Suppose amateur actuaries – people without any training or experience – did a better job of calculating insurance rates than kabbes and I do? How would we feel?
Suppose clients who defend themselves were more effective advocates than minty green and Sua Sponte? How would they feel?
So, how do professional teachers feel, when home schoolers out-perform students taught by the public and private schools? E.g., at the National Geographic Bee, where home-schoolers took 1st place, 3rd place, 4th place, and 10th place. This is really impressive, when you consider how small a percentage of students are home-schooled.
Schools with professional curriculums, certified, educators, and the most up-to-date teaching materials do not teach their students as much as ordinary, untrained parents do. Something is seriously amiss.
Objection your honor, assuming facts not in evidence.
You have some kid who was home schooled (or a series of kids who were homeschooled) who won some national honor. You assume this means:
Apparently all home schooled children ‘do better’ than those taught in public school.
That home schooled children and public schooled children start off on equal footing and that the only difference 'tween the two is who trained their teacher.
That ‘home schooled’ children are taught by ‘non professionals’ .
That winning a specific national test (spelling bee, geography bee etc) is the best indicator of how well ‘educated’ the kid is.
Please support these bases for your OP, with data, not OP ed pieces.
I’m really getting quite concerned for you. You’re an actuary in real life, and yet you consistently here make outrageous claims based on very little real data.
What is wrong with this picture? For starters, I am not a parent but I do not view most parents as ordinary. When I hear the stories they tell about the sacrifices they make and the challenges they face, I conclude that they are extraordinary. I am certain that these parents you speak of are not ordinary.
I confess that I have not researched this but I would guess that public education has produced far more geography bee winners and spelling bee winners etc than home school. Even looking at percentages, I am certain this would be the case.
This is a great success story for home schoolers. Hoo Rah for them.
Some teachers will point out the vast array of competitions that public school students have won.
Some will blame homeschooling parents for drilling information into the children’s heads 24/7 or abusing them, like that one father did to his homeschooled students
Some will accept that one-on-one teaching DOES have it’s benefits!
while you’re looking, please also find out the total number of kids who participated in the events, and if they were home schooled/ public schooled etc.
If you have one winner who was home schooled and 500 other participants who weren’t, I don’t really think that you can make the claim that it was the ‘home schooling’ that did it.
also please see my above list.
remember, “data” is not the plural of ‘anecdote’. this is something some one who regularly works with statistics should be acutely familiar with.
December, this is the sort of dumb OP title that should be put into a textbook on logical thought as the perfect example of “Begging the question.”
There are, in fact, two stunningly obvious reasons why home schooled kids would do better on standardized tests, even if public school teachers are just as good or BETTER than the parents doing home schooling. I am amazed I have to even mention them, but here goes:
The vast majority of the difference is due, of course, to home schooled kids having parents that are actually supportive and interested in their schoolwork. You will find that kids who are homeschooled and who take standardized tests are disproportionately likely to come from stable homes with supportive parents who stress the importance of education. They are less likely, I would imagine, to come from broken homes and homes where the kid is kept home so they can fetch cigarettes. This obviously would give the homeschooled kids a significant advantage that has nothing to do with the location of their schooling. If you were to compare homeschooled kids with a sampling of public school students that has an equal proportion of children from stable/broken/screwed-up homes I imagine most of your difference would vanish.
I absolutely cannot stress enough what a monstrous difference this is. It’s not uncommon for a public school class in a middle-class neighborhood to have one or two kids who quite literally never show up at school because their parents are worthless bums who can’t control them or just can’t be bothered to send them.
Homeschooled kids are in a class of 1-4 children. Public school kids are in a class of 15+ children. While this probably has minimal effect on bright children, kids who have particular problems are far likelier to have them addressed if they’re homeschooled just by virtue of logistics.
Your title assertion is frankly sort of dumb. Let me put it this way; suppose you were to take the public school teachers and have them homeschool their OWN kids, and take home schooling parents and have them replace the teachers at the local public schools. Do you really, honestly believe the homeschooled kids would suddenly stop learning and the public schools would magically improve? Or do you think perhaps the advantages of homeschooling would turn out to be independent of the professional status of the instructors?
You have made the astonishing logical leap that better scores by home schooled kids = more talented home schooling teachers. Considering the obvious alternative reasons I’d say that’s a bizarre leap to make, especially when you haven’t got any DIRECT evidence public school teachers are inferior.
They’d feel exactly like I do: That they wish they’d hired me in the first place, instead of waiting for the appeal. And oh yeah, they’d get their asses kicked. Guaranteed.
What’s wrong with this picture is that you’re overlooking the fact that the home-schooled child in effect has his teacher’s undivided attention 24/7/365, for as long as it takes for him to get the facts into his little head. If it takes him all day every day for a month to learn the state capitals, then by golly that’s how much time he and Mom spend on it.
Show me the public school system that can match that and then we’ll talk about “amateur teachers vs. professional teachers”.
If you took an amateur actuary and gave him one problem, and gave him unlimited time to keep on doing it until he got it right, you’d probably have some pretty impressive statistics for amateur actuaries. They’d get it right every time, by golly.
I was getting ready to post something similar, but I can’t say it any better. Homeschooled kids have parents who care, and who are able to find the time to devote to their kids. Not everyone has this luxury. Lots of parents of public school students care also, but I suspect that in general, homeschooling parents are exceptional.
Again, just what I was going to say. I’ll add that I wish my classes had 15 students. My university classes average 30, and that was the case when I taught in a public US middle school too. I’ve had twice that number–in an English composition class, no less, which requires extensive one-on-one work in order to iron out individual problems. And it wasn’t my only class. Give me one bright student, raised by educated parents who have taught the kid to value education, and ask me to teach that kid to write. It would be a joy.
I applaud parents who homeschool, and wouldn’t take anything away from them. I would add that they face nothing remotely like the challenge of teaching 5 or 6 classes of 30 students, a quarter of whose parents don’t give a rat’s ass about what the kid learns and have not prepared them in any way for the education that I’m supposed to give them. As a teacher, I may be a little defensive, but I submit that anyone who asks the question in the OP doesn’t understand a teacher’s job very well.
Someone asked for data? The best source seems to be the National Center for Education Statistics, “the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data that are related to education in the United States and other nations”. I guess that means their work is authoritative.
There are lots of other useful documents on non-public education here.
Perhaps this is because teaching rote memorization of geography (or spelling or whatever) is not a major focus of public schools?
Homeschooled children have a lot of leeway in what they learn. That means if their parents want them to be geography bee stars, they can spend the majority of their time training to be geography bee stars. These children have essentially a full time coach, who is very likely pushing them towards a certain goal (winning a geography bee) with minimal distractions. It is much like promising child athletes who devote a lot of their effort towards winning athletic competitions.
Public school students, however, have limited class hours to cover a lot of material. They don’t spend a lot of their time on memorization because frankly there are other, more important, things for them to learn besides the capital city of Sri Lanka.
Rote memorization and regurgitation of facts is a neat trick, may occasionally be useful and is certainly good for performing well in specialized competitions, but I don’t think it is an accurate way to measure the superiority of an education system. Geography bees measure exactly how well children perform in geography bees. While winning one is an achievment and a may be worthy goal, it really does not reveal much about the quality of the rest of the education.
To compare home schooled students to public school children in thse competitions is kind of like asking why public school P.E. classes don’t turn out the same caliber of athletes as full time pro coaching does. It isn’t a fair comparision and it won’t yield much insight.
Honestly these sort of contests have always struck me as a little creepy- kind of the intellectual equivelent of kiddy beauty pagents- a little bit like turning kids into trained monkies. I am much more interested in how home schooled kids perform in, say, essay competitions than how they do in these very specific and only marginally academic contests.
I will also point out that a school aims to do more than simply provide academic results - it seeks to create an individual who will function in non-academic society.
To test the success of this goal compared to those who are homeschooled, we would also need some kind of success measure for life post-school (tricky to say the least) and data on that success measure (all but impossible, I’m guessing).
For example, and looking at only one small part of society, we would require (for each demographic strata) profession and salary.
Of the exceedingly academically brilliant people we interview at my company, we do occassionally get those who we could never take on as consultants because they have no social/communicative skills whatsoever. Although they are in the upper 0.01% academically, they will struggle to find a job commensurate with this. Can it really be said, therefore, that their education was a success?
The intended question meant to ask was how you would feel if clients could defend themselves more effectively than you could defend them. Your response indicates this hypothetical situtation is unthinkable. It’s not enough that “home-defended” clients spend full time on their case, have greater commitment, etc. Lawyers in general are far more effective at their craft than untrained, inexperienced people.
So, why isn’t this true for teachers? IMHO one reason is that teacher training, textbooks, school structures, curriculums, etc. are not well designed for effective learning. The relative success of home-schooled students is a wake-up call.
december, your last post prompts the serious question: Did you, in fact, actually read any of the responses to your OP other than minty’s? Because it doesn’t seem as if you’ve addressed any of the objections to your titular assertion.
OK, here goes.[ol][li]Several responses questioned whether the results of the Geography Bee were sufficient proof that home-schooled students do better. They said, e.g., the sample was too small or it was rote learning. Those objections were thoroughly answered by evilhanz, who provided several cites demonstrating that home-schooled students do indeed do considerably better. []A number of posters observed that home-schooled students have the advantage of one-on-one teaching, greater time and effort, and parental commitment. I pointed out that “home-defended” clients have similar advantages, but clients with real lawyers make out a whole lot better.[]Then there was the objection that the schools aim to socialize students as well as to educate them. I certainly agree, but I don’t see that as invalidating my thesis.[/ol]Looking at the big picture, the effectiveness of home-schooling has been a big surprise. A number of states have put various restrictions and requirements on home-schooling, because they doubted tha the home-schooled would learn as much as school-schooled. (And, because educators’ groups have fought to prevent the competition.) The earliest group of home-schooling families were viewed as mostly religious nuts – a group not reputed to have outstanding educational values. [/li]
It is stunning that the home-schooled children not only keep up with the norm, but considerably exceed it. Many posters here seem unwilling to face up to this surprising reality. It should be a wake-up call, but some have responded by hitting the snooze button.
december, verification of higher test scores or even higher social success rates among home-schooled children is in no way supportive of your stated thesis that amateur teachers are “more effective” at teaching than professionals.
Do you see the difference here? Even if you can show (and I’ll take evilhanz’s cite as pretty good evidence in support of this) that homeschooled kids tend to do better at formalized tests and have higher college admissions than public schooled kids, you’ve still said nothing about the relative one-to-one effectiveness of the teachers.
Please try RickJay’s thought experiment about having the ‘amateurs’ teach in a public school classroom and the ‘pro’s’ teach in a home environment, and imagine what sorts of difficulties or pleasantries each group would be likely to experience.
I guarantee that if you gave me one problem – all available data, a good computer with Excel on it, and the sort of answer you were seeking, I would outshine you or kabbes on that problem.
Of course, it would take me an enormous amount of time to master the discipline and I would be focusing on that particular problem, while you and he were working a variety of problems for a variety of clients (or for a variety of interests of your client’s).
So clearly this proves that you’re incompetent as an actuary, right?
I will grant you that the range of skill levels and motivation among professional teachers is quite broad, and that 50% of them are below average.
However, this does not prove anything remotely resembling your initial assertion. (BTW, a “bee”-type competition, stressing rote learning of facts rather than mastery of discipline and pitting student against student, hardly qualifies with any sort of statistical validity – as I would assume you would know!
