This article is a good, all-rounder with a minimum of Da Rules, and some good words from the local assistant superintendent.

• Andover Townsman, Andover, Massachusetts, , 6 April 2006, Home schooling: Participants say it gives kids freedom to pursue interests
  
  O’Neil, the assistant superintendent, said Andover is “very supportive of home schoolers.” O’Neil approves each home schooling plan submitted by parents and oversees the plan to ensure educational goals are met. She says the variety of home schoolers in town run the gamut from those families who travel to Europe for several months out of the year to those who have home schooled from the beginning.

  “Ultimately, you want children in an environment that is the most conducive to learning,” O’Neil said.

The one glitch in the article concerned Da Rules:

• Home schoolers are not required to take the MCAS. But they are required to take the SATs.

According to a Massachusetts homeschooler, the reality is that homeschoolers do not take the MCAS, and tests such as the SAT are left to the discretion of the family.  In Massachusetts, homeschooling is not an area where the state makes the rules.

• Massachusetts Home Learning Association

  Approval and oversight of home education is a local, rather than a state function in Massachusetts. Therefore, the Department of Education (DOE) is not involved in setting policy, overseeing school district practices, or otherwise enforcing the Commonwealth’s home education law.

 

hat tip to the HSWatch list

A single illiterate person is a tragedy. 
A million illiterate people is a statistic. 

(paraphrased from Josef Stalin)

In Indiana, a child wasn’t being well raised, intervention by other family members was needed, and the newspaper needed to report it:

Black Enterprise, New York, NY, 5 April 2006,  Free, for Good or Ill: Parents, Critics Disagree on Need for Oversight:

Before he moved in with the Chapmans, the boy could barely read and had a speech impediment that made it hard to understand him. Within six months, he could read at a third-grade level, and his speech had started to improve.

…

Local families who home-school their children tout the freedom Indiana affords them in educating their children, but critics question whether there is enough oversight to ensure the system isn’t abused.

It’s good that someone was available to rescue the boy and give him an education that seems to be working for him.  But who rescues those who are already in public school and aren’t succeeding?  The 2003 report, A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century (dial-up caution: large document with charts and graphics), shows:

page 5:  Fifty-two percent of adults in the total NAAL population completed at least some education beyond high school, compared to 14 percent of adults with Below Basic prose literacy. [the point being that 14% of adults with "some education beyond high school" have Below Basic prose literacy -- 1% were in the "Graduate studies/degree" level]

page 14:  Average prose literacy decreased for all levels of educational attainment between 1992 and 2003, with the exception of adults who were still in high school or completed a GED (table 7).

page 15:  On the prose scale, the percentage of college graduates with Proficient literacy decreased from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003.

A short report of the study is available from the New York Times:

16 December 2005, Literacy Falls for Graduates From College, Testing Finds

 

In the discussion of how much regulation and oversight, if any, should be levied on homeschooling families, the NAAL study shows that not even a nationwide standard of compulsory school attendance produces a population in which 100% of the members function even at the “Basic” literacy level.

I am happy that Erinn Chapman’s young brother’s situation was recognized and fixed.  The implication in the first article that the existence of this kind of situation means that stricter homeschooling rules and regulations will keep all such situations from happening, i.e., “to ensure the system isn’t abused,” is erroneous.

My colleague Mary found mention of another federal bill that includes homeschoolers, and she has it blogged at Support Group News.

• S.2423 – SEEK Math and Science Act

When considering ‘rigor’ as applied to children and teens, consider the meaning of rigor mortis.

In the following article, I wonder why the sixteen years of homeschooling seven kids doesn’t give Mrs. White’s status at least the same weight as a teacher freshly graduated from a 4-year college?  Surely sixteen years of being an educational chief cook and bottle washer should amount to some sort of accomplishment. Still, that may be a stylistic quibble on my part, but one which could have been pointed out by the writer.

• Daily Press, Newport News, Virginia, 14 March 2006, Va. law would lift degree requirement

  After 16 years of home schooling her seven children, ages 5 to 19, Betsy White knows how to get them to read, to understand arithmetic and to research anything she doesn’t know.

  But public school teachers have something White doesn’t have – a college degree.

There’s also the slight inaccuracy of Virginia being credited as the ‘only’ state to require a college degree.

• Virginia is the only state that has a degree requirement for parents who home-school. Ten states require a high school diploma. The rest set no education requirements for parents.

North Dakota includes a college degree or teacher certification in its requirements, as does Tennessee.  Michigan likes bachelor’s degrees, and Minnestoa has a fondness for teaching licenses.  Washington state wants 45 college quarter credit hours, and it’s hard to tell with Iowa.

Still, despite that research bobble, the writer gathered opinions from many homeschool advocates, as well as the de rigueur comments from public school officials.  (someday I’d like to see the same favor granted to homeschool advocates in articles about public school legislation)

Good luck to the Virginians, and cheers to Governor Warner during his review of the bill.

In 2001, Councilman Kevin Chavous proposed a “Compulsory School Attendance Amendment” to make preschool compulsory in Washington, DC.  Darcy Olsen of the CATO Institute commented:

• CATO Institute, 14 August 2001, Trading Sippy-Cups for School Desks

  As to why the achievement gap persists, [AFT President Sandra Feldman] says, “One of the main answers can be found in the 68 percent of a child’s waking hours outside of school versus the 32 percent spent in school.” To drive the point home, Feldman also proposes extended-day and extended-year schooling along with new summer programs. Why not just cut out the family altogether and send newborns to boarding school?

Almost five years later the state of Illinois proposes much the same thing. 

• Illinois Family Institute, 11 March 2006, Give me your poor, your tired—your toddlers

  The race for the governor’s seat is turning into a race for our youngest children under the banner of Universal Preschool. Three other states offer preschool to 4-year-olds, but Governor Rod Blagojevich is not to be outdone. He is proposing every 3-year-old and 4-year-old attend state-funded preschool.

Next year it will have been 20 years since David Elkind wrote Miseducation:  Preschoolers at Risk.  Perhaps a 501(c)(3) group could get started to collect donations to send this book, at the least, to anyone espousing state preschool.

Another book that my fictional foundation might distribute is Cradles of Eminence, ”An absorbing study of the childhoods of some 400 prominent people that seeks to relate early-childhood factors to eventual success in life.” 

Preschool isn’t mentioned as a factor in the introductory overview.

As reported at the Lew Rockwell blog, the laws concerning homeschooling in Australia are under consideration with an eye to changing them.

• LewRockwell.com, 1 March 2006, The Quiet Ambush

  The most sinister aspect of the whole business is the fact that the proposed regulations say nothing of the extent of intrusion. The Minister for Education in Victoria, Ms. Lynne Kosky, insists that once all the homeschoolers have licences they will be left alone. But we have no formal, written assurance that this will be the case. Once the licences are in place, homeschoolers could quite easily be required to teach the same government-approved, functionally dead curriculum used in state schools – a curriculum not only statist and strictly secular, but also practically useless. Even the Australian Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, has admitted as much:

Australian homeschoolers are not pleased with the development.

• The Age, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 6 March 2006, Home sweet school

  Home schoolers argue that the Government is trying to control a viable form of education it has not sought to understand and that it is ignoring the significant body of research that heralds home education a success.The Education Department argues that the Government seeks only to ensure home-schooled children receive a quality education and that it has a responsibility to see that they reach their potential.

The part about a “quality” education is the same theme I’ve been reading about for nearly a decade concerning homeschooling.  The implied charge is that without being required to, homeschooling parents won’t provide quality guidance or materials.  The odd thing about that position is that I’ve been hearing about the crisis in education since Sputnik was launched.  That was in 1957, and it was followed by the National Defense Education Act in 1958.  Last month the 21st Century National Defense Education Act was introduced in Congress. How much longer is the (American) “crisis” going to continue?

But, I’m digressing, and need to get back to the Australian situation.

• In reality, home-ed has been a “thorn in the side” of the Government for years, because it comes under the jurisdiction of the Community Services Act, notes Dr John Barratt-Peacock, whose PhD on 280 home-educating families – The Why and How of Australian Home Education – out of La Trobe University in 1997, remains the seminal work on the Australian situation.

  “It’s an annoyance to professional teachers to be told that after all their training, education and everything else, that a mum with no education can do just as well or better,” Dr Barratt-Peacock says.

So it seems immaterial whether the “mum with no education” can do the job, what’s important is that mums doing this irritate professionals.  Tsk.

• [Dr Alan Thomas] says none of us are formally taught the essential skills we learn from infancy: speech, basic literacy and numeracy. And while he does not wish to be seen as an advocate, he concedes, “There is no scientific basis whatsoever for the almost universal assumption that this traditional means of educating children (mainstream schooling) is essential if they are to progress after reaching school age. It is just that we are so inured to school-type learning that it is very difficult to imagine any alternative.”

The five-page article has many good points, and is well-rounded.  If you don’t want to skip back to the top of this blog post, the full five pages are here.

Good luck to the Australian homeschoolers who are educating their legislators.

The Virginia Parent Teacher Association says homeschooled children will be ill-served if bills in the Virginia legislature, HB 1340/SB 499, are signed into law, and change one of the categories under which Virginia parents may homeschool. The first homeschool option under Virginia law is to allow homeschooling for a parent who has earned a “baccalaureate degree from an accredited institution of higher learning.” Under the proposed law change, this would change to requiring only a high school diploma, an option that already is available to Virginia homeschooling parents.

• Yes, Virginia, you CAN homeschool without a college degree!

Despite the change is wording only, the Virginia Parent Teacher Association opposes the change.

• W*USA 9 News, Washington, DC, 2 March 2006, Virginia Debates Home Schooling RequirementsBut the Virginia Parent Teacher Association is worried. They say it may put home schooled children at a disadvantage by allowing their teachers to have lower qualifications than their counterparts in the public schools.

Click on the “related video” to hear the televised report.

Although the requirement of a college degree for teaching, there is no statistical evidence that parents having earned a degree makes a difference in the quality of home education.

• Education Now, Summer 1999, A nationwide study of home education: early indications and wider implicationsIn many cases, teacher-parents said that teacher training made them realise that parents could teach. While some teacher-parents found their teaching experience a hindrance, others found it an asset.

We parents without college degrees have not been living in a time capsule so that our mental faculties are frozen at the high school level. We’ve negotiated whatever life circumstance has brought children into our lives, and we’ve raised those children, learning as we go. We have read books, magazines and newspapers. We’ve listened to political debates on television and voted in elections. We’ve gone to work, earned money, bought cars and licensed them, and bought homes and possibly improved them. After earning all that money we’ve managed budgets and filed taxes. Sometimes we’ve even traveled. And though it all, we’ve performed, participated and plowed through all the myriad tasks of adult life in the (Gregorian calendar’s) 21st century.

I was never taught ‘computers’ in my 1960s-era high school, but here I am, online. Ditto for my husband, and yet now he fixes computers for a living. It’s his fourth career field after having retired from two other systems. Are those examples anecdotal? Yes. But if you collect enough anecdotes and sort and file them appropriately, pretty soon you’ve got a statistic.

Additionally, although to some people keeping score it won’t matter much, we learn as we go in homeschooling. If something works, we keep doing it. If it doesn’t work, we stop doing it. With apologies to all the fine teachers in schools, we homeschooling parents are not salaried workers marching through another year to retirement, teaching the same material One More Time, almost by rote when ‘teacher-proofed’ materials are used. We high-school-diploma homeschooling parents are as actively engaged as our college-degreed colleagues. We care as much, we work as hard. Concerning what we do with our kids, we sift, we sort, we choose. It doesn’t take a college degree to be able to see what is or is not working educationally for our children, and we make our own adjustments.

Teacher-proofing schoolrooms is bad policy, and so is parent-proofing homeschooling.

A while ago I saw the following paper online.  I’ve had it sitting in my ‘drafts’ file since then as I’m no authority on accreditation, and the Connections Academy activity in Missouri had my attention, so my researching time was taken. 

• A case study of the benefits of accreditation for home study programs for access to higher education in Georgia by Angela Evans, now Assistant Director of Admissions for Counseling and recuiting/Home Shool Liaison (sic)

The paper contains many quotable parts, which isn’t surprising in an almost 150-page document.  Some of the more colorful are,

• page 31:  “The home schooling movement will instead receive credit as a deviant ‘“tail”’ that ends up wagging key pieces of the ‘“dog’” of public education” (Crowson, 2000, p. 299).
• page 32: Many parents are dissatisfied with the conventional methods of educating children while others are in support of unschooling (a New Left political movement aimed at disintegrating the class structure of society).

As much as I’d like it to be, this post isn’t about the contents of the disseration, but about the concept of “accrediting” the way homeschooling parents teach their children, something that is gaining credence in Georgia.  Even rambling wrecks from Georgia Tech have caught the bug.

• Georgia Tech Home School admission        

  If a student does not attend a home school accredited by one of the approved organizations, the following documentation must be provided to be considered for admission:

Luckily for non-expert me, someone else is an expert, and she wrote a piece on the new trend in Georgia.

• Guarding Our Birthright – the Question of Accreditation, by Mary Hood     

  As far as Georgia goes, without a massive change of heart, I’m afraid I’m going to see a steady erosion of homeschooling freedom until it is all gone. Once the high schools really have to be accredited, it will only be a matter of a few years before the middle school, and then the elementary school will go the same route. At that point, homeschooling as a genuine, unique option will have gone away and we will simply be one subset of the public education system.

The entire article is well worth the read.

Spunky writes about grand plans for compulsory K – 14, and exit exams from college.

• Reverse Accountability

  The reforms continue to look more and more like another step in the government’s attempt to impose increasing control over higher education. TexasNextStep is working to make K-14 the norm, with the state footing the bill. The next step would be to make at least two years of college compulsory.

Tie the control over higher ed to the womb to classwoom push-for-preschool, and where is there any crack in the proposed monolithic top to bottom control of the development of our country’s citizens?

 The existing system of education can’t keep up with what it needs to do, and the answer is more of the same? 

Eyewitness News 3, Hartford, Connecticut,  Report: Conn. has more school students than Census counted 
Dateline: Boise, Idaho.

• Idaho is one of six U.S. states that require no registration from parents who decide to keep their children out of school and teach them at home. But neither the state nor school districts track homeschooling, so nobody knows for sure how many children are learning somewhere. Kelly estimated there are more than 4,700 homeschooled kids in Idaho.

  "You’re still left with 9,000 kids" not accounted for, Kelly said. His report, "Educational Neglect and Compulsory Schooling: A Status Report," was commissioned by the Idaho governor’s office, which did not return calls seeking comment Thursday.

This report is reminiscent of a story I saw in our overseas military community’s newspaper, the Heidelberg Herald-Post, in 1995.  The homeschool-specific portion of that 1995 story read:

• In other DODDS news, officials will establish a new regulation requiring DOD personnel overseas (sic) to attend school.  Present rules call for commanders to encourage school attendance.

  “The word ‘encourage’ is too soft,” said Bartley Lagomarsino, deputy director of the DOD Education Activity.  “If we get a DOD instruction requiring school attendance, commanders and DODDS administrators will have the authority to make inquiries of parents.”

  Lagomarsino said DODDS doesn’t have data on whether there are children overseas who aren’t getting an education.  With the regulation, officials can gather this information.

  “We can match that list against our rolls, and find our (sic) if children are not attending our schools are going to host nation schools (sic) or are getting other appropriate alternative education,” Lagomarsino added.  “We want to make sure no children are falling through the cracks.’"

At the time, I wrote DoDDS a letter, DoDDS being the DoD Dependent Schools system.  The point I made to them, and one that is relevant-in-theme to the Idaho-by-way-of-Connecticut story, was that during the Cold War, and prior to both the overseas military ’drawdown’ and the rise of homeschooling, there was no mechanism for keeping track of the thousands of American kids littering foreign countries around the globe from Germany, to Morocco, to Turkey, to the Philippines, to Japan, and nobody worried then about crack-slipping children.  Truancy aside, it wasn’t until parents started taking responsibility for their children’s educations that the overseas officials started worrying about where the kids were.

From my letter:

• During the Cold War, when overseas troop strength was at its highest, I noticed no such policies requiring parents to report where their children were enrolled, despite the size and fluidity of the population.  There were more cracks for the children to fall into , and they were much bigger since there were no computer databases on students, nor were there programs to consolidate data.  Why was there no fear for these children then?

  The junior noses in theater remained uncounted by DoDDS throughout the 70s, … the 80s, … and the first part of the 90s …  Never once was concern expressed by the school when we arrived at a new duty station as to whether or not we had children or, if we did, where they were.

The common features between the Channel 3 report of the Idaho story, and the 1995 Herald-Post story are:

• "No one" knows where the children are
• The student "accounting systems" are poor
• Schools ‘don’t have the data’
• No registration is required
• The bureaucracy needs more authority
• Officials need to oversee homeschooling

The unanswered question, though, is what about the children who do attend school, but yet graduate without a good education?

• Kansas City Star, Kansas City, Missouri, 20 January 2006, College students lack basic skills

  More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

So, in the Idaho story, a boy had his mother fill out his application.  In the 2001 episode, an overseas general said he’d heard of a boy who couldn’t pass the ASVAB.  These types of examples are being used to push for more authority over homeschoolers.  But what about the 50 and 75 percenters in the A.P. story picked up by the Kansas City Star?  Where did they go to school?  And who’s got authority over those schools? 

The watchers want to watch us.  Who’s watching them?