Posted on 08/10/2009 4:53:45 PM PDT by achilles2000
Each year, the homeschool movement graduates at least 100,000 students. Due to the fact that both the United States government and homeschool advocates agree that homeschooling has been growing at around 7% per annum for the past decade, it is not surprising that homeschooling is gaining increased attention. Consequently, many people have been asking questions about homeschooling, usually with a focus on either the academic or social abilities of homeschool graduates....Drawing from 15 independent testing services, the Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics included 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states who took three well-known testsCalifornia Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and Stanford Achievement Test for the 200708 academic year. The Progress Report is the most comprehensive homeschool academic study ever completed...Overall the study showed significant advances in homeschool academic achievement as well as revealing that issues such as student gender, parents education level, and family income had little bearing on the results of homeschooled students....
(Excerpt) Read more at hslda.org ...
In what government school district in which no parent has a college diploma do the children score on average in the 83th percentile on a composite battery of achievement tests?
Answer: NONE.
But "amateurs" - homeschooling parents - do accomplish this.
The government school system needs to be closed.
The edu-fascists will not like this. Look for home schooling to be banned in the USSA within 5 years. (Must indoctrinate the young to be model socialists.)
Don’t worry about Obama going after homeschoolers either. HSLDA will fight to the death over parents’ rights to homeschool their children. Personally, everybody should pull their kids out of schools, as the Internet has tons of sites where kids can get edumacated.
“The government school system needs to be closed.”
Or, at least, return to city school boards with local authority and local participation only. Federal intervention, as it has everything it touches, has ruined the education process.
PING
In my opinion, our education system was fine until the government decided they could run it better than local communities could. Makes me wonder about their ability to run our health system.
Two good points.
The “edu-fascists” will be busy “manufacturing” spurious studies to show that somehow education by government really is superior.
As things stand, the Dalai Bama’s boy, Arne Duncan, and others are moving in the direction of increasing the federalization of the government schools. Our highly trained education professionals will go along because they will get more money, which is what the system is really about (in addition ot giving certain groups privileged ideological access to children).
Those institutionalized children who are academically successful are likely 100% “afterschooled”! The institution is doing nothing more than sending home a curriculum, administering tests, and grading projects! It is the parents and child who actually doing nearly all the hard work in the **HOME**.
In fact, the time spent in the institutional school actually **retards** the social and academic progress of children with committed parents. It wastes a ton of their time. These kids would do better if the school mailed the curriculum and textbooks to their home, and only saw them for testing.
So?...What about children from dysfunctional families? Are the government schools helping them? NO! These kids would be better off in institutional schools that attempt to duplicate in the school what should be happening at home. George Will calls these schools “paternalistic” schools. KIPP schools are a good example.
It is utter and complete foolishness to continue with the typical government school model that have today. These schools waste the lives of children who are motivated and who have motivated parents, and they are utterly and completely inadequate to meet the needs of unmotivated children with dysfunctional parents.
If conservatives refused to send their children to government re-education camps this fall, the entire system would collapse, the government school system would be delegitimized, and the left would be denied its single largest source of funding and ideological influence....but too many conservatives would rather just complain or attend a meeting.
A collapse of the legitimacy of government education would completely disrupt the BHO healthcare and environmental agenda...
Children learn to be socialists/communists the moment they put their foot in a government kindergarten classroom. They learn for 13 or more years that it is OK for the government to steal from their neighbor the money needed for something they and their parents want ( schooling).
Do this for 13 years and what you have is a budding communist.
Free government education teaches children to be communists and this is true if the school district were the size of a suburban subdivision.
Whether it was fine or not - and I would say it wasn’t - the system is never going back. We have two choices - submit to it (school reform is an absurd activity that has always failed to produce anything except more money for the left) or secede family by family from the corrupt and decaying government school system.
You are exactly r ight. We had homeschooled from the start, as had my other siblings, but I had one sibling who didn't homeschool. Then it dawned on her that she was the one who was actually schooling her children, every night around the dining room table as she helped them work through their homework.
So she pulled them out and homeschooled them.
Indeed it would! Better yet, it would be better if conservatives voted in a united way for their complete closure.
I live in one of the reddest states in the union. In my county conservatives **love** their government schools and are blind to how these indoctrination camps are turning their children into communists.
“Then it dawned on her that she was the one who was actually schooling her children, every night around the dining room table as she helped them work through their homework.”
More parents should have similar moments of clarity...
“Or, at least, return to city school boards with local authority and local participation only.”
This will never happen. The left never gives up power or money. We can only pull down their corrupt institution and start over. The only solution is to secede family by family and DEFEAT every bond election.
While I am completely for homeschooling and greatly admire those who have taken on this responsibility, your final sentence is wrong. Our school system, like our health care system, needs some surgery - school system is in worse shape - but it does not need to be discarded.
There are plenty of great teachers out there - Christians and conservatives. We need more of them in the schools. That’s the way to solve the problem, not your answer.
My wife taught for 32 years and will gladly argue about how much the government has screwed up our education system. I graduated high shool in ‘59 and college in ‘68 (3 1/2 year interval for service). I was academically well prepared for college unlike many of today’s students who need remedial courses before they actually start college courses. The trend in some schools systems around Dallas, Texas is to lower grading standards to “encourage” students to stay in school. I’m sure that will help these students succeed in a world labor marketplace. Of course, since American students rate near the bottom of the pile in Math and Science compared to the rest of the world. lots of luck.
Wrong answer at every level. When you put good people into a bad system, the system wins. The system does need to be discarded, and should have been discarded a century ago.
The schools have transformed the majority of this generation of government school students into the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the 21st Century. If they can get work, their employers will the government, Chinese, Indians, and....homeschoolers.
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