It is determined on a state by state level and varies from ‘not allowed, so you claim you’re running a private school instead and homeschool your kids anyway with no oversight’ (ie, California) to ‘here, pass these state benchmarks every few years’ to ‘homeschool? sure, whatever man, when did you have kids? cool dat.’
The homeschool lobby isn’t quite as well known as the NRA, but they have been VERY effective over the last 30 years for their largely christian fundamentalist populations in a LOT of states. Quiverful in particular is very dependent on homeschooling and the associated lack of oversight from any ‘outside’ influence or authority.
I think you missed the point of my post. The ENTIRE POINT of the overarching homeschool lobby (the hslda and associated working groups) is to PREVENT any sort of state oversight of homeschooling families as an unconstitutional intrusion of the state into the sacred privacy rights of the family (ie the parents) and their (generally considered) God given rights to do whatever they like with their kids (up to and including abuse) because the kids belong to them.
It’s not a failure on the part of state agencies to miss this, it’s the targeted and desired result of years of calculated legal wrangling starting in the early 80s.
I see. They feel the family’s privacy is paramount.
I have no objection to homeschooling if the children are receiving a good education. Their SAT scores should, at least, be comparable to public school graduates.
I didn’t realize there’s no monitoring or testing by the school district.
No state requires visits by authorities to homeschools. In fact…
• In 11 states, parents don’t have to inform school districts or anyone else that they’re homeschooling.
• Most states have no minimum education requirements for parents.
• 33 states have requirements that homeschooled kids are to take certain subjects, but 22 of these have no means of checking to determine if they are.
• The vast majority of homeschooled kids are not required to take state assessments.
If all this sounds as if parents in some states can "homeschool and never teach them a bloomin’ thing, that’s only because that’s correct. In fact, nobody even tracks whether or not parents actually stay home.
I have never home schooled, but I work in a school district. I’m almost 100% positive in my state that kids that are homeschooled are required to take state tests. As far as I know, they go to what would be their “home school” if they were actually attending that school during the test dates.
I homeschooled my daughter for high school (Arkansas). There was a waiting period, and I had to file a curriculum. Other than that, no real oversight. (FWIW she’s in grad school now)
Both of my nieces have spent some of their school days learning at home, due to health and other issues. They used the school’s curriculum and on a few occasions had tutors come in when it was something their parents couldn’t help them with; one is currently doing an online high school program, and the other is a HS senior dual enrolled in high school and community college, and attends all her classes at the college. This has all been done with the school’s oversight and is part of their IEP and 504 protocols.
A-Beka is probably the best known homeschooling curriculum and is HEAVILY fundamentalist Christian in ints outlook. I still see ads for Calvert, also a well-known curriculum that I used to see in my mom’s magazines when I was a kid, and there are many others, both religious and secular.
Most of the families I have known personally who HSed did it either because of a child’s health problems (like, for instance, my nieces) or they lived in an area where the public schools were not good and the private schools had lengthy waiting lists, were prohibitively expensive, and/or not much better if at all. Some used religious curricula and others didn’t even if they were Christian, because they were doing it for other reasons.
That said, the owner of an independent craft store in my old town said that she didn’t know that wackadoodle HSers existed in that area until some of the kids started coming into her store, which had a public work area, for “socialization”. These kids knew the Bible inside and out, and that was pretty much it; they had poor reading comprehension, didn’t know basic math, didn’t have an age-appropriate knowledge of current events, etc. She’s a devout Christian herself but had never met people like this at church or anywhere else.
And while I don’t know either family personally, I do know of two families who HSed their kids because they DID NOT want them exposed to Christianity, and knew they would be in a public school, by other kids inviting them to church and that kind of thing. :dubious: One family was pagan and the other was hardcore atheist. I really don’t think that’s healthy either but I’m not in those families.
That’s pretty useless as a criterion. By the time you’re taking the SAT, you’re most of the way through high school. If the kid does poorly, then what? They’ve still been homeschooled for ten years already by that point, and their younger siblings (if any) will probably be close to that. Plus some kids are going to score lower than average just because of their natural aptitude, not because of how they were taught, and you aren’t going to have high enough numbers at any given “school” to do meaningful statistics. Plus, of course, not everyone takes the SAT at all to begin with, because not everyone is aiming to attend college.
It’d be more useful to make them take the same state-run standardized tests as everyone else in their state, but even those don’t usually start until several years in, long enough that an uneducated child is going to be hopelessly far behind by that point.
One big problem is the parents couldn’t teach their kids to butter toast. That runs that gamut from “How do you write an essay? Don’t worry, Jesus will provide.” to “How do you solve 3x+1 = 16? Fuck if I know.” But of course homeschooling does not require one to be a qualified teacher.
I toyed with the idea of homeschooling because we are so far away frm the schools my kids attended. I am so glad I didn’t. I would’ve never gotten thru the math in highschool grades. All my kids did well in our Podunk school. In the end, all the time on the road paid off. (Unless you count the cars I wore out).
That’s a pretty rare situation. I’d say it’s actually more accurate to state that some professional teachers can’t teach kids to butter toast. While there are some exceptions, parents who care enough to home school will tend to do a good job.
Your statement about “qualified teacher” is pretty hilarious given how low teacher standards are in the US. It’s literally one of the easiest degrees to get and few states test teachers to make sure they understand the subjects they are teaching.
Now I do think there should be required standards for home schooling. That standard should be set at “safer and better than the local public school”.
I have met plenty of teachers who can’t put a sensible sentence together, and I’ve met teachers who are the best kind of awesome. But the saddest are those who have just given up, the red tape, the parents, the administration and the kids have left them without a soul. It is a really hard job if you really put yourself out there, and they don’t earn enough. Sad.
States might not require teachers to test to show proficiency in the subjects they’re teaching. But you do need to pass tests to be considered a “highly qualified teacher”, and if you’re not an HQT, you’re going to have a heck of a time finding a district (or even a charter) that’ll hire you.
My mom was considering homeschooling me in high school, for a while, due to some complicated circumstances at the school I’d been attending. But she knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep up on the math, and figured that she’d have to find some way to get me into some sort of dual-enrollment at one of the local colleges. Fortunately, I got into a very good high school at the last minute, so it didn’t end up being necessary.
There are as many reasons for homeschooling as there are homeschooling families. There’s religious fundamentalism (Christian or otherwise). There are health/developmental issues with the kids. There’s distrust of government. There’s a genuine belief that the parents can provide their children with a better education than what the schools can provide. They don’t want their kids exposed to whatever is going on in the public schools their kids would otherwise attend (gangs, drugs, what have you). And so on.
I don’t have kids, but you can bet your sweet bippy they would not see the inside of the public school in this town. I listed out the reasons why, but then deleted them because that would quickly steer this thread into GD territory.
Long story short: don’t just assume that someone homeschools their kids because they’re religious whackjobs.
I know some folks pretty well who mostly homeschooled, and they did so for religious purposes. But, they are pretty well off, and they did it quite well. It was, literally, a full time job for the mother and they hired special tutors for foreign language, math and some other subjects. They spent money to convert part of their home into a room specially dedicated only to the schooling, so it wasn’t, for example, done in the kitchen with the TV on.
It’s not an easy thing to do, and most parents are ill equipped to do it right, especially with several children across age ranges. It can be done, of course, but not easily.
My former neighbors led a peripatetic lifestyle. They home schooled their bright, charming daughter mostly to make lots of free time for extensive travel abroad. She had social opportunities through sports, friends, and band music lessons. They struggled to find a home school curriculum to guide her lessons though because the curricula were all either simplistic or just religious tracts in disguise.
During the 1990s, I was part of a non-profit which (among other things) provided support to homeschoolers. At that time anyway, there was very little government oversight. What little oversight existed was easily worked around. Suppose you live in a state where the law requires every child to attend an actual school. No problem, you just file the paperwork to declare your house as a “school”. Then suppose there’s a law requiring every school to have at least one teacher with a certification. No problem, you just find a diploma mill to give yourself a certification. And if the state were foolish enough to pass a law shutting down schools which don’t meet benchmarks, they’d end up closing some of their own public schools in the process.
Look at it this way. If you believe the purpose of school is to ensure that our citizens are well-educated, then our public schools are mediocre at reaching that goal and homeschooling doesn’t do any worse. But if you believe that the purpose of school is to keep kids busy, off the streets, and out of the job market, then public school does a great job and homeschooling doesn’t do any worse. And if you believe that the purpose of school is to train factory workers on how to be obedient… then homeschooling fails but that’s okay because it’s a small percentage of your available work force. And if you believe that the purpose of school is to separate truth from falsehood, producing graduates who can spot con artists and tell the difference between science and hoaxes… then homeschooling fails miserably but public school doesn’t do much better. Consequently, there’s very little motivation to force homeschooling to improve. And, as others pointed out, there’s fierce push back, much of which is religiously motivated. So politicians generally just leave it alone.