This article is misleading and seems to want to promote private Christian schools. My husband and I have been married for twenty-five years. I'm a stay-at-home mom. We have four children ages 21, 17, 7, and 5. One is at a Christian Bible College, (he graduated from a Catholic high school and was previously homeschooled), one is in private school and also previously homeschooled, one is currently being homeschooled, and one is in public school. I don't think our seven year old homeschooled child is at a higher risk for divorce than any of our other children.

I have compared this “article” with the report on which it is based. In many cases CT has grossly misinterpreted the results, and offered a distorted, biased view that is at clear odds with the actual results of the study. Two examples: CT says public students are most likely to spend a lot of time volunteering. This is a fabrication. According to this study, all groups volunteer more in real life than public school students. The study shows that some types of volunteer work are done for reasons other than school, but no one does less actual volunteer work than public school students. CT says homeschooled kids are most likely to get a divorce. This way of reporting it is the opposite of the actual result of the survey. The survey shows, in fact, homeschooled children divorce less often than general population. CT based their comment on what the result would be, theoretically, if the only factor in a child's life was schooling.

This infographic pains me. I have read the entire research report and whoever did this particular extrapolation did not understand the data properly. Even aside from the small sample of many of the categories (which the researchers admit if you look closely in the appendix), some of the data interpretation is just plain inaccurate. Looking at the homeschooling data, for example, one discovers that the raw data shows greater volunteerism and missions activity than in many of other groups (contrary to what the writer says above!) The writer for this graphic focused on the data that was an attempt by the researchers to isolate the "school effect", which gives a skewed perspective. The bottom line is, you must read the actual report, not CT's flawed interpretation of the report, to understand what the research is all about. I deeply respect CT and those who work there, but in this particular case, someone did not take the time to truly understand the research and report accordingly.

This infographic is a joke. Without any context, all it does is take a cheap shot at anyone not in a private Christian school (esp. home-schoolers). Frankly, I'm ashamed of CT for misusing information this way. As an informed reader on Facebook wrote: "This study (the Cardus report) was not intended to be used as it was in the CT article, and its sample is flawed for such purposes; one sample was of 2000 Americans, of which a disproportionate number must be publicly schooled, and the other sample (to control for this, and in accordance with the study's purpose) a disproportionate sample was chosen from a database, with 1000 private school students, and 500 public school students. The study does not state how many students of each subgroup were included beyond these numbers. Especially re:homeschoolers, it is fair to assume that it was a very small (and thus unrepresentative) sampling... The CT article was pretty selective about what it reported for all subgroups." I'm calling FOUL!

This "article" really is more a header. However, under "Related Elsewhere," you can download the full Cardus report. And, indeed, these roughly 60 pages are worth perusing, and possibly more than once. In brief, conservative Protestant schools produce well adjusted, well scrubbed members of society who aren't overly ambitious or engaged with respect to politics, education or culture in general. They tend to be deferential worker bees. Graduates of Catholic schools are much more politically and educationally ambitious and engaged, and are willing to ask the hard questions of those around them, but their spiritual lives are tenuous. Religious home schoolers as a rule don't get much in the way of high praise, if I remember correctly. Graduates of public schools, as you would imagine, occupy the broadest spectrum of results, seeing as they represent the vast majority of graduates.