Studies confirm homeschool achievement

  Over the past few decades homeschoolers have won wider acceptance as a mainstream education alternative. This has been due in part to the commissioning of research that demonstrates the academic success of the average homeschooler.
  The last piece of major research looking at homeschool academic achievement was completed in 1998 by Dr. Lawrence Rudner. Rudner, a professor at the ERIC Clearinghouse, an arm of the University of Maryland, discovered that homeschoolers (on average) scored about 30 percentile points higher than the national average on standardized achievement tests.
  This research and several other studies documenting the success of homeschoolers have helped the cause tremendously.
  Because Rudner’s research was more than a decade old, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) commissioned Dr. Brian Ray, an internationally recognized scholar and president of the non-profit National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), to collect data from the 2007–08 academic year for a new study.
  Drawing from 15 independent testing services, the Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics included 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states who took three well-known tests. The report is the most comprehensive homeschool academic study ever completed.
  As shown in the chart, the results found in the new study are consistent with 25 years of research, which show that as a group, homeschoolers consistently perform above average academically.