by Joseph Grayhaim

Once again, homeschoolers in America have scored decisively better — by 126 points — on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) than their age-peers in institutional public and private schools.

A recent study included the results of 13,549 homeschool seniors who took the SAT in 2014 and compared their results with approximately 1.7 million high school seniors and juniors in the United States who also took test.

The SAT is administered by the College Board, and tests reasoning ability in writing, mathematics and critical reading in order to assess college-bound students’ abilities for college admissions purposes. Along with the ACT exam, the two tests are the primary source of college entrance information that admissions’ officers use to determine a prospective student’s viability for acceptance to the college.

Here is the SAT breakdown by section:

CRITICAL READING:

Homeschoolers’ Score                    Non-homeschoolers          Difference

567                                                         497                                   70 points

MATHEMATICS:

521                                                      513                                     8 points

WRITING:

535                                                      487                                     50 points

TOTAL:

1,623                                                   1,497                                   126 points

These figures come from the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), which has been tracking and publishing information on homeschoolers’ academic performance for many years. This is not the first year that homeschoolers outscored their institutionally-schooled counterparts; it is the most recent.

One of the most significant aspects of the SAT superior homeschooler performance is that over 95 percent of non-homeschooled students are taught by professional teachers.

This superior showing by homeschoolers on the SAT flies in the face of nearly constant criticism of homeschooling by public school officials, that homeschooling does not provide as robust an education as institutional schooling. Homeschoolers perform well once in college, too, both academically and socially, also contradicting the erroneous assertions from institutional school officials about socialization.soci

Many American parents are assertng their freedom to homeschool and homeschool growth is on the rise across the U.S. having increased by almost 1 million students in the past 13 years. This rise in homeschooling reflects the increasing dissatisfaction by parents of the weak public school environment, both social and academic. Social issues like herd mentality and bullying are frowned upon by informed parents and a continuing erosion of academic performance – with Common Core representing the last straw for many – have fueled the increase in homeschooling students and interest in homeschooling in general. ♦