In the 1980s, I found work as a freelance journalist and became a contributing editor at Harper's, where I published an essay on homeschooling.  It caught the attention of an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, with whom I worked on a book-length expansion designed not to promote or espouse homeschooling but to examine and explore it.

Family Matters is in some ways personal--I was simultaneously a homeschooling parent and a public high school teacher while writing it.  Mostly, though, it's a thorough look at homeschooling as one possibility among many in the education of children.

I'm not an advocate.  Homeschooling has been exercised to ill effect.  At the same time, handled deftly, it's a rich, fulfilling, and highly successful approach to educating children.