Some public schoolers have results that are the match for any homeschooler's. If I'm not mistaken, however, a greater fraction of homeschoolers have better results than the fraction of public schoolers with those same results. There are a lot of factors involved: homeschoolers may have more involved parents than the majority of public schoolers; homeschoolers may be less peer-oriented than public schoolers for whom "good grades aren't cool"; homeschoolers more often get to have a say in what they learn and when they learn it than public schoolers; more homeschoolers get to pursue their own interests and therefore learn it more thoroughly; more homeschoolers are taught by the tutorial method (one-to-one, very small group) than public schoolers are; homeschoolers get more real-life education out in the community, on field trips, making family vacations into educational opportunities, etc. (so learning is not compartmentalized but rather a 24/7 experience). Another factor is that ALL public schoolers are mandated to take the tests that make up those statistics, but only a relative few homeschoolers are mandated to take them, while others take them because they choose to, and still others don't take them at all.
