No longer the awkward stepchild of educational choices, home-schooling has gained enough critical mass and positive press to make it not only a viable option for parents but also a lucrative market for publishers. With conservative estimates at two million home-schooled children in the U.S., publishers are stepping forward to sample a piece of the marketing pie. But while home-schooling has largely been the domain of evangelical Christians—families who opt out of the educational system for moral and religious, if not academic, reasons—the frontier has opened up to include those of other faiths and those who claim no particular faith at all.
Broadman & Holman, a Nashville-based Christian publisher, got into the home-school market in a big way in 2001 when it acquired the rights to Loyal Publishing's home education book line. The house hired home-school media consultant Zan Tyler to further cement its place as a primary publisher for home-school buyers.
"The growth of home-schooling will continue between 7% and 15% annually. Right now it's worth about $850 million in curriculum and resources," said Tyler. As for trends, she points to Web-based learning, special-needs home-schooling, home education at the high school and college level and the wide availability of teacher's resources. "There's so much product it can be overwhelming," Tyler said. Helping to clear up that confusion is a book due from B&H in February 2005, 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum by Kathy Duffy.
This past spring B&H released its second curriculum product, Countering Culture: Arming Yourself to Confront Non-Biblical Worldviews, a book/video/CD project by David Noebel and Chuck Edwards, as well as the 2004—2005 edition of Worldwide Guide to Homeschooling by Brian D. Ray.
With the advent of Web-based or distance learning over the past decade, home-schooling has taken on a new look. The same can be said for the way home-schoolers acquire books. "It used to be that conferences were the way to go when buying resources, but now the Web has become popular, and there are also more bookstores featuring home-school materials via [distributor] Appalachian's Homeschool Headquarters," Tyler said. State home-schooling conventions feature as many as 100 vendors. Buying from catalogues and the Internet doesn't allow a parent to peruse the material first—frustrating if the product turns out to be a dud. The most expedient solution, at least for Christian home-schoolers, is to access one of Appalachian Distributor's 250 Homeschool Headquarters stores—independents who make a substantial initial investment ($6,000) to become a one-stop shop for home-school customers, with access to 5,000 different products from 130 publishers. Participating stores spend about $700 a year to receive national advertising, custom catalogues and other direct-mail options.
"Homeschool Headquarters represents the five categories most home-schooling parents want: subject, grade, parent helps, learning styles and full-line curriculum," Pat Marcum, director of the division, told PW. Marcum said a very small percentage of general-market stores participate in the program, but the ones that do are generally school-supply stores rather than traditional bookstores.
Shelf Picks for Home-schoolers
As PW trawled for Christian publishers' best home-schooling picks, we turned up Multnomah's revival of Let's Make a Memory by Gloria Gaither and Shirley Dobson, now expanded into a series of practical guides for family activities. The first guide in the series, Making Ordinary Days Extraordinary, was released in June, and the second, Creating Family Traditions, will be in stores October 1.
Harvest House released an updated edition of home-school expert Mary Pride's Herculean signature title in June, Mary Pride's Complete Guide to Getting Started in Homeschooling. At more than 600 pages, the book covers every aspect of home-schooling imaginable.
Since its inception, Thomas Nelson's Tommy Nelson division has tried to cater to home-schoolers, but the publisher is keenly aware that the market presents challenges, said v-p and associate publisher Dee Ann Grand. "We called it a vapor market because we couldn't grab it," Grand said. "Home-schoolers don't have a big BEA yet, but we see the ball rolling toward it and want to be ready for it."
New this summer from Nelson's Cool Springs Press imprint is Dig, Plant, Grow: A Kid's Guide to Gardening, which helps transform the home garden into a hands-on mini-laboratory. Also, the popular book A Faith to Grow On has been repackaged, updated and re-released along with a new journal. Nelson plans to publish a Faith to Grow On Bible featuring the ICB translation in the coming months.
Zonderkidz, the children's product division of Zondervan, broke out a home-schooling section for the first time in its 2004 catalogue. The lineup centers on Bibles—namely, the bestselling Adventure Bible—Bible storybooks, fiction titles and a few picture books. In the tradition of Scholastic's Dear America series, Zonderkidz released Liberty Letters, a historical fiction series by Nancy LeSourd for girls ages 8—12, a year ago and added a title from the Civil War era this spring. More titles are scheduled for fall 2004 and spring 2005.
Kathy Needham, senior director of marketing for Zonderkidz, said the publisher has a home-school Bible in the pipeline, as well as a VeggieTales curriculum. "Home-school is now a category we're intentional about—we're actually plugging products into the pipeline as we think about who are our customers and what they need," said Needham. The company's market research has found that 19% of home-school parents shop in bookstores, 49% get materials at conferences, 35% rely on other home-school parents (pass-along) and 49% are interested in new product developed specifically for them and sold at bookstores or conferences.
Moody Publishers puts a fresh spin on the traditional home-schooling parent book with its May title Help! I'm Married to a Homeschooling Mom by Todd Wilson. Book six in Moody's Daughters of the Faith series, Shadow of His Hand: A Story Based on the Life of Holocaust Survivor Anita Dittman by Wendy Lawton, was published in July.
Robin Jones Gunn's Christy Miller series from Bethany House has long been a favorite for home-schooled teen girls, as has Oasis Audio's Boxcar Children series. Tyndale offers the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre of audio book classics, with Anne of Green Gables releasing in October. This fall Tyndale partners with Group Publishing to launch the Hands-On Bible, which may be used as a self-contained Bible or as a companion to the Hands-On Bible Curriculum. The publisher will also break out its new parent/teacher edition of Ilumina: The World's First Digitally Animated Bible and Encyclopedia Suite, an Encarta-like product that can be accessed on DVD systems as well as computer CD-ROM drives.
Revell released a new title, Home Sweet Homeschool, by Sue Maakestad in July, and Crossway Books published When Children Love to Learn: A Practical Application of Charlotte Mason's Philosophy for Today, edited by Elaine Cooper, in April. This summer, Crossway also repackaged and re-released four titles in the perennial home-school favorite The Cooper Kids Adventure Series by Frank E. Peretti. Allegiance Press is releasing its new Shakespeare Rated G series, an updated version of The Family Shakespeare by 19th-century British doctor and "man of letters" Thomas Bowdler. The series gets kicked off this fall with Romeo & Juliet.
On tap from Kregel Publications this summer are two titles in the medical-ethics BioBasics series: Basic Questions on Healthcare and Basic Questions on Genetics, both edited by John Kilner. For Bible scholars, Kregel has released The Kregel Pictorial Guide to Bible Facts and Figures by Tim Dowley (Aug.), a companion to The Kregel Guide to the Temple by Robert Backhouse.
Not for Christians Only
But not everyone wants to home-school their children from an evangelical Christian standpoint, points out Jon Sweeney, associate publisher of SkyLight Paths. "There's also the sort of liberal, spiritually interested home-school track. People who opt out of traditional education are not just conservatives," Sweeney said. "SkyLight Paths did a book a year ago called Ten Amazing People that has done phenomenally well"—so much so that Scholastic Book Fair bought thousands of copies and sold them through its roving book fairs during the 2003—2004 school year. The publisher's spiritual biography series on such personalities as Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi and Black Elk are also geared to liberal alternative home educators, Sweeney said. "This is really a growing part of the market because so many of the available resources are for conservatives, and there's still somewhat of a void out there."
In addition to a staggering backlist of general reference and subject-specific titles suitable for home-schoolers, Scholastic is debuting five new products that should have direct appeal for the home-school market: in science, the Scholastic Atlas of Oceans (Aug.) and the Speedy Facts series (Aug.) aimed at ages 7—10, with titles such as Fish Sleep But Don't Shut Their Eyes. In history/social studies, watch for Walt Whitman: Words for America by Barbara Kerley (Sept.); My Guardian Angel by Sylvie Weil (Aug.), about a Jewish girl in medieval France during the First Crusade. As part of its Life and Times series, Scholastic will release Pandora of Athens, 399 B.C. by Barry Denenburg (Oct.) aimed at readers aged 9—12.
Wiley released four titles this summer in the new Keys to Success series: How to Study for Success, How to Write a Great Research Paper, How to Ace Any Test and How to Build a Super Vocabulary, all by Beverly Chin. Bestselling backlist from Wiley includes McGuffey's Eclectic Readers and Janice VanCleave's 200 Gooey, Slippery, Slimy, Weird and Fun Experiments. Jossey-Bass, a division of Wiley, offers in its religion program Kids Say the Best Things About Life by Dandi Daley Mackall (Mar. 2004) and Kids Say the Best Things About God, also by Mackall. From Wiley's general interest line, home-schoolers will find Janice VanCleave's Super Science Models (July 2004) and Dr. Math Gets You Ready for Geometry by the Math Forum (Dec. 2004).
Jewish home-schoolers can take advantage of Behrman House's extensive backlist and new titles, such as the Let's Discover (Shabbat, Mitzvot, the Holidays) series, as well as new releases Jewish Heroes, Jewish Values by Barry L. Schwartz and The Great Israel Scavenger Hunt by Scott E. Blumenthal. New from Jewish Lights is the Jewish Family Fun Book by Danielle Dardashti and Roni Sarig, ideal for home-schoolers needing vacation and holiday ideas plus ways to add Jewish education to every day. The publisher's backlist title Putting God on the Guest List, about including God in your bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, has sold more than 80,000 copies.
Home-school expert Mary Pride said among the biggest trends she sees in home education are the increased participation of minorities and publishers waking up to the viability of online study guides. "It used to be there wasn't as big a market for study guides as for the original books," Pride said. "You had to invest in marketing, print runs and so forth. But now you can create a study guide to an original text and put it on your Web site as a PDF file, which hardly costs the publisher anything. Master Books already does this fairly well. I see this trend emerging unconsciously. Publishers have not yet started thinking every time they come out with a book, 'Where's our study guide?' but this makes the original book more valuable."
And, it could be added, much more coveted by home-schoolers.
