| Home schooling has grown rapidly and now comprises over two percent of school children. Home schooling families are not isolated: much home schooling is short-lived, most home schooling families also send children) to school, and many home teaching mothers work. I model home schooling choice by assuming that mothers maximize a utility function comprising goods, leisure time, and child quality, which is produced from inputs of money and time. I estimate the model using household-level data from the 1996 and 1999 National Household Education Survey merged to secondary data sets, and, separately, district-level data from Wisconsin.; High-income families living in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) tend to produce child quality by investing in schools. If academic school quality is low, these families may resort to home schooling. Low-income families in MSAs have less recourse to school choice, so investing time in the local school district is important. If school finance is more centralized and local politics therefore less important, these families are more likely to home school. In rural areas, home schooling is popular among evangelical Protestants, although through peer effects or politics their propensity to home school decreases as the percentage of local evangelical Protestant residents increases. Evangelical Protestants inside urban areas form private schools instead.; Household characteristics also contribute. Home schooling is more likely when adults in the household expand the mother's time budget. Pre-school children increase home schooling; the negative substitution effect on a mother's wages dominates the negative time effect pre-schoolers impose. The presence of a husband increases home schooling outside MSAs but not inside MSAs. Married couples inside MSAs tend to substitute to high-quality schools instead of home schooling. Because families outside MSAs have limited school choice, the income a husband earns is more often used to allow a mother to home school. Despite paying a higher implicit tuition, more educated mothers of younger children are more likely to home school. Mothers of older children, even if highly educated, have greater difficulty substituting for specialized teaching available at higher grades. Consequently, there is no systematic relationship between mother's education and the home schooling of older children. |
