Brian Ray has spent the last three decades as one of the nation’s top evangelists for home schooling. As a researcher, he has published studies purporting to show that these students soar high above their peers in what he calls “institutional schools.” At home, he and his wife educated their eight children on their Oregon farm.
How a true believer’s flawed research helped legitimize home schooling
Brian Ray says home-schooled students do better. His daughter tells a different story.
December 11, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
His influence is beyond doubt. He has testified before state legislators looking to roll back regulations. Judges cite his work in child custody cases where parents disagree about home schooling. His voice resounds frequently in the press, from niche Christian newsletters to NPR and the New York Times. As president of the National Home Education Research Institute, he is the go-to expert for home-school advocates looking to influence public opinion and public policy, presenting himself as a dispassionate academic seeking the truth.
But Ray’s research is nowhere near as definitive as his evangelism makes it sound. His samples are not randomly selected. Much of his research has been funded by a powerful home-schooling lobby group. When talking to legislators, reporters and the general public, he typically dispenses with essential cautions and overstates the success of the instruction he champions. Critics say his work is driven more by dogma than scholarly detachment.
“You see this in a lot of areas,” said Jim Dwyer, a professor at William & Mary Law School who wrote a book about home schooling. “Someone with an ideological agenda can concoct bad social science and convince naive researchers and naive audiences to accept some position. It’s clearly true of Ray. … The research he relies on is not scientifically valid.”
Taken as a whole, the academic literature shows mixed academic outcomes for home schooling: Some studies find benefits; others show deficiencies.
Nonetheless, Ray’s work, which concludes home-schoolers score far above public school students on standardized tests, has been widely cited for many years. He has exercised enormous influence in winning acceptance for the practice and minimizing regulations. J. Michael Smith, a former president of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the nation’s chief home-school lobbying group, said his group “has lost track of how many times Brian Ray has been called on to help establish the validity and success of homeschooling in court rooms and legislatures around the country.”
Ray comes from a conservative Christian movement that sees home schooling as a biblically mandated counterweight to secular modernity.
In a 2019 speech to a California church, Ray argued that home schooling was the only acceptable option for Christians. He quoted Luke 6:39: “A blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? Will they not both fall into a pit?” Schoolteachers, curriculum developers and professors who train teachers are all “blind,” he said, and therefore will lead children into a pit.
“You home educate if you believe it’s biblically normative and/or commanded,” Ray added. “You don’t home educate to get high test scores.”
He made a similar argument in an August podcast interview. “Does God give you the choice to just delegate [your children’s education] to anybody you want?” he said. “Absolutely not.”
A community of home-school alumni has arisen in recent years to forcefully reject this form of education. They say their parents ignored entire subjects, focused on faith over academics and were physically abusive. Among these critics is someone Ray knows well: his oldest daughter, Hallie Ray Ziebart, 43.
In interviews, Ziebart said her father taught her almost no math, routinely required her to work long hours for his nonprofit institute during school days, and whipped her and her siblings with switches and other objects when they disobeyed his orders.
Her allegations were echoed by two of her siblings and by four others who spent time at their home. Some of her charges are bolstered by journals she kept at the time. She’s voiced some of these accusations in recent years on TikTok.
Ray said in an interview that he spanked his children but vigorously disputed his daughter’s characterization that it was “abuse.”
Ziebart said some of her schooling was robust. Her mother taught her to love reading, and her father was creative and excited about teaching science. But she said she was taught very little math.
“Math,” she said, “is just a big blank empty void.”
The rise of a researcher
Ray, 69, received his master’s degree in zoology and earned a PhD in science education at Oregon State University, thinking he might be a science teacher. But soon he grew interested in home schooling — both for his own children and professionally. Oregon State University rejected Ray’s proposal to study home education for his dissertation, but he began collecting data. In 1985, he started a journal called the Home School Researcher.
Around this time he met Michael Farris, who had co-founded the HSLDA and was beginning to build the Christian home-schooling movement.
“He said, ‘Brian, you’re already an expert. But the moment you get your PhD handed to you, call me, and we’ll bring you into court as an expert witness,’” Ray recalled during a 2021 Facebook Live interview. “If you go do something almost nobody’s doing, then you’re an expert!”
After earning his PhD, Ray took a job as an assistant professor of education at Seattle Pacific University, a Christian school. He worked there for just two years.
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End of carouselOver the past three years, American interest in home schooling has soared. In this series, The Washington Post explores how that rise is transforming the nation’s educational landscape — and the lives of hundreds of thousands of children who now learn at home rather than at a traditional school.
Many parents say home education empowers them to withdraw from schools that fail their children or to provide instruction that better reflects their personal values. But there is little to no regulation of home schooling in much of the country, with no guarantees that kids are learning skills and subjects to prepare them for adulthood — or, for that matter, learning anything at all.
Home-schooled children have attended Ivy League schools and won national spelling bees. They have also been the victims of child abuse and severe neglect. Some are taught using the classics of ancient Greece, others with Nazi propaganda. What all share is the near-absolute control their parents wield over the ideas they encounter.
Stories in this series will analyze the rise in home schooling, explore the perspectives of current and former home-schoolers and assess home education’s impact on public school systems and on the fierce debates about what children should learn about race, gender and the role of religion in public life.
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Arthur Ellis, who was on the faculty at the time, said Ray was asked to leave. “His whole philosophy was really at odds with what we were trying to do, which was teach people in the public schools,” he said. “His view was that home schooling was superior.”
Ellis said he and his colleagues were unimpressed with Ray’s approach to research. “It’s an odd thing to do research when you already know what the outcome is because you believe it — you’re a true believer,” he said. Ray, he argued, “is more of a salesman or a cheerleader than anything.”
A spokeswoman for Seattle Pacific University had no comment on Ray but said a faculty member’s position on home schooling is not a criterion for evaluation.
Ray declined to speak in detail about the circumstances of his departure. “It was a conflict over what it really means to be a Christian university,” he said.
Ray returned to Oregon in 1991 and eventually devoted his full-time efforts toward home-schooling research, creating his own institute. The HSLDA helped give Ray his start, funding his research and recruiting subjects. Asked why he trusted Ray, Farris said, “He was a home-schooler. Simple as that.” He added that Ray also “was a stickler for academic accuracy.”
“I knew it wasn’t going to be worth investing time and resources into if you didn’t have someone who could defend his research,” Farris said. “I learned a lot about the protocols of academic research from him.”
Who gets studied
Ray’s decades of research demonstrate one point beyond dispute: Some portion of home-schooled students do very well academically, and home education can be successful for some children.
The question is whether those children are representative of home-schoolers and whether research supports his oft-stated contention that home-schoolers perform 15 to 30 percentile points better than public school students. (Recently, he said, he has revised his estimate to 15 to 25 points.)
Ray’s studies have included thousands of students across the country, often recruited with the help of HSLDA.
He compares their results on standardized tests to those of public school students, consistently finding home-schoolers with higher scores in all subjects. He finds home-schoolers register as high as the 80th percentile — sometimes even higher — meaning their average score is better than at least 80 percent of traditionally educated test-takers.
In an interview, he offered some possible explanations. Home education provides small classes, more feedback from adults and freedom from bullying, he said. If anything, Ray told The Post, standardized tests are written to test what students are taught in public school, so home-schoolers are at an inherent disadvantage.
“Someone with an ideological agenda can concoct bad social science and convince naive researchers and naive audiences to accept some position.”— Jim Dwyer, professor at William & Mary Law School
Critics cite numerous problems with Ray’s approach: These tests are optional in the vast majority of the country, and many home-schooled students don’t take them. The ones who don’t might have scored far worse if they had been required to sit for exams, as public school students are. Many students take the exams at home, which might offer advantages over public school test-takers who face a controlled environment. And parents had to opt into Ray’s studies, potentially skewing his sample further.
Demographic information collected as part of Ray’s research showed almost all students in his samples were White, Christian and came from two-parent married families. Their parents were more educated than average. In short, they were the type of students who tend to do well no matter where they are educated.
A 2016 federal survey, by contrast, found 41 percent of home-schoolers were not White, 56 percent had parents with less than a Bachelor’s degree, and 21 percent were living in poverty.
In an interview, Ray responded that all studies have “limitations,” but he said that does not make his results invalid. He also said he has worked to include more representative samples and demographics in his research, saying methods “mature over time within a field.”
In his academic writing, Ray often includes notes of caution. In a 2017 review of home-schooling research, for instance, Ray cautioned that “consumers of the studies should be careful about assigning causation to a form of schooling” when looking at academic and other outcome data, because it is “difficult, if not impossible” to determine what role demographics and other factors played.
Asked whether it’s possible that students who do well in his studies would do well in any setting, given their demographic advantages, Ray replied, “That’s a reasonable hypothesis.”
Yet he dispenses with the caveats when talking about his results to legislators, courts, journalists and the public.
In a 2005 book he wrote about home schooling aimed at general readers, Ray repeatedly cited his studies’ findings with none of the cautions included in academic papers. He mentions none on his website, either.
He takes the same approach with the press. “The research said over and over again,” he told the Pensacola News Journal in 2012, “that these young people are performing above average and on average they’re surpassing public school students.”
When asked for the best work on home-schoolers, Ray cited his own work and that of three other researchers. The first, Sandra Martin-Chang of Concordia University, conducted one study on home schooling, which found mixed results.
The other two both cautioned that their findings should not be used to make comparisons to public school. Lawrence Rudner, whose 1999 study featured some of the same methodological problems as Ray’s work, wrote in his paper, “This study does not demonstrate that home schooling is superior to public or private schools. It should not be cited as evidence that our public schools are failing.” The second researcher, Jon Wartes, was a high school counselor who studied home-schoolers in Washington state in the 1980s. He cautioned: “This data should not be used to make homeschool-conventional school comparisons.”
A researcher’s impact
More than any other researcher, Ray has shaped the conversation around home schooling.
The Home School Legal Defense Association, which has 98,000 member families, has made wide use of Ray’s research, implying that home schooling is better than public school. A 2009 “progress report” focused on his findings said, “Homeschoolers are still achieving well beyond their public school counterparts,” a generalization that does not take into account the demographics of his sample.
The stakes are particularly high in state legislatures, where lawmakers write rules governing home schooling — and in recent years, have rolled back accountability requirements such as testing and reporting on student progress.
Last year, New Hampshire lawmakers were considering whether to remove a requirement that home-schooled students show “reasonable academic proficiency,” which was defined as scoring in the 40th percentile or higher on state exams. Ray was among those making the case for reduced regulation.
Ray testified that “40 years of research” by “various scholars” finds home-schooled students “typically outperform public school students by 15 to 30 percentile points.” But he also argued that it was wrong to set a 40 percentile cutoff — or any cutoff at all — unless public school students below the cut off were forced to leave public schools.
The bill was passed and signed into law.
In 2008, the debate in Nebraska was the inverse. Lawmakers were considering legislation that would have required that home-schooled students take standardized tests. Ray delivered his standard assessment of superior home-school performance.
This time, a committee member grilled him. A state senator asked Ray whether all home-schooled students took the test, and when Ray replied that they did not, the senator said, “Generally for good research you don’t allow the subjects to self-select. … ‘I decide I’m going to have one of my kids take the test, but not the other one.’”
Nonetheless, the bill was defeated.
This past summer, as Minnesota considered new rules for home-schoolers, an official from the Minnesota Association of Christian Home Educators drew on Ray’s research to argue against further rules. “The results of achievement vis-à-vis peer groups has been consistently very strong,” he wrote in an email to state officials and other advocates.
Among the recipients was Samantha Field, government relations director for the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a group founded by former home-schooled children who lobby for additional oversight. She was frustrated to see the assertion, which she argued was not supported.
“This misinterpretations of these studies is so dispersed and widespread. One of the challenges I’m having is overcoming that home-schoolers are all geniuses,” she said. “It’s just ubiquitous at this point. When I’m in dialogue with people they make the claim that home-schoolers outperform public school and I say, ‘What?’ And they link to Brian Ray. They are the most cited studies when we are talking about homeschool legislation.”
Ray’s influence extends to courtrooms, as Farris predicted it would. Ray often serves as an expert witness in family disputes, typically where one parent wishes to home-school the children and the other doesn’t. Ray listed about 90 cases where he testified (or was prepared to when the case settled) on a document submitted to a Washington state court in 2022. In an interview, he estimated that he testifies in about five cases per year.
“You home educate if you believe it’s biblically normative and/or commanded.”— Brian Ray
It’s not unusual for judges to cite his work in their decisions. In a 2008 Pennsylvania case, a court rejected a father’s request that parents who share custody be required to use public schools when they cannot agree.
“Dr. Ray, who, among other things, has reviewed thousands and thousands of home schooled children’s standardized test scores and portfolios over a 23-year period, testified that the children are ‘very high in the terms of their academic achievement,’” Judge Jacqueline Shogan wrote in her appellate ruling.
And in Michigan, the state Supreme Court cited Ray’s testimony in a landmark 1993 decision striking down a state law that required students be taught by certified instructors.
More recently, Ray has traveled the world, presenting his research and encouraging officials in other countries to adopt policies friendly to home schooling. He counts at least 10 countries where he’s traveled to discuss the topic, including Russia, Brazil, Ireland, South Korea and Germany.
Other influence is more personal. Mike Tindall, a pastor in Lindale, Tex., who worked for Ray’s National Home Education Research Institute for a few years, said people often approached him at home-school conventions.
“‘Thank you very much for NHERI’s work,’” he recalled hearing. “‘It went a long way in helping convince Blank’ — some type of relative — ‘that home schooling was a good option.’”
Is home schooling really better?
The academic benefits of home schooling are not nearly as clear as Ray claims, experts say.
Studies suggest home schooling does not make a significant difference in how well students perform, said Robert Kunzman, an education professor at Indiana University who runs the International Center for Home Education Research, which he co-founded out of frustration that so much research in the field was driven by advocates, including Ray.
“The kids who were going to score well in a public school setting are going to score well in the home-school setting, and vice versa,” he said.
One of the best studies found negative results, said Kunzman, who co-wrote a review of the academic literature. The Cardus Education Surveys were run several times in the United States and Canada by a Canadian Christian think tank, using representative samples. They found home-schooled students were less likely to attend selective colleges, spent fewer years in college and wound up working in lower-paying jobs.
“Homeschoolers as a whole do not have great educational and economic success if measured by conventional standards,” Kunzman and a co-author wrote, summarizing those surveys.
Home education is not an easy area to study. Very few states require these children to take exams — the result of intense lobbying by home-school advocates and a contrast with public schools, where almost all students are routinely tested. It’s not possible to conduct a gold-standard academic study where some students are randomly assigned to home school and others to traditional school. It also is tricky to discern which children have experienced a mix of conventional and home education, and how much influence each experience exercised.
Many studies are small scale — one cited by advocates included a total of four children; another had eight — making it impossible to generalize their results. Meanwhile, many of the larger studies, including Ray’s, suffer from skewed samples, critics say.
One common thread is that home-schoolers perform better on reading than on math exams.
“It’s hard if not nearly impossible to isolate the causal effect of home schooling,” said Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who in 2019 reviewed a number of home-schooling studies for the HSLDA. She said studies show that academic outcomes for home-schooled students are “generally positive,” but said they do not show home schooling is the reason.
Most everyone in the field, including Ray and his allies, agree that more research is needed. Carlos Valiente, a professor of human development and family science at Oklahoma State University who has worked with Ray, said Ray’s work has been important but more needs to be done.
“Like all areas of research, there comes a time when you start doing more advanced studies,” he said. “The next generation of research needs to be methodologically stronger, so there’s clear evidence homeschooling is what’s leading to those outcomes. I believe Brian will play an important role in conducting these studies.”
Ray’s home school
One of Ray’s harshest critics is his oldest daughter, who has been estranged from her parents since 2016, when she decided to divorce her husband. Ziebart said after that, her parents “shunned” her. In an 18-page email heavy with scripture, he told her that she had not shown “biblical grounds” for her divorce.
Eventually, she began blogging about her experiences and later described them on TikTok.
Ziebart recalled her early years of home schooling as joyful. “Everything was exciting and fun and interesting,” she said. But she said it felt less carefree as she got older and her father began working with leaders of the Christian home-schooling movement.
Memories of her academic experience vary by subject. She said her mother did a good job teaching reading and her father was a “masterful” science teacher, taking the children into nature and exploring the world around them.
History, she said, was taught from a religious and conservative point of view. She said that she was told, for instance, that the slave trade was “meant for evil but God made it for good” and that things worked out for enslaved people “because they got to be Christians.”
Katie Maine, a family friend who spent a lot of time at the Ray house, recalled learning there that the Holocaust was a horrific event but one used by God to help Jews “realize their Christianity.”
Ray said they never taught anything that could be construed as racist or antisemitic. “From a biblical perspective, does God have his hand in all things? Is he involved in all of history? Yes. That’s what would have been expressed.”
The biggest missing piece of her education, Ziebart said, was math. She said she was taught virtually none. In 2020, she took a placement test to enroll in community college and said she scored at a fifth-grade level in math. One of her sisters, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said her math instruction ended after pre-algebra — typically an eighth-grade course — but added that she was more interested in other topics and did not mind.
Ray replied that he wanted to be sure his children learned “the basics” but that going further was driven by each child’s interests, and all families choose what to emphasize, offering a “customized education.”
“What percent of students in the public schools learn algebra and know it? Low!” he said. “If someone doesn’t learn as much in math but they are amazing in the language arts, what does it matter really?” Later, Ray emailed The Post to say that Zeibart had “studied math through algebra and did well in it.”
Ziebart has spoken publicly about what she calls physical abuse — being hit with sticks, wooden spoons and a cord as a young child and teenager. She also described this in two journal entries written in her adolescence that she provided to The Post. Several others inside and outside the family also said Ray used physical discipline.
“I love him so much and [he] shouldn’t have hurt me.”— Hallie Ray Ziebart, 1992 journal entry
In a journal entry dated Dec. 17, 1992, Ziebart, then 12, described one conflict where her father “grab(b)ed my head and shook me hard.”
“I have been having ear ac[h]es and I had one today and when he did that it hurt me bad, inside & out,” she wrote. “I love him so much and [he] shouldn’t have hurt me.”
Ray responded: “We used legal and loving spanking. Period.” He denied that he ever grabbed her head or shook her. And he said Ziebart only started complaining about her parents after she “didn’t get the support she wanted” after telling them she was divorcing her husband.
Ziebart had used corporal punishment on her own children when they were young, but said she changed her view when her oldest daughter was 5. “She is so perfect. I can’t hurt her,” she recalled thinking. She also home-schooled three of her four children for years but moved all of them to public school after her divorce. Then, she had to get a job and support her family.
After cleaning houses for six years, she landed a position as an aide at a local public school.
It has been eye-opening, she said. On one hand, she witnesses the system’s flaws: Many students are being poorly served, and teachers face impossible demands. She understands why her parents wanted something different.
But her own children, she said, have thrived.
“The first couple years my kids were in public school, I experienced profound grief for my younger self and experiences I missed,” she said. “My kids are daily challenged by different belief systems, different children, different ways of seeing the world.”
