At chick-fil-A headquarters in Atlanta, Andy Lorenzen helps recruit the 30,000 front-line workers at the company's 1,000 restaurants across the country. It's a daunting task in the fast-food industry's revolving-door environment. It's especially challenging at Chick-fil-A, where the goal is to hire young counter workers and kitchen aides--average age 17--for the long run. As of last year, more than half of Chick-fil-A restaurant operators had come up through the ranks.
To find reliable employees, Chick-fil-A prefers to tap what it believes is a unique source of talent--high school- and college-age homeschoolers--young people who have been educated at home rather than sent to public or private schools.
"They're smart, ambitious and very driven," Lorenzen says of his homeschooled employees. "They have a high level of loyalty to the business, are diligent and have a good work ethic." A nine-year HR veteran at Chick-fil-A, Lorenzen's success depends on the quality of his hires. "When it comes to homeschoolers, I've only heard good things from our restaurant operators who employ them."
Chick-fil-A may be on to something. Homeschoolers are popping up everywhere, moving seamlessly into college and the workplace, thriving in internships and in entry-and professional-level jobs. They're also making a mark as entrepreneurs.
At New Times Media, publisher of an independent weekly newspaper in San Luis Obispo, Calif., Tamara Cohen, a 24-year-old homeschool alumnus, is the youngest account executive on staff. Bubbly and gregarious, Cohen does not fit the homeschooler stereotype of bookish introvert. "To succeed in my field, you have to be self-driven and good at networking," she says. "In sales, it takes creativity to learn what's important to your customer."
Rebecca Durkee, 24, recently moved from Schroon Lake, N.Y., to Los Angeles to take a restaurant chef position. People who learn that the outgoing, take-charge Durkee was homeschooled are surprised. "There's a stereotype of homeschoolers--that we're reclusive geeks," she says. "I'm not that way at all. I'm extroverted, a leader and interact well with others. Homeschooling has helped me decide what I believe for myself and not to be afraid to express my views."
Many who have had no personal involvement with homeschooling think it's a fringe educational theory practiced mostly by religious fundamentalists. Indeed, most parents who homeschool their children are guided at least partly by religious principles, and many are evangelical Christians. But some parents who homeschool their children are Muslims, Orthodox Jews or of other faiths, and still others are driven more by secular educational philosophies rather than religion.
As the homeschool movement goes mainstream, it is converting thousands of parents fed up with perceived shortcomings in public education. The number of homeschooled children has tripled over the past decade. Those in the first wave have graduated, gone to college and entered the workforce, and now employers are getting their first glimpse of what homeschoolers can do. Anecdotal reports show that homeschoolers are thriving. Long before they get their first full-time jobs, many have accrued years of experience through apprenticeships, part-time employment or work in their own enterprises or in their families' businesses.
"They're well-versed in basic business principles," says Gary Knowles, professor of adult education at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Knowles, who has studied home-educated adults, says, "There's a sense that if they want to do something, they can. They have discipline to either run their own business or become quite focused employees."
Critics of homeschooling contend that it's not a well-rounded education, that its graduates lack exposure to real-world diversity and that they don't have social skills needed for success in an increasingly team-oriented work environment.
HR not only must consider such concerns but also may have to grapple with questions such as how to evaluate someone who doesn't hold a state-issued high school diploma. Also, most homeschooled students go on to school their own children at home, creating a greater need for flexible work schedules. Moreover, homeschool vendors are gearing up to offer package deals to employers on curricula and materials that can be added to companies' benefit packages.
By the Numbers
As many as 1 million children--up from approximately 300,000 in 1988-are being homeschooled. The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) in August released the first-ever comprehensive study on homeschooling and pegged the number at 850,000 students in 1999. The actual number could be almost 17 percent higher or lower, says NCES statistician Stephen Broughman.
Some observers think there are more than 1 million homeschoolers. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), a home education information and research organization in Salem, Ore., believes his estimate of 1.2 million to 1.8 million is reliable. "Homeschool people are very privacy-oriented, slow to give information to government entities," he says. "Because I'm viewed as objective by homeschoolers and [by] state and federal governments, all are less reticent about sharing information with me."
A similar range of figures is put forth by Ron Packard, CEO of K12, a McLean, Va.-based business that sells homeschool curricula. The fledgling company, founded by former Secretary of Education William Bennett, is attracting investors who are convinced there's gold in the burgeoning homeschool market. "There are between 1 [million] and 1.8 million homeschoolers," Packard says. "Twenty percent are on the fringes--the 'preach and teach' faction that want religion embedded in every subject, and the 'unschoolers' who don't want any formal education. Neither of these is for us. Our market is the 80 percent in the middle--religious and secular--who are united in that they want a great education for their kids."
Mitchell Stevens, a professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., and author of Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (PUP, September 2001), says even if homeschoolers total around 850,000, that would be double the number in charter schools and "greater than the enrollment in the Chicago public school system. Homeschooling is a boutique option, but it's legitimate."
Indisputably, it's an option that families have been selecting increasingly over the past 30 years. In the 1970s, there were 15,000 home-educated children. According to Ray and others, the total will increase 7 percent to 12 percent per year. Growth in recent years has been fueled by "violence, health issues and dissatisfaction with public education," says Laura Derrick, president of the National Home Education Network (NHEN), a national advocacy group in Austin, Texas.
What Happens All Day?
The issue for HR professionals will be how to evaluate the type of education a homeschooled applicant received. While some states mandate that homeschoolers submit curricula for approval, keep logs of subjects covered each year and have students take regular standardized tests, others leave it completely to the discretion of the parents.
Homeschool families typically start out relying on established curricula or trying to replicate public school as they recall it. As they get more comfortable, they adjust, settling into a modus operandi more their own. Parents who lack expertise in a particular subject may find another parent or a tutor to provide instruction, or they may have the student enroll in a community college or correspondence course or school online.
"At some point, every homeschooling parent hits a brick wall," says Cafi Cohen, author of Homeschoolers' College Admissions Handbook (Prima Publishing, 2000) and a parent of two homeschoolers now in their 20s and working. "None of us has the expertise to do it all, but we do have the expertise to be good networkers, to find people who do have the skills and are enthusiastic about teaching," Cohen says. "My job was to help uncover options, and there are a lot of them," including correspondence schools, community resources and now the Internet.
Because of homeschooling, Cohen says, "our kids got so far ahead. What it takes a school seven or eight hours to do, we were able to do in an hour and a half. We'd do academics for three hours a day and be finished, including any homework assignments." Cohen says her children could decide how to use their free time, "except they couldn't watch TV or mindless videos. ... My son got a private pilot's license; my daughter earned money to study abroad in Australia. Both signed on for volunteer work and paying jobs, and as a result, they had a pretty good sense of the work world before they hit college age."
