Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey

As readers of Homeschooling: a Family’s Journey may recall, we have always paid close attention to the relationship between homeschooling, economics, and lifestyle. The global financial crisis that began shortly after publication of our book led us attempt to identify the best places to live for homeschoolers. The reason was simple: income was uncertain and costs were rising relentlessly in New Jersey. Could we keep affording this place? Was it worth it? Was there a better place to be?

In order to answer those questions for ourselves, we tried to consider all of the factors that make places particularly good to live for homeschoolers. Our conversations with other homeschoolers indicate that many people across the country are asking the same questions we were asking about their own states. So we present the preliminary results of our own analysis here, with more to come over the next few weeks.

In the Best Places To Live for Homeschoolers project, we rank states according to such factors as:

• Economic: cost of living, cost of housing, taxes, cost of health insurance, employment, support for small business and entrepreneurship.
• Cultural: rates of college education, marriage, church attendance, library use, mental health, state productivity, etc.
• Civic: volunteering, voter turnout, political corruption and government transparency.

This information can be accessed in spreadsheet form here.

Many of the factors might matter to anyone. However, we think that some are particularly important to homeschoolers. Research and our own experience suggest that homeschoolers are entrepreneurial, involved in civics, and likely to make use of cultural opportunities such as museums and libraries.

The top ten states in our preliminary analysis may be surprising. They are:

1) Wyoming

2) South Dakota

3) Colorado

4) Michigan

5) Utah

6) Kansas

7) Nebraska

8 ) Idaho

9) Iowa

10) Virginia

In addition, we will include in our analysis certain indicators that will be directly and primarily important to homeschoolers. We have developed what we call the homeschool intensity index. This index is the ratio of the number of homeschool groups in a state to its population. The higher the index, the greater the intensity of homeschooling in the state. We also consider the burden of regulation on homeschoolers. We will be posting more information about this in a few days.

Of course, homeschoolers are a diverse bunch, and most would not welcome being told what is best for them. So we plan to make spreadsheets and charts interactive. This way, users can choose to weight factors differently depending on their preferences. For example, one of our data sources for homeschool regulation is the HSL DA. Some people love it, and some loathe it. The interactive feature will allow you to make your own decision about whether to include this data in your own assessment. Please check back fo this feature.

We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to homeschoolers. We would like to ask for your help and input to make it better. For example, we would like to go beyond the state level to provide people with advice on individual communities within the states we have selected. We would also like to have a conversation about these findings. We have provided a forum in which this conversation can take place and we hope you will participate. After all, you know your state and your neighborhood best.

We also welcome your advice about how to improve this analysis for the future. Thank you.

Greg

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