Does someone want to start a vaccine thread? It seems like a hot topic and maybe one that could generate some interesting discussion.
I want my thread back
Sorry, autz. I was trying to push for the same thing, but was overruled, twice.
squeegee, autz, I’m more than happy to set aside the question about efficacy and safety of vaccines. But we can’t ignore that one of the rules that many home school regulators seek to impose on homeschooling parents involve vaccinations, and we have to consider the reasonableness of such regulations in any debate regarding what constitutes reasonable regulation of homeschoolers.
Vaccination is a non-issue in NZ and Australia for homeschoolers. We have the same regulation as outschoolers. We just have to talk to a doctor and show that we have made an informed decision not to vaccinate. Actually I don’t think I even needed to do that in NZ, I can’t quite remember how they did their register.
So while vaccination can be a big issue for homeschoolers, it’s not automatically a big issue. Mtgman, I’d take issue with your theory that your kids will necessarily come in contact with so few people as to never put a pregnant woman at risk. However my take on that one is that women of childbearing age should check their status because vaccination in childhood is not automatically going to mean an individual woman is still protected.
autz, KellyM, Mtgman -
I will start a new thread in GD on the vaccination topic so that we can relinquish autz’ thread. I’ll try to briefly summarize the points here, then we can all have a good food fight. 
But not tonight – it’s darned late, and the rubella’s gonna hit the fan at work bright-n-early tomorrow. I’ll try to get something posted by after dinner on Monday.
Shall we table this for now?
Thank you KellyM. That was my point as well. Below is a snippet from an earlier post which apparently either no one read or no one cared to take seriously.
I never intended this to become an hijack, and indeed I tried to keep it from becoming that. All I intended was to show reasonable doubt exists on the wisdom of mandating vaccination for homeschoolers. I guess I should have gone on to do the same for regulations on length of term(nine months) and SpazCat’s other points as well, then maybe it wouldn’t have seemed I was focusing on vaccination and it wouldn’t have been such a short step to a hijack about vaccination. I honestly have no interest in debating the efficacy and safety of vaccines either here or in a new thread. My primary point was to show there could be reasonable objection to a legal framework for establishing homeschools which requires vaccination.
Enjoy,
Steven
Then I shall leave off beginning another thread. It seems the participants minds are already made up and shan’t be swayed by the facts.
Or perhaps the participants have the facts, gathered through painstaking research of their own, and came to a different conclusion than you did. Nice of you to give them the benefit of the doubt instead of underhandedly calling them closed-minded and ignorant.
Enjoy,
Steven
2 questions:
What’s an outschooler?
- For those of you who think there should be no oversight of homeschooling, what do you propose to do to prevent people from taking advantage of that? I’m talking about the nightmare people who take their kids out of school and let them do nothing all day. I know there are probably very few of these people, but one bad apple…
There isn’t a way to stop ALL abuses in ANY educational system. There will always be at least “one bad apple…” Holding homeschoolers to a higher standard than public schools are held to is unreasonable and creates artificial barriers to homeschooling. There are students who attend public school but drop out and do nothing all day. Truancy laws are supposed to catch this, but aren’t 100% effective. Students can daydream their way through public schools and graduate without learning to write. Student’s needs go unmet fairly frequently by the public school system and while we’re trying to change that, is it fair to say homeschools can’t exist unless they can achieve what public schools, with the financing of the state and the power of law behind them, have not been able to achieve? Students fall through the cracks in all systems. It’s unreasonable to expect homeschools to be free of cracks.
I’m with tomndebb in theory, allowing social darwinism/natural selection to choose the most effective legal framework for a state to use when approaching the subject of homeschooling based upon the results. It’s hard to be laisse faire about educating the next generation, but when you consider the “system” they’re being educated under is run by the people who care most about the child’s success in life, I think it’s not unreasonable to give them slack and see how they manage.
Enjoy,
Steven
Mtgman, I totally agree!! There is a girl who lives across the street from us, 11 years old, never failed a grade of public school. One day, she was over, and she was playing a game of Monopoly with my 11 year old daughter and me. She had a hard time counting the money! I can’t believe that in the long run, she would be much worse off being badly homeschooled than she is in public school. We probably all went to school with someone who just cruised through and never managed to learn a damn thing. But I think the demand for “more oversight, more oversight” will die down in a few years, when the current crop of homeschoolers are in college, out in the world, and we can all see how they’re doing.
Out schooler== someone who is not homeschooled.
No need to wait. People have been homeschooling since the dawn on time. There were over a million homeschooled people in the US last year. Here’s your first datapoint. Homeschooled grades 1-8 then(neither parent was college-educated and they did not feel up to adequately covering advanced material) private school for a year and a half (freshman and first semester of sophomore year), public schooled for remainder of sophomore year, junior and senior years. Graduated with honors, member of the academic team, recieved awards in statewide mathematics olympiad, Thespian, community volunteer, college graduate(3.2 Cumulative GPA, 3.8 in major subjects), holds two degrees, supports local theatre, science and history museums as well as the local zoo. Gainfully employed, married with four children ages 6 years - 6 months, living in a nice home in a nice neighborhood.
That’s a brief bio of me. There are thousands more like me all around the world. All the studies I’ve seen indicate that homeschooling produces a superior education. Cite 1, a brief factsheet taken as a summary from a full study of over 5400 students. A more complete study summary can be found here. An Independent study from 1999(full results including test result comparisons to public and private schools approximately halfway through the results). Another which is a digest of a US Dept of Ed Study. I would also swear Cecil did a column on it, with inconclusive findings. I can’t find the column right now, but IIRC he mentioned homeschooling parents are often in above-agerage economic conditions and uneducated parents are not likely to take on the responsibility of educating their children. Children of economically advantaged and well-educated parents often do well in public school as well, so it’s not crystal clear and more studies needed to be done to control for the factors of parental education and economic status. AFAIK this research has not been done, but my second cite includes data about parent’s education and economic status as well as religious beliefs and other factors.
As of now I see no compelling reason to regulate homeschools. They’ve consistently produced students who are at or above the median produced by public schools. Where’s the harm being done to homeschooled kids that legislation would prevent? All systems are going to have cracks. All barrels of sufficient size will have bad apples. People seem to be arguing that home schools have INHERENTLY bigger cracks than public schools. Most of these arguements rest on misinformation and hysteria fueled by personal anecdotes on “I knew a lady who homeschooled…” horror stories. A true analysis pitting public education against home education without an agenda, and including datum on incidents of abuse and neglect probably has yet to be done, but the evidence gathered so far is striking. I don’t deny the bias of most of my cites, but it’s a simple fact that pretty much only the people who are pro-homeschooling are currently doing studies.
Enjoy,
Steven
PS, My second cite was from a study of over 20,000 students from almost 12,000 families.
Enjoy,
Steven
Mtgman,
I guess my question is whether we as a society want to ensure that children are at least familiar (even if they don’t accept) such concepts as evolution, civil rights, respect for differences.
Do you think there are some things that everyone should know, or should that be left totally up to the parents?
Are there some things everyone should know? Heck, yes.
But the things I put on my list of “should knows” are different from yours.
The question is, do I have the right to force your children to learn certain things?
I say no.
FWIW, my brother and his wife homeschool. Because he is a Baptist minister, everyone assumes they homeschool to avoid the godless secular government schools, and either look down on his blind fundamentalism or congratulate him on his upright zeal to raise god-fearing children.
Truth be told, the schools in their town just blow, and that’s the only reasion they do it, but he doesn’t have the heart to tell them that…
And you think homeschooled children are deficient in those areas? Moreso than publicly schooled children? This question is more applicable to parenting styles than education choices. If a child is raised by a racist, or a religious fundamentalist who believes evolution is a lie, or someone who believes gay people are, and should be, second-class citizens do you really think sending them to public school will negate the parent’s influence?
I trust the parents to educate their children to the best of their ability. Even in households where religious fundamentalism is the motivation for homeschooling(as it was with my parents) the education is superior(or do you not believe there were questions about civil rights, evolution, etc on the standardized tests homeschoolers studied in my second cite took?). A superior education leads to a superior mind which is capable of recognizing it’s own prejudices and a mind which posesses the critical thinking skills to make its own decisions upon reaching adulthood.
I’m fine with leaving choice of cirriculum, what the child should know, in the hands of the parents. As I said, I believe that parents(for the most part, as always there will be exceptions) will be better caretakers of the child’s interests than the state. I do not believe it is a parent’s place, or the public school’s for that matter, to push issues such as civil rights, accpetance of evolution theory, or respect for differences. Schools, home, private and public, should teach children HOW to think, not WHAT to think. Show me homeschools are worse at teaching children HOW to think than public schools are and I’ll abandon the cause entirely. Remember, even with prejudiced, bigoted parents, a child who has a good education can become anything. As of today, I believe, and I believe the evidence indicates, homeschooling gives the best education of the big three alternatives(public, private, home).
Enjoy,
Steven
Maybe, maybe not. But there is certainly a better chance of negating the parent’s influence if the child is in a school than if they don’t have such outside influences and alternative view points.
My parents were quite anti-religious. I was taught that most religious people are just plain stupid and ignorant. In high school I was seated next to Seth. We became buddies, walked to class together, he was good in Spanish and helped me with my home work. After knowing (and respecting) him for months I found out that he was a devout Jehova’s Witness. I was amazed because Seth was neither stupid nor ignorant. He had been challenged by constant interactions with students not of his religion, and his faith had been strengthened by these challanges. Seth explained his religion to me. I never agree with it, but I came to understand it. I would have never sought out a friendship with a JW, but I profited from it. In this case some of my parents’ prejudice was negated.
Does that mean you support standardized tests for home schoolers?
But what about FACTS? I never said the children should accept evolution, just learn about it, what it means, how it applies, etc. And they don’t have to believe that the Civil Rights movement was a good thing, but they should know that it happened, and this is what the people were fighting for, and what rights they now have.
I very seriously looked into homeschooling my children. After lots of reserach and reading books, I decided not to. A lot of people I know and respect homeschool their children. I have NO problem with that.
But I do have a problem with the idea of no oversight.
Some public schools are crappy. No one disputs this. that would be WAY crappier if they had no oversight.
Oversight brings accountability. It helps weed out the majority of hard working and caring homeschooling parents from the minority who abuse the system.
It’s hard to find the right balance. How to catch the crappy homeschooling parents from the legitimate ones? How to not be too hard in your standards, yet hard enough to catch those abusing the system?
i don’t know how much oversight is enough. Tests only? Submit curriculum? Mandatory conference? Board oversight? Something else entirely?
That’s why I started this thread.
Homeschooled kids DO have outside influences and they ARE exposed to alternative viewpoints. An excerpt from a study I quoted earlier addresses this point. The mean number of extracirricular activities for homeschooled students is 5. Homeschoolers today are exposed to a wide variety of outside influences. It’s hard to ignore evolution when you go on field trips to science museums. It’s hard to treat other ethinic groups as subhuman when you play alongside them every weekend in the soccer games. 98% of homeschoolers are involved in two or more extracirricular activities, and since over half of homeschoolers are urbanites, this means even people in townships and rural areas are dedicated to getting together with other people regularly. It’s pretty clear the vast majority of homeschoolers don’t keep their kids from exposure to other ideas.
No, not at all. I don’t care for standardized tests for ANY students, home, private, or public. Children are too unique for standardized tests IMHO. In the survey I cited the use of the standardized tests was voluntary. I think the cite was around 39,000 students were asked to take the tests and nearly 21,000 of the responses were usable. A good number probably didn’t have any interest in taking it, and some screwed up or neglected the paperwork so their results weren’t usable.
The main thing to remember there was that it was a study and that it was voluntary for the homeschoolers. In the interest of science, about 21,000 homeschoolers fully participated. It is still striking to see the homeschool results all above the 75% marks even though their cirriculum was not designed ot teach the subject matter the test would cover(as many public school cirriculums are). Even with such widely varied cirriculums as the over 12,000 families from across the US were sure to have, the children still were posessed of strong enough factual knowledge and strong enough critical thinking skills to excel on tests the like of which many of them had probably never been exposed to. An excellent datapoint for a study, but it doesn’t seem to offer any ongoing benefits to mandate standardized testing for homeschoolers.
This is what my comment about the standardized tests was meant to address. I believe there is a very strong possibility the tests those homeschoolers voluntarially completed contained questions of FACT. Their performance on those tests seems to indicate they have at least as good a grasp of facts as students educated in public schools.
I don’t see the distinction you seem to be making between crappy parents and crappy homeschooling parents. What standards of parenting need to apply to ensure we catch the crappy parents and don’t unnecessarially mess with the good parents? How can we be sure a parent isn’t raising a kleptomaniac? A horrid bully? A violent bigot? A violent racist?
There are fairly clear litmus tests for education. Critical thinking skills, literacy levels, knowledge of facts, historical knowledge, etc. All the tests on homeschooled children seem to indicate they are excelling in these areas. So what makes a homeschooling parent deserve different oversight than a non-homeschooling parent? To ensure they keep doing what they’ve been doing all along? They haven’t needed state supervision so far, why should they now?
Enjoy,
Steven
What a great thread…
autz, in Canada, at least in Alberta, Home education is accepted and is even funded for you if you are ‘overseen’, I use that term loosely, by either: Designates from the public school system, private school system or a specific homeschool governing body (of which there are many). One in particular, (I’m sure there are more) is a private group that hires only accredited teachers. They leave it totally up to the parent what and when to teach with the following accountability measures in place. You may either:
- Provide an annual ‘general’ education plan with what material you’re going to cover (i.e. algebra I , chemistry, Rennaisance Art and architecture, earth science etc.)
- Provide a ‘Portfolio’ for the facilitator to view (not police), showing the types of material your child has worked on over the year
- Fill out an annual questionaire which basically ‘rates’ your child in different areas
- Parent/Facilitator/child interviews with the facilitator twice a year.
They also suggest grades 3, 6 and 9 government testing for measurement of general knowlege of those key grades.
It seems to work quite well and has a strategy that suits pretty well everyone.
~eNiGma