RICHMOND, Va. – Despite evidence showing homeschool students outperform their public school peers in academics, and a growing movement of parents educating their own children, Virginia Union University professor Matthew Lynch claims “the jury is still out” on the effectiveness of homeschooling.

Lynch doesn’t think many parents have what it takes to teach their children at home, and believes parents should undergo rigorous training programs before they’re granted the privilege, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.

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“To have a high school diploma and all of a sudden start teaching students or teaching your own child? Even though you have their best interest at heart and you may want the best for them, you may not be able to provide that,” Lynch said.

“Without that type of rigorous training, I just wouldn’t feel comfortable allowing somebody to home-school their kids.”

Lynch, an education “expert” as dean of Virginia Union’s school of education, stands in defiance of a growing number of families in Virginia and across the United States who are opting for home education.

In Virginia alone, more than 32,000 students were homeschooled, which the state permits with permission from their local school district. The state regulations also require that parents have a high school degree and meet specific state requirements to teach their children and report their progress, according to the news site.

The National Home Education Research Institute reports the number of American students educated at home this year was 2.3 million, an increase of about 300,000 since 2010.

“I wasn’t willing to let my kids be educated by the government,” said Nikki Brungard, Virginia parent of three homeschool students. “I want to be the one to frame their worldview.”

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“For me,” she said, “what public schools teach is just different from what I value and what I find to be important.”

The Times-Dispatch highlighted homeschooling ahead of the 33rd annual Virginia Homeschool Convention that’s expected to draw about 14,000 people to Richmond on Thursday.

The National Home Education Research Institute reports “the home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public school students on standardized academic achievement tests,” and results for minority students have been even better.

“A 2015 study found black homeschool students to be scoring 23 to 42 percentile points above black public school students.”

The academic progress for black students is particularly impressive because public schools and many other types of education programs have not produced similar results. It’s also encouraging because “homeschooling is quickly growing in popularity among minorities,” according to the NHERI.

Other homeschooling research groups, like the International Center for Home Education Research, contend the impressive academic achievement of homeschool students is based on a skewed perspective, because those who participate in school research are often “far whiter, more religious, more married, better educated and wealthier than national averages.”

“It is thus impossible to say whether or not home schooling as such as any impact on the sort of academic achievement measured by standardized tests,” according to the center.

Regardless, millions of students and their parents across the country are convinced that learning at home is more productive and rewarding than a public school education. Ironically, as public schools in many metropolitan areas – Detroit, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Oakland, Washington, D.C., and numerous others – continue to fail students year after year, education “experts” like Lynch continue to call for “quality control” on home educators.

“I think that homeschooling is a great thing, a great idea,” Lynch told the Times-Dispatch. “But there needs to be some type of quality control.”