Off the top of my head, from conversations with therapists or other parents of learning disabled children.
doreen, such conversations rarely impart that feeling unless there is a persistent problem in that community with the school refusing to effectively educate disabled students. Most parents of disabled children turn to the public school system for help first.
This charge is applicable to other education systems as well. Certianly there are public school teachers whose methods do not work well for all their students. All the research I’ve seen seems to indicate that homeschooling families are better at meeting a child’s individual needs than both public and private schools(as evidenced by their higher academic achievement and superior critical thinking skills). Again, we’re not shooting for perfect here, we’re shooting for something better than what we currently have. An education system which helps a larger percentage of students more fully realize their potential.**
Again, I believe this is a family’s right. WHAT their children learn is up to the parents. You, and I for that matter, may disapprove of their philosophy, but it is not for us to judge. My parents set up our homeschool to give us a fundamentalist Christian education. Their children, by all the measures they have been held up against, recieved an education at least the equal to that of publically educated children. Unusual beliefs and good educations are NOT mutually exclusive. This is decidedly NOT an example of the parent’s teaching style conflicting with the child’s learning style from the information you have given so far. It may not have met your idea of how a child should be raised and the social values a child should be taught, but it is still a far cry from evidence the child is getting a substandard education.
I see arguements all the time saying “but they’ll teach the kid that evolution is a lie!” or “but they’ll teach the kid that blacks are subhuman!” and it is really intolerable. You simply can NOT restrict homeschools based upon the parent’s beliefs or the beliefs they intend to instill in their children unless you can prove a clear and iminent danger, to themselves or society, would result. Keeping the kids away from their neighbors may seem “strange” or “unusual” but it’s not dangerous to the children or the neighbors. I am adamantly opposed to the idea of victimless crimes. Ultimately it is every individual’s responsibility upon reaching adulthood to seperate the wheat from the chaff. I learned a lot of stupid, heck just plain wrong stuff from my parents when I was being homeschooled. Learned a lot of dumb and just plain wrong stuff from television and my teachers in high school. I continually hear dumb things from my cow-orkers and repetitions of urban legends. Ultimately it comes down to critical thinking skills. People whose education instills superior critical thinking skills will evaluate their beliefs and become their own person, not just a reflection of their parents.
As of today, homeschools, regardless of their holding “rigid beliefs” which some or most of us might find distasteful, are still producing the largest percentage of students with strong critical thinking skills AND a statistically better grasp of the facts. This has been the trend for years and the margin is growing.
The ONLY curriculum guidelines the state has the right to set are guidelines for basic academic subjects and citizenship values which must be introduced during education. Anything else is extremely close to legislating thought or infringing upon religious practices.**
What measures are you going to use to determine if a parent educator is incompetent? What remedy do you propose if someone is found incompetent? Remember the requirement to stay purely academic instead of slipping into requirments which would infringe upon the practice of religious beliefs.
All through this thread we’ve done the same thing over and over. A claim will be advanced saying “some homeschoolers are abusing the system”(some anecdote about kids watching TV all day) or “some parents should not be allowed to homeschool”(some claim about how parents aren’t qualified or have beliefs which should not be propagated, although to be fair this claim was made more strenuously in the thread about home inspections which sparked this thread). Homeschool advocates will say “Yes, such situations either exist or have the potential to exist.” Then the advocate for oversight/accountability usually follows up with a “if we’d just do X, this would take care of those abuses/undesirables”. So far every X has really been a myriad of other variables which can be picked apart one by one as unreasonable or with strong potential to be unfair to the children and/or parents. We’re no closer to a working framework than we were two threads and a few hundred posts ago.
Given: Abuses(educational neglect, i.e. not even making the attempt at teaching the children at all, not physical abuse) need to be identified if possible, remedied when possible, preferably with minimal intervention. Removal of the child should be a last resort.
Given: Inadequate education, to be determined by a method as yet undecided but hinging on inadequate critical thinking skills and inadequate knowledge of age-appropriate facts, should be identified without imposing undue burden on the homeschooling family. The method of determination should be flexible enough to allow for the individual curriculum the homeschool is almost certain to have. The homeschooling family should be advised on how to correct this deficiency and aided in adjusting their teaching style or training the parents to teach if possible. Continued inadequacies result in increasingly intrusive interventions, up to and including removal of the child from the homeschool.
Can we agree on these two goals? I’d also like to propose a third goal if I may.
Given: To ensure fairness in the testing and determination of cases of abuse or inadequacy, representation or input from other homeschoolers will be used as a check on the system. If the state agents find deficiency and the homeschool representative finds no deficiency no action will be taken. Parents accused of abuse or inadequacy have the right to face their accuser and to request a review of the proceedure which determined their offense for irregularities. They are also entitled to at least one warning and are placed upon probation at the end of which the assessment will be reviewed and the tests re-applied. No punitive action can be taken against the homeschool until at least two tests have shown inadequacy(with the agreement of both the state agent and the representative of the local homeschooling community) and one probation period(between the two evaluations) has passed.
Is this a decent start? I’m pretty tired right now so I may not have covered everything, but I tried.
Enjoy,
Steven
Sorry, I wasn’t clear.I didn’t at all mean that their style conflicted with the childrens’s style (I wouldn’t know), only that if there were such a conflict, they were neither flexible people to begin with, nor would they be at all likely to join homeschooling groups where other parents might point such a conflict out. (I wasn’t referring to religious beliefs, either. I was talking about inflexibilty in general).
I don’t mean to advocate any particular measure, only that there be some measurement beyond a parent saying the family is homeschooling.
Then I misunderstood- I thought your position was that the problem is persistent.
doreen, it is persistent in many communities.
Please stop being deliberately dense; it is an extremely annoying habit.
Kelly,
So far you have called doreen ‘annoying’ and ‘dense.’
This has so far been a calm and civilized discussion, and I see no reason for personal insults. SHe certainly has made no such remarks to you.
And you believe their inflexibility would impair their ability to adequately educate their children? I agree this is a possibility, but I don’t see evidence which would indicate it as a definite conclusion. It is also possible to adequately educate a child without being members of homeschool groups or exposing the child to a variety of ideas. I personally believe it is not the best method, but it still seems to work. The only arguements I’ve seen against a parent being the child’s only teacher and the child having minimal outside contact are based on the notion that the child is being somehow brainwashed into a viewpoint the critic finds objectionable. I strongly oppose censure of homsechooling parents based upon the parent’s ideals or values they intend to instill in their children and my opposition only vanishes when a clear and present danger to the child or society resulting from this instruction arises.**
Seeker: Oh great Guru! What is the secret of long life?
Guru: Do not die.
Enjoy,
Steven
I don’t believe their inflexibilty would impair their ability to educate their children* except* in the specific instance of the teaching style not meshing with the child’s learning style and the parents being too inflexible to change.
And now for the response that I thought I posted this morning-
First of all, I agree with your goals. I also think that you don’t disagree so much with the idea of oversight in itself but rather with the standards and methods used. But I get the impression (not specifically from this thread and certainly not from your posts) that there is a group of homeschoolers who object to any oversight at all, either on the basis that a parent has an absolute right to determine their child’s education, even if it consists of TV all day or because they don’t acknowledge either that some people are not qualified to homeschool (and you can put me first on the list of unqualified people) or that some of those unqualified people may choose to homeschool anyway.
My reason for not wanting any significant oversight of homeschooling is that I do not trust government. I do not believe that families should be subject to investigations of what goes on in their homes absent credible evidence that anything is amiss. Any sort of non-fault oversight of home schools that requires inspections in the home or of the child violates this principle. I am willing to accept a requirement that parents submit some form of documentation that they are educating their children, but mandatory testing of children is unacceptable to me. At best, I will accept testing of children whose documentation is lacking or that suggests that the education is significantly lacking.
As for why homeschools should not be held to the level of private schools: home schooling takes place in the home. The home is sacred. The government shall not intrude on the home without a damn good reason to believe that there is something wrong there. Period. The Constitution says as much.
Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you, I was distracted by the pit thread Tars mentioned.
True. As I mentioned earlier, every system will have cracks. I’d also like to mention that no one is talking about mandating homeschooling. If a parent is not meeting their child’s needs because of some inability on their part to adequately instruct the child and is either incapable, or unwilling, to change their instruction style, there are other education avenues available. Co-operative homeschooling groups, private education, or public education to name a few. Even in the extremely small percentage of cases where a parent and child’s styles would produce a conflict which would prevent adequate learning I would still be willing to trust the parent to recognize this and, because I believe most parents truly want to do what is in the child’s best interests, seek out more effective education for their child.
The studies seem to support this as well. A large percentage of homeschoolers send their children to either private or public schools for high school because they believe they could not adequately teach this advanced material. As more homeschooling groups emerge and curriculums improve this seems to be less necessary, but it is still an option that parents have shown they will exercise because they believe it would be better for the child.**
I actually don’t care for the idea, but I’m willing to compromise.**
Certainly there are absolutists. They are not limited to the homeschooling side of the proverbial isle however. Mandatory public education would never have come about if there weren’t extremely active people who believed, absolutely, that it was the best thing for the children. These beliefs still exist and are evident in the laws of states where homeschooling is highly regulated. What people like KellyM seem to oppose is the suggestion of some right of the state to mandate intrusive oversight into the home based on fear of a tiny minority of homeschoolers who would insist on attempting to educate their children at home when they were not adequately capable of doing so. This seems to be a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
I happen to believe the cure does not necessarialy HAVE to be worse than the disease. If we can clearly define fair goals and methods of such oversight as well as putting active and adequate checks on the power of the officials who perform the oversight then I’m willing to accept it as a compromise.
On the whole I still find the idea repugnant and I’m extremely annoyed that a few bad apples seem to be spoiling the barrel for the rest of us. It’s not fair that the state should take such an interest in home education as to mandate intrusive oversight when it would be considered ridiculous to mandate intrusive oversight into the home to ensure the children are learning adequate hygiene habits. After all, the state has an interest in having a hygenic population to control the spread of disease and keep preventable health care costs down. If a tiny minority of children turn out xenophobic and psychotic as a result of being raised and educated by xenophobic and psychotic parents does it justify mandating intrusive oversight into ALL homes? Heck, I can promise some children, somewhere are going to turn out to be xenophobic and psychotic, why aren’t there mandatory psychiatric evaluations of ALL a state’s citizens once a year or so?
The answer, of course, is that it would be extremely violative of individual rights to privacy and could quite possibly create an oppressive system. Why do people fail to see the same danger in a system of mandatory intrusive oversight of homeschools? I think homeschoolers are suffering from public apathy towards their situation. Not enough “regular” people homeschool for this to be really taken seriously. It’s the old “it doesn’t affect me, why should I care?” attitude. It’s not fair, and I resent being on the receiving end, but that’s just the sour grapes talking.
I am willing to prove myself as a parent who can adequately educate his children in order to placate the opposing side. However, I fully intend to do everything in my power to keep EITHER side from stacking the deck. I simply want to ensure I have a fair framework to work with.
Enjoy,
Steven
I don’t think either you or I can come up with an accurate percentage, for the same reason I’ve been umcomfortable with the statistics you quoted (although I only today realized why I’ve been uncomfortable). First, “homeschooled” must be defined. Is it any child not enrolled in a public or private school or is there a different definition? I suspect the percentage receiving an inadequate education differs by who is included- and so will any other statistic. For example,
http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/rudner1999/FullText.asp is based on a questionaire given to homeschooled students using a particular evaluation service. The study showing that 98% of homeschoolers participated in two or more activities used this method
Neither one of those studies includes in its sample homeschoolers who do not take standardized tests, are not on mailing lists ,have not participated in Ray’s previous studies and who are not involved in support groups and networks.They certainly will not include any children who are both not enrolled in school and not educated at home.
Perhaps an example will be clearer-
My definition of “homeschooled” will include any child not enroled in public school, because if there is no oversight of homeschooling that is how it will have to be defined.
I want to find out how many homeschoolers in State X participate in two or more extracurricular activities. State X has minimal requirements for homeschoolers- just teach a basic curriculum, no registration or paperwork needed. I could send a questionaire to every household in the state, asking whether there are children in the household,where they are educated and how many extracurricular activities they are involved in (and I haven’t seen a study which has done this) Or I could randomly send my questions to members of homeschooling groups-but if I do the latter, my results only apply to the population surveyed. It’s possible that homeschoolers not belonging to groups are either more or less likely to be involved in extracurricular activities than those belonging to groups.
I move on to State Y, which does require registration for homeschoolers.I send my survey to a randomly selected group of families who have registered. My results only apply to registered homeschoolers. Unregistered homeschoolers may be more or less likely to participate in activities than registered ones.
The same thing goes for adequacy of education- no study can validly make a claim about an excluded group. If a study of homeschoolers who take a particular standardized test shows that they score above average, it says nothing about how those who didn’t take the test would have scored, and we don’t know if there’s a difference between those who do and those who don’t take the tests. ( such as ,maybe those who are not providing an adequate education are less likely to have their children tested)
So the girl in the closet is homeschooled?
By that definition, a 14 year old attending a private military academy where he doesn’t even see his family but during the summers and a few times during the school year is “homeschooled”.
So is a child who completes a course of secondary education and proceeds to college before reaching the age of adulthood.
So is a toddler who spends 8 hours a day at a licensed day care.
I would think that the term “homeschooling” cannot fairly be applied to any family which sends their children over to the care of any institution for the purpose of education where such education is not delivered in the home, as that makes nonsense of the term “home”. Nor can be applied to families who make no effort to provide an education to their children, as that makes nonsense of the term “school”. Yet your definition would apply that label to both groups.
Words should mean what they say, whenever possible. Your definition does not pass that test. Can we perhaps find a definition which does less violence to the English language?
On the oversight issue: The State of Illinois, despite its lack of oversight of homeschooling, is able to distinguish truants from homeschooled children. I submit that if they are able to do so, should also should you and your definition. Education, like parenting, does not generally require oversight, and a person can be educated quite successfully in the absence of government inspectors.
Missed the typing error- (and stupidly forgot to account for age)
Amend the definition to “any child within the age range covered by compulsory education laws who is not enrolled in a public or private school”. And by the way- my definition was in the context of the hypothetical study following the definition.
I’ve asked before exactly how the State of Illinois has been able to make this distinction, but you haven’t answered me. Imagine I am a parent in Illinois who doesn’t send my children to school and an investigation ensues.Is my curriculum or my children’s achievement evaluated against a previously set standard (or one of a number of previously set standards to be chosen from as appropriate)? Is the determination based on the whim of whoever is investigating the incident, so that different officials might come to different conclusions, and I as a parent have no advance notice of the standards expected in such a situation? Or does the investigation stop when I say “I’m homeschooling” or “I’m teaching the required basic curriculum”? Anything but the last option is a form of oversight.
In my opinion, in real life, no. In a situation where there is *absolutely no *oversight of homeschooling beyond (possibly) registration , how could you say she isn’t? On what basis would you make that determination with no standards? Perhaps she’s being abused or neglected by being in the closet, but that has nothing to do with education. A publicly educated child could be in the closet from the end of school one day to the start of school the next.Maybe she’s got some workbooks in there with her.
The same standards that are applied to private schools are applied, because in Illinois a home school is a private school with an enrollment of one (or, sometimes more, in a larger family). Because the investigation would take place in the context of a criminal prosecution for truancy, the standards are (ultimately) defined by the appellate courts of the State of Illlinois, whose decisions are public record and binding law.
You are also incorrect when you state that the ability of the state to investigate credible claims of truancy is a form of oversight. Oversight is when someone looks over your shoulder from time to time (or continuously) to verify that you are doing your job correctly. The overseerer has an assumed right to investigate the matter over which oversight is being exercised.
This is not the way it works in Illinois. Truancy is investigated as a criminal offense, and as such no investigation can begin until the police form “reasonable suspicion” (a term of art) that the crime of truancy has taken place. The police and the district attorney are not entitled to check in on you periodically to make sure you haven’t broken any laws lately. Most of us believe this is a good thing, and our Constitution certainly supports this view.
The absence of oversight does not mean the absence of standards. It only means that compliance with the standards will not be checked for unless someone has a good reason to believe that compliance is not being met.
I still believe that you are seeking to define “homeschooling” the way you are in order to include truants in the category of homeschoolers, with the clear intent to use truants to pull down the statistics about homeschooling. This is supported by your admission that grossly neglected children are not “homeschooled”.
Really, it is not that hard to examine an individual situation to decide whether the parents are (a) making a bona fide attempt to teach their child or (b) ignoring their child’s education entirely. And this is exactly the examination that is made, first by the police and then, if necessary, by a court of law, when a credible accusation that a parent is not schooling their child is made in Illinois.
Pretty clearly, you and I have a different idea of what constitutes oversight.(I see it as the right to determine how or to what standards that matter is done, and the dictionary definition supports one view as much as the other, since it includes both “watchful care” and “regulatory supervision”,but no reference as to the form of the supervision ) Be that as may, if you had explained how Illinois distinguished truancy from home schooling the first time I asked, we might not have been arguing.
and this
is pretty close to where I started off, with this
You’re still not getting it. That definition was solely in the context of the hypothetical study I described. It is not how I would actually define “homeschooling”.But I’ll change it again “For the purposes of this study, homeschooled children are defined as those children , within the age range covered by compulsory education laws, who do not attend public or private schools and whose parents have not been convicted of educational neglect regarding that child.” How would you define “homeschooler” for the purpose of a study of all homeschoolers, not just those who take standardized tests,buy curricula, are on mailing lists or belong to support groups? And how would you find the ones who don’t take standardized tests, don’t buy curricula, aren’t on mailing lists and don’t belong to support groups?
It seems to me that you’re defining “homeschooling” to include only those parents who are doing it well.
With all due respect, I am not in the position of needing to come up with an answer to this question. I’m not the one trying to demonstrate need for new laws or mandatory oversight. If oversight advocates are going to say homeschooling increases risk of abuse/neglect, the onus is on such advocates to prove this increased risk. **
The legal system, at least in my state, has shyed away from a legal definition of “homeschool”. Quite frankly most homeschool advocates don’t care for such a definition either because as soon as a “legal” definition is established this automatically forces some sort of oversight(and all the slippery slopes we’ve been treading on in this thread). Once there is a definition there will be someone checking individual cases against that definition and probably some sort of sanctions if a family fails to meet the definition. Pretty much all it takes to be a homeschooler, and all no-oversight advocates say it should take, is a parental declaration of “we homeschool.” For the sake of the discussion I’ll agree to a loose definition, but we should keep in mind that in many states(approximately half) all it takes to be a “homeschooler” is either deciding to do so or registering intent to do so. In most other countries it is rare to even require registered intent.
You mentioned earlier that most of the cases you saw when investigating truancy reports were families who were not attempting to educate their children, NOR were they claiming to be homeschooling. I don’t think a reasonable definition would include families who keep school-age children home and do not even make the attempt at educating them. I would have to say that intent to provide education would have to be the fundamental piece of any such definition. This would leave out the families who keep older children home to provide daycare or to allow those children to work. Sound fair?**
And you believe this lack of data implies something? Care to share your speculations?
Any more rigorous method of data-gathering would certainly be challenged if some authority tried to mandate participation. It is the nature of almost all studies to be voluntary. It is also perfectly understandable that studies are only sent to people who are likely to be both willing and able to complete them. This has been the primary method of conducting studies, especially when personal information may be involved, for a great many years. If these studies “bothered” you, out of some feeling of selectiveness of participants or lack of comprehensiveness, then I have no remedy. They are what we have and I acknowledged their potential bias when I first cited them. You are certainly welcome to present other studies at any time.
If one were to question my cites I think the survey of 20,000+ homeschoolers from across the US would be a prime candidate. The surveys were originally mailed to nearly 40,000 students. Nearly half of homeschoolers did not respond, or did not respond with usable data. What does this say about the nonresponsive group?
Answer: Absolutely nothing. It is completely fallacious, as you seem to admit, to speculate as to why those families chose not to participate. It is certainly not evidence that they are hiding something or that their children would not have performed well on the tests.**
I’d have to quibble with such a definition. As I mentioned earlier it’s not fair to count families who do not even claim to be homeschooling, but since we haven’t agreed on this point yet I’ll leave it at that for now.**
I’m afraid that’s going to be a sticking point then. It is simply unfair to expect families to submit to oversight, especially oversight which may enter the home, on nebulous charges which boil down to “Some group no one has data on may be locking their children in the house, neglecting their education and/or beating them! You better let us in and prove you’re not one of them!”
Again, innocent until proven guilty. Prove the per-capita instances of abuse/neglect are higher in homeschoolers than in society in general. Until then there is no compelling reason for new laws.
Enjoy,
Steven