Lost in all the heat and smoke here is a numerical comparison between home education and institutional education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics of the United States Department of Education, in 2007:
*The number of homeschooled students was about 1.5 million, an increase from 850,000 in 1999 and 1.1 million in 2003.
*The percentage of the school-age population that was homeschooled increased from 1.7 percent in 1999 to 2.9 percent in 2007.
So, let’s say 10% of the people homeschooling fit the ignorant, insular, and abusive model that many in this thread are railing against. That’s 150,000 children. To be consistent, suppose that institutional education somehow fails to reach 10% of the roughly 51.2 million school age children in the U.S., which means institutional education churned out over 5 million unprepared children in 2007. 5 million, and that’s a conservative estimate.
Those who fear that the republic is at risk through a dumbward spiral fueled by home education might redirect their ire to the bigger number as it makes a lot more sense from a social and economic standpoint to focus on the larger problem.
It’s somewhat more difficult to remain ignorant, insular and abusive in the public school. At least with the public school, you can address a problem with a teacher and if necessary change teachers or schools.
When considering how to address problems, you must also consider the cost. I reject your estimates of problem cases and that the proportions are similar, but even so, I can easily address many if not most of the cases of ignorant homeschooling by simply not allowing people that can’t qualify to homeschool.
Dealing with problematically performing public schools is a more complex problem. There probably isn’t a single, across the board solution. You can’t just dissolve inner city schools and move the kids elsewhere.
My friends who are working in New Orleans public schools and New Orleans public charter schools disagree with your assertion here. They have stories that would astound you as to the willful ignorance, the willful antipathy to education, and the rejection of what some would call societal norms. New Orleans is not unique among urban school systems, and urban school systems have the vast majority of the nation’s young people.
Design your policy then. How would you go about evaluating home educators? At what direct cost? At what opportunity cost? Direct federal mandate? Federal mandate that the states regulate home education in a standard manner? Who pays?
Exactly. You will get more bang per buck spending that buck addressing deficiencies in the public school system than you will spending that buck chasing a few thousand kids in the home education system.
I don’t worry about homeschooled children being dumb. Even if their parents teach them that evolution is a tool of the devil, they’ll probably still do better on mathematics and English testing than the general school population.
No. AlienVessels has said that parents should not be allowed to homeschool their children without first demonstrating competence. This means a starting assumption of incompetence, with the burden of proving otherwise.
And I am asking, why is schooling, in particular, so important that we should assume parental incompetence in this area, when the state and social default in almost all realms of parenting is to assume competence (and good intentions)? You follow? People have to do terrible things to their children in most respects to even run the risk of having the state (or anyone) intervene, yet AV says we should start out with an interventionist position with respect to schooling. Why the difference?
If you think about it a little, you’ll realize that public schools must have mediocre (moderate, “only ordinary”) standards. You can’t have high standards except by excluding people, which is anathema to the public school mission.
I work at a university (a staff member). I’ve talked with friends in the faculty and they’ve mentioned the home schooled kids really stand out. They’re more focused, complete their work on time, and get better grades.
It would be interesting to see formal studies on a big scale. I suspect home schooled kids do better in most subjects.
There may be small gaps in their education. Especially in the sciences, but a student with strong, independent study habits can easily catch up in college.
It’s not a problem…except if the parents get divorced. Which happens a lot–half of all marriages end in divorce, of course, and homeschooling moms aren’t the only ones who get stuck in this situation.
But on the other hand, it’s a piece of the equation that I rarely hear homeschooling parents take into consideration. “What’s best for my kid?” is a great question, but two of other questions have to be “Can we afford to live on one income instead of two, and how does that affect my kid?” and individually “If things don’t work out in this marriage what happens?” I know from personal experience that nobody wants to think about getting divorced, but I myself had wished I had planned more.
I recently worked on a non-profit with a woman who had homeschooled her kids for over a decade–someone who’d given up a good career because she felt being there with her kids on a regular basis was important. Shortly before her last kid left the nest, her husband left her. Needless to say, her years of homeschooling did not help her find employment. I know it sucks to say but…it happens, and it’s got to be part of the equation.
No, you will get more bang for the buck having a basic requirement that people demonstrate competence and resources to homeschool. You’ll strip out the low end because they’ll fail the basic requirements. Relatively inexpensive to administrate.
Public schools are harder to deal with because they don’t have the option of self-selection. They have to address the needs of every single child attending, irrespective of the effort that child’s parent(s) put in. Many more bucks to the bang to fix the low end there.
I’d require that homeschoolers demonstrate compentency in the material to be covered and make a commitment to provide a minimum amount of classroom time and resources to the students being homschooled. Pass a test, sign a document committing to meet the educational requirements that the public school must.
If your kid shows up to public school with rickets, I guarantee there will be testing and enforcement.
As far as parental competence, lets start with an average reading level at 8th grade.
If most parents included schooling as a significant role in parenting, I might be more flexible in my view of what the average parent is capable of. But “go do your homework” doesn’t cut it for me.
And I didn’t invent an interventionist policy with respect to schooling children. We require that kids be educated and we hold the schools to some standards. Parents homeschooling should be able to show they meet those standards.
When you’re the king you’ll be free to go after some fraction of the 2% of U.S. school age students if you like. I’d rather my tax dollars go towards the larger problem: kids who are in the eighth grade and who cannot read, write, or do math and who are demonstrably slipping through the safety nets in the urban public school systems. To my mind those are the kids who pose a significant threat to the social fabric.
Compared with other college graduates? Not that I heard - just the opposite, in fact. Those in education tend to have lower SATs and other measures of learning than other subject areas.
This notion that teaching is an incredibly difficult and esoteric area that is beyond the reach of the average parent is a little bizarre. Most of the difficulties in teaching in public schools is that you are teaching a room full of strange kids that you don’t know very well. Parents don’t have that disadvantage.
I mean, come on. Haven’t any of the home school opponents ever helped a kid with his homework? Teaching the subject is not all that different.
Some schools used to accept teachers with no educational training at all, just subject matter experts, and to my knowledge they don’t do any worse than those with a degree in education.
Not to denigrate teachers who do a good job, but this is not rocket science. If you can learn a subject well enough to understand it, you can understand it well enough to teach it. Especially when you have only one student going thru the material at a time. And doubly especially if it is only at the middle, or even high school, level.
And the answer to correcting the problem with 8th graders not performing is NOT to hand them to other “8th graders”.
The price per student to fix the urban school problem will be vastly more than simple requirements we already assess against public schools.
That’s the wonderful thing about a democracy. We all get to vote on what seems to make sense for the majority. One consequence is that sometimes our tax dollars are spent in ways we don’t entirely agree with.
I’m unaware of any democracies in which that doesn’t occur. I certain think that parents that have the resources and qualifications should be able to teach their children at home, just as I’m ok with people posting a surety in an escrow account in lieu of purchasing auto insurance.
I’m not sure that’s true. Schools are required to have standards because they’re supposed to prove to parents that they deserve the trust placed in them. Private schools aren’t required to have the same standards, since they’re not government bodies and presumably are voluntarily chosen by the parents. The parents are the ones with the actual job of looking after children’s welfare, and they’re assumed to be competent unless proven otherwise.
Public schools are supposed to have standards because they are supposed to serve the citizens. The state serves the citizens, not the other way around. The right to oversee a child’s education reposes with the parents, who then may or may not decide to delegate that education to an outside party.
That’s the overview of how compulsory education in California works.
Homeschooling is currently in the grey area, but all the other options are regulated by the state.
Here is a web site from a Homeschooling Association. When you homeschool, you are asserting to the state certain commitments in time and resources and attendance of the student.
So basically is boils down to a judgment whether the “8th grader reader” (and by the way, that is the average, 50% are there or BELOW in skill) can teach capably.
Rocket science? No. But there’s a pretty great continuum with no maxing-out that I’m aware of: the better you are by inclination, training, and experience, and the more work you put into it, the more effective your teaching is. The best teachers are incredibly better than the worst ones.
And there are plenty of people I’ve encountered who understand a subject just fine, but are complete basket-cases when it comes to teaching it. Surely you’ve encountered those teachers also?
The same can be said of parents. And we are not talking about the extremes, but averages. The average home-schooling parent, with a “class size” of two or three, is going to be better than the average teacher with a class size of thirty.
Sure, I have met several incompetent teachers. But that demonstrates my point - possession of a teaching degree is no guarantee of the ability to teach.
Teaching and tutoring are different things. Home schooling is pretty much tutoring, except with the advantage of added motivation (because it is your own kids) and much more immediate feedback on whether or not you the student is mastering the material.
The idea that teaching is so difficult that only someone with a degree in education can do it seems to be a mainstay of teachers union rhetoric. As mentioned, anyone who has successfully helped a child with his homework knows better.
And as I said, the idea that home schooling is dangerous because high school algebra is so difficult is pretty silly.
According to these cites, teacher wannabes and teachers have higher SAT scores and IQs than average college grades. Several cites say that average college grads IQs are 115, average teachers 120. I’m sure high school math and science teachers probably score a bit higher in certain areas (as they should).
The only places where I saw lower scores were on suspicious-looking rightwing blogs with not references.
To address the bolded part in your post, all I can say as that you are exaggerating mine and others claims. All we’re saying is that teaching is a skilled profession that needs skilled personnel.
I also want to say that just because homeschooling is a smaller endeavor than a whole classroom, it’s still much more than tutoring. Even tutoring requires proper knowledge of the subject and communication skills.
Because education in our modern society requires more skill than typical parenting skills. Most parents have reasonable skills to care for their children, just like most animals.
So who says those parents who are below 8th grade reading level are the ones doing the home schooling?
Basically, the law is that, as in all other areas of child rearing, the presumption is that the parents are competent unless there is evidence to the contrary in the specific case.
From my perspective, people with an 8th grade or under reading level are not competent to teach material with above that reading level. If you can’t master the daily newspaper, IMO that’s evidence you’re probably not competent to teach.