Home schooling in the United States: The responsiveness of state legislatures to political demand

Home schooling---defined as educating the child under the supervision of parents rather than schoolteachers and thus replacing full-time attendance at an institutionalized school---has quietly outpaced reliance on vouchers and charter school reforms. As the number of home schoolers increased exponentially from 1990--2000, the responsiveness of state legislature to the demand for home schooling warrants consideration. Because the flexibility of home schooling legislation can (1) serve as a barrier of entry to parents who want to home educate their children and (2) affect the competition against private schools and thus the quality of education, this study examines two questions: "What causes a state government to adopt a certain home schooling policy? How does the adoption of flexible or inflexible home schooling policy impact the education market?" To explain the variation in state policy toward home schooling, a state's socioeconomic, political, and regional factors are theorized to affect the innovation of home schooling policy. The factors examined are party unity of the state legislature, the political ideology of the state, and the salience of the home schooling issue as the political determinants; religiosity in the state, the percentage of racial minority, the performance of public school students, and per capita income of the state as the socioeconomic determinants; and regionalism. To assess the market impact of the diffusion of different home schooling laws, the variation in home schooling laws is theorized to increase competition in the education market and therein impact student enrollment in private schools. The variables tested in the competition model are the flexibility of home schooling legislation (the predicted values for the flexibility variable are derived from the ordered probit test of the first question), the education of parents, the performance of public school students, religiosity in the state, the percentage of racial minority, the size of the family, per pupil expenditures, per capita income of the state, and public school enrollment The findings are mixed, as some conditions that are hypothesized to impact legislative flexibility or student enrollment do not attain statistical significance.