institutionalized peers.