Home schooling anybody?

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Nor is this an argument for home schooling. I can point to a lot of cases of child abuse by parents (death, maiming, starvation, as well as physical and mental abuse and a number of these cases are situations where there's a stay at home mom) as a reason for not home schooling.¹Being at home does not mean being safe.
Being at home does NOT mean you're free from abuse and bullying.²Sorta off topic. We were talking about testing and home schooling and about the fact that it's the home school associations who are reporting the wonderful statistics.³Well, I was talking about the "standards" -- reading, writing, math, sex education, biology, history, etc.
Reading doesn't teach you to analyze or critique. The questions I saw required understanding and critique and reading dear old Bertie and George did not prepare for what was on the SAT. Or ACT. Or GRE.
As was I. Perhaps our differences in philosophy are due to the differences in the students we taught. Mine were mostly poor and mostly minority.⁴And that's why I was a little puzzled that you should cite him, since this very situation is occurring with the home schooling associations reporting their successes.
Not really, because of the different methods of doing this. Until about 30 years ago, teachers were sent by the government to island communities and other communities to teach. I spoke with Native Americans who were raised under this system and what they said was that once the teachers no longer came, people moved to the cities so that their children could be educated. For the very few who live in inaccessible areas, home schooling is done though it is more similar to what college "distance education" is nowadays than "mom teaching and making the lesson plans from material she selects and she approves of."⁵Although as a teacher I couldn't select the textbooks that I taught from, at the same time all the material in the school was not biased by my own opinion or understanding or cultural preferences. This is not true in a homeschool situation, where a single person dictates the material used (which may be biased toward their own ability to teach.)⁶In fact, the Alaska State Government says:...
...
So they have no idea how well or how poorly these children are being educated. Nobody's measuring it.⁷

1. It's a rebuttal to "there are also more instances where we don't see any evidence of fraud".
2. "Homeschooling" does not mean "confined to the residence between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m." either. As Milton Friedman once said: "You have to compare something to something". We are interested in relative adacemic success and relative relative safety, conventional schools and homeschooing. In Hawaii, juvenile arrests and juvenile hospitalizations for human0induced trauma fall in summer, when school is NOT in session.
In 2007:

Students ages 12 to 18 were victims of about 1.5 million non-fatal crimes when they were at school compared to about 1.1 million non-fatal crimes while they were away from school.

3.The immediate point involved fraud in the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools.
(Pyrts): "Accounts" gives no sense of hard numbers about the scope and range of fraud."
(Malcolm): "Here."
4. Same here.
5. This I doubt. "Homeschooling associations" don't monitor student performance, if my understanding is correct. They are more support groups and resource-sharing collectives. Where States require monitoring, it's usually participation in standardized testing or required record-keeping by the homeschooling adult.
6. Nothing stopped a teacher in the conventional schools at which I taught from tossing the textbooks and using other materials. I did, because the Math books they gave us were garbage. I expect things might have been different in English and History classes. Even there, though, teachers have considerable freedom to vary.
7. That does not describe the option of enrollment in government-operated "virtual" correspondence schools.

 

[Pyrts]

We seem to be having two different conversations. I'm interested in finding out numbers and statistics about homeschooling and where they come up with all the "happy numbers" from and how they're measured. I ask because I'm a scientist and the first thing we do when we see an interesting paper is go find the methodology and numbers.

I'm not seeing either.

Your responses are frankly confusing -- you state that your respone #1 (a comment about the threat of being raped) is a response to "there are also more instances where we don't see any evidence of fraud"???

Other quotes are pulled out of context -- quotes are very nice fodder for Facebook but frankly (unless the quotes happen to be from a paper where Friedman was addressing homeschooling or where these other people were discussing the quality of education and how to achieve it specifically and in context) they're irrelevant.

And they don't shed any light on the question of "just who came up with these results for home schooling and how did they do them and is there any independent audit?" Statistics on problems in schools prove that various agencies are paying attention and auditing what's going on in school.

Who's auditing home schooling? Is every single home school "fraud free"?

It all cycles back to the fact that we can't support the superiority of a home schooling education without some sort of monitoring and metric. And a report by a home schooling association just doesn't do it for me, thanks.

If you find some numbers by non-homeschool groups about how the homeschool students test or compare (particularly for a reasonably large sample and in more than one area of the country) I'd love to continue the discussion. If you've got some information on the methodology they used that I haven't found in a quick review, I'd love to see that as well.

Otherwise, I'll leave it to someone else to swap interesting quotes and news stories with you.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

...Your responses are frankly confusing -- you state that your respone #1 (a comment about the threat of being raped) is a response to "there are also more instances where we don't see any evidence of fraud"???¹
Other quotes are pulled out of context -- quotes are very nice fodder for Facebook but frankly (unless the quotes happen to be from a paper where Friedman was addressing homeschooling or where these other people were discussing the quality of education and how to achieve it specifically and in context) they're irrelevant.²And they don't shed any light on the question of "just who came up with these results for home schooling and how did they do them and is there any independent audit?" Statistics on problems in schools prove that various agencies are paying attention and auditing what's going on in school.³Who's auditing home schooling? Is every single home school "fraud free"?⁴
It all cycles back to the fact that we can't support the superiority of a home schooling education without some sort of monitoring and metric. And a report by a home schooling association just doesn't do it for me, thanks.⁵If you find some numbers by non-homeschool groups about how the homeschool students test or compare (particularly for a reasonably large sample and in more than one area of the country) I'd love to continue the discussion. If you've got some information on the methodology they used that I haven't found in a quick review, I'd love to see that as well.

Otherwise, I'll leave it to someone else to swap interesting quotes and news stories with you.⁶

1. (Pyrts): " in public school, I know darn well who sat in what chair and took what test and how long it took and whether there was any interaction (asking for clarification, attempting to peek at books.) For this round, they just sent out tests and accepted them -- there's no evidence of who actually took the test and how they took it."
(Malcolm): "Exactly this sort of fraud occurs widely in the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools (the "public" schools)."
(Pyrts): "What's your source for this claim of fraud?"
(Malcolm): "Numerous newspaper accounts of teachers, principals, and district officials altering test answer sheets or engaging in other manipulations, such as prior coaching of students using the test questions or excluding students whom they expect to test poorly."
(Pyrts): "And there are also more instances where we don't see any evidence of fraud.¹ "Accounts" gives no sense of hard numbers about the scope and range of fraud.²"

(Malcolm): "1. "Most of our students did not get raped in the halls yesterday" isn't much of a defense of school security."
(Pyrts): "Nor is this an argument for home schooling."
(Malcolm): " It's a rebuttal to 'there are also more instances where we don't see any evidence of fraud'."

(Malcolm): "2. Here."
No response?

2. The quote are relevant, but I'm not sure which quotes you disapprove, so I'll have to leave it at that.

3. The "agency" that was paying attention to test fraud was the newspaper, not any government agency. The agencies that were paying attention to the seasonal variation in juvenile arrests were the Hawaii Attorney General's office and the Juvenile Justice Data Center. The Hawaii Health Information Center gathered statistics on seasonal variations in juvenile and adult hospitalizations.
Hyman and Penroe,
Journal of School Psychology

Extrapolation from these studies suggests that psychological maltreatment of school children, especially those who are poor, is fairly widespread in the United States....
...schools do not encourage research regarding possible emotional maltreatment of students by staff or investigatiion into how this behavior might affect student misbehavior....

4. Some parents are abusive. So are some teachers. Aggregate numbers indicate that juvenile arrests, juvenile victimizations, and juvenile hospitalizations fall when school is not in session. Therefore...

5. Earlier, I wrote: "There is a large discussion here involving the construction and relevance of controlled experiments in public policy in a free society" and "This has been done in Alaska, where parents may enroll their children in "virtual" correspondence schools (loosely monitored homeschooling, in effect). I believe the intertemporal comparison (before the policy versus after the policy) establishes the success of the policy."
6. Try here.

 

[Star]

No home-schooling for my 2 kids. I prefer to have them educated by people that are more qualified than I am.

Same here. If I was qualified I would rather home school my son. He isn't in school yet, he is just a toddler but it's been on my mind. I don't like what's going on with the education system these days.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

No home-schooling for my 2 kids. I prefer to have them educated by people that are more qualified than I am. (Besides, home-schooling is not an option here)

Same here. If I was qualified I would rather home school my son. He isn't in school yet, he is just a toddler but it's been on my mind. I don't like what's going on with the education system these days.

If you don't want to homeschool your kids, then your kids are probably better off in school. The critical factor in academic success is motivation. Children, especially very young children, will work for love and parents are a more reliable source of love than are strangers (present company excepted, apparently). Once a child has learned to read and compute at the level of the material we call Algebra I (equation of the line in two-space), s/he can pursue most academic subjects independently with no more than a well-plotted curriculum and the occasional pat on the back.

In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote that parents are the natural teachers of their children.

Further...
Marvin Minsky
Interview
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 1994-July

...the evidence is that many of our foremost achievers developed under conditions that are not much like those of present-day mass education. Robert Lawler just showed me a paper by Harold Macurdy on the child pattern of genius. Macurdy reviews the early education of many eminent people from the last couple of centuries and concludes (1) that most of them had an enormous amount of attention paid to them by one or both parents and (2) that generally they were relatively isolated from other children. This is very different from what most people today consider an ideal school. It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens.
Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

 

[Mercurial Artism]

If I had to spend eight hours a day teaching a kid calculus, French, computer programming, medieval European history, playing the trumpet, physics, economics, and American literature, I would not know what to do. That would be typical for the courses I took—plus physical education, health, and driver’s education.

Each class would be an hour (or less) and I would need at least an hour (probably more) to prepare for each class. And that would be just getting by the skin of my teeth. 16 hours a day. But then you need planning and grading. And eating and cleaning. So you are running probably 20-22 hours a day. But you can’t live on 2 hours sleep. But you have the weekends. Push some of the work to the weekends to get ahead. Spend 10 hours a day. That gets you 20 hours in on the weekends. So now you are down to 16-18 hours on the weekdays and 10 hours on the weekends. So you are only putting in a 100 hour work week. With no leisure time. And pulling this off just barely.

Sounds tough. I would think almost impossible. My calculus teacher couldn’t teach French. My French teacher couldn’t teach physics. My physics teacher couldn’t teach American literature.

The idea that any one teacher could effectively teach all of these courses (and this is just one semester) is unreasonable. The idea that a parent, not trained as a teacher, can pull this off is absurd. (Yes, there are some extreme exceptions where it has been done. And that those cases are rare proves the rule that it cannot be commonly done. And I would question the completeness of the education in those cases. And the opportunities.)

This is why I wouldn't homeschool for the high school level. If public school doesn't work out for the kid in high school, then they can take community college classes. At least where I grew up, community college classes were free for minors, though you had to buy the books. Also, even a physics PhD likely wouldn't have the resources in home to properly teach a high school or college level physics class, unless they had a bunch of lab supplies and programs at home. Ditto for chemistry or biology. Homeschooled kids who excel in college in the sciences very likely took college lab science courses at a local community college or university.

However, for the elementary school and junior high ages, I see few problems with an intelligent and highly educated person homeschooling, provided they have the temperament, teaching skills, time availability and commitment, and do not have a strong weakness in a given area (plenty of people are very skilled at language and history, say, but barely competent in math, or someone very good at math and science who doesn't know much history or literature).

It would be much easier to keep up for elementary or junior high curriculum, though. The elementary science curriculum rarely extends past what you can learn from watching NOVA specials and reading a couple of kids' science books at the library. I think there should be much more emphasis on the process of meaning of scientific inquiry, instead of "Here are the steps to the scientific method; memorize them and regurgitate on the quiz next Friday". Barring highly unusual circumstances, though, this can usually be supplemented in addition to the public school education, provided the parent has that understanding (and since many don't, I would rather see the public education improve in this and other regards, so that kids can learn this regardless of the ignorance of their parents).

One of the most obvious problems I see when people tout the success of homeschoolers is that it is a very different group than the general population. Most obviously, these are the kids whose parents decided to spend all that extra time to teach their kids themselves and be that much more involved in their educations. Equally, it excludes those whose parents may have wanted to homeschool, but due to their financial situation it is basically impossible and so never crosses their minds as an option to seriously consider.

Also, a lot of the kids who are homeschooled are in the tails - kids who learn very fast and have a drive to learn, as well as kids who have various learning disabilities. Intuitively, these two groups would seem likely to cancel out, but I have my doubts this is so. First, you'd have to consider the amounts of kids in each category, as already high-achieving kids may make up a bigger proportion. Many kids with learning disabilities are generally quite intelligent, but with a significant weakness in a particular, perhaps narrow skill. How many homeschooled children have profound intellectual disability, compared to the amount of homeschooled children who are profoundly intellectually gifted? Then you have more average-achieving children with highly involved parents (who might have been achieving below average without such involvement, which they probably could have gotten from their parents while attending public school). Then you factor in things like religious homeschooling, where they might be deficient in science education, but receiving an average or better education in things like reading, writing, or math.

My point being that any study comparing the achievement of homeschooled children with that of public school children needs to rigorously take these factors into account, and probably more I haven't thought of. My guess would be that, while homeschooling would greatly benefit a few, for most people it would be average or worse, and whatever flaws exist in homeschooling today would magnify tenfold at least if there were no public school, and it was private school or homeschool, because you'd have a lot more people with less qualification, less time, and less motivation than the current batch of homeschoolers.

 

[marplots]

... Once a child has learned to read and compute at the level of the material we call Algebra I (equation of the line in two-space), s/he can pursue most academic subjects independently with no more than a well-plotted curriculum and the occasional pat on the back.

I clipped this out because it sounds good on the first read, but sounded bad when I thought about it.

You use the word "independent" in an odd way. They need the books -- fine. But they might also need some coaching, peer interaction, testing to measure their progress, customized examples and on and on. In many areas they also ought to be interacting with the outside world, repeating experiments and so on. Interaction is important to internalize material and allow room for critical thought. Rote isn't what we desire is it?

Independent is a sham -- no one really expects them to be independent, we are just arguing how much interaction and of what type produces the best result. I was arguing for an online model because it allows for more feedback and engagement than a book does, but also has the property of being cheaply duplicated for efficiency. I would still include teacher-student and student-student interaction.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

...My point being that any study comparing the achievement of homeschooled children with that of public school children needs to rigorously take these factors into account, and probably more I haven't thought of.¹ My guess would be that, while homeschooling would greatly benefit a few, for most people it would be average or worse, and whatever flaws exist in homeschooling today would magnify tenfold at least if there were no public school, and it was private school or homeschool², because you'd have a lot more people with less qualification, less time, and less motivation than the current batch of homeschoolers.³

1. We agree. Thoroughly controlled experiments in public policy are hard to design in a free society. One method that comes close is the random assignment lottery, where people volunteer for treatment and the volunteers are assigned by lot to the treatment group and the control group (e.g., charter school enrollment and enrollment in the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools). Even here, obviously, every participant is a volunteer, which separates the volunteers from the non-volunteers. I'm not sure this really matters. Values intrude into experimental design. Suppose you found, say, that homeschoolers performed worse than controls in an experiment with subsidized homeschooling. This still would not imply that subsidized homeschooling is a bad idea. By analogy, I have a similar objection to studies which compare private schools to the cartel's schools. I welcome the results that show superior performance by private schools, but even if they were worse, they might still be good policy if, for example, subtracting the kids who do not do well in conventional schools improved the performance of the students who remained in conventional schools. Suppose test score comparisons showed no difference between homeschoolers and conventionally schooled children but subsidized homeschooling achieved these results at lower cost to the district. Would that not support the policy?
2. I don't see what magic people see in institutions operated by people who draw a government paycheck. We are all public citizens and private individuals. Teachers in St. Andrew's Priory are as much "the public" as are teachers in WEB DuBois High School. Students in the Academy of the Sacred Heart are as much "the public" as are students in Franklin Delano High School. People do not become more intelligent, more altruistic, better-informed, or more capable when they draw a State paycheck.
3. I expect performance would improve with every increase in the range of education options available to parents. The argument for parent control shares features with the argument for private property and markets: parent control and the system of title to resources unite local knowledge with the incentive to exercie control wisely. True, some parents will neglect or abuse their kids. So will some teachers.

Compulsory attendance statutes imply some sort of "public" school as a default option for students whomh all other schools reject.

 

[Mercurial Artism]

2. I don't see what magic people see in institutions operated by people who draw a government paycheck. We are all public citizens and private individuals. Teachers in St. Andrew's Priory are as much "the public" as are teachers in WEB DuBois High School. Students in the Academy of the Sacred Heart are as much "the public" as are students in Franklin Delano High School. People do not become more intelligent, more altruistic, better-informed, or more capable when they draw a State paycheck.

I see no magic in it, either. There are plenty of inept, fully-credentialed teachers. The point is that parents who opt to home-school and people who go through teacher training are not representative of the general population. Teachers are required to meet certain minimums, and while I believe these minimum requirements are frequently too low or otherwise flawed, they at least have evidence that they grasp a minimum level of skills (fortunately, there are many good teachers who exceed those minimums, both credentialed teachers and otherwise, but if I had to bet on experienced teacher or randomly selected parent, I would bet on the teacher).

I do not think homeschooling ought to be banned. There ought to be a method in place of making sure that kids who are homeschooled (or put in other private schools) are learning. Kids enrolled in public school get tested all the time. They may not get taken out of the school based on test results, but they may be directed to remedial instruction, and their teachers evaluated. Likewise, poor performance on standardized tests needn't mean the homeschooled kid gets put into the public school - there should be an evaluation first, to look at how their achievement compares to theoretical ability based on IQ and similar tests. If it's due to ineffective homeschooling setup, the parents may get the choice to go back to public school or try some interventions first and re-evaluate after a trial period.

My school district offered once a week tutoring when I was out sick for a long period of time, but could also be useful as a way to monitor the progress of a homeschooling student who is struggling and determine the best placement for that individual. Many people homeschool successfully. However, if the parent is not fully able or willing (lack of education, lack of time, exhaustion from working, poor at teaching, trouble juggling parenting and teaching roles, unwillingness to let their kid attend social functions outside of the home due to overprotectiveness, etc.), they are unlikely to succeed, unless their kid is just very bright and self-motivated anyway.

Homeschooling should not be promoted as something any parent can (or should) do with any child, because the success of current homeschooled children (whatever degree of success there is currently) cannot be extrapolated to any other parent/child. I actually have a lot of criticisms of the way education is done in public schools, and some ideas for radically changing educational practice. I don't know currently how many of these ideas are practical or even likely to be more successful than current practices, but I hardly think the system is a bastion of intellectual development and enlightenment.

It can be done well, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong - or right. If the parent seeks out group activities for their kid to participate in the community, has the knowledge and teaching skill and time to cover the subjects they need to cover, monitors their child's progress in an objective manner (like tests and homework they do without looking at a book or cheat sheet), and so on, it can go very well. But not every parent is up to it, and for many children there's no reason to suspect it will benefit them. Yeah, a Ph.D. who understands a broad variety of topics in sufficient detail for the grade level working one-on-one may well outperform the teacher with a B.A. and a teaching certificate managing a classroom of 30 kids. Or they might not. But not every parent went to college, and not every teacher struggles to address the varying needs of their students.

3. I expect performance would improve with every increase in the range of education options available to parents. The argument for parent control shares features with the argument for private property and markets: parent control and the system of title to resources unite local knowledge with the incentive to exercie control wisely. True, some parents will neglect or abuse their kids. So will some teachers.

Compulsory attendance statutes imply some sort of "public" school as a default option for students whomh all other schools reject.

I never argued that homeschooling should be removed as an option. And parent control is not always in the best interests of a child, even barring extremes of abuse. My dad was overprotective of me, and I think it contributed to my social anxiety and social isolation (it's difficult to sort out how much is genetic versus environmental). Then of course there are parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. Even if you think it ought to be legal for a parent to refuse vaccination on behalf of their child for any reason, it is certainly not in the best interests of the child.

I do think that the default, the path of least resistance, should be public school. If homeschooling were the default, lots of people would keep their kids home (or at least delay school entry) when homeschooling isn't a feasible option for them. It's like vaccines: they are opt-out, not opt-in (though the "philosophical exemptions" make opting out too easy). Fewer parents would opt-in for vaccines than for public school because lots of parents need income from more working hours, whereas staying up-to-date on vaccinations can mean more gasoline used, time off work without recreation, paying co-pays, and the like.

The state's standard may not be up to your standards or mine, but it needs to be equally available to all. The reason to pay taxes for schools even if you don't have a kid and never will is because enough people think it is important enough to society at large that we do not increase the amount of illiterate and innumerate individuals, particularly since a larger fraction of jobs in the U.S. today require much more in the way of reading and arithmetic skills than, say 200 years ago. While teachers do not always succeed, there is no reason to think a randomly selected parent will do better than a randomly selected teacher, and plenty of reason to think a randomly selected teacher will do better than a randomly selected parent. The credential isn't everything, but it is evidence of a minimum, evidence which is lacking for most who do not have such a certificate.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

...Teachers are required¹ to meet certain minimums, and while I believe these minimum requirements are frequently too low or otherwise flawed, they² at least have evidence that they³ grasp a minimum level of skills (fortunately, there are many good teachers who exceed those minimums, both credentialed teachers and otherwise, but if I had to bet on experienced teacher or randomly selected parent, I would bet on the teacher)⁴.
...
I do not think homeschooling ought to be banned. There ought to be a method in place of making sure that kids who are homeschooled (or put in other private schools) are learning⁵.
..
The state's standard may not be up to your standards or mine, but it needs to be equally available to all. The reason to pay taxes for schools even if you don't have a kid and never will is because enough people think it is important enough to society at large that we do not increase the amount of illiterate and innumerate individuals, particularly since a larger fraction of jobs in the U.S. today require much more in the way of reading and arithmetic skills than, say 200 years ago. While teachers do not always succeed, there is no reason to think a randomly selected parent will do better than a randomly selected teacher, and plenty of reason to think a randomly selected teacher will do better than a randomly selected parent.⁶The credential isn't everything, but it is evidence of a minimum, evidence which is lacking for most who do not have such a certificate.

1. Note the passive voice. Government school administrators require that the teachers whom schools employ meet certain minimums. This introduces the problem of regulatory capture at a point well down the road to complete domination by insider interest groups (Colleges of Education and teacher unions).
2. Who is "they" here?
3. Teachers have evidence? Or "(minimum requirements) have provide evidence..."? See #1.
4. I would bet on the parent. One thing that a random parent is more likely to provide is love. Motivation makes a vital contribution to academic success and parents will more reliably supply love than will an institutional employee. People are social creatures. Children, especially very young children, will work for love.
5. I agree, as a matter of practical politics in the current legal environment. I support repeal of compulsory attendance laws, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and tax support of schools, as an ultimate goal. I see most steps in the direction of greater parent control of sub-adult education as positive. I do not expect to see public acceptance of subsidized homeschooling without some "public" accountability mechanism. I have a hard time imagining any such mechanism that insider interest groups (i.e., the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel) will not subvert.
6. We disagree. See #4. I recommend James Tooley's The Beautiful Tree. Tooley anticipates and addresses nearly all of the arguments against private education that I have ever seen. He also provides abundant evidence in support of parent control. He discusses "public" accountability mechanisms and market accountability mechanisms at length. Tooley joins my list of education policy recommendations, Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (Brookings, 1990), Steuerle, et. al. (eds), Vouchers and the Provision of Public Services (Brookings, 2000), Enlow and Ealy (eds), Liberty and Learning: Milton Friedman's Voucher Idea at Fifty (Cato, 2004), and Sheldon Richman, Separating School and State.

 

[mikeyx]

I've been half hearted following this topic, but it got curious enough to look up how Home Schooling works in my home state, and after reading it, I'm left faily uncomfortable, more so than before on Home Schooling. The wording on what if any standards the kids are held to ie, like Standardized testing, is very very ambiguous. They may be held to a "portfolio review" but the Home Schooling organization claims its not mandatory. It boils down to being able to prove you are compliant to statute such and such, and I will go back and look but couldn't to it's wording.

SO based on the info I have; my major reservations:

1) Most folks who seem to do homeschooling seem to want to shelter the kids from the outside or at least the version that in some cases that challenges Mommy or Daddy's belief system, although I would likely throw that generalization at Catholic School or Bible school as well case by case.....

2) A lack of interaction kids would otherwise get in public school, extra circular activities, sports and the like...

3) finally as stated above, the standards strike me as being almost nonexistant....

me no likey...

 

[marplots]

3) finally as stated above, the standards strike me as being almost nonexistant....

me no likey...

And there's another set of standards I think are often overlooked. When we think of education as primarily about ennobling a kid or getting them to learn as much as possible academic-wise, we miss another important function of public schools (or at least group schooling).

I am happy for a child who rises to their potential. But when they become a fully participating citizen, I expect them to meet standards of behavior as well. So, for instance, I think self discipline and the ability to obey the rules and keep their promises is important. I assume they learn this by training in obedience to authority and operating within an existing structure. I also assume they are used to a system of rewards based on performance and meeting imposed obligations.

While all that may be possible in homeschooling, there is a customization element that, while purportedly helping with knowledge transmission, also keeps the homeschoolers from learning institutional systems. Arguably, they will then "graduate" without the skills needed to operate in just such a system.

I'd also propose that homeschooling is done as a way to opt out of exactly the system I want those kids to be aware of and comfortable with. In this way, even the flaws in the public school system are valuable insofar as they teach that such flaws exist, may be exploitable, and are part and parcel of getting by in the world.

If high school is a trial run for adulthood, it should be as realistic a training venue as possible.

 

[mikeyx]

I think the one scenario I would be more open to the idea is for the "gifted student" who is actually held back by public school, which is in no way perfect, provided interaction with peers of their age groups didn't suffer. Other than that I keep thinking about the sheltering thing, and just be that a-hole stereotyper, mommy or daddy crackpot wants to shelter lil' Johnny from the rest of the world.

Even after looking around the local Homeschooling advocacy website in related links, there's a mention of the "new world order", and the kookoo clock made it's appearance.

 

[Theofrak]

We home schooled our oldest, mainly because we didn't like the teacher he would have in public school, and no private school that was easily acceptable. He was in 2nd grade. We enjoyed the process, but I'm not sure I would want to do it in his later years. There is too much that a student learns from a variety of people.

 

[Magic 9-Ball]

We know someone who is home schooling their 2nd child. I asked if they grade on a curve.

Interesting they decided to home school their second child but didn't their first. They said it was better for this particular child's development, plus this one is 6 years younger than the 1st child.