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Those institutionalized children who are academically successful are likely 100% “afterschooled”! The institution is doing nothing more than sending home a curriculum, administering tests, and grading projects! It is the parents and child who actually doing nearly all the hard work in the **HOME**. In fact, the time spent in the institutional school actually **retards** the social and academic progress of children with committed parents. It wastes a ton of their time. These kids would do better if the school mailed the curriculum and textbooks to their home, and only saw them for testing.

wintertime, I was thinking of you and this point you promote when I was reading the report which is the subject of the thread.
It just appears that parental involvement in education is what tells the tale - and anything which dilutes that is a negative. I found myself wondering how the data might be defined which would tell us how much of the performance of public school students is controlled by parental involvement - as you put it, "afterschooling." It just looks like homeschoolers match up with some subset of PS pupils whose parents are similarly involved in their education.
My other reaction to the data presented was that maybe the perspective changes if you look at the hole in the donut - instead of saying, "parental education doesn't make much difference, only between 85 and 90 percentile," you could say that it makes a substantial difference - between 15 and 10 percentile - in the number of students who are better academically than your kid.
My granddaughter spent a year in an elementary school which had a slogan, "where excellence begins." I snort when I see it, because my granddaughter was reading before she ever set foot in a school. And because her mother was Phi Beta Kappa and her father has a PhD. "Excellence begins" in elementary school? Hardly! Already too late by then, pretty much.

"parental education doesn't make much difference, only between 85 and 90 percentile," you could say that it makes a substantial difference - between 15 and 10 percentile - in the number of students who are better academically than your kid.

Good point. In a large high school the number of children who are better academically could be fairly large. This difference could be very discouraging to those who are in the 85%.