My issue is that it is not scientifically or statistically accurate to use a sample size of one to make any kind of objective or predictive judgment on the quality of that child’s teacher.
You wouldn’t say that if the kid passes the GED, then that parent has a 100% success rate and therefore is a far better teacher than anyone in the public or private school system. So why do you do the opposite and assume that the parent must be a terrible, horrific teacher with a 0% success rate?
And then your go on to complain about the content. I find it objectional as well. It is not, however, abuse.
Yeah, it is not how I would educate my child nor how I would want her to be educated. But if you (the general you) want to educate your child in that manner, then I don’t see how it remotely approaches the term “abuse.” The child is still learning cognitive thinking skills, even if from a religious perspective.
When the question about the origin of life, the universe, and everything comes up, a child is going to wonder how God comes into it all. Wanting to provide your own answer is your job as a parent, not a thing to be shirked. And for too long there are atheist science professors in schools who all but tell young minor children that science has this covered and your parents are wrong and there is no God. Parents push back against that so we have home schooling.
I’m not saying that we should substitute the first chapter of Genesis for biology class. But a reminder to teachers that they should be respectful of religious beliefs and a disclaimer that we just aren’t sure about the ultimate source of matter and life so that you should search your own conscience about that is appropriate.
You seem big into the evolution debate. I see your frustration with the homeschoolers curriculum on this but I have to ask, do you know how this topic is taught in the public schools?
Public schools teach to state standards HERE are the science standards for Kansas. Scroll down to page 55,58 (middle school) and 91,95 (high school) for the ones regarding evolution (called Natural Selection, History of the Earth, and Evolution). Do you find those acceptable? I do because I think they cover the topic well.
Any homeschooler or public schooler for that matter, could easily cover this material in a week or so. They are at most 4-5 questions on a state standardized test. HERE is an example of the questions regarding evolution for middle schoolers. HERE is a practice test for high schoolers. Obviously they wouldnt be able to ask all those plus all the other topics on a 2 hour test.
Are those acceptable to you? Again, I think they do because they show understanding of the topic.
Again, in schools that I know of this is at most a week or so and frankly I consider these topics to be less important (and frankly boring) than the nuts and bolts of science like dissecting frogs or watching chemicals react. Ok, things evolve and change. They get that. Kids like doing things hands on and these topics mostly consist of watching videos, looking at charts, or maybe looking at some fossils. HERE is a sample lesson plan on Evolution for high schoolers.
Why do I say a week or so on evolution? Because a teacher has 9 months or less to cover LOTS of material, most of which is more “fun” than evolution.
And the thing is one doesnt even have to believe it. A student just needs to be able to answer questions on it on a test.
As for careers. Lets say a college student goes into a job interview for an internship with a scientific lab which would lead to a career in a science field. Would they even ask questions about fossils and age of the earth?
So while I see your frustration with the homeschooling curriculum, I dont think you should toss out homeschool education for the much superior public school education because of it.
FWIW here are the policy recommendations from a pro-homeschooling organization that also supports some measure of regulation: Policy Recommendations - Coalition for Responsible Home Education
My apologies if that’s a repeat; I haven’t been following closely.
Actually, evolution is one of the few areas that I fully expected to be full of religious instruction and while I’m against schools, public or private, “teaching the controversy”, I’m certainly not shocked by it. Here in Atlanta, one school board was even trying to get it into the public schools again. I also feel if that was the only area affected by homeschooling, kids could have a pretty well rounded educational experience.
What I didn’t expect was for English, Math, Physics, etc. to be wasting so much time on useless religious topics in some of the curriculum.
Regardless, and despite the fact that we’ll likely never completely agree on this topic, I sincerely appreciate you starting this thread. I found myself far more passionate about this topic than I would have imagined and learned quite a bit more than I do from most threads here. So thanks!
Unfortunately, life doesn’t give you perfect information to make decisions. All we can do is make the best decisions we can based on the information we have. If that information is that a parent homeschooled their kid for 13 years and the state discovers that kid can’t read the home school teacher needs to go to jail.
If we can test annually and discover that a 1st grade graduate can’t read we can send the parents to school to help them learn to teach reading better if after 3rd grade the kid still can’t read then we can put them in public school and there is still time to recover.
As far as the other end of the spectrum, I’m ok with a home school teacher telling people they are the worlds best teacher because their kid got their GED. They could even get the same prize as other amazing teachers their students can come to their retirement party and tell them how much they impacted their life.
Thanks, I am surprised how much discussion this started.
FWIW when my kid attended a private Christian school I wondered also why every lesson had to weave in bible verses and such. But its a popular school, beats the public schools in SAT, ACT scores and number of kids going on to college. And the other parents really like it. We only left because my son wanted to take classes not offered.
I hate the public school monopoly (thanks NEA) and I truly feel we should do education with an “umbrella” approach. Under this umbrella parents would have the right to chose public, private, alternate, homeschool, or a magnet school. All the kids would be required to take the same standardized tests. So if a test determines whether or not a home school kid gets to stay in that, the same test should say if a kid in a public school is allowed to advance up a grade or not or whether that teacher or school is doing a good job.
I’m glad your passionate on homeschooling and its good and bad points. Homeschooling, or a variation like say 3-4 families doing a private/semi-homeschool together, or a regular school where kids only attend 1-3 days a week, is vital in these times where public schools are failing or times like right now when schools are closed or simply where parents want an alternative. They need good resources and support.
BTW, what did you think about Kansas science standards?
You might be surprised about home many home school kids earn national prizes in science, art, spelling bees, geography bees, etc… A kid with a passion for one subject might actually do better in a home school environment where they can devote more time to it.
I don’t believe that that is a repeat and if they were in charge of it, I think I’d be a staunch defender of home schooling as an option. I appreciate you finding them as I didn’t run across them while digging around. Their staff seems to come from predominantly home schooled backgrounds, some with wonderful and some with horrible experiences. They also seem to be focused on what is best for the children. I’ll stop using the term abuse as a replacement for what they call educational neglect as it seems more descriptive.
In short, I find them pretty awesome! Does anyone see any issues with their policies?
Some are a touch too vague to evaluate, but seems a starting point with rational thought behind it. If I have time I’ll consider a line-by-line.
They appear to reference, sometimes verbatim, from this source (Google Books), which is put out by the National Research Council. I don’t have any issues with that whatsoever.
But the information is so horrifically incomplete to be meaningless. If I open a restaurant and have one customer who gives me 5 stars nobody says that my restaurant is the greatest in the entire world, better than anything Gordon Ramsay has done because he only has a 4.9 rating. With a sample size of one you basically have no information from which you can make any sort of meaningful extrapolation.
Why don’t we treat like things alike? Why, if a child in the public school system goes 13 years and cannot read, is a teacher or an administrator not going to jail? Because a hundred other kids can read? They still neglected that one child. It is like my earlier hypo that I get a sentencing discount for the kids I didn’t beat.
And again, I think for the third time in this thread, why do we remove children from homeschooling when they fail, but we continue to allow the public schools to fail children? If the price for failure is the removal of children from a home school, why do we not give a voucher to a kid who the public school continues to fail?
Nah, in reality those aren’t “like things” at all. This is why in responsible systems of education we have things like standard school curricula and teaching protocols, student tracking, administrative supervision, electoral control of school boards, and so forth. The purpose is to make the public education process as transparent as possible so communities can tell whether teachers are actually abusing or neglecting kids.
Because we have mechanisms in place to assess whether teachers and administrators are doing their jobs properly, we don’t send them to jail if they are doing their jobs properly but nonetheless a small minority of their students fail in education. If too many of their students fail in education, they may get restructured or retrained or fired, but we don’t send them to jail unless we know they’ve outright violated the legal conditions of their employment.
When it comes to homeschooling parents who insist on carrying out their alleged educational mission on individual children under a cloak of complete secrecy, on the other hand, we don’t have those assessment mechanisms available. Like I said, if a school’s enrollment consists of one child, then that “school” has either a 100% success rate or a 100% failure rate. And if educational authorities aren’t allowed any oversight on that “school”'s educational practices, then the only yardstick by which we can measure their performance is that success or failure rate.
Myself, I’d be delighted if we had a far more energetically and transparently regulated homeschooling system, where homeschooling parents were actively engaged with educational authorities to work out what their responsibilities and duties as education providers would be. We could assess homeschooling parents on whether or not they were actually carrying out their agreed-upon duties, not just relying on the crude yardstick of whether or not the educational efforts succeeded for one particular kid.
But it’s the extreme “parental-rights” ideologues themselves that have been stridently advocating for the “crypto-schooling” system with no effective regulation or supervision of their methods or goals. They have only themselves to thank if they are consequently getting judged harshly on the basis of their outcomes alone. If the crypto-homeschooling movement doesn’t want to lie in that bed, they shouldn’t have made it in the first place.
See above (likewise not for the first time). If you refuse to allow your educational activities (which are supposed to be providing the schooling that the state is legally obligated to provide to children) to be monitored and evaluated, then the only thing we can use to assess your effectiveness is the simple binary of whether or not your pupil-offspring is adequately schooled.
If you insist on making childhood education a black-box affair with no meaningful oversight of what you’re actually doing, you can’t expect to be allowed to go on using your black box when it’s obviously not working. “One strike and you’re out” is a reasonable rule for the sort of zero-supervision, zero-assessment “crypto-schooling” system that these ideologues are championing.
(Personally, I think it’s even too generous a rule; I’m not in favor of even letting people get up to bat in that kind of situation with no umpires and no scorers. Not with the educational fate of children at stake.)
I think the problem with that idea is who should do it and who pays them?
The local school already has enough problems on their plate and having to also supervise the home school kids probably wont work.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all. I’m well aware of the success stories from home schooling from an academic standpoint. From what I can tell the educational success of students can be directly impacted by their student:teacher ratios. So having a 1:1 or 3:1 ratio should beat out a 30:1 all else being equal. But yet my point stands that the award for a great teacher is a hand shake and a plack and I’m ok with home school teachers receiving those rewards too.
If you get 5 starts on Yelp from your only customer then I’m total ok with you calling yourself the world’s greatest restaurant. Likewise if you’re only customer dies because you decided to serve bleach instead of water then you deserve to go to jail not see if the bleach kills your second customer. Or maybe we could have health inspectors come into your restaurant and ensure you’re being safe before you kill someone and then we just need to teach you that bleach isn’t for drinking.
I’ve already said that I’d be ok with teachers and administration going to jail for any educational neglect they force on children in proportion to their contribution to that abuse but unlike home school no one person is responsible. To run with your beating a child analogy a person that walks by and punches a 10 yea old in the face deserves jail time but way less than a person who does it 100 times even if 100 people come by and punch the kid.
For the second time, we do remove children from teachers every year. I had one math teacher 3 times as a maximum and I could have chosen to stop going back after the first time. My first grade teacher was different from my second grade teacher and I had no repeats until high school. You are trying to swap in entire schools for individual teachers and even then kids will have three different schools (in most cases) in their academic career. And even if you substitute entire school districts fo a single home school teacher we currently have the means to remove school boards that are failing too.
I do think we need to come up with ways to help failing teachers/schools/and districts but the solution is not allowing parents to be completely unsupervised in their attempts to educate.
Some states do some version of this already as part of their legal regulation of homeschooling. Homeschoolers in Connecticut, for example, have to teach certain mandated subjects and do a portfolio review with school authorities. Some states require homeschooled students to participate in standardized testing or employ a certified teacher, as in Iowa:
In Massachusetts,
In New York,
There’s nothing impossible or excessively burdensome about having responsible administrative monitoring of homeschooling education. The reason so much of the US doesn’t provide it is AFAICT mostly because of ideologues with aggressively extreme views about the absolute supremacy of “parental rights”.
There have been cases where that was the ONLY thing the kids learned, because they had stage parents. Finding this online is difficult, but there was a family in the 1990s who had multiple children advance to the finals of the National Spelling Bee (which, BTW, isn’t going to be held this year) and after the youngest one turned 18, they revealed that this was why they were HSed and that their father regularly threatened to kill them if they didn’t make the cut.
As I mentioned up-thread, measuring teacher efficacy is extremely difficult even in a school setting with large sample sizes. Success is when a teacher improves a student more than other teachers could have. But we can’t run the same six year old through first grade 100 times. So the best we can do is look at averages over time. But even then, the performance of a single child says little about the performance of a teacher or a school, because nobody knows how that child could have done elsewhere.
So there’s not much point arguing these silly hypotheticals about jailing people if a kid doesn’t hit targets. Nobody is seriously proposing it anyway.
I cited them previously in this thread, but you are forgiven. 