My experience is different. Most of the people I know who homeschool do it because they don’t want their kids taught certain things, like evolution or indeed a lot of basic science. These folks mean well, but they DON’T know and accept their limitations. They think that if it’s in the Good Book, then it’s true, and if it isn’t, then it’s not true. And many of these people would have trouble figuring out how many gallons of paint they’d need to paint a room, for instance. They do take a lot of time and trouble to teach their kids, but most of this effort is directed towards bringing up the kids to follow their religious beliefs.
Now, I live in Texas, and there are a lot of fundamentalists living here. Quite probably, I get my experience of homeschoolers being taught mostly about the Bible because of the fundamentalists are heavily represented here, and because fundamentalists tend to do more homeschooling. However, I think that this is a valid concern for everyone.
I suppose I’ve done some halfhearted homeschooling myself, in that I took my daughter to a tutor when the school wasn’t interested in finding out if she was dyslexic, and they certainly weren’t interested in helping her learn to read. I tried to teach her to read, but I’m not the world’s best teacher. So I got her help, and I did teach her other things, but she was going to the public school at the same time.
There are some good homeschoolers, but in my experience, they are vastly outnumbered by the people who want to shelter their kids from the sinful world.
If that were the problem, it’d be fixed by now. The reasons for the weaknesses of the American school system are complex and poorly understood. The gaps you speak of start well before middle school, and a lack of qualified teachers is only one factor in complex question.
As a teacher with more than a decade’s experience, I will tell you that content knowledge is just not that big of a deal. Provided there are no ideological impediments, the vast majority of things taught through high school can be mastered by an adult reading one chapter ahead.
How active are you in the home education community in your area? Enough to know that you’re seeing a statistically valid sample? I’m sorry - - for the kids affected and for the perception on home education - - that your experience is so negative.
I’m not really active at all. I do come into contact with homeschoolers (parents and kids) on a regular basis, though. The parents generally are quite vocal about how they are avoiding the Evils of Evolutionary Thinking, whether the subject was under discussion or not.
So how about the other way? What percentage of prison populations are homeschoolers? What about people admitted to rehab programs? People on public assistance? People in remedial studies classes at community colleges/centers?
These things have data collected about them and it’s not self-selected in most cases.
I’d personally be surprised if homeschooled students are represented at anything near their estimated general population proportions in these statistics.
I’m not sure what you mean by accredited curricula with professional grading services. Do you mean that the home school teacher takes courses in math and science and becomes accredited? If the curriculum is rigorous and required for home school teachers, I’m happy with it. Do all states require this?
Are you a middle school science or math teacher? The reason I ask is that I doubt most adults can teach the middle school algebra and physical sciences (or even biological sciences) that my daughter was taught by just reading a chapter ahead. Way too complicated. They would have to first learn (re-learn) it themselves, then prepare to teach it properly. Heck, I have an advanced degree in science and I had to look up a few things before I could help her on her homework. Maybe her curriculum was a little tougher than most American schools but I think that’s where the problem lies. It’s possible the curriculum for many European schools is tougher. I know that the curriculum for the university track students is quite tough. According to the Europeans I have worked with, students going into science/math-type paths are required to take differential and integral calculus and at least 2 science courses. That means that they have to have at least algebra I and probably geometry (or equivalents) in middle school.
According to your cite, the comparisons were between cities and their corresponding wealthy suburbs. The problem is poverty, not ‘public schools falling apart.’ It’s even worse when a great deal of money comes from local property taxes. Poor districts means less money for schools. Complicating it with discipline/home/crime problems means less resources for proper education.
You’d have to normalize for the plethora of other variables. Data is not necessarily self-selected but it would have a bias for certain populations. Not as simple as you think.
No. The curricula are courses of study for the students. Various entities produce accredited curricula to provide parent teachers with text books, lesson plans, and other academic materials to use on their children / pupils. Some of these include a grading service in which the student sends in assignments and tests for evaluation and grading.
For example, we use a self designed Montessori-based curriculum for our children pre-k - 6th grade. In 7th grade we purchase the curriculum from The Calvert School and pay to have our child’s work evaluated through Calvert’s grading service. This in preparation for transition out of home study and into regular school in 8th grade in part to get the student some exposure to processing feedback from someone other than mom and/or dad.
Each state has a different approach to how it regulates home education. I do not know of any states that require use of an accredited curriculum. Most of the people we know who use them do so for personal reasons. Google “homeschool curriculum” for more examples.
Do we even know the estimated proportion of homeschooled students in the general population? According to the HSLDA, ten states don’t even require parents to notify any agency that they are homeschooling.
In any event, the only one of the above institutions which might have data regarding homeschooling are the community colleges ( and even the community colleges might not if the student has a GED) In my experience ( and I’ve worked with all of them ) prisons, rehab programs, and public assistance programs ask about the highest level of educational achievement, and may conduct standardized literacy tests, but do not ask what type of education a person has received.
I too would be surprised. I’d be astonished, however, if you could establish a causative link. Much more likely would be that both homeschooling and stayin’ out of trouble share a similar cause: parents who are highly involved in their children’s education.
I’m sure I’ve got kids who are going to be in jail at some point in their lives, and I’m sure I’ve got kids who will never see the inside of a jail. Both groups are in public schools.
Similarly, I know kids who aren’t in public schools. The ones whose parents pull them out of school because they’re moving, and they can’t be bothered to enroll them in a school anywhere in the country, and we worry about their fate until they turn up half a year later? I seriously worry about those kids’ future. The ones pulled out of public school for homeschooling because public school can be too rough? I don’t worry so much that they’ll end up in prison.
It’s not that I think homeschooling prevents jail: it’s that I think active parents sometimes prevent jail and also sometimes homeschool.
I know a fair number of homeschoolers. About 1/3 have used some combination of homeschooling and “regular” (whether public or parachoial or private) schooling. The rest have been solely homeschooled.
The majority are homeschooling because they think their kids’ needs are not met in a traditional school setting. In a couple of cases, this is due to medical needs, either physical or emotional. The rest, um…well, in more than a few cases, it’s maternal separation anxiety, it seems.
The biggest problem I see with homeschooling is that it requires at least one parent to remove themselves from the paid workforce, usually for a number of years, at a significant long-term risk to future earnings and career. Yeah, yeah, they could work the night shift, or have the kids study at night, etc etc…but that doesn’t happen in any of the families I know. Nope, it’s Mom staying home, often for 10+ years.
No, but as I mentioned earlier, I started teaching AP Economics with absolutely no background in it, and students from my first two years went on to be economics majors at Ivy League schools and did fine. Yes, you’d have to relearn a lot of things, but relearning things doesn’t take that long. Remember, this is the parent’s full time job. It is what they do with their life. It’s not unreasonable to think that an average adult could learn in three hours of independent study what they need to teach over five hours of class time each day. Assuming the kid is using that two hours for independent work, art and music practice, etc., that’s a full time job for both of them.
With all due respect, why is this a problem? I know plenty of Moms who stay home and clean their house while the kids are in school. Most of my friends go play tennis while their kids are in school. And the homeschool teacher does have a job, – it’s just unpaid. Their life, their choice.
I think a lot depends on the material and the curriculum. I’ve looked at an example of a Christian homeschool curriculum and publisher of materials and I must say I’m fairly impressed: http://www.veritaspress.com/ Starting to learn Latin at Second Grade, teaching history chronologically (an idea I agree with), math two years accelerated than average, logic at seventh grade etc., etc. Despite being creationists they include the Origin of Species in the curriculum. Certainly equals or exceeds what I learned at public school at the equivalent grades and California is said to have one of the stricter standards in the Union as regards to education.
Last time I checked, about 30% of homeschoolers are conservative evangelicals–which doesn’t make them fundamentalists, that’s a smaller subsection. That percentage is shrinking as homeschooling becomes ever more mainstream. The evangelicals are more visible, because they are a cohesive bloc and an easy market and they’re vocal. The other 60% or more of homesachoolers is made up of pagans, Mormons, Catholics, Muslims, don’t-care’s, atheists, and everybody else, and they all do something different. They are thus much harder to pin down, they mostly talk to each other on the Internet instead of in print, and they use a zillion little companies or major textbooks used in schools.
I know some evangelicals, and they’re all pretty ordinary friendly folks who work hard to teach their kids well. I only know a couple of serious fundamentalists maybe IRL.
I got up at 5am, drove 2 hours, and spent the whole day teaching kids how to weave on a loom. I have a 2-hour drive ahead of me, and a bag of M&Ms to keep me awake. Wish me luck!
I don’t think anyone doubts that there is a great amount of quality material available for home schoolers, but what is available is not necessarily what is being taught.
30 years or so ago I completed the coursework just short of the hours required in student teaching to graduate with a teaching certificate. I quit because I was appalled at how little I needed to know to teach and how challenged by the coursework my peers were.
I didn’t feel qualified then, but I was technically. In my opinion, a homeschool teacher needs to demonstrate that they have mastered the material they are teaching. I don’t care if you can put together a classroom bulletin board, but if you’re just staying one lesson ahead of the kids, that’s not teaching.
You also need to demonstrate that you’re going to apply the same kinds of resources that kids would have access to in public school. That includes computer, media, science project and other resources. Similarly there ought to be the kinds of field trips you mentioned. There ought to be opportunities for the students to interact in a cooperative learning setting with other students.
Roughly half the adults in the US read at an 8th grade level or lower. Now how many parents do you think are qualified to teach?
Urm, maybe more accurate to say ‘But what is available may not necessarily be what is being taught?’
These curricula for aren’t exactly cheap. Add a grading service and you’re talking real money for a lot of folks. Why would anyone bother to produce a curriculum if nobody is buying it? Why would the home educator buy it and then not use it?
We lived in New Orleans for 11 years and homeschooled for six of them prior to moving last summer. We have friends who either used to teach and who still teach in the public school system in Orleans Parish. Conditions described below have improved since Katrina, but not universally.
To use the New Orleans public school system as an example, your approach would require: ridding our home of toilet paper (teachers often got parents to buy that since the school system didn’t provide it); stop cleaning the bathrooms and doing general maintenance (teacher friends would get volunteers each fall to help them paint the walls in their classrooms as the school system wouldn’t do it), get rid of or break our computers (even when they had them, many schools’ systems did not work), get rid of supplemental reading materials (a kindergarten teacher friend bought her own books and materials for the class), and that’s just the top of the list. Science supplies? Surely you jest.
I AM qualified. I’m an experienced high school teacher with a list of local and state awards. I’ve got the highest AP scores of any comprehensive high school in my large urban district in two separate disciplines (English and Economics). The only thing in the world I know I am good at is teaching, and let me tell you: staying one chapter ahead is just fine. This is especially true in homeschooling, where you have infinite time to teach and reteach and tailor to a particular child’s experience. If the first time you explain the distributive property, you make a hash of it, you can go back and redo it.
Every time a teacher gets a new prep they have to learn the content. For many teachers, this happens every couple of years. It’s just not that hard.