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.
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.
I had this discussion with a single mom a couple years ago. She had a son somewhere around 8-12 years old. I really can’t remember his exact age. I remember her telling me all the differences between school nowdays and school when we were kids(in the seventies and early eighties). She told me that kids lug around 40lbs of books or more everywhere they go. they don’t use lockers. They have tons of homework everynight, even in elementary school. There’s no recess. There’s no gym class. They get in trouble if their sack lunch has anything in it that is disposable(bad for the environment). They spend all day talking about the environment, politics, and current events. Then they are handed huge assignments to do at home. the teachers don’t do a DAM THING to teach or help the kids with their assignments. The kids are expected to do all that on their own or with some aftershcool tutor. If the parents are poor, the parents ARE the tutor.
When I was in gradeschool, there WAS NO SUCH THING AS HOMEWORK. Except for spelling tests that is. OR if you were dumb and couldn’t keep up. Otherwise, all your studies were done at school. Sometimes a big writing assignment was finished up at home if you didn’t get it done on time.
NOBODY carried a book bag until 11th grade or later, if at all. There was no text books to take home until 7th grade and then there were so few of them that no book bag was necessary. And you almost never needed to take them home anyway. They stayed in the locker. 80-90% of all homework was completed in study halls...up until about 11th grade, when writing assignments became more involved and classes became more difficult. Test time was a little different. there was always cramming for a test the night before. But that’s about it.
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.
wintertime, I was thinking of you and this point you promote when I was reading the report which is the subject of the thread.It just appears that parental involvement in education is what tells the tale - and anything which dilutes that is a negative. I found myself wondering how the data might be defined which would tell us how much of the performance of public school students is controlled by parental involvement - as you put it, "afterschooling." It just looks like homeschoolers match up with some subset of PS pupils whose parents are similarly involved in their education.
My other reaction to the data presented was that maybe the perspective changes if you look at the hole in the donut - instead of saying, "parental education doesn't make much difference, only between 85 and 90 percentile," you could say that it makes a substantial difference - between 15 and 10 percentile - in the number of students who are better academically than your kid.
My granddaughter spent a year in an elementary school which had a slogan, "where excellence begins." I snort when I see it, because my granddaughter was reading before she ever set foot in a school. And because her mother was Phi Beta Kappa and her father has a PhD. "Excellence begins" in elementary school? Hardly! Already too late by then, pretty much.