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Texas Home School Coalition
Tim Lambert, President

PO Box 6747, Lubbock, TX 79493
(806) 744-4441 ~ fax (806) 744-4446
staff@thsc.org ~ www.thsc.org

 

Texas Leads the Way in Growth of Home Schooling

According to a recently released report by the U. S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, the number of home schooled students reached 1.5 million in 2007.  This represents a 74% increase since its first report in 1999 and a 36% increase since its 2003 estimate.  The percentage of the school-age population being homeschooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007, according to the Department of Education.

However, Dr. Brian Ray, President of the National Home Education Research Institute, believes these estimates are low because home schooling parents are significantly less likely to answer government-sponsored surveys, and his organization estimates over 2 million home school students in 2008.

Tim Lambert, President of the Texas Home School Coalition, says that Texas leads the country in the number of home schooled children, with an estimate of well over 300,000 children and close to 120,000 families.  “Since the Texas courts clarified that home schooling was legal in 1987, we have seen a robust growth of about 6-8% per year,” he said. 

Some of the top home schooling reasons in a 2007 Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey include: concerns about the school environment (including safety, drugs, peer pressure): 88%; a desire to provide religious or moral instruction: 83%; a dissatisfaction with instruction at other schools: 73%; an interest in a non-traditional approach: 65%.  The percentage that fell into the category for “other reasons” was 32%, indicating that there are a good many reasons that families choose to teach their children at home.  The survey allowed families to choose more than one reason, and it is very likely that most families took advantage of that option.  Mr. Lambert said, “Many Texas home school families would acknowledge many of these same reasons in their decision to teach their children at home.”

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