There is no evidence of a problem because there is no evidence at all. And that is because there is no testing.
I would propose that all children, in public, private, charter or home schools take the same standardized test. It should be clearly spelled out what happens to teachers whose kids are consistently low scoring.
If it is a homeschooling parent whose child is performing poorly, then I would advice a higher level of regulation. That parents would have to submit monthly curriculum and get advice from an eduction professional.
If a classroom teacher has children who are performing poorly, they would also have to be under increased supervision and be under the wing of a teacher trainer with more experience and a more solid record.
Fair?
also, the analogy sucks because there is feedback if you don’t properly prepare food. namely, you or your kid gets sick and you improve yourself the next time around.
not so much with schooling - it’s not the kind of thing that you can so easily identify.
also, fwiw, if you show up to the emergency room 3 times a week for a month with food poisoning, there’s a good chance children’s services is going to come around and pay you a visit. acting like there’s no regulation of your household, as far as your children’s welfare goes, is absurd.
I would vote for that - sounds fair to me.
this is like arguing that we should do away with driver’s licenses because you can’t keep people off the road who really want to drive without a license.
namely, it’s like a bunk argument. you’re equating a lack of resolve to enforce oversight standards to an actual lack of oversight. wrong-o.
I found this in a quick Google search of homeschooling and SAT scores:
Yes, but you’ve already acknowledged that your feelings are not precisely in line with federal law. So it’s not clear to me why you keep mentioning how you feel, unless it’s intended to persuade others that your feelings should trump established law.
That a public school may require children to leanr opposing viewpoints is beyond cavil. That the government may REQUIRE that children get those opposing viewpoints is highly doubtful.
Uh Oh. You shouldn’t have said that. Better pray **Skald **doesn’t show up. In the meantime, if you spy any flying monkeys, don’t think, RUN.
Notice what happens to the alleged “homeschooling advantage” between the K-12 standardized tests, where the homeschooled students are well above national averages, and the college-admissions tests, where the homeschooled students drop to “at least on par with others” (details in the link).
As I’ve been pointing out, in the K-12 standardized tests the studies are comparing the results of mandatory universal testing of public-school students with the results of testing a self-selected sample of homeschooled students. Unsurprisingly, the homeschooled students are found to perform much better.
In the college admissions tests, though, none of the testing is mandatory (in other words, all participants are self-selected), and the study looks at all test results for both homeschooled and non-homeschooled students. All of a sudden, the homeschooled students are not performing significantly better than their peers. (In fact, as noted in the link, one study found that on a particular college test called the mathematics ACT, homeschooled students’ scores were slightly worse than those of the non-homeschooled.)
People keep writing that there is no testing of homeschoolers. Isn’t homeschooling highly regulated in some states? True, in some places you don’t even have to notify the district, but I found this:
Now I have no idea if that’s correct or not, but if it is, then the data are out there. Whether or not those data are accessible to us is another question.
I think that the government should intervene in any case in which it has reason to believe that abuse or neglect is occurring. Barring that, they should butt out. I’m glad they did in my case.
Sorry, but the parent can teach the kid what they want, but also make certain that the kid can parrot the proper party line of bullshit in public. You can make the child understand the truth of needing to have a public face and a private face.
Students may have to pass standardized assessment tests to comply with state regulations on homeschools, but AFAICT the data about standardized test results aren’t published except for public-school students.
If homeschool advocates in a state with universal mandatory standardized testing for homeschoolers want hard evidence about how homeschooled students perform compared to others, I would think that lobbying to have the homeschoolers’ standardized test results annually summarized and released to the public, just as public school students’ test results are, would be the way to go.
True, based on one of those studies it appears that homeschooled kids who self-select to take college entrance exams perform equivalently to public school kids who self select to take college entrance exams.
Therefore - homeschooling is no worse than public schooling.
No, that doesn’t follow at all, it’s the worst kind of sloppy research methodology in point of fact.
The conclusion would be that the self selected cohort is no worse than the self selected public schooled cohort at taking college entrance exams. A broader conclusion is not only unjustified, it is unjustifiable.
Oh, and:
:rolleyes:
Reposting a thoroughly debunked bit of junk science to push an agenda? In fact, posting the same text you did before, when it was shown to be bogus, and adding new text that uses* the exact same junk-science, agenda-driven deception*? How’d I guess?
Just cut this shit out already.
And, damn, as long as I’m on the subject (sorry for the triple post, but this is just annoying):
Yes, but think about that for a moment. "These 16,311 homeschool students’ scores were not self-selected by parents or anyone else. " Are there only 16,311 homeschooling students in the nation? No, there are more. Does that, in fact, mean that they were self-selected? By definition, yes. *Then why would someone claim that they were not? *
Because they were crafting a fiction to push an agenda.
Look at that study as well. “included 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states who took three well-known tests—California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and Stanford Achievement Test for the 2007–08 academic year.”
Again, this is the worst, sloppiest kind of junk-science, agenda driven nonsense. If you take a self-selected cohort and test it against the average of the entire nation’s school systems of course you will find a difference, that’s why no respectable study would ever be designed in such a manner. And “there can be no doubt” that students were represented across a random cross section of backgrounds? How on Earth can there be no such doubt? In fact there were zero methodological safeguards to ensure that (or at least, none that were discussed in the link) and no reason, at all, to certify that was the result. And even if it was, self-selecting would nullify any possible methodological advantage that might occurred from a randomized sample. You can’t take randomized demographics and then only take those who self-select out, that nullifies the entire purpose of a random sample in the first place.
The eggshell-thin rationalization that’s offered is that “The concern that the only families who chose to participate are the most successful homeschoolers can be alleviated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of parents did not know their children’s test results before agreeing to participate in the study.” This is, blatantly, bogus. If asked after the fact, parents would have known numerous facts including but not limited to how their children felt the did on the tests, how well they’d prepared, etc… And that any of the parents already knew their children’s scores is such a red flag that I’m surprised the fraudsters even let it slip.
(In fact, since we were talking about state-specific tests administered on a national level, it’s far and away most likely that the parents had to self-select to get their students to take the tests in the first place, nullifying even the flimsy rationalizations offered by the advocacy-group).
The agenda-driven advocacy group knows this, and tries to rationalize it away.
"Critics tend to focus on this narrow point and maintain that they will not be satisfied until every homeschooler is submitted to a test. This is not a reasonable request because not all homeschoolers take standardized achievement tests. In fact, while the majority of homeschool parents do indeed test their children simply to track their progress and also to provide them with the experience of test-taking, it is far from a comprehensive and universal practice among homeschoolers.
The best researchers can do is provide a sample of homeschooling families and compare the results of their children to those of public school students, in order to give the most accurate picture of how homeschoolers in general are faring academically."
In other words, asking for an actual scientific study with valid methodology is “unreasonable” and so the "best " we can do is provide a study that’s so powerfully broken that its value as anything other than deceptive propaganda is nil.
We can, potentially, analyze the effect of homeschooling. But rigged tests set up to give specific results are not the way to do it, and that this group pretends otherwise is no excuse.
It’s a fraud.
And one can not get the straight dope on a complicated issue by fraud.
If you allow homeschooling, yes.
Yes
Yes
Mandatory outside time/some sort of “socialisation for homeschooled kids” program where they get to meet other kids, the inspections & testing already mentioned, the children’s own wishes to be taken into account (i.e. inspector to determine that parents are not *forcing *homeschooling on their children if they’d rather go to school.)
All this stems from my belief that children are **not **the property of their parents, that parents do not have any *rights *in regards to their children’s education as much as they have responsibilities. Society trumps parents, IMO (as long as it’s a society I agree with, of course 
) If I were in charge, there’d be *no *homeschooling.
That’s b/c a lot of homeschoolers are the VERY sheltered Jesus types. The type of UBERconservative families where beating a kid with an instrument is thought of as OK, and where they are SO sheltered they can’t even say gee or listen to Christian Contemporary Music. In other words the type of families where a school like Bob Jones is too libral.
I’d take the claims of Homeschooling Legal Defense Assocition with a grain of salt. They are very conservative and very Baptist strict.
Regarding unschooling. My girlfriend was unschooled and she is one of the smartest people I know. Granted her unschooling was done under the ageis of a very cool set of unconventional parents.
The study used data from fifteen different testing services. So no, they were not self-selected by definition.
Do you have a cite that shows that the parents in this study knew how well their children did on the tests?
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s a nonsequitor. It doesn’t matter if they used eight million testing services. In each and every case, home schooling parents had to choose to have their children take the test, and then had to choose to report their scores. This is then measured against a compulsory test given to everybody in various states, California for instance which includes a large percent of recent immigrants who cannot (by any honest person) be expected to be able to score at grade level statistically reliably. And out of that self-selected group of voluntary test-takers, only those who chose to report to the study are used (a second level of self-selection, and one which the fraudsters deliberately use to obfuscate their findings. I’ll get to that in a moment)
Even then the fraudsters’ claim that while 30+% knew their scores and the exact breakdown of difference between the reporting and the non-reporting cohorts was deliberately distorted. To say nothing of the fact that letting parents opt-in after their children already took the test, regardless of whether or not they knew the scores, would allow parents to choose to opt out if their kid came home and said “Mom, I bombed on that!” versus “Yeah, I aced it.” Moreover there were a host of other methodological problems, includi9ng but not limited to a highly unrepresentative sample size that the fraudsters want to claim is representative (almost 100% had personal computers at home and two parents [which they compare against 8th grade non-American Indian and Alaskan students. Seriously], more than 80% had one parent who didn’t work at all, and of that 20% almost 85% worked only part time, etc…)
I’m kinda surprised here Shodan.
Your cite shows that.
[
Which means that a non-zero percentage, in fact, did know their children’s scores before agreeing to participate in the study. If we look at their actual report, we also see that* almost a third did in fact already know their scores* and the denial of its influence is so flimsy methodologically as to be worthless, or, more likely, misleading.
[
So just a quick rundown: almost 1/3 of parents already knew their scores. To ‘prove’ that factor didn’t matter, only 3 of 4 (really 3 of 15) testing firms were cherrypicked to give results and even then the reporters were compared not against non reporters, but against reporters plus non reporters. **They actually had the nerve to average in the doublely-self selected cohort with the non-reporters in order to boost their numbers. **
Fully 100% had already self selected to even be eligible for the study, despite their claims the cohort was wildly unrepresentative of the nation and the states where the test are given. And that doesn’t even get into the problems like standardized tests are a very poor metric of overall school efficiency, especially when you’re essentially measuring a public school that has to teach numerous things and a homeschooling parent who can deliberately choose to engage in nothing but test prep for however long they want. Most (actual) studies have shown that for things like the SAT, the single greatest predictor of score improvement is whether or not someone can afford to engage in test-prep. In fact, the spread for SAT scores based on SES levels for those who can afford test prep, home computers, etc… versus those who cannot very rather interestingly mirrors the spread for homeschoolers who can afford to do nothing but testprep if their parents decide to drill them on a test ahead of time.
Again, all of this is from your cite and, to be honest, this is just a cursory glance of its deceptive construction. It’s almost a textbook (no pun intended) look at how to cook data to support an agenda. No honest participant in this debate should take anything those fraudsters say at face value, at all.