The Miami News Record - Powered by the News Record and You! posted an article from a mom who started home educating her kids six months ago. Kristen Hoover offered her experiences getting started, along with the results so far.

The ABCs of homeschooling: laughter, learning, bonding and togetherness

When we remodeled one end of our house into a classroom, our son learned how to hang sheetrock and lay laminate flooring. Our daughters are becoming quite the seamstresses, and that 11-year-old can make a mean pan of brownies. All of us are greatly enjoying our latest quest to find the perfect bread recipe. We’re already obsessing over seed catalogs and planning our garden. We used after-Christmas sales shopping to teach percentages. A trip to the hardware or grocery store is most likely going to involve a math lesson. I ran into a friend in Sears a few months ago who told me she had just seen my kids in the shoe department, and the oldest was quizzing her siblings on how to calculate the price of a pair of shoes that were 30 percent off. Of course, we are studying the curriculum required to graduate, but more importantly, our kids are learning how to function in this big ol’ world — most of the time, without a calculator.
As far as the socialization that the masses seem so concerned about, well, most importantly, we’re not concerned about it at all. Our kids are very involved in their youth and children’s groups at church, we have friends who homeschool, and we are also part of a homeschool group in Miami (MAPLE: www.facebook.com/groups/maplehomeschool/) that meets once a week. The kids still hang out with their public-school friends, and our oldest, contrary to the thinking of the total stranger who told our 16-year-old daughter that homeschooled kids won’t ever marry, is dating a wonderful young man (public-schooled, no less) and goes on dates and everything. Our kids can carry on conversations with adults, are polite and well-mannered, and seem to function just fine in society.

One family’s example of living and learning.

By Sage Ross (Flickr: Boston Wiki Meetup) via Wikimedia Commons

Aaron Swartz is dead. His memorial service was Tuesday at a synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois.  I ran into the terrible news reading Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing. Besides working with Doctorow on Creative Commons, Aaron developed the RSS program, the popular news and information site – Reddit, along with Public.Resource.Org. He co-founded Demand Progress, and served as a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.  Those are a few of his contributions from his 26-year-old life.

The prosecutors, legislators, regulators, MIT leaders and other mucky mucks against him surely did not anticipate the fallout from his tragic death.  In a time where there is little public honor in Aaron’s and my home state of Illinois, Aaron (and his family) have been acclaimed for his fight to open access for documents and information that should be freely available via the internet.

From the Chicago Tribune By John Keilman and Sally Ho:

“He grew up in an environment where those sort of things were held in high esteem, the notion of making the world a better place,” Robert Swartz said.

That outlook became clear at 13, when he gained national acclaim for creating a do-it-yourself online encyclopedia that predated the launch of Wikipedia. It was the height of the dot-com boom, yet his site, The Info Network, was bereft of advertising, subscription fees or any other way to generate money.

“That’s not what the Internet was made for,” he told the Tribune at the time. “It was based on open standards and freedom, not ads.”

After Aaron’s freshman year in a private school, he moved on to homeschooling, supplementing his education with Lake Forest College classes.  The homeschool community can be proud of him, not just for his brilliance, but for the way he lived his life expressing that genius.

The above video How We Stopped SOPA is explanation of the political activism and creativity used against an invasive regulatory bill that would cause government censorship on the internet.

Homeschoolers passionately protect our educational autonomy by visiting our represesentatives in our state and nation’s capitol.  We do this to guard against our children being shut down in their learning joys and life passions. Just as Robert and Susan Swartz allowed for their son.  We can relate to Aaron’s conversation he shared with a United States Senator.  When Swartz asked him about the hypocrisy of the SOPA bill stifling freedom of information, he saw fire develop in the representative’s eyes, along with a raised voice: “There’s got to be laws on the internet. It’s got to be under control.” The tyrannical attitude was defeated that time.  Aaron went on to say that these invasive bills will “happen again. The fire in these politicians’ eyes hasn’t gone out.”

The internet really is out of control. [He said with a mischievous smile] But if we forget that. If we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t really make a difference. And we see this as someone else’s responsibility to do this work. And it’s our job to just go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well then next time they might just win.  

Let’s not let that happen.       ~ Aaron Swartz 1986-2013

Internet - 1 Congress – 0

From the New York Times By John Schwartz Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26 

 In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.

The government shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”

Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.

Aaron’s family created a website: Remember Aaron Swartz:

About this site

Aaron was a tireless supporter of the open internet and an old-school hacker. To honor his memory and his contributions to technical community, Aaron’s family and friends wanted to provide a way to share their memories that:

• uses free and open source software wherever possible
• licenses its content under the Creative Commons
• is open to the technical community to hack on and contribute to
• leverages tools that Aaron used and contributed to, like Markdown and RSS

The site itself is a work in progress; we can’t do everything ourselves. To that end, we’d like to invite other programmers to contribute to the improvement of the site on Github. Here are more features we’d like to add:

• make it easy for a broader community of contributors to share memories, perhaps via Github’s Javascript API and CORS
• allows for sharing and contribution to Reddit
• provide compatibility across a diverse set of web platforms

If you’d like to contribute, please fork the repo on Github and get hacking. Alternatively, you can email your memories to share them directly with Aaron’s family and friends, who will work to shift them onto the website as quickly as possible.

Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.

Tim Berners-Lee ~ eulogist at Aaron Swartz’s funeral and creater of the World Wide Web

A Nov. 11th L.A. Times article for L.A. at Home, which seems to focus on architecture and design for southern California homeowners, carried the cutsy title, “For home-school parents, classroom design is the subject du jour.” The first part of the article does, in fact, focus on parents with a severe yearning to replicate school in their homes, quoting one parent who “…demolished a galley-style kitchen in her home to create a school setting. The house had to be extended into the backyard, with a brand-new kitchen built in.”

Another parent, who the article describes as ‘striving for structure and routine,’ states, “It seems there’s a whole new group of us that I refer to as ‘contemporary home-schoolers…’” The article goes on to explain that she is “so committed to the idea of replicating a traditional school experience for her son that she has given her classroom a name: University School for Children, with uniforms, a logo and school IDs.”

This beginning part of the article almost had me passing it over for mention here, but the second part highlights an entirely different approach, and quotes a longtime friend and author: “Tammy Takahashi takes an ‘unschooling’ approach with her three children, ages 7 to 13. The classroom might be an art table at home, a recycling center or the beach. The inherent appeal of the approach is that the style of teaching can be tweaked to accommodate what works best for the student, said Takahashi, who has also written two books on home schooling.”

There are some good arguments for both structured and non-structured approaches, and lots of food for thought and discussion.

The venerable New York Times Magazine published an article on November 8, 2011 titled My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists, by Margaret Heidenry:

“Tired of the constraints of the 40-hour workweek, my father, in 1972, quit his job in publishing. My parents were in their early 30s, and they had four children under 7. ‘But we still wanted to explore the world,’ my father recalled recently. They bought six one-way tickets to Europe, leaving only a laughable $3,000 to subsist on. Young and idealistic, they thought they could easily educate us along the way. ‘Life itself would become a portable classroom.’”

Margaret explains how for the next four years they “embarked on an uncharted ‘free-form existence,’ traveling through Spain, England, a Midwestern farm, Mexico, and finally settled in St. Louis. She details how her parents stretched their budget to allow for the far-flung classrooms, and writes of the family adventure, “…my parents were consistently inconsistent. There were a few interludes of standardized education, but for the most part, as my mother would later write in this magazine, ‘during all this time, the children traveled with us and received nothing that remotely resembled formal schooling.’”

“Home Is Where the School Is,” published in the Oct. 19, 1975, issue of The New York Times Magazine, was the first article in a national publication to espouse what was then still a fringe educational choice.

Read Margaret Heidenry’s entire article at the link above.

After just a few months of college – in which he enrolled after spending his middle and high school years unschooling – Dale J. Stephens, 19, left school. Based on his conviction that college is not necessary for success and fulfillment, he founded an organization called UnCollege, which promotes ways that young people can “hack their education” by finding individualized paths to self-directed learning. A Thiel fellowship recipient, he is currently writing a book for Penguin called Hacking Your Education and traveling extensively on speaking engagements.

In a guest post for The New York Times, Mr. Stephens explains his belief that any student at any level, even those in traditional education environments, can take charge of their learning:

“Why did I make trouble? Going along with the program seems pretty sweet. I could have written papers, skipped class and partied until dawn. After four years as a college student, I would have had many friends, a good job and letters after my name. But I left college because I realized I couldn’t rely on a university to give me an education.”

Read the entire article at the link above.

Too Cool For Homeschool? (Here’s what you didn’t know), by Melanie O’Brien, shares the activities of families involved with the Baltimore Homeschool Community Center, described as “…bright and friendly, full of laughing kids and smiling adults.” The member-based organization serves homeschooling families throughout the Baltimore area. O’Brien writes:

“But wait a second. Why are homeschoolers away from home, in a center taking classes? If you’re like me (and statistics suggest you probably are), then your state-mandated K-12 education happened in a public or private school. But for about 2.4 percent of Maryland’s school-aged kids, education happens somewhere else.”

The article is long, interesting, fair and balanced, and the final paragraph, while startling and unusual for an article about homeschooling, leaves true homeschoolers with a knowing smile. Recommended reading, for sure.

According to this news report from New Jersey: “Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle will introduce legislation to regulate the home schooling of children. This comes on the heels of a recent investigation by the State Department Of Children And Families into the tragic may death of eight-year old Christiana Glenn of Irvington.

“Christiana died of malnutrition and an untreated broken leg. She was also supposedly home schooled. Vanieri Huttle’s bill would require medical exams and submission of student work portfolios for home-schooled children. It would also prohibit children under the supervision of DYFS from being home-schooled.”

Discussion of this potential leglislation is under discussion at the HEM Networking group, a free forum for homeschoolers prodvided by Home Education Magazine: “This bill is bad. Public school students are not required to undergo medical exams. Furthermore, there has been no evidence that homeschoolers in NJ are not doing a good job and that they suddenly need supervision by the public schools.”

In a contribution to the HEM-Networking group discussion, former HEM News & Commentary editor Valerie Moon shared a link to author Milton Gaither’s review of Timothy B. Waddell’s “Bringing it all Back Home: Establishing a Coherent Constitutional Framework for the Re-Regulation of Homeschooling” in Vanderbilt Law Review. Waddell, a recent graduate from Vanderbilt Law School and now a clerk for the U.S. District Court of Alabama, here presents a constitutional argument for increased regulation of homeschooling and much else besides.

Valerie shared this excerpt from Gaither’s review:

“As my summary indicates, I really liked this piece. It is the last of a long list of legal articles I’ve reviewed over the past few weeks, and it is the best of the lot in my view. John Holt wouldn’t like it because in his view it was always better to have things unclear than clear, for then you could get away with more. But I for one appreciated not only Waddell’s summary of the issues but his proposal as well. I know some of my readers will react strongly against what I’m about to say, but Waddell’s proposal to me does a good job of maintaining the freedom to homeschool while at the same time providing a mechanism for catching children whose parents are being abusive or neglectful. A homeschooling family that is doing its job should have no fear of outside evaluation–should welcome it in fact, as it will demonstrate to the public at large how effective homeschooling can be.”

This underscores a longstanding concern we’ve had with Gaither’s position on homeschooling, as he deliberately frames John Holt’s pioneering work for homeschooling freedoms in an unfavorable light, while dangerously welcoming government oversight of families.

The future of laws and regulations in Indiana

In Homeschool regulations ahead? Karen Francisco in The Journal Gazette writes:

Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett released new non-waiver graduation rates today with a news release that suggests Indiana high schools might be “counseling students out” of public schools and into homeschool. Last week, I blogged about a New York Times article on private schools “counseling out” struggling students and I cited some examples of northeast Indiana parochial school students who transferred to public schools at the parochial schools’ request.

The Department of Education news release raises suspicions about the legitimacy of transfers from Indiana public high schools to a homeschool: “While we believe the vast majority of Indiana’s schools are doing the right thing, we fear some schools may be issuing waivers for students that aren’t quite ready to graduate and even counseling students out of traditional public schools and into ‘homeschool’ where the students then become untraceable,” Bennett said. “We are doing these students no favors and must reexamine this process. Homeschool is an excellent choice for some students, and such a decision should be made with each individual student’s needs in mind. However, if a student is reported as having transferred to a home school program, that student should, in fact, be participating in a legitimate program.”

And therein lies the problem – what’s a “legitimate” home school program? For better or worse, Indiana is among the states with no regulation of homeschool instruction.

Continue reading at the link above.

The New York Times put most homeschoolers into an undesirable, non-bid for fame.  We’ve been profiled as a special interest group wanting something (money) from these “new Republicans.”   I don’t know about many other homeschoolers, but I’d rather step out of this particular limelight of perceived hands held out. As an Illinois homeschooler, my husband and I have known we could use the Illinois Education Tax Credit for some years, but decided it wasn’t worth it for various reasons. We learned some time ago that our freedom is worth more than money.

In the NY Times’s Room for Debate, Susan Neuman, professor in educational studies and assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration had an interesting point of view.  She started out with the notion that ‘conservatives’ are trying to destroy public education with homeschool tax credits.

I’d say that ‘conservatives’ like Chester Finn are trying to destroy homeschooling with his love of standardized tests.  His thumbs up for homeschool tax credits came with the notion that “if they don’t pass those tests, either the subsidy vanishes or the kids must enroll in some sort of school with a decent academic track record.”  As if those tests are a good synopsis of what children learn.  As if enrolling kids who don’t do well on tests is reason to be in a school.  We could turn that around to say that some public school students shouldn’t be in school because those tests look very bad for them.  Most good teachers agree that teaching to standardized tests doesn’t help learning, even if their union insists on testing for homeschoolers.   From the edu-industry end, Mr. Finn was invested as a Director of K12, Inc. until July of 2007 and is still a member of the Education Advisory Committee.  Not surprisingly, Finn was promoting the virtual schools heavily in this non-reality based comparison of homeschooling and virtual schools:  “From a policy perspective, however, there’s not much difference between teaching kids at home and enrolling them in any of hundreds of “virtual charter schools” or district- or state-run alternatives”.”    His K12 company is lobbying hard in Illinois for more business than just the Chicago Virtual School.  I wouldn’t want him speaking on behalf of the homeschooling community because dollar signs keep distorting his view.  In The Educated Child, a book he co-authored with William Bennett, they stated that “homeschoolers should not have to do so [homeschool]  because there are no good schools available”.  What they don’t seem to understand is the homeschooling lifestyle enables the family to enjoy each other and their education and isn’t necessarily because of an indictment of schools.  Families homeschool in communities with the best school districts too.

Rob Reich – notorious for his anti-homeschool freedom attitudes – sounds almost excited about federal tax credits.  His piece is similar to Finn’s, except he wants homeschool registration, where Chester Finn likes the testing notion.   I think Reich’s piece was the tamest of any of his previous articles demanding homeschoolers answer to the government. There’s cause for alarm.  Reich senses promise in registering all homeschooled children with the use of tax credits.

Want a tax credit to home school? Accept a requirement to register your child as being home schooled and that the child take the same state tests as other public school students. Federal dollars come with strings attached, and these particular strings are in the best interests of children, anyway.

Luis Huerta of Columbia University had a piece with many similar points to a Daily Beast article.

The current efforts consist of a two-prong approach that involve resurrecting recently proposed legislation: First, the Family Education Freedom Act of 2009, sponsored and repeatedly introduced by Representative Ron Paul of Texas has proposed a tax credit of up to $5,000 for private school tuition and home schooling expenses. Second, the Parental Rights Amendment of 2009 sponsored by Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and written by Michael Farris, the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, would protect “the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children” as a fundamental right.

But I think his point below shows the HSLDA sponsored contradiction in promoting a Parental Rights Amendment, while chancing federal regulations of homeschooling with tax credits.  I also don’t like the Parental Rights Amendment because we don’t need our rights enumerated.  We already have them.

Dana Goldstein from The Beast says in her article How the Tea Party Will Destroy Education Reform that:

The organization [HSLDA] has powerful supporters—both veteran legislators and newcomers. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the caucus’ vice-chairwoman, support homeschool tax credits. John Kline, the incoming House Education Committee chairman, was the keynote speaker at last spring’s Home School Legal Defense Association conference, where he said he would work to “charge up Capitol Hill with the message of homeschool freedom.”

I’m all about a message of homeschool freedom, but we generally keep it to ourselves, unless ironically enough, legislators or school authorities start getting in our way.

Here’s some more “new Republican” names laid out from the Beast that want to ‘help’.

“Rubio and Paul ran for Senate supporting tax credits for homeschoolers, though they also describe themselves as deficit hawks committed to balancing the federal budget. Paul has been an especially vocal advocate for homeschooling, often speaking publicly about the prominent role homeschooling volunteers played in his Kentucky campaign. He spoke on June 25 to the Christian Homeschool Educators of Kentucky, whose mission is to “protect children from mental, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by secular humanists in a socialist society or governmental system.” On his campaign website, Paul’s staff regularly promoted homeschooling as an alternative to failing public schools, citing high academic achievement scores among homeschooled children (who also tend to come from more affluent families than their public school counterparts.)”

Cato Institute‘s Neil McCluskey seems to get it in his article: Unconstitutional Intrusion

The sentiment is right: Home schooling parents shouldn’t have to pay for schools they don’t use then pay again for education they do. But good intentions neither make a law constitutional, nor necessarily sound. Proof of home schooling could be defined as passing federally prescribed tests – just the sort of mandate many home schoolers despise. In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution gives the federal government specific powers, and the feds may do nothing beyond them. Included among them is nothing about education, so Washington may make no education policy. And no, the taxing power does not allow Washington to do whatever it wants as long as it is connected to taxes. Taxation may only be used in service of the enumerated powers.

McCluskey finishes with this thought:

Home schoolers deserve some breaks. At the national level, that means adhering to the Constitution and getting the federal government out of education, which would benefit not just home schoolers, but all taxpayers.

I don’t think most homeschoolers consider themselves deserving of a break.  Except when legislators or public school authorities interfere with well or ill intentioned motivations.  Rule number one for homeschoolers should be to not make any rules or laws or regulations for homeschooling families.  If we’ve already determined it’s worth it to go against the societal mainstream of public schools, then we’re also pretty determined to create the best learning opportunities for each of our children in the coziness of our homes.  In other words, no worries about us, as public schools already have plenty to do on their own.

Neumann concludes with a question.

This latest proposal is designed for the heart not the head. Home-schooling families are too smart and too savvy to buy into this half-baked plan. They know that tax credits are good for nothing but greater federal intrusion. Is this what the Tea Party had in mind?

If you’ve ever heard the story about The Wild and Free Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp, then you’ll understand homeschoolers don’t want to end up in the educational market’s pen.  Many have walked away from the carrot.

NHELD’s Deborah Stevenson has an excellent piece about this tax credit issue.

Spunky has a piece, along with good comments on the issue.

Update – My thoughts, concerns,  a bit of research and a lot of other good folks’ articles regarding the IL Education Tax Credit and its repercussions are posted here.

Submitted by Susan Ryan, who is happily and independently homeschooling in Illinois

The theme for this Carnival revolves around quotes from the popular movie The Princess Bride, one of the most quoted movies of all time and a particular favorite of homeschooling families. Familiar lines such as “When I was your age, television was called books.” “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” and “As you wish.” are incorporated into the Carnival as the storyline is explained for those (few) who may be unfamiliar with it. It’s a brilliant composition, and a delightful foray into the movie’s favorite scenes. A fitting fifth anniversary edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling!