And herein lies another lesson about careful reading: readers should always go to the original source of a claim, not the second- or third-hand report of the claim. In what seems to be a total disregard of Rudner’s disclaimer, we’ve already seen how the HSLDA represented Rudner’s results to the media and the public at large, and how a similar misunderstanding or misrepresentation continues to percolate through the media and the larger homeschool community. 

The point of these conclusions is not to disparage homeschooling or undermine claims about the value of a good home education. (Indeed, I am in the business of homeschool curricula, which suggests that disparaging homeschool is not in my best interests.)

Instead, the point of this investigation is to use one case study to show how easy it is for students and adults alike to be influenced by superficial claims, bad reporting, incomplete data, and information that hasn’t been properly sourced or otherwise scrutinized before its conclusions are trumpeted out of context. No one wants an incomplete story like this, about homeschool or any other important topic.

And it turns out that there’s no real reason to misrepresent the data on homeschooling anyway. In the years since 1999 and 2009 respectively (perhaps you’d find it interesting to pass the Brian D. Ray study through the series of source questions on your own?), several groups have gone over Rudner’s results with the kind of scrutiny I’ve been suggesting throughout, the kind that professional historians and fact-checkers apply to their own claims and source material (for a sampling see McCracken; Reich; Kaseman; Kunzman; Lubienski; Martin‐Chang; and Murphy). The results suggest that while interpreting Rudner’s conclusions conservatively is probably justified, it is not false to argue that a well-run homeschool is at the very least competitive with a well-run institutional school:

Education Policy Archives, “Contextualizing Homeschooling Data: A Response to Rudner,” Kariane Welner, Kevin Welner, 1999

• Rudner’s sample population was not random or representative

• Rudner did not control for background demographics of his participants

• Rudner’s conclusions, while not false, are not generalizable outside of his particular subset of homeschooled students 

Journal of College Admission, “Exploring Academic Outcomes of Homeschooled Students,” Michael F. Cogan, 2010

• After controlling for demographic backgrounds homeschoolers outperformed their peers at one Midwest doctoral institution 

• In a comparison of retention and graduation rates no differences were found between homeschooled students and their institutionally educated peers

Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, “The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement:

Evidence From Homeschooled and Traditionally Schooled Students,” Sandra Martin-Chang, Odette Gould, Reanne Meuse, 2011

• “When the homeschooled group was divided into those who were taught from organized lesson plans (structured homeschoolers) and those who were not (unstructured homeschoolers), the data showed that structured homeschooled children achieved higher standardized scores compared with children attending public school. Exploratory analyses also suggest that the unstructured homeschoolers are achieving the lowest standardized scores across the 3 groups.” (This is perhaps unsurprising given their disinterest in standardized objectives and metrics.)

The Journal of Educational Alternatives, “Homeschooling: An Updated Comprehensive Survey of the Research,” Robert Kunzman, Milton Gaither, 2020

• “One generalization that emerges from many smaller studies on academic achievement is that homeschooling actually does not have that much of an effect on student achievement once family background variables are controlled” (270)

• “A second consistent finding of these studies over the past 30 years is that homeschoolers tend to perform better on verbal tests than they do on mathematics assessments…Given this persistent corroboration across three decades we might conclude, tentatively, that there may be at least a modest homeschooling effect on academic achievement— namely that it tends to improve students’ verbal skills and weaken their math capacities” (271)

• “One obvious reason for the potential finding that homeschooling heightens performance at the extremes of the distribution curve is that it by definition magnifies the role of the parent in a child’s education. A consistent finding in the literature on academic achievement is that parental background matters a lot” (272)

• “Several studies have found that homeschoolers outperform their institutionally schooled peers with similar demographic backgrounds on grade point average [in college]…Studies of other academic variables have found little to no difference between college students who were homeschooled and those who attended traditional schools [such as graduation and retention]…The one category where homeschoolers tended to outperform their peers from other schooling backgrounds was campus leadership—homeschoolers were significantly more involved in leadership positions for longer periods of time” (273)

• “The consistent finding of [college admissions studies] is that homeschooled applicants are accepted at roughly the same rates as their conventionally schooled peers, that admissions staff generally expect homeschoolers to do as well as or better than their conventionally schooled peers in college, and that while colleges and universities welcome homeschooled applicants, most do not go out of their way to provide special services or admissions procedures for them” (273-274)

• “[R]esearch on the lives of homeschooled college students…masks one profound insight that emerges from some of the larger-scale quantitative studies using representative samples: very few homeschoolers take the SAT or ACT or go on to attend selective four-year colleges and universities…Studies of homeschoolers in college are thus not capturing the post-homeschool experiences of most homeschooled children” (274)

• “[From research into education and employment] the clear and unavoidable conclusion of what is probably the most rigorous data set ever created to measure homeschooling’s long-term academic impact is that homeschoolers as a whole do not have great educational and economic success if measured by conventional standards like a college degree and a high-paying job. On the other hand, as several researchers have pointed out, conventional standards might not be what is motivating a large percentage of homeschooling families anyway” (275)