It would be good to know how these homeschoolers were chosen for the study. They may be a select sample?
I know of some families who pull their kids out of public school, sign up for “home school” and the kids are never heard from again.
http://www.freedomforchildrentogrow.org/8318-DCSF-HomeEdReviewBMK.PDF
According to the above study of 1,200 homeschooled children from last year, “Children educated at home are twice as likely to be known by social services and four times more likely as young adults to be out of work, education or training than those who go to school”
I know a lot of homeschooled children who are flourishing, but it ain’ all roses.
I presume (or more true I hope), code_grey, that you accept that the government has some authority to limit a parent’s actions towards his or her child. Why are those laws not slippery slopes?
YOu can make the argument you are advancing towards any government power. What if it gets abused? What if it gets extras tacked on? Do you have the same kind of slippery slope arguments against the census and requiring registration of births?
There is a proper role for the government in ensuring that parents do not abuse their children. Failing to provide for the education of a child is a form of abuse. There is therefore a role for the government in ensuring that parents provide for the education of their children. And that has to involve some kind of regulation of home (and private) schooling, if we are indeed to permit home (and private) schooling.
We do regulate public schools (and private schools as well).
A very important thing to note about such studies is that the participants are generally self-selected, which raises the possibility of sample bias. As this analysis points out,
Emphasis added. When you compare the academic achievements of public schools with homeschooling in such studies, you need to bear in mind that you’re comparing apples and oranges. The public school test averages are based on mandatory testing of all (or nearly all) enrolled students, whereas the homeschooling results are based on a much smaller and self-selected sample.
You called it.
I don’t want to turn this into a debate about educational theory and pedagogy, but this is a bit… off?
It doesn’t take DaVinci level polymathness to be able to educate your kids to at least a grade 8 level.
Caveat: I’m certainly not trying to say that homeschooling is necessarily inferior to other forms of schooling. I’ve had students in my classes who were homeschooled and whose performance was absolutely awesome. I think that the dedication and involvement required for good homeschooling often does result in the student’s receiving a really superior education.
However, we need to be aware that surveys like the ones ITR champion cited are not giving us meaningful statistical information about the comparative performance of homeschooling and other schools on average. So we can’t really use them to support the “if it’s working great, don’t fix it” argument against regulating homeschooling.
We simply don’t know how well homeschooling is working overall, because we have no reliable data about the performance of homeschooled students in general, because we have no regulations in place for homeschooling that would make it possible to acquire that data.
Yes, but it is hard to believe that any parent would have what it takes to effectively teach in all subjects necessary to graduate. It is not enough to just keep ahead of the student a couple of months in the workbook-real teachers have to have an advanced understanding of the subject as a whole. Teachers in public schools specialize(and go through extensive training) in specific areas of knowledge for this reason.
Again - use a test to check. Most homeschoolers that I know work in teams and bring in experts.
Teachers in public schools are SUPPOSED to specialize, but that depends on the district and State. Your description of the public school instructors is the ideal, but does not necessarily represent reality.
villa, here is a nice way to put it. Any policy can give benefits and/or damage various constituencies/groups. An interventionist government policy in child education is likely to benefit some groups (teachers, government officials, children of abusive parents) and hurt other groups (normal parents who may be persecuted by the government on claims of child abuse, denial of education etc). Likewise, a hands-off policy will benefit the “average” parents and hurt the above mentioned abused kids and government employees.
The liberal governments, when formulating policy, follow the “let no crisis go to waste” principle. If they see some kids abused they declare it “crisis” and use it as justification to push interventionist policies. By contrast, the “silent majority” of parents, while not supporting bad behavior by abusers, should be primarily concerned about implications to THEMSELVES. At least in the “ideal world”, that is - in practice nowadays you can PR-spin that silent majority to acquiesce to almost anything.
To give a more concrete example, if 100,000 kids are going to be “abused” for lack of interventionist policy but 100,000,000 normal parents will have the government off their back in return, that’s a good tradeoff. The interests of the vast majority of the normal people making up the nation should take priority over the desire of the nanny state to “right all wrongs” and wash away the tears off the eyes of a a small group, even if they happen to be kids.
Moreover, notice that the opponents of educational regulations don’t do it just for abstract reasons. It’s not just an abstract “slippery slope”, it is a very real, ongoing slippery slope. For instance the government is already, via the Bush’s No Child Left Behind, pressuring schools into adopting policies that, you guessed it, benefit some and hurt many others (the others being the great silent majority of Americans). The government, on the state level, has already been known to push through public school educational policies that were deemed harmful by many parents, like whole language. In the case of whole language it was only forcibly applied to public schools that time - but what is to stop them to establish mandatory tests for all kids that can be passed only by those taught via whole language methods? Or what is to stop them from creating “math” tests based on constructivist approaches where your kid’s paper will be failed if he got it all right but forgot to draw a picture of sustainable dolphin?
Further, the difference between a bad law and a truly evil law is in its potential consequences. A law that threatens normal people with a 5% decline in disposable income can be thought of as “bad”. A law that threatens normal people with having their kids take away by the State - that’s “evil” from capital E.
i would disagree with this up until high school, at the very least
i really don’t think the vast majority of school districts in this country, save the exceptionally well funded or the massive ones, have 7th and 8th grade teachers that are that highly specialized - you’re still learning basic concepts at this level that, with a minimal amount of “boning up”, many parents (certainly not an average one, however) would be able to teach to their children (assuming they’re good educators, of course, which has nothing to do with their level of polymathness)
No more so than the state doing the education means that the child is a possession of the state.
I suppose it is a judgment call, but the desire to educate your own children does not seem suspicious to me. YMMV.
I would think the state would need to make some kind of objective case that harm was being done - “We just don’t like it” is not a good enough reason to overrule a parent.
The difficulty about “what to do if Johnny isn’t up to grade level” is that whatever you want to argue should be done to home-schoolers can equally plausibly be done to public school students as well.
Suppose we give every child in the district a standardized test. 99% of the home-schooled pass with flying colors. 30% of the public school students fail. If the reasoning is “if the child isn’t learning, the educator is doing harm” then we need to prevent that educator from doing the harm.
What do we do with the failures - kick them out and send them to home school? 
Accountability in education is a fine thing. But given that home-schooled kids do better than average pretty much across the board, ISTM that we need to worry less about them and much more about the ones being taught by members of the union.
Regards,
Shodan
Not necessarily. Whether or not it’s a good tradeoff depends partly on what’s meant by “abuse” and what’s meant by “having the government on your back”.
A reasonable level of government intervention and scrutiny is not an undue hardship for normal parents to put up with, to allow for detection and remediation of situations that are truly abusive.
What we will all always argue about is what constitutes a “reasonable” level of intervention. You seem to be arguing that the only reasonable level is zero, and anything beyond that is a slippery slope to tyranny, but that’s not very persuasive.
Another silly strawman argument. Teacher resistance, public opinion, school board elections, and so on do influence educational policy, as we saw in the abandonment of “new math” methods in elementary math instruction that simply didn’t work. Yes, we need to be alert about resisting stupid and over-intrusive regulations, but imagining far-fetched dreadful consequences as an excuse for resisting any regulation whatsoever is just gratuitously exercising your worry muscles, and mine get enough exercise as it is.
All homeschooled kids, pretty much by definition, have parents who are very involved in their children’s education. Kids with parents like that tend to do better in any school than kids with less involved parents.
In the specific case I know about, I’ve mentioned (in the other thread) that my sister has a Ph.D. in molecular biology. My brother in law actually is a high school teacher. They are well qualified to home school their daughter.
ETA: And if there’s a subject they don’t know that their daughter wants to learn, the home schooling community brings in an expert to teach it. That’s how she’s been taking American Sign Language lessons, for example.
I really don’t think that implication-by-definition is warranted.
A good chunk of them (but not a plurality by any stretch) are probably religious, political, or other type zealots who have very screwed up notions of modern, public school based education.
What happens when the benign local democratic government decides that children should be taught some principle that conflicts with the parents’ religious or moral belief?
It does not, in other words, take an evil fascist government to impose the teaching of Creationism – we’ve seen many instances of local school boards attempting to do just that. Ultimately those first blatant attempts were shot down by the courts, but savvy school boards came back with “Intelligent Design,” and “Evolution is Just a Theory.”
Or in the alternative, perhaps to ring an issue that might appeal to a different crowd than that example does: what if the benign local democratic government mandates teaching diversity and tolerance by requiring “And Tango Makes Three” to be read and understood by first graders? Many folks here will probably think that sounds like an unobjectionable plan, of course, but to some parents, this may be undesirable.
Don’t recall saying that it did. But the key thing to remember is that it is the rights of the child that are most important here.
Don’t recall saying that it did. If a parent homeschools, they are making their home a school. Thats chool should be subject to the same level of inspection and regulation as any other private school.
Don’t recall saying that it was. As stated above, regulate home schools like other private schools. Some regulations won’t apply - I don’t think, for example, a home schooling situation without disabled children should be required to provide disabled access ramps. But where it makes sense for the same regulations to apply, apply them. Notiec I haven’t yet talked about content of the education at all, other than the same requirements that we enforce, supposedly for the benefit of the child, on what they should learn in public and private schools.
Don’t recall saying public schools should not be held accountable. I think there should be more accountability in public education.
I am talking about the locus of the rights involved, and those of the child are, IMHO, more important than those of the parent. While the parent acts as guardian of those rights much of the time, the state also has a role to play to protect the child’s rights against intrusion from the parent. That requires a degree of regulation.
Did anybody see this? Because you are all going on as if it is ‘known’ that homeschooled children do better.
2 x more likely to be known by social services
4 x more likely as young adults to be out of work
A parent’s rights to Freedom of Religion would become implicated if the parent was forced to teach their child something they found religiously abhorrent. That doesn’t happen, as far as I can see. Even if regulation of home schooling set a curriculum that could not be deviated from, I still don’t see a violation. The parent would not have to teach evolution, for example, even if it was on the curriculum, because they could either allow someone else to teach that part of the course, or they could enrol their child in public school.
The parent’s right to Freedom of Religion does not, however, I believe, extend to control over his or her child. Someone else teaching a child evolution does not impact the parent’s freedom of religion, it may impact the child’s. And we accept generally that children’s rights are interpreted differently and are more circumspect in many ways.
I therefore don’t see, within the realms of reasonable possibilities, regulation of home schooling could impact the parents’ religious freedoms. Then again, I wrote my seminar paper on the concept that the First Amendment probably doesn’t prevent the government from requiring all children to attend secular public school, so it isn’t surprising I come to that conclusion.
Did your seminar paper acknowledge your belief that existing Supreme Court precedent was meaningless, in view of the clowns sitting thereon?