I haven’t said anything against homeschooling–just the quality of your cites. I’m sure it works out fine when the family has a big enough income that an educated woman can afford to devote all her time to the kiddies. And all those field trips around the country! Sounds like more fun than actually getting a job. My own public school experience wasn’t 100% perfect, but Mom was a widow who had to work.
Then, there are folks like the Duggers. It’s one thing to see how well some homeschooled kids do in college. But some of them will never be given the chance to apply for higher education. Especially the girls. (No Doper Homeschoolers in *that *group, of course!)
By the way, as a renter I only pay school taxes indirectly; but my landlady indicates that I do pay! As a non-parent, I’m glad to contribute to public education. And to theTexas Freedom Network, to keep an eye on the antics of the Governor, Legislature & State Board of Education–which has been known to make buzzards gag. Surely, homeschoolers don’t try to duck out of their community responsibilities!
Yeah, really. In preindustrial times kids that can walk and carry become part of the labor force for the most part. Not a lot in common with modern times of near universal education in 1st world countries.
They are isolating their children from the school environment where the vast majority of children are socialized. “Protecting” children from the realities of that social environment will not equip them to deal with people that learned to thrive in that environment.
Deciding you can do a better job is great if you’re qualified to make that judgment. Most people are not qualified.
But that’s not quite how it really works. I have many friends who have spent years volunteering their hearts out at the schools, only to find that their child is still being badly served no matter how much they try to work for change within the system. How many years do you spend hoping that next year, your child will be assigned to a teacher that fits and maybe make some academic progress? Many homeschoolers are made, not born.
My neighborhood school–one of the best in the district–is overflowing with volunteers, as are the magnet programs (such as open structure, GATE, or Spanish immersion) at certain schools. They don’t actually need me-- I’ve been of much more use doing field trip tours of the public library for hundreds of public-schooled kids, which not everyone could do. And the place is overcrowded as it is. (I should also note that my neighborhood school is overwhelmingly white and middle-class–hardly a beacon of diversity and tolerance. Our homeschooling park group–heck,* my own family*–is more diverse in every way.)
Bridget, you might be surprised at how many people committed to homeschooling manage to do it despite low incomes. I know single moms who homeschool. I know one woman who has lived on almost nothing for the past 3 years, since her husband is a real estate agent in Las Vegas. Her ingenuity is dumbfounding. I’m not sure that anyone in our park group doesn’t have serious money worries these days. And as I’ve mentioned, our own financial state has been problematic for the past couple of years. I do have a part-time job; I just do it as well as the homeschooling. Homeschooling is not only for the wealthy.
The only homeschooler I know is my sister, who has homeschooled my niece for her entire education. My sister, as I’ve said, has a PhD in biology. I think she’s qualified.
Several people here have commented that they believe that homeschooling should be tightly regulated, or that parents should have credentials, or something along those lines. I’d like to ask a little bit about the differences between private schools and homeschooling.
Private schools are not required to hire accredited teachers or give their pupils standardized tests. There are no particular requirements for a private school at all. In California, where I live, a homeschooler is (legally speaking) a private school. We fill out the same forms.
So, do these same opinions apply to private schools? There are a lot more children in private schools in the US. Have those parents also abandoned the public schools–should they be volunteering their time? Do you also blame them for exercising an option that is not open to all, that is in fact far more financially difficult than homeschooling?
I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I’m just not seeing how any single person (mom, dad, grandma, whoever) is qualified to teach all subjects in all grades from K-12. State licensing requires teachers in schools to have spent a number of years learning how to teach, and learning the subject they teach, and getting certified to teach; and even after all that, they teach one grade, or one subject. I just don’t see how we could possibly reasonably expect someone without an education agree to do better than certified teachers.
I mean, just from my own experience, I could no longer ask my own parents to help with my math homework by 7th grade, because I was taking more advanced math than they remembered how to do themselves. They would NOT have been able to teach me 12th grade calculus.
Well, okay, I’ll contribute my anecdotal evidence! Woohoo!
Before I moved here, I knew very few people that homeschool. Now, I work with a bunch of engineers, several of whom homeschool their children. These kids are the smartest kids their age I’ve ever met. At least two of them have won a number of local awards for academics and music. Spending some time with one of them made my husband decide maybe we should homeschool! Their fathers, at least, are all well equipped in math, science, and English (otherwise they wouldn’t be working at our company, which in addition to engineering work requires a lot of writing proposals and such), and usually in other areas as well (most of them have a very good grounding in current events, have some experience with a foreign language, etc.).
A couple of people at church homeschool their kids as well. These actually tend to be the families who are a bit more hippie and liberal; the conservative ones tend to have too many kids to want to homeschool. Their kids are also just amazing. I used live very close to and frequently visit one mom who was homeschooling, and on a shoestring budget – they raised chickens and a huge vegetable garden and recycled their wash water to get by, and her kids convinced me maybe we should look into homeschooling. Very smart, very interested in things, do all sorts of interesting activities, don’t seem to have much trouble with socialization because they have a good homeschool network around here as well as lots of church events. And as teachers she and her husband are at least as well equipped as the engineers I know.
One more anecdote. The other kid I know who’s been homeschooled goes to the (extremely conservative) church my husband used to attend. She seems like she might be smart, but is kind of scary with the spouting her parents’ opinions thing, and does not appear to talk at all other than the aforementioned spouting her parents opinion.
So, yeah, if that’s the only kind you’d ever met I can see how you’d be against it. But my anecdotal experience has been almost all positive.
ETA: Most of these people sent/are planning to send their kids to the public school system starting in high school.
But even homeschooling parents who don’t have the benefit of partnerships with other homeschooling parents, or hired tutors, can do an acceptable job, I think. Suppose you wanted to learn a subject outside school; how would you go about it? What resources would you seek out for yourself, and how would you measure your own progress? Whatever your answers–those things can be put in service of a homeschooling program. Sometimes the parents learn right along with the kids, which can be an important lesson in itself.
I read the linked document and I’m not seeing anything which invalidates the research. Are there specific sections you believe support your view that existing research on the quality of home education is fatally tainted by methodological errors? I’ll reproduce most of the summary and conclusion from that paper here because I don’t think it makes the point it seems to me you’re trying to make.
Everything I quoted is verbatim(typos are my own). Exactly what part of this review do you believe invalidates the cites provided by Shodan? The authors say there should be better controls, but they stop way short of saying the studies are invalid, and in fact they reiterate their belief, based on their review of dozens of studies, that positive effects for all of society result from homeschooling.
Enjoy,
Steven
ETA: Ninja’ed! Oh well. Having a partial transcript of the cite will be useful to the discussion as a whole I think.
But they don’t. Virtually no one actually tries to teach their child every subject for 13 years. And no one has to do it alone, from just their own knowledge. The resources out there are incredible.
People put homeschooling co-ops together.
They ask a relative, friend, or neighbor to teach something.
You can hire a tutor or take classes.
You can take video/online courses in anything. (My daughter wants to take a Latin translation/music course next year–first she has to finish her computer typing course.)
If you belong to a charter school, like we do, you can ask your overseeing teacher to do some teaching.
You can read a bunch of books and learn how to do something together. (My Latin is not much better than my 10yo’s.)
You can take courses at the local community college, which is how many high-school age homeschool kids do it.
By the time a kid is in high school, she needs outside classes anyway. Colleges don’t usually accept recommendation letters from parents. At the very least, lab science courses and higher math are usually outsourced (though actually my husband is an excellent calculus and physics teacher; between the two of us, we actually could handle high school coursework, but we don’t plan to do it alone).
You should also keep in mind that an awful lot of homeschoolers don’t go through high school. In fact, quite a few only do it for a year or two, on an emergency basis to deal with some situation in their lives. Many stop after 6th grade, and more after 8th.
Myself, I want to continue through 8th grade unless something fairly dire happens. That will get us out of the awful math curriculum, and through the shark-infested pit that is junior high. After that we’ll see; I think there are pros and cons on either side, but I think it would be an awful lot of fun to homeschool in high school. There is so much freedom! Our local high school is pretty good, certainly much better than mine was, and I haven’t got much objection to it except that we could be doing more interesting stuff.
My parents were incredibly dysfunctional, there was addiction and mental health issues, all of it invisible to the outside world. I barely got out with my life.
If they had chosen to home school, (a choice my mother would have loved, had she had the option!), I would not have made it out. For a lot, A LOT, of children, school is the only respite from the horror that is life at home. Might as well shut down the children’s help lines, cut the counselors in half, nobody is going to be able to report anything, anyway.
You gotta know that the families teetering on the brink, the first time they have to answer to why Johnny has bruises, or Susie hasn’t eaten in 24hrs, are going to ‘homeschool’. Shudder.
The authors’ belief is irrelevant as other than their personal opinions if the research data, as they conclude, suffers from “mostly” poor methodology. That isn’t “my” view, it’s the conclusion of the literature review.
Just the fact that the samples are self-selecting renders the cites little better than anecdote.
What they’re likely to find is that homeschooling efficacy is extremely sensitive to the conditions in the home. I have no doubt that in some cases it will be far better than public school. I have no doubt that in some cases it will be substantially worse.
IMO, anyone that can demonstrate that they have the resources available to homeschool should be allowed to do so with the proper monitoring.
The public schools in the United States do a lousy job in most places. Not in all places, but in most places. Consequently supporters of public schools have a strong reason to want the competition outlawed. It’s a lot easier to make money if everybody has to buy your product. Coke would outlaw Pepsi if they could. Microsoft owuld outlaw Macs if they could. Public school supporters would outlaw homeschooling if they could, and probably private schools well.
I teach at a private high school and many of my students have been homeschooled. I have yet to see a single one who lags academically or socially in any significant way. On the whole, they seem to be about average by our school’s standards. Needless to say, that puts them above average by public school standards.
I find comments such as “many parents are not qualified to be teachers” to be highly amusing. Many teachers in public schools are not qualified to be teachers. Perhaps we should solve that problem first.
Well, I don’t know how you do it, but short of some bit of trivia that can be looked up on Wikipedia, if I want in-depth learning on a subject I take a class (or a series of classes) on it, from people or organizations that have a reputation for teaching it well. I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say here? If they don’t hire tutors or otherwise learn from people qualified to teach the subject, then I still don’t see how an unqualified parent can adequately teach their child.
I had forgotten a story that my dad’s current wife, a retired elementary school teacher, told me about a student in her third grade class years ago. She said the girl contacted her later, after graduating high school, to say that she (the girl) had been brutally sexually abused throughout her childhood at home, and felt that the only safe place she had was school. She thanked my dad’s wife for giving her a safe space.
Interestingly, my dad’s current wife once “diagnosed” a girl in her third grade class as lesbian and told the other children to stay away from her, and regularly read the Bible as literature to her class, so there’s that.
Private high schools can be selective about the students they admit. Selection bias.
I’m not sure what your argument is here. Home schooling is bad because there are terrible parents that don’t home school? Or that abusive parents will home school their kids so that they don’t get caught abusing them? Is that even common?
Home schooling isn’t a trivial thing to set up. There are hoops to jump through and over-sight. It’s not something a lazy, selfish, abusive parent is going to go through just to cover their butts. These types of parents might encourage their kids to ditch school or call them in sick, but they’re not going to the trouble to set up home schooling.
Just from the anecdotes in this thread, most home schooling parents are highly motivated to do it. They might not be motivated by reasons we all agree with, but they aren’t entering into it lightly. It is not the easier of the two options by any measure.
I dunno. I started teaching AP Economics when I didn’t know a damn thing about it. I read corresponding sections from four college textbooks every morning before class for a year. My kids did fine on the exam, and I have former students who are econ majors at Harvard, Brown, UVA and UT, and none of them found themselves less prepared than their peers. Honest to god, all the way through Freshman college classes, the material kids learn just isn’t that hard. What they need to learn in a semester, a parent can teach themselves in a couple weeks.
The average parent may not remember 7th grade math, but if they sat down and tried to figure it out–if they were really committed to the idea–I bet they could. It’s not rocket science.