Welcome to the National Home Education Research Institute!

The National Home Education Research Institute's mission is to:

• Produce high-quality research (e.g., statistics, facts, findings) on home-based education (homeschooling).
  
• Serve as a clearinghouse of research for the public, researchers, homeschoolers, the media, and policy makers.
  
• Educate the public concerning the findings of all research on home education.

Whether called homeschooling, home schooling, home-based education, home education, home-schooling, unschooling, deschooling, or a form of alternative education, the movement is growing and the National Home Education Research Institute is tracking and analyzing it, internationally. NHERI's forte is in the realm of research, statistics, technical reports, data, facts, demographics, the academic world, consulting, academic achievement tests, and expert witness (in courts and legislatures) while serving people ranging from researchers and policy makers to professional educators, teachers, homeschoolers (home schoolers), and parents in general to the media, marketing consultants, and the general public. Simply put, NHERI is a key international leader specializing in homeschool research (i.e., home-education research).

NHERI was founded by its president Brian D. Ray, Ph.D., who has been the editor of the refereed academic journal Home School Researcher since 1985.

In fulfilling its mission, NHERI engages in professional research for various clients throughout the nation and internationally. In addition, Dr. Ray and his associates serve as consultants to the growing number of those presently engaged in research on home education topics. Dr. Ray or another representative of NHERI will be speaking in several places around the country; see the Calendar of Events for a detailed schedule.

NHERI, a 501(c)(3) non-profit research and educational organization, also makes available for public purchase many print, audio, and video productions ranging from basic bottom-line fact sheets about homeschooling to more technically sophisticated academic reports.

Homeschooling is growing worldwide, and as more and more parents homeschool (home school) their children, NHERI will be studying them, striving to understand them, educating others about them, and serving them.

Some of the research reports, books, and videos (video) available at NHERI’s site are as follow:

• Home Educated and Now Adults: Their Community and Civic Involvement, Views About Homeschooling, and Other Traits – newest nationwide study of “graduates” of homeschooling; family history, demographics, community service, occupations, reasons for homeschooling, attitudes toward homeschooling, satisfaction with life
  
• Worldwide Guide to Homeschooling – research, history, charts, how families get started homeschooling; like a small almanac
  
• Strengths of Their Own – nationwide study of homeschool families and their children; academic achievement, demographics, et cetera
  
• Home Schooling on the Threshold – full-color synopsis (booklet) of dozens of research studies
  
• Home-Based Education: The Informed Choice – video with research, statistics, charts, philosophy of education, history, and more
  
• Home School Researcher journal subscription and back issues - link

A study (August 2008) by Dr. Brian Ray and Dr. Bruce Eagleson in the peer-reviewed Journal of Academic Leadership finds no relationship between the degree of state control of home-based education and the college SAT scores of the homeschooled. You may This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , president of NHERI, about this study.

The new article, “California Homeschool Court Decision Ignores Research Findings and Constitutions,” was posted March 7, 2008. (read it )

The U.S. Department of Education (USDE; National Center for Education Statistics, NCES) released in December 2008 a report entitled “1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007” (by Stacey Bielick) in which the author estimates the number of homeschooled students in the United States (i.e., homeschool population size) to be 1.28 to 1.74 million in spring 2007. Dr. Ray, of NHERI, on the other hand (read Dr. Ray’s brief review here), estimates that there were more than 2.0 million K-12 homeschool students in the U.S. during the spring of 2008 (see Research Facts on Homeschooling ). Consistent with Dr. Ray’s estimates, the NCES researcher found that the homeschool population has grown about 8% per year during the 4 years since the NCES’s previous study.

Homeschooling in Full View: A Reader, edited by Bruce S. Cooper, Ph.D., was published in June 2005. This, a full-scale edited book, is a reader that describes, discusses and analyzes homeschooling from an array of different and international perspectives. The diverse authors portray the energy of this movement in this volume, looking at the history of “education writ large,” in a larger social, political and religious context, one for placing homeschooling in perspective. The homeschool movement is both a proactive new direction in education that stands on its own and it is a reaction to the problems and inadequacies of existing schools and schooling paradigms. This is the newest (as of June 1005) scholarly book on home-based education (homeschooling), but written with a wide audience in mind. It includes chapters on a variety of topics and from diverse perspectives by Bruce S. Cooper, Brian D. Ray, Donald A. Erickson, Charles D. Glenn, Tom Smedley, Michael W. Apple, Nicky Hardenbergh, Rob Reich, Venus L. Taylor, Scott L. Somerville, Steven L. Duvall, and Clive R. Belfield. (order Homeschooling in Full View)

Dr. Ray, in “A Brief Review of Educational Neglect and Compulsory Schooling: A Status Report,” provides a critical look (as of January 28, 2006) at a new report written by Philip Kelly, Robert Barr, & James Weatherby that relates to homeschooling (click here ).

In summary, the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) is a key leader when it comes to conducting and reporting on homeschooling as it relates to homeschool research (i.e., home-school research), homeschool statistics, homeschool data, homeschool reports, homeschool facts, homeschool consulting, homeschool studies, homeschool population, homeschool demographics, and homeschool expert witness.