Homeschoolers in California will be unhappy: According an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, a “California court ruled this month that parents cannot ‘home school’ their children without government certification. No teaching credential, no teaching.” The only cheers you are hearing are from the teachers’ union.
For some parents, the motive for home schooling is religious; others want to protect their kids from gangs and drugs. But the most-cited reason is to ensure a good education. Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of subject. They perform well on tests like the SAT — and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.
Really? I wish my experiences with homeschoolers were more hopeful. My first brush with homeschooling came with one of my mother’s next-door neighbors. This woman gave new meaning to the term “laid back” — if there is a notch above totally comatose, that would describe her. She was very devout, in her own careless way, and claimed to be keeping her children home to school them, but neither Mother or I ever saw any evidence of it. Sure, her children — not having been exposed to the rough-and-tumble of school life — were incredibly gentle, but they were dumber than bunnies, and just wandered the streets day and night. They completely baffled my own school-age kids.
And a friend has a daughter who recently became engaged to a home-schooled young man, who is very bright but possesses some serious, well, gaps. For their honeymoon, he told her, he wanted to visit the capitals of Europe for a couple of weeks and stay in some nice resorts. “How much do think that will cost?” she asked him. “Oh, maybe, $200?” he replied. Huh? I suppose he’ll figure out the realities soon enough, but I suspect that’s not his only blind spot.
Three cheers for those out there who are homeschooling their children and who are doing a good job. After all, as the WSJ noted, “That so many families turn to home schooling is a market solution to a market failure — namely the dismal performance of the local education monopoly.” But I worry that, for every home-schooled kid who earns a college scholarship, there are several seriously emotionally and socially crippled kids out there whose parents thought they knew best, but didn’t.
March 24, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I am split on how I feel about home schooling. Like you, I have seen some great results as well as some pretty bad ones. One of my clients home schools her kids and they all are very bright. They volunteer at the zoo and museums every week. They have a strict schedule and each kid plays a musical instrument very well. However, I also know a lady who thought she was being a good mom by home schooling her daughters. Unfortunately, she was trying harder to be a “cool” mom and they never did any actual school work. When one of the girls decided to go to the high school she was tested at a fifth grade reading level. I think home schooling is a huge responsibility and if you are not up to the challenge you shouldn’t put your child’s education on the line.
March 29, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I guess the results of homeschooling are on a par with public schooling: sometimes good; sometimes bad. With both, it really does depend on the teacher, doesn’t it. I don’t think we can make blanket statements–or laws–that do justice to either.