The Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents

Academic achievement of homeschoolers

Are home educated students doing well academically? As a group, they certainly are. The articles below describe the academic successes of some individual homeschoolers and/or provide a comparison, in terms of academic achievement, between the homeschool population and the population of students attending school.

In fact, many families choose to homeschool for the very reason that they have concerns about the academic level their children can achieve in a school. For some, the concern is about adequate stimulation of a bright or gifted child, for others it is on the contrary the concern that their child might struggle to keep pace with the bulk of the class and, if falling through the cracks, might not reach their full potential.

The academic excellence that home education can provide is no doubt due in part to the fact that it allows homeschooling families to tailor all aspects of education to each individual child’s abilities, interests and needs.

A brief look at comparisons of standardized test results for home educated students and public school students, 1998
A look at the results of standardized tests indicates that children taught at home by their parents perform at a higher level on such tests than their contemporaries who receive traditional public schooling.

Stanford’s Experience with Home Educated Applicants
An article from Stanford Magazine, November/December 2000 ~ In A Class By Themselves: A wave of homeschoolers has reached the Farm–students with unconventional training and few formal credentials. What have they got that Stanford wants? And how do admission officers spot it?