Home schooling: an alternative school choice.

• Author: Houston, Robert G., Jr.

1. Introduction

   Whether it is due to the global economy, the information age, or other factors, the external constraints on public schools are changing. Parental choice regarding school enrollment is increasing for a variety of reasons. The choices outside the public system are increasing due to publicly financed vouchers, private scholarships, and increased incomes. In addition, both courts and legislatures have required school reforms. In response to these mandated reforms and to the changing environment more generally, public schools have introduced their own reforms by offering a variety of special programs in the form of magnet schools, charter schools, and increased choice among the traditional public schools.

   Households are exercising another form of school choice that has been ignored almost entirely in the literature. Scholars have not examined systematically households' decisions to educate children at home, or to home school. Given that approximately 1.5 million children are estimated to be educated at home, this is a significant type of schooling. The home school issue raises many questions. Are the families who choose to home school doing so because of dissatisfaction with public schools or because of religious preferences, or are other factors driving the home school movement? The answers are important because they are related to the fundamental question of what determines a household's choice of school type and the potential impact of public policy on this choice.

   In this article, we build on the existing school choice models to extend the options to include public, private, and home schools. We then test the implications of the model with two original data sets. First, with data from the Kentucky Department of Education, we create a panel of district-level data over five years to examine the factors that contribute to a family's choice to home school. We then test the model's hypotheses utilizing district-level data for 10 additional states. (1) Departments of Education provided data on the number of home-educated students in each district. The states represent diverse policy perspectives with respect to the degree of regulation of home schools. The empirical results suggest that the decision to home school depends on the expected quality of schooling the home unit can produce relative to that available from alternatives. More specifically, our results indicate that women's educational attainment helps explain home school enrollment, that greater heterogeneity of inco me within a public school district increases home enrollment, and that stricter regulations decrease home school enrollment.

2. Homes as Schools

   Throughout history, families have chosen to home school their children. In the 17th and 18th centuries in the United States, some wealthier families hired private tutors to educate their children, but the majority of parents trained their children at home. (2) Famous students from these early arrangements include Albert Einstein, Amadeus Mozart, George Washington, and John Stuart Mill. In our country's early history, home education was, in part, due to the lack of available alternatives. The passage of compulsory education laws created a wealth of public schools and the choice to home educate almost entirely faded away with strict truancy laws. Today, home education is an increasingly popular educational choice among parents.

   For the most part, the little that is known about those who home school is anecdotal or based on surveys by advocacy groups for home schooling. There is some evidence suggesting that the resurgence of home schools as a modem form of school delivery came about during the antiestablishment period of the 1960s. More recently, journalists have portrayed home schooling as the alternative preferred by large numbers of fundamentalist religious households. One thing that has been consistently found in all studies of home education is that the growth has been strong. In the 1970s, the government and various home school groups estimated the home school population to be between 10,000 and 20,000 students. By the late 1980s, the numbers had grown to between 120,000 and 260,000. Recent estimates put the home school population between 1.2 million and 1.6 million and growing at the rate of 10% per year. Home-educated children make up about 1.5% of total school enrollment and 15% of nonpublic enrollment. Some researchers fee l the home school population will reach 3 million by the end of this decade.

   Public perception of home education has also changed over the last 15 years. In 1986, a Phi Delta Kappa-Gallup poll found only 16% of Americans believed home schooling to be a "good thing" (Lines 1996). In 1994, however, a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found 28% of Americans would actually prefer home education to in-school education. The upper bound on the potential home school population is hard to estimate, but it could be significant. Potentially, the upper bound on the home school population equals the 6.8 million families with children (25.9% of all families with children) with a nonemployed, stay-at-home parent. (3)

   The growth in home education has led to a host of challenges to existing truancy laws and eventually resulted in new legislation. Thirty-five states have laws specifically dealing with home schooling. (4) These laws can vary significantly across states. A few states have even begun to offer hybrid forms of public-home enrollment. Idaho allows for dual enrollment, and one district in California offers a $1000 voucher to home-educated children for the purchase of district-approved textbooks. (5) The one attempt to regulate home education at the federal level was defeated in the House of Representatives 424 to 1 (Robertson 1994).

   In the remainder of this article, we consider the decision to enroll children in home schools as a utility-maximizing choice made by households. After developing a conceptual model to analyze the school choice decision, we empirically investigate factors expected to influence the decision to home school.

3. A Model of School Choice

   Theoretical work on the demand for alternative types of schooling began as early as the 1970s with studies by Stiglitz (1974) and Sonstelie (1979, 1982) and with recent generalizations by Lankford and Wyckoff (1992), Lankford, Lee, and Wyckoff (1995), and Downes and Schoeman (1998). In the 1980s, empirical work on the public-private school choice issue also emerged (Gemello and Osman 1984; Long and Toma 1988; West and Palsson 1988; Lankford and Wyckoff 1992; Lankford, Lee, and Wyckoff 1995). This literature has found, not surprisingly, that socioeconomic variables and religious preferences are significant factors in explaining private school enrollment.

   In this section, we generalize a utility-maximizing household decision model of school choice to include home schools as a form of schooling that may be an alternative to either public or private schools. For purposes of illustration, assume public schools are represented as type 1, private schools as type 2, and home schools as type 3. We assume that each household or family, h, has a mother (m), father (f), and a single school-age child and considers a set of mutually exclusive school type options, j, j = 1,2,3 (6) Each household chooses the alternative j that provides it the greatest utility, [U.sub.hj]. For example, a household chooses school type 3 among the three alternatives if the utility [U.sub.h3] > [U.sub.hj] for j [not equal to] 3. The household utility from any school type j depends on a vector of household attributes, [X.sub.h], representing socioeconomic characteristics and tastes for schooling relative to a composite package of consumption goods, [C.sub.h]. Utility also depends on a vector of school attributes, [S.sub.j], which influences the household's perception of the school. More formally,

   [U.sub.hj] = U([X.sub.h], [C.sub.h], [S.sub.j], [[epsilon].sub.hj]), (1)

   where [[epsilon].sub.hj] is a scalar composite of all relevant but unmeasured factors. The inclusion of this random disturbance term will capture both unmeasured school-specific characteristics and the perception of these characteristics by each household. (7) Each household maximizes utility by allocating its budget between schooling and all other goods and services.

   As represented above, the choice of school type depends not only on the characteristics of the school and the socioeconomic characteristics of the household but also on the consumption of other goods. Consumption of other goods enters the equation because the types of schools differ not only in attributes of the school that are observed by the household but also in cost to the household. Publicly provided schooling is tax financed by a flat tax, t, on household earnings, and all households pay for public schooling regardless of whether or not the child is enrolled in the public system. Households that choose the public school, or school type 1, may incur some additional costs besides the payment of taxes. The cost of supplemental materials, extra curricular activities, etc., may be paid by the public school household. Households that choose traditional private schooling (type 2) must pay the tuition price set by the school and other costs, such as textbooks and donations to the school, and in addition must pay the tax for the public school. (8) Finally, households that choose home schooling must pay the cost of educational materials such as books, curriculum planning guides, and extracurricular activity fees and continue to pay the tax for the public school. (9) The explicit cost may be a relatively low part of the cost to the home schooling family. The household has to forego potential labor income to enable one parent to remain at home. For purposes of simplicity, we assume the mother is the parent that home schools and therefore does not participate in the labor force. (10) The family will take these...