Homeschoolers are an increasingly diverse crowd

All parents want a good education for their child.

But an increasing number of Americans refuse to accept the notion that the school down the street is the best way to provide that. And catching their attention - alongside the growing number of charter or alternative schools - is homeschooling.

Arguably the fastest-growing trend in education, homeschooling now surpasses charter schools in the number of children it attracts. Homeschooled students equal about one-fourth the private-school population, experts say.

Home-based education has long since shed its stereotype as the province of religiously conservative parents who don't like public school culture. The typical profile of a family is still white, two-parent, and better educated and more religious than average. But many people who don't fit that bill are opting out of the school system as well. Their growing presence - and the resulting diversity of viewpoints - are challenging a once-small movement to figure out how inclusive it can be.

"In the early days of the modern homeschooling movement, homeschoolers worked together," says Laura Derrick, public relations director for the National Home Education Network (www.nhen.org), a group started as an alternative to exclusively Christian organizations. "There were homeschoolers working across political lines, across religious beliefs. But there came a time when there was a split."

Advocates of more-inclusive groups - some of whom add they are personally quite religious - say issues range from ensuring that all parents get the accurate information and support they need, to concerns about research given to media, much of which has been conducted by specifically Christian groups who often get a self-selecting response.

Homeschooling research may be notoriously problematic, but there's no doubt the growth of the movement has been explosive. About 15,000 families homeschooled in the early 1980s. Now, the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) puts the number at between 1.5 million and 1.9 million students - close to 3 percent of the school-age population. They say the homeschool population is growing 7 to 18 percent a year.

That's been helped in part by high-profile success stories like homeschoolers' 1-2-3 finish in the National Spelling Bee this summer and the Colfax family in California, who sent three sons to Harvard and wrote a book about their years learning together. Influential as well has been wider public acceptance - perhaps in part because of the increasingly varied constituencies who have joined the movement.

Meeting on the playground

At a recent "park day" in Longmont, Colo., where a group of homeschoolers meets once a week for play and chitchat, mothers discussed their own varied approaches to homeschooling.

One chooses to follow a more traditional, "Charlotte Mason" approach. (The 19th-century educator advocated a liberal, core-subject education that inculcates a love of learning.) Anothe does unit studies and sets out a plan for each day. A third has decided to send her four children to school this year for the first time. Sally Vinke, also a member of the group, calls her approach with her nine-year-old daughter, Corey, "pretty radically unschooling" (see sidebar).

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