In No Magic Bullet for Education the Los Angeles Times takes a look at teacher evaluations, education reform, Race to the Top grants, standardized tests and more:

The “unschooling” movement of the 1970s featured open classrooms, in which children studied what they were most interested in, when they felt ready. That was followed by today’s back-to-basics, early-start model, in which students complete math worksheets in kindergarten and are supposed to take algebra by eighth grade at the latest. Under the “whole language” philosophy of the 1980s, children were expected to learn to read by having books read to them. By the late 1990s, reading lessons were dominated by phonics, with little time spent on the joys of what reading is all about — unlocking the world of stories and information.

You may not take standardized tests quite so seriously, and may even question their importance. Our ability to homeschool doesn’t depend upon test scores (at least not yet), nor do we get government entitlements when the scores are top-notch. Still, standardized tests do have benefits for homeschoolers.

First, they validate what we do as a movement. Regardless of the criticism, the numbers are in our favor, showing that homeschooling can stand up to the strictest academic standards.

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Second, testing is a way to get positive or negative feedback on how your homeschool is doing.

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Lastly, it gives the students a sense of accomplishment, that they’ve done their best, they’ve worked hard, and despite what they might think, they have learned something.

Yikes! To write, “Our ability to homeschool doesn’t depend upon test scores (at least not yet),” (my emphasis) and then claim that standardized tests validate the movement is so short sighted.

Duncan uses HSLDA’s “Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics” to bolster her position on testing. Backing your ‘validation’ argument with HSLDA’s ‘leadership’ makes this somewhat understandable, but no less short sighted.

HSLDA ‘leadership’ in protecting our homeschooling freedoms lost my support years ago. Read HSLDA Study: Embarrassing and Dangerous by Larry & Susan Kaseman for more information. For alternative ideas see, Countering Problems Created by Research on Families

Read Heather Duncan’s piece on testing here.

So, food for thought on standardized tests from the next generation:

As was the case with No Child Left Behind, the stated goals of Race to the Top sound like no-brainers, but it is in the implementation that this plan fails to fundamentally improve the education system.

Specifically, the continued emphasis on standardized tests is alarming, the large focus on charter schools is unfortunate and the proposals for dealing with failing schools are unnecessarily and ineffectively harsh and disturbingly oversimplified.

Unfortunately, we can’t escape our unwarranted fixation on standardized tests as a method of evaluating students and teachers. I’ve written extensively about this in a previous column, so let me summarize:

“To expect a teacher to teach to a test is unreasonable because it expects the teacher to narrow his or her curriculum, rather than expand it, in the sense of depth rather than breadth of course. This ultimately does a disservice to students … To expect that students from all ranges of the spectrum of human experience can be measured by the same standards is highly ambitious and fairly absurd.”

Read “Race to the Top” a short run to failure by Jesse Goldberg writing for the student newspaper The Lamaron. The author also critiques competition in education in this same piece.

Online High Schools Test Students’ Social Skills

As Digital Learning Programs Grow, Educators Hope to Prevent Teens From Feeling Isolated

Online high schools are growing more popular. Roughly 100,000 of the 12 million high-school-age students in the U.S. attend 438 online schools full-time, up from 30,000 five years ago, according to the International Association for K-12 Learning Online, a Washington nonprofit representing online schools. Many more students take some classes online, while attending traditional schools. The National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education, says 1.5 million K-12 students were home-schooled in 2007, a figure that includes some who attended online schools. That is a 36% increase from the 1.1 million in 2003.

The part that caught my eye was how homeschooling was used in this line of reasoning:

Most online high schools are relatively young, and there has been little research on cyber students’ academic performance or social adaptation. But education experts say that studies looking at home-schooling suggest that students educated in nontraditional environments perform as well academically as their peers at conventional schools.

“When you look at home-school students compared to public or private school students, we have some reliable evidence to show that students are doing about the same but not better [in home school],” said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College at Columbia University.

Researchers affiliated with home-schooling cite their own studies showing that home schoolers outperform their conventionally educated counterparts on standardized tests.

So readers are reassured that, as public education moves towards online schooling, we do not have to be afraid because homeschoolers are academically normal. I would argue we are ahead of the curve on thinking about kids and learning. But, isn’t it implied by this reassurance that homeschoolers are leading the way?

From this piece in the WSJ to a recent WaPo piece on a longer school year, the language surrounding reform has a familiar ring. The big difference is on the substance of assessment. Too bad so much effort and emphasis was put into those “researchers affiliated with home-schooling” who purposefully tied us to outperforming “conventionally educated counterparts on standardized tests.” If the same amount of effort had been expended on the message that we should trust parent and children with their own education we would be in much better shape to handle the push for Common Core Standards that will help drive a new round of reform.

I purposefully skipped the headline issue because concern about socialization is such a non-homeschooling issue. If you haven’t resolve the socialization issue for yourself the comments to Glader’s story are interesting. You can also search this site for more thoughts on the subject. Here is a place to start: The “S” Word.