Home Education through the Lens of Municipal Records: A Case Study in the Parisian Suburbs.

Research about home educators is often limited by a reliance on convenience-based samples. This paper explores an alternative source of information: written reports from inquiries held by the French public administration on every registered home-educated child. First, I depict how these inquiries are legally designed and how our research team has negotiated with government agencies to gain access to these reports. Then I discuss the case study of Cheny, a city located in the working-class suburbs of Paris. In Cheny, 70 children from 44 families were registered as home educated from 2011 to 2016. I use the city records to describe what the local authorities know and think about families who home educate their children and what this knowledge teaches us about the practice and public regulation of home education in France. I focus on the ability of these reports to provide us with information about parental motives. I also raise different questions about the value and weaknesses of such sets of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]