This paper reviews recent evidence on home-schooling and home-based education in the US.  Using various sources including state-level information and data on home-schoolers who took the SAT in 2001, we describe the characteristics of home-schoolers and analyze the motivation to home-school.  We then evaluate home-schooling in terms of freedom of choice, efficiency, equity, and social cohesion.  Throughout the evaluation, we note difficulties in identifying the treatment effect of home-schooling.  On freedom of choice, we find that home-schooling may be highly liberating.  On efficiency, we compare SAT test scores of home-schoolers with students in other types of school (noting the lack of evidence on home-school costs).  There are serious methodological concerns in ascribing overall test score differences to home-school provision, including self-selection of test-takers and absence of controls for co-variates; but we do find relative differences between results for Verbal and Math tests for home-schoolers.  Issues of equity in relation to home-schooling arise because families are now the ultimate determinants of a child’s welfare and prospects; we find relatively strong intergenerational academic transfers for home-schoolers.  The research on social cohesion, which is mainly published in general media, reports positive effects but focusses entirely on the individual home-schooler and not broader societal impacts.  We trace the consequences of this evaluation for policies on regulation, finance, and support services for home-schooling.