A question on our HEM Networking list over the weekend brought up the issue of research and homeschooling families, and I thought my response, which was simply a selection of excerpts from a column by Larry and Susan Kaseman, might be worth sharing with this broader audience. I wrote:
Just for perspective, and a little food for thought:
Does Homeschooling Research Help Homeschooling?
- Larry & Susan Kaseman
Excerpts:
When homeschoolers agree to participate in research, they are also agreeing that homeschooling can and should be measured by the categories and terms that researchers choose. In other words, homeschoolers who participate in research are agreeing that the important parts of homeschooling, or at least the criteria by which it should be judged, are things like number of hours spent “teaching” or “studying,” standardized test scores, etc.
The most insidious outcome from this condition is that people no longer trust their own knowledge, experience, and judgment about themselves and their children. Homeschoolers become an illustration of some research study rather than the richer reality they really are.
The rights of parents to educate their own children have a solid foundation. By agreeing to research that will evaluate the “success” of homeschooling, homeschoolers are implicitly agreeing that they need to be judged and assessed. They are thereby surrendering important rights that do not need to be justified.
…research categorizes and labels homeschoolers and seeks out the differences among them. It divides them into lots of little subsets instead of emphasizing their common commitment to securing the best education for their children. It even divides homeschoolers by raising the question of whether to participate in research.
A grassroots organization is strong because a group of people realize that they can take responsibility for some aspect of their own lives, such as the education of their children, and carry it out. In opposition to this, research encourages people to turn over private thoughts and personal details to “experts” who will then put them into some form (which the people could not do themselves, according to the researchers) and present them to others, such as school officials and legislators who will then decide what is best for the people to do and require them to do it. This weakens people and encourages them to become dependent, to surrender their strengths and accept the requirements of others.
There’s one more excerpt I meant to include, and will post there now:
Many important parts of homeschooling (the look of joy on a child’s face as he or she discovers something, the recovered self-confidence of a child who had been labeled “learning disabled” by a conventional school) cannot be captured and recorded in quantitative or “scientific” studies. Therefore research gives a misleading picture of homeschooling when it claims to show the strengths of homeschooling but fails to study or report the most important ones.
Tags: homeschool, homeschool research, homeschooling, homeschooling research, Kaseman
April is National Poetry Month, and while I’ve never been a poet, I do love poetry, and my mother was a poet, which probably comes as a surprise to many members of our family. Mom didn’t share her poetry much, and I only know about some of it because every once in a while I’d find a poem scribbled on the back of an envelope or grocery list. I think she wrote them primarily for her own enjoyment, which seems to me the highest form of poetry. Just the simple joy of how words can fit together into something lovely, funny, inspiring, memorable.
Mom wrote beautiful long poems, short poems, haiku (the smallest literary form, and with the most rules!), freestyle verse, rhyming poems and those that didn’t rhyme but were just lovely to read and gave one something to ponder, to enjoy, to remember long after the poem had been lost to the trashcan or the fire. Being a homeschooling mom, and unschooling specifically, that was the subject of some of her most memorable poems, for me anyway, and I wish I still had some of them I could share. But alas, after all these years I have only the fond memories of poetry about children snug on cold winter days, and her reading to them by the fire while they enjoyed her fresh warm oatmeal cookies and mugs of steaming hot cocoa.
While I was mailing some things at the post office the other day I noticed a new display they have on American poets, and it was so interesting that I looked up some more information when I got home. Here are a few good sites I found; a few minutes on any of them will provide some inspiring reading:
Famous American Poets and Poems
And then there’s poetry for kids:
In that category I must share a really lovely blog I came across when looking for poetry information: Smallworld Reads: Reading Poetry with Children
From that site, this lovely bit:
“Whatever you do, find ways to read poetry. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it.” ~Eve Merriam
The wonderful world of poetry is fun to explore, and most of us have many good memories relating to poetry in some way or another. Remember The Cat in the Hat, The Highwayman, The Raven, The Road Not Taken, The Ants Go Marching, Paul Revere’s Ride, Jabberwocky, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Lorax, Trees?
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree…
I dunno. The poems my mother wrote were really lovely…
Tags: Helen Hegener, homeschooling, poems, poetry, poets, ~ Unschooling
Welcome to our new site design! If you’ve been with us awhile you’ve seen us shift gears like this before, and hopefully each time we do it enhances and improves how you interact with our website. If you’re new to our HEM site, welcome again – and please poke around and familiarize yourself with what we have here.
We’ve spruced up the looks of the site and re-organized some of the navigation, on our way to publishing the complete archives of Home Education Magazine online – that’s twenty-six years of published content – while we continue to broadcast timely news, great homeschooling resources, and plenty of valuable information from the HEM blogs.
The header across the top of this page remains in place for the most part as you move throughout our site. There will be exceptions as we continue to move stuff around between our old site and this current version, but we’ll try to keep things as clear and easy to follow as we can. This Editor’s blog will be the newsy ‘here’s what’s happening’ guide to using this site and the place where we note and explain the ongoing changes as they happen. Check back here often or – better yet – link to our RSS feed for regular updates and information.
Remember to change links and RSS feeds if you have them:
Old link and feed to this blog:
http://www.homeedmag.com/blogs/editorial
http://www.homeedmag.com/blogs/editorial/feed
New link and feed to this blog:
http://homeedmag.com/editorial
http//homeedmag.com/editorial/feed
Tags: Helen Hegener, HEM blogs, HEM Editor, HEM Editor's blog, HEM RSS feeds, • Home Education Magazine
What is that light down the road?
The further you back away the better your perspective. At least that is what I have always told myself. In physical terms it is true – I always want the camera to back away so I can see the larger context whether it be sports or a news event. The ‘bigger picture’ has always drawn me, has always fascinated me for human events too. In fact, I feel very uncomfortable forming an opinion on any issue without an exploration of that bigger picture.
I suppose what you risk in backing up for perspective is getting so far away you actually lose sight. Yet, for me, I have been rewarded too many times with one of those “I get what is going on here!’ moments, or, been rewarded by being moved to ask the better questions. Another risk in that bigger picture perspective is that it often challenges the dominant thinking. I am not suggesting that I have experienced anything like realizing the earth isn’t the center of the universe and subsequently suffering the wrath of the dominant theology; yet some days have been very dark with ridicule.
I had been watching the news about the collapse of Wall Street when the title lines on the homeschooling news feeds were peppered by the National Center for Educational Statistics report of growth in homeschooling numbers – it took Google 0.29 seconds to come up with 29,027 blog articles about the growth of homeschooling. I will confess to not being thorough and reviewing each of these blogs, but the predominant sense in my random review was the bloggers by-in-large felt this was great news, three cheers for us:
1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007
In this Brief, students are considered to be homeschooled if their parents reported them as being schooled at home instead of at a public or private school for at least part of their education and if their part-time enrollment in public or private school did not exceed 25 hours a week
Over the years HEM has dissected a large number of surveys and a review of this survey questionnaire doesn’t make me want to shout for joy. They leave a lot of room for misinterpretation. A look at the NHES:2007 SCREENER sheet tells me the key term, enrollment, is mentioned in the notes for surveyors, not in the direct questions to parents. I am sitting in Wasilla, Alaska as I type this; our home offices are in Washington state. Both states have public school programs which have advertised themselves as homeschooling. The wording of this survey would lead participants of these programs to reasonably identify themselves as homeschoolers for this survey.
We can, have and will debate whether enrollment in public school programs is homeschooling or not. We have taken a lot of criticism over the years for holding the position that enrollment in public school is not homeschooling. But I think this argument may very well be just an academic exercise at this point. I fear the autonomy we enjoyed while homeschooling our kids may be a thing of the past, as homeschools are driven toward acting more and more like schools.
What does this have to do with the collapse on Wall Street? To get a perspective on this question, I have to tell you I backed up to 1969. As a college kid taking a Short Story and Novel English course, it dawned on me that the regularly scheduled tests were written by the Teaching Assistants, who all appeared to be working on their Doctorates. My TA wrote the first test, which was based totally on his lesson plans. So after a little poking around I came up with a list of which TA was responsible for which test. Then ‘success’ in this class was a simple matter of attending the TA’s class in the week leading to the test. No study necessary, no understanding of the material was needed – just listen in class and regurgitate. I gamed the system, got an A. For the buddies who I let in on my ‘secret,’ and my parents, who were paying for this schooling, it was a great and celebrated success. The real lesson I took away was that gaming the system (corruption) pays. So Schooling 101: Corruption can equal success.
The temptation is to draw strict hard lines, but like I suggested earlier, perspective can be dangerous – be careful how you use it. I will not try to argue that school corrupted a generation, but at the same time there are parallels between my schooling and the corruption in the financial sector. Both systems have high stakes for those in them, expectations and demands of success are as real for a school kid as they are for a CEO, and rewards for meeting these expectations are tangible. I may express a reluctance to draw a straight line between school and the stories coming out of the financial sector, but we hear educators and politicians drawing direct lines between schooling and success, based on a promise of greater accountability.
The calls for more accountability in our education system promise a better educational system. Yet, I just keep thinking of that A in English, and, from my perspective, I have to wonder if there isn’t systemic corruption inherent in the way we choose to measure success? As homeschoolers are being pushed to be more like schools, can we challenge the measure of success for our kids? Is our goal raising kids or raising test scores?
Tags: accountability in our education system, Google, growth of homeschooling, Hegener, HEM, homeschooling, homeschooling numbers, National Center for Educational Statistics, perspective, public school programs
“Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat…” -from the old nursery rhyme and carol: Christmas is Coming
With the Big Day only a week away, I thought it would be nice to share some Christmas thoughts. Of course, I realize that my very diverse readership includes many who either don’t celebrate Christmas, or who celebrate one of the variations on the holiday, but at the risk of being socio-politically incorrect, I’m going to stick with good ol’ Christmas here and hope it isn’t perceived as being insensitive to the preferences of many homeschoolers. It’s just how I view the holiday, my perception, my perspective.
A friend and I were discussing Christmas the other day and she asked where the Xmas variation came from, and neither of us knew, but later I looked it up and found this interesting bit of information at Wikipedia:
The word “Christmas” originated as a contraction of “Christ’s mass.” It is derived from the Middle English Christemasse and Old English Cristes mæsse, a phrase first recorded in 1038.[1] In early Greek versions of the New Testament, the letter É¥ (chi), is the first letter of Christ. Since the mid-sixteenth century É¥, or the similar Roman letter X, was used as an abbreviation for Christ.[2] Hence, “Xmas” is often used as an abbreviation for Christmas.
There are many such opportunities for learning related to Christmas. The other evening my Dad and I watched an engrossing program titled The Real Story of Christmas on the History Channel. As their website explains:
Christmas has had a long and varied history. It has been celebrated for centuries by different people, at different times, in different places, and in many different ways. Here you will find links to information about the different ways that the holiday we know as Christmas has been celebrated, or not celebrated, over the years.
The History Channel site offers synopses of the program with fascinating tidbits of information, like this one, under ‘Outlaw Christmas’:
From 1659 to 1681, the celebration of Christmas was actually outlawed in Boston. Anyone exhibiting the Christmas spirit was fined five shillings.
Delightful video clips of the holiday program are available to watch free. The entire History Channel website is an impressive resource for anyone teaching or studying history, of course, but these kinds of programs point out how it can be applied to many other subjects, such as Social Studies – or, of course, just enjoyed for the pure fun of learning!
The fun of learning in the Christmas spirit also shines through in two great websites, the appropriately named Xmas Fun and the thoroughly delightful Merry-Christmas.com, both featuring games, puzzles, songs, crafts, stories, jokes, coloring pages, riddles, trivia, recipes and more! These are wonderful site to explore with kids, just be prepared to spend some time – and to hear pleas for return trips to these sites!
For a truly educational experience you can also visit the Wikipedia page Christmas Worldwide, which links to information about Christmas customs in over 40 countries around the globe. How Christmas Works is a fun and informative visit, and for the artistically inclined there are the marvelous snowflake design sites like Make-A-Flake and Snowflake Builder.
So my point is simply this: So many wonderful resources support this special time of year, and learning becomes so much fun and so easy to enjoy, that one wonders why the public education system considers this a sort of unofficial “time off from learning.” Now I doubt there actually is such a thing as a moratorium on learning, since even “not learning” is educational in its own way, but I trust you know what I mean, dear reader.
When I was little, Christmas always brought the most interesting kinds of learning as my parents wrapped up telescopes, books, microscopes, globes, chemistry sets, musical instruments, games, construction kits, aquariums, and once even the Encyclopedia Brittanica! There were plenty of Barbie dolls and train sets, of course, but they just brought different types of lessons. A child who’s engaged and interested in life will find learning almost everywhere. It’s only when children become disengaged and disinterested that learning becomes strained and difficult.
When I was small and walked to school I remember looking forward to being away from the school and the “teacher’s dirty looks” almost as much as I looked forward to Christmas itself. Two whole weeks without the burdens of school! The excitement of ringing in the New Year was tempered by the knowledge that soon afterwards it would be back to the classroom for me, and learning would be transformed somehow from simply a common everyday occurrence to something almost grim and unsavory, even though I was a better-than-average student. I was lucky; my parents seemed to have an innate understanding that school was not a good place for kids, and they didn’t object too strenuously when I unceremoniously dropped out. And then Mom found John Holt long before I did, and my two youngest siblings never went to school at all until my sister decided to give college a try (and made the Dean’s list). But I digress…
Christmas is filled with the very best kinds of learning: Caring, giving, sharing, togetherness, love… And the learning isn’t just limited to the youngsters; if we keep our hearts open this season we’ll learn new ways of celebrating, if we pay attention to those around us – really pay attention – we’ll gain new insights and understandings.
I hope your family’s Christmas is merry and bright, filled with small kindnesses and simple joys. I hope you have gingerbread cookies, sleigh bells, pine-scented candles and at least one concert of Christmas carols. I hope that small thing you’re secretly wishing for is under the tree, with a lovely ribbon. And as always at this time of year, I give a prayer for peace on Earth and good will towards men.
I’ve seen an interesting letter referenced on blogs and lists a couple of times now, in response to a November 12 fund-raising alert from HSLDA, which stated in part: “…And whenever private educators accept grants and benefits, there are conditions to receiving those benefits, including being subject to regulation. Just because the federal government has no constitutional authority over home education, however, doesn’t mean that federal bureaucrats or legislators might not attempt to impose some form of regulation over private and home education.”
The apparent letter of reply to that solicitation came from an interesting source: Dr. Patrick J. Wolf, a Professor and 21st Century Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions. Dr. Wolf wrote, “I cannot tell you with any certainty what policies President Obama will pursue regarding homeschooling, since, as you correctly observed, he has been strategically evasive regarding the issue. What I can do is provide you with some reasons to be more or less concerned about the future of homeschooling in America.”
Dr. Wolf, who holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard, then outlines three potential reasons for concern – and five reasons those concerns are probably unfounded. It’s an interesting read, especially this part: “Obama does speak of requiring “greater regulation” of and “accountability” in independent charter schools. Such language suggests that Obama may be skeptical of the effectiveness of autonomous educational institutions that are free of government control.”
Ever more reason to develop ways to distinguish between “autonomous educational institutions” and “autonomous educational methods.
Tags: constitutional authority over home education, Dr. Patrick J. Wolf, homeschooling, HSLDA, independent charter schools, President Obama, regulation of home education
Illinois blogger Susan Ryan found an interesting little item, and I’m wondering if anyone is seeing similar activity in their own states?
Susan wrote:
This “guide” was written up by counsel for the IL Principals Association and was posted on Market Watch:
Homeschooling Law Resource Guide – Released by the Education Law Association
Last update: 11:04 a.m. EST Dec. 3, 2008
DAYTON, Ohio, Dec 03, 2008
The Law of Homeschooling is a resource guide that provides information on recent updates to homeschool statutory and regulatory requirements for all fifty states as well as Washington D.C. This publication takes an in-depth look at each state’s legal requirements under which parents may provide a home-based education to their children. (Read more at Susan’s blog.)
Anyone know anything about these folks?
Tags: homeschooling, homeschooling law, IL Principals Association, Illinois, Ohio
A friend sent me a link to a humorous homeschool video on YouTube today and when it was over a couple more were offered, so I watched them too… I knew there were a few clever homeschool videos out there, but I was amazed to find there are dozens of good homeschool humor videos! Some of them are really clever and well done, while others, well.. not so much, but all in all they’re a wonderful testament to the humor, diversity, inspiration and boundless creativity of homeschoolers!
Here are a couple of my favorites:
Milton Gaither has an interesting paragraph in his review of Greg and Martine Millman’s book:
Historians and organization theorists will be very interested in the Millmans’ chapter on Homeschool Groups. It begins by connecting homeschooling to the “emergence†scholarship of John H. Holland, explaining that homeschooling is an unplanned and uncontrolled system of networks built “from the bottom up by thousands upon thousands of individuals making free choices about education†who nevertheless coalesce into “educational communtities that are as stable and distinctive†as the city neighborhoods studied by Jane Jacobs or the leaderless ant colonies studied by Deborah Gordon. The Millmans also draw on the “social capital†framework of Robert Putnam’s influential Bowling Alone. They explain how homeschool groups provide rich social bonds of connectivity and reciprocity for their members.
“Leaderless ant colonies,” eh? That might explain a few things.
Tags: Bowling Alone, Deborah Gordon, Greg and Martine Millman, homeschool groups, homeschooling, Jane Jacobs, John H. Holland, Milton Gaither, Robert Putnam
Helen
mark
david
Public School Programs Are Not Homeschooling
By the 1990′s homeschooling had become an accepted alternative to public schooling and traditional private schools. Dozens of books touted homeschooling as a desirable approach to living and learning together as a family; newspaper articles and interviews showcased happy, smiling children and their proudly beaming parents. The movement had arrived, found its place in the sun. People who might never have considered the option were seeing homeschoolers portrayed on television and in movies, homeschooled kids were going to Ivy League colleges, becoming rock stars, winning spelling and geography bees, traveling the world. The cachet of homeschooling was solid marketing gold.
Around this same time a whole new class of public school programs, often delivered directly into the home, gained acceptance and began increasingly targeting homeschooling families. These programs came under many descriptive terms such as charter schools, cyber schools, cyber-charters, eschools, Independent Study Programs (ISPs), dual enrollment programs, Blended Schools Programs (BSPs), Programs for Non-Public Students (PNPS), Public School Alternative Programs (PSAPs), virtual schools, community schools and various other names. But these public school programs also came with public school regulations, which imposed testing and accountability requirements in alignment with national education goals and standards.
While the public school programs have effectively served the needs of some families, it is unwise to allow the perception to grow that they are equivalent to homeschooling. The very construct of these public school programs runs counter to the ability of families to handcraft an education for their children. Homeschoolers have more than thirty years of experience in living and learning with children outside the public school parameters, and the important lessons they’ve learned in the process are in danger of being lost.
We, as homeschoolers, also have over thirty years of history affirming our freedom to assume the responsibility to educate our children. Many diverse ad hoc and formal organizations collectively discussed and argued the issues and then interacted with local officials. Countless families took countless trips to state capitols fighting for and against legislation that directly and indirectly affected homeschooling families. These homeschool pioneers voluntarily put themselves on the line to ensure each other’s right to assume responsibility to educate their own children, and this is something worth hanging onto and celebrating; it is democracy in action. When the perception arises that these public school programs are equivalent to homeschooling, we lose this important history and the untold benefits it accords us all.
The functioning of our government is something that we all need to be concerned with, and, as noted above, homeschoolers have engaged with the process and have thereby earned the credibility to speak to this situation. When these public school programs use government funds, regulations are inevitable, and homeschool advocates, concerned about the danger of blurring definitions between homeschooling and these public school programs, have long sought ways to raise awareness about the situation. Larry and Susan Kaseman of the Wisconsin Parents Association have been at the forefront of this effort, authoring articles such as “Homeschooling in Public Schools: A Dangerous Oxymoron,” “Let’s Not Let Cyber Charters Do In Homeschooling“, “Homeschoolers, Is Our Good Name for Sale?“, and “Risks Virtual Schools Pose to Homeschools.”
The most common – and tragic – misunderstandings related to the questioning of these public school programs have always spiraled around the underlying intentions of those concerned about homeschooling freedoms. Accusations and attacks have derailed many discussions of the issue, and have repeatedly stymied attempts to hold meaningful conversations on the topic. As a result, this widely recognized and very legitimate threat to the nature, language, and definition of homeschooling is relegated to controversial issue status and summarily avoided.
The inability to discuss the situation, to build an understanding and an awareness of the problem, is exacerbated by the expectation that the threat will show itself in a headline-making manner, and does not recognize the slow grinding process of wearing away at freedoms and responsibilities. Unless we can find a way to talk about this situation, we will find ourselves helpless observers as the word ‘homeschooling’ continues to lose its historically important meaning.
Valerie Moon made an observation in her July, 2007 post at the HEM News and Commentary, “Programs Co-opting Homeschooling?“:
By September, Valerie was sounding a little more resigned [edited for space]:
So here we are, many years later, with an increasingly ambiguous word and a body of families whose hard-earned descriptive terminology is being effectively usurped.
In the comments section of my Nov. 24 post, Mary Nix noted:
Senators blaming homeschoolers for the rising cost of public education. Anyone seeing the problem yet?
Tags: accountability, Blended Schools Programs, BSP, community schools, controversial, cyber schools, cyber-charters, dual enrollment programs, e-schools, education reform, eschools, government funds, HEM News and Commentary, homeschool, homeschooling, Independent Study Programs, ISP, Larry and Susan Kaseman, Mary Nix, Ohio, PNPS, Programs for Non-Public Students, PSAP, public school, Public School Alternative Programs, regulations, requirements, testing, Valerie Moon, virtual schools, Wisconsin Parents Association, ~ Charter Schools