Excellent article. However, I have a small quibble with one assertion. Just as some public school education is substandard, so is some homeschool education. Much homeschool education is excellent and I find it irresponsible to label it all as substandard.
Excellent article. However, I have a small quibble with one assertion. Just as some public school education is substandard, so is some homeschool education. Much homeschool education is excellent and I find it irresponsible to label it all as substandard.
I have no doubt that conscientious parents find ways to homeschool their kids that produce results superior to what the public school system offers. The concern is for the children whose parents are not so motivated. The reports I have read regarding online “learning” during the pandemic are revealing and alarming. A large portion of kids never tuned in.
I think the key to educational success is parental involvement, whether home schooling or public/private schooling. I’m betting that the kids who didn’t fall behind during the classroom lock outs had parents that got involved in their education.
The last year I homeschooled our youngest daughter before she went to public high school, we enrolled her in a new online school that was "open enrollment" in our state, which meant we didn't have to pay for it.
Despite the fact that I was closely involved in her schooling, the online school was a disaster. Her teachers were not meaningfully present. The curriculum (based on Common Core) was a complete mess, to the point that I had to get directly involved in finding and teaching material that was being taught out of order. Eventually she simply started resisting participation (in something she had been eager to try at the beginning of the year).
Homeschooling has to be geared to the needs of the student, not to the needs of the parent or the needs of the school system.
Personally, I think I would have done well in an online school as a child (not that such a thing was more than a sci-fi fantasy at that time). Our middle son would done well. I am sure that our oldest son would have done just as poorly with it as our youngest daughter did.
But I can tell you from personal experience that whether online school is successful or not depends a lot more on the child's learning style than on the parents' involvement.
It does seem likely! It hurts to consider how many business, services and institutions were closed during the pandemic, perhaps reducing the possibility that other parents were at work. Here in the Atlanta area, the school systems came up with really inventive ways to make sure kids could study online. My county bought untold numbers of laptops for kids to check out, and one county drove school businesses into neighborhoods to serve as hotspots where there was below par connectivity.
I would have to say that neglecting your children’s future potential may be a sign of despair.
Online school is a mess. For my daughter's last year of homeschool, we signed up for an online school that had just become available in our state as an "open enrollment" option (meaning that it didn't cost us anything).
The teachers were mostly AWOL, but parents were not expected to be part of the process either. The students were expected to work through online units with little or no direct instruction from teachers. Math and science were poorly designed "Common Core," with the result that kids were expected to be familiar with material they had not yet been taught (I had to look through the textbook, find the relevant material, and teach it to my daughter myself so that she could do her online work). Eventually, my daughter resisted doing her schoolwork at all.
I would never recommend online school for any but the most self-motivated kids. I would have done well in such a system, I think. And our middle son probably would as well. But it was a nightmare for our youngest daughter and it probably would have been a nightmare for our oldest son.
I will be eternally grateful for the Home School Assistance Program that our school district in Cedar Rapids was operating when we lived there. It gave me the courage and resources to homeschool our sons when they desperately needed an alternative to what their schools were offering. It provided a supervising teacher for free (ours was an art teacher by education, so she brought art projects each month when she visited). It also provided textbooks to choose from. And the most wonderful part of it all was that it provided group activities that our kids could attend, including band, choir, science fair, spelling bee, geography bee, field trips, and once-a-week PE and art classes with other kids in the program. The benefit for the district was that they got funding--not as much as if the kids were in classrooms, but more than if the students were being homeschooled with no connection to the district.
The district we lived when our youngest daughter was homeschooled had no such program. The best we could do was dual enrollment, so she could go to art and PE. And the online school had nothing good about it at all.
The homeschoolers I know are very well educated. Both of mine went on to college (one has already graduated). Home schooling is definitely NOT substandard.
Based on the sat scores it is a falsehood entirely. The SAT scores for homeschool kids is higher than the average. They try to debunk it by saying it is self selection but everyone self selects to take the test.
Excellent article. However, I have a small quibble with one assertion. Just as some public school education is substandard, so is some homeschool education. Much homeschool education is excellent and I find it irresponsible to label it all as substandard.
I have no doubt that conscientious parents find ways to homeschool their kids that produce results superior to what the public school system offers. The concern is for the children whose parents are not so motivated. The reports I have read regarding online “learning” during the pandemic are revealing and alarming. A large portion of kids never tuned in.
I think the key to educational success is parental involvement, whether home schooling or public/private schooling. I’m betting that the kids who didn’t fall behind during the classroom lock outs had parents that got involved in their education.
The last year I homeschooled our youngest daughter before she went to public high school, we enrolled her in a new online school that was "open enrollment" in our state, which meant we didn't have to pay for it.
Despite the fact that I was closely involved in her schooling, the online school was a disaster. Her teachers were not meaningfully present. The curriculum (based on Common Core) was a complete mess, to the point that I had to get directly involved in finding and teaching material that was being taught out of order. Eventually she simply started resisting participation (in something she had been eager to try at the beginning of the year).
Homeschooling has to be geared to the needs of the student, not to the needs of the parent or the needs of the school system.
Personally, I think I would have done well in an online school as a child (not that such a thing was more than a sci-fi fantasy at that time). Our middle son would done well. I am sure that our oldest son would have done just as poorly with it as our youngest daughter did.
But I can tell you from personal experience that whether online school is successful or not depends a lot more on the child's learning style than on the parents' involvement.
It does seem likely! It hurts to consider how many business, services and institutions were closed during the pandemic, perhaps reducing the possibility that other parents were at work. Here in the Atlanta area, the school systems came up with really inventive ways to make sure kids could study online. My county bought untold numbers of laptops for kids to check out, and one county drove school businesses into neighborhoods to serve as hotspots where there was below par connectivity.
I would have to say that neglecting your children’s future potential may be a sign of despair.
Online school is a mess. For my daughter's last year of homeschool, we signed up for an online school that had just become available in our state as an "open enrollment" option (meaning that it didn't cost us anything).
The teachers were mostly AWOL, but parents were not expected to be part of the process either. The students were expected to work through online units with little or no direct instruction from teachers. Math and science were poorly designed "Common Core," with the result that kids were expected to be familiar with material they had not yet been taught (I had to look through the textbook, find the relevant material, and teach it to my daughter myself so that she could do her online work). Eventually, my daughter resisted doing her schoolwork at all.
I would never recommend online school for any but the most self-motivated kids. I would have done well in such a system, I think. And our middle son probably would as well. But it was a nightmare for our youngest daughter and it probably would have been a nightmare for our oldest son.
I will be eternally grateful for the Home School Assistance Program that our school district in Cedar Rapids was operating when we lived there. It gave me the courage and resources to homeschool our sons when they desperately needed an alternative to what their schools were offering. It provided a supervising teacher for free (ours was an art teacher by education, so she brought art projects each month when she visited). It also provided textbooks to choose from. And the most wonderful part of it all was that it provided group activities that our kids could attend, including band, choir, science fair, spelling bee, geography bee, field trips, and once-a-week PE and art classes with other kids in the program. The benefit for the district was that they got funding--not as much as if the kids were in classrooms, but more than if the students were being homeschooled with no connection to the district.
The district we lived when our youngest daughter was homeschooled had no such program. The best we could do was dual enrollment, so she could go to art and PE. And the online school had nothing good about it at all.
The homeschoolers I know are very well educated. Both of mine went on to college (one has already graduated). Home schooling is definitely NOT substandard.
Based on the sat scores it is a falsehood entirely. The SAT scores for homeschool kids is higher than the average. They try to debunk it by saying it is self selection but everyone self selects to take the test.