Home Schooling: More Than A Million Kids And Growing: Can It Work For Your Family?

More and more parents are taking over their children's education with help from the Internet and each other. But critics worry kids aren't getting what they need.

THIS FALL, AS MOST KIDS MADE THEIR ANNUAL TREK BACK TO THE classroom, a small but growing army of parents just said no to school. Some, like Jean Forbes of Alexandria, Va., thought their children needed extra attention. Forbes is a former actress whose current career is teaching her two sons, Aaron, 14, and Jesse, 7, and running a theater group for 40 other kids who are taught in their homes. She and her husband, Jan, pulled Aaron, who is dyslexic, out of public school six years ago because they felt teachers weren't helping him enough. Other parents want to give their kids the chance to follow their interests rather than a textbook. Outside Los Angeles, Marcy Kinsey, a mother of three kids--ages 11, 9 and 7--calls herself an ""unschooler.'' Right now her kids are studying bats, everything from their diet to their wingspan to the specifics of their natural habitat. They've even built a bat house in the backyard, which required many hours of practical math problems.

Still other parents pull their kids out of school to solve what they think is a short-term problem--and find long-term challenges. Eric and Joyce Burges, who live outside Baton Rouge, La., began home schooling nearly a decade ago after their oldest son, Eric Jr., had a disastrous year at a selective magnet high school. It was a struggle at first; neither is a professional teacher. But as Eric Jr.'s confidence rose at home, so did Joyce's, and she now teaches her four other kids, ages 15 to 3, at home as well. School begins every morning at 7 and lasts until lunch. Joyce says home schooling has been a test of her strengths and weaknesses. Accepting the latter, she hired music and algebra tutors. ""I know what I want them to learn, and I know what they want to learn,'' she says. ""I don't have to do it all.''

Just a few years ago, home schooling was the province of religious fundamentalists who wanted to instill their values in their children and back-to-the-earth types who rejected the institutional nature of public schools. Now it's edging ever closer to the mainstream. In 1993--after years of court battles--it became legal in all 50 states for parents to take charge of their kid's education from kindergarten to college. While there are no national statistics, researchers who study home schooling estimate that as many as 1.5 million youngsters are currently being taught primarily by their mothers or fathers. That's five times the estimated number of home schoolers just a decade ago and bigger than the nation's largest public-school system, New York City's. The increase is especially remarkable in an era of two-income families, since it pretty much requires one parent to stay home (generally the mother), at some financial sacrifice. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 59 percent of those surveyed said home-schooled kids were at least as well educated as students in traditional schools. ""Home schoolers' image is not wacko, fringe, lunatic-type people anymore,'' says Brian Ray, president of the Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore., a nonprofit group. ""Today almost everyone knows a home schooler, so it's more socially acceptable.''

Some of the new home-schooling parents are looking for a way to reclaim family closeness in an increasingly fast-paced society. Others have kids with special needs, perhaps because they're highly gifted or have learning disabilities or emotional problems. Still other parents worry about unsavory influences in school--drugs, alcohol, sex, violence. Florida education officials report that in the last few years, the No. 1 reason parents gave for home schooling was ""safety.'' Some intend to teach at home all the way through 12th grade. Others see home schooling as a way to get through a bad patch in a kid's school life.

Their lesson plans are as diverse as their reasons for dropping out of the system, but what unites all these parents is a belief that they can do a better job at home than trained educators in a conventional school. That would have been an outrageous notion a generation ago, when far fewer parents had college degrees and most people regarded teachers and schools with more respect and even awe. Today parents are much better educated, hooked up to a world of information via the Internet and inundated with headlines about problems plaguing public schools. They see home schooling as one more step in the evolution of parent power that has given birth to school-choice programs, vouchers and charter schools. ""Americans are becoming fussy consumers rather than trusting captives of a state monopoly,'' says Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. ""They've declared their independence and are taking matters into their own hands.''