Posted on 11/18/2012 5:16:50 PM PST by SeekAndFind
FR hiccupped.....
Not the feds......
I already explained to Metmom in a private reply that you were the original "Grammar Nazi" (BTW that is the correct term.) and that it was one of your usual "All talk and no action posts with the usual insults"
Also,....I have a busy life creating health, wealth, and fun for the world to enjoy. I am in a rush to get out the door, so, I will not be responding to any post, from anyone, until late into the evening ( if at all).
Of course you won't respond. Just like Metmom won't come out and admit that you do the cause more harm than good.
Doesn't it bother either of you that the nicest thing you can say about wintertime is that his/ her style is "different"?
WV job service and almost all WV employers require a GED or high school diploma. Some employers even require applicants to prove proficiency in Reading in addition to the above before getting an interview.
One student paid $200 for an online GED course and exam and could not get a truck driving job until he passed the WV accepted GED exam.
We participate in the Oklahoma based GED certification program. Not all states do.
I don’t see any problem for a home schooled student to pass the GED and receive a high school diploma. It is free and takes little time.
“Of course you won't respond. Just like Metmom won't come out and admit that you do the cause more harm than good.
“Doesn't it bother either of you that the nicest thing you can say about wintertime is that his/ her style is ‘different’?”
Although I've disagreed with most of what you've posted about homeschooling when I've paid any attention to what you post at all, here, I must agree.
Wintertime is hardly the best spokesman to the “unconverted” about this topic.
Although I have a low view of it, public education predates the Revolution. It's thus hard to state that it's all just a communist plot!
That being said, I live in a state, Maryland, with allegedly very good public education (Number 1 in the country, or so I'm told by ceaseless mailings from our governor, Martin O’Mutley.). Our local elementary school is one of two or three in our county (which is the No. 3 county in our No. 1 state), because of its “excellence,” to which one may send his child if his child's own assigned school isn't doing the job for the child.
Our neighbors shunned us for years because we chose to homeschool. One neighbor told us that homeschooling was child abuse. Another neighbor questioned whether homeschooling was even legal. That neighbor also strongly implied we were just too lazy to send our children to school.
But the neighbor kids who stuck it out with the public schools, well, let's say that their college choices were a little limited. My son's choices were, in a sense, limited, too. Limited to the upper end.
I'm for what works for kids.
Whether it's public, private, parochial or homeschooling.
But the data that I see is that a mediocre homeschooling is usually better than all but the very best public school. And a TV set and a bag of corn chips is better than many, many public schools. Private schools are highly-variable, but the better ones are often better than their public school peers (not always, and not uniformly), but the best homeschool beats all.
For kids with intact families, that can manage to scrape together the mortgage or rent payment on one income, and will do without many of the luxuries of life, homeschooling is usually the best choice for most kids.
sitetest
Good post.
I don't think you have disagreed with what I have said. I am in favor of "all of the above." If you are happy with what ever system you are using God bless you go for it. If people want to homeschool great I support them. If you want to use public schools or parochial ones great.
What I am against is certain posters labeling ALL public school teaches as communists or "useful idiots." Including many other insults veiled and otherwise.
When I taught in New York (rural school district) We had about 8- 10 families that had to use out facilities to take a basic (ninth grade) Earth Science test. 90% of our students passed 90% of the homeschoolers failed one scored a whopping 23 out of 100.
Since moving to VA. I have become acquainted with about 20 homeschooling families both through work and people at our Church. Two families in particular are exceptional with 12 children between them. Then there are the three that that are the opposite end of the spectrum. all three of these were put into our school because their parents were not able to handle them. We had to have one of the "little angels" (age 17 yrs 6 months)removed by the police and get an order of protection because he targeted a 14 year old girl to "date". He had a violent outburst one day when I separated them and did about $500 of property damage. One of them was dropped off at our building an hour later we received a call from his mother that she was not going to pick him up was instead asking us to have him committed to the children's Psych center because he had beat up her and her mother that morning.
The rest of them are just average, no better or worse than the kids I have in my class every day.
For kids with intact families, that can manage to scrape together the mortgage or rent payment on one income, and will do without many of the luxuries of life, homeschooling is usually the best choice for most kids.
Intact families, wow that is an oxymoron. I have 60 students right now. I can count on one hand the number of families that are "intact." And keep in mind this is a rural school district in VA. Out of those 5 only one does not have both parents working.
Like I said I am in favor of "all of the above." If it works for you God bless you go for it. But please don't attack me or insult me for doing the best I can do to help the maximum number of kids I can, because the sad reality is that while I only spend an hour and a half with these kids it is an hour more than many of their parents.
The problem with your posts is that you often speak with what seems to be a forked tongue.
You first say:
“I am in favor of ‘all of the above.’”
But then you post all sorts of stories about failed homeschooling efforts which are out of all proportion with the actual experiences of actual homeschooling families.
That is dissembling.
For years, we worked with the fellow in our county who was in charge of supervision of homeschoolers. He’d been a public school teacher for about 20 or so years, and was kind of burned out (don’t blame him). So, because he was well short of retirement, they gave him the job of supervising the homeschoolers, and he brought a rather confrontational attitude to the job. He was notorious throughout the state! In the first years that he held the job, he was stern, nasty and tough. Dot every i, cross every t.
But after about three years, he mellowed out. He figured out two things:
1. The vast majority of homeschoolers weren’t trying to scam the system, weren’t too lazy to take their kids to the local public school (LOL! What a laugh! As if teaching your kids at home takes LESS time and energy than dropping off at the local public school!! LOL!!), and were generally good and decent people trying to do the best for their kids, and;
2. Most homeschooled kids did better, covered a broader curriculum, scored better on standardized tests, were more polite and civil, better behaved, and related better to folks not their own age, especially adults, than most public school kids.
By the time he retired, nearly 20 years later, he'd declared that working with homeschoolers had been the best part of his job, the easiest position he'd had in the public school system, and the most pleasant. It was a delight to see parents so involved with their kids' education, and a delight to see such an overwhelming population of happy, academically successful children.
So, your counterexamples, to the degree that any of them are true, are the exceptions, not the rule. Don’t believe me? Look at the research that’s been done. Here’s just one data point: The median standardized test percentile rank for public school kids is, almost tautologically, 50%. For homeschoolers, it’s 86%.
You’re pointing out the anomalies and posting as if they were usual homeschooling experiences.
Like I said, that’s dissembling.
With that promotion of falsehood, I disagree.
Although homeschooling may not work for everyone, and although there are some public schools that provide a decent education, and a few that are pretty darned good, homeschooling generally beats public schooling. By a significant, and measurable amount.
sitetest
And I understand that the largest "career group" or category amongst home schooling parents is public school teacher. Several of my close home schooling cohorts were public school teachers before they home schooled their children. None of them really wants to go back to full-time teaching in the public schools either.
There is not doubt that every single child would benefit from more individual attention, but I am sure that you are aware of the concept of norming. For the most part home school children (according to your statistic) are performing at above average levels.
Well what is going to happen to that number when you add more and more of the population to it. Initially it will stay at or near that 86% but gradually over time it will move closer to the 50% of the rest of the population. It may never reach 50% but I can bet that it will be a lot closer to 50% than to 86%.
As far as looking at research when I have asked a certain person on this thread for on-line links I have been directed to only homeschool links. While I am not saying they are wrong I would rather see an unbiased view from a group like Rand or Heritage foundation. So if you have an unbiased link let me see it.
I completed my 20-year homeschooling career last May. I have friends and acquaintances in the public school system - teachers, principals, aides, etc. A friend who is a principal at a local elementary school once told me that I was the only home schooler she had ever met who was not crazy. Now, I have met some crazy home schoolers, but most of them that I know are not, or at least I don’t see that side of them. LOL!
I have come to believe that folks who work in the public school system for the most part just don’t get to know the vast majority of normal homes schoolers who are out there. They really do see the crazies, the people who pull their kids out of school because the school made them angry or because they really are too lazy to get up and get their kids to school.... then they realize that they really do have to work at teaching and have to put up with their kids all day long. They give up and put their kids back in school, with no progress having been made and their kids are just that much farther behind.
And my sister-in-law is a retired public school teacher and she is sure that for every nightmare public school situation I can point out, she can counter it with a nightmare home schooling situation. I don’t think so. She looks at those situations and generalizes them to all home schoolers and doesn’t see what is right in front of her: My successful home schoolers and all their friends who have done well and done so without the dehumanizing experience of public schooling.
I know that home schooling is not for everyone, but I am so thankful for the opportunity to home school my own, and I am thankful that my oldest is now home schooling her step-son and plans to home school any more children that she has.
I apologize for the arrogance that we home schoolers often display. It is just hard to be humble when something you do succeeds beyond your wildest dreams. That’s the way it was for us - we really had no idea what to expect and we could not be happier with the results!
I understand your point, but it's irrelevant, and also not quite meaningful.
Certainly, if everyone were homeschooled, the median score would be the 50th percentile. That's a tautology.
But it's irrelevant. On average, homeschoolers do way, way better than public-schooled kids. Even as homeschoolers have gone from a tiny part of the school-aged population to roughly around 4% or so of that population, the differences have held up.
As for research, most homeschool research is conducted by folks interested in homeschooling. Most other folks don't seem very interested. However, there is research out there done by non-homeschooling-related organizations, and this research is in line with the research from homeschool=related organizations. The problem is that because non-homeschooling-related organizations don't frequently do this sort of research, the studies can be considered stale, and thus open to the criticism that they're no longer particularly relevant.
I imagine part of the problem is political correctness: the education establishment, which is officially hostile to homeschooling (but backs an absolute license to abortion on demand, go figure), is unlikely to look kindly at those who try to live within it going around and proving that public school teachers are not possessed of some highly-specialized knowledge of how to educate children.
Another problem that feeds the first is that it's easy, really easy to find large masses of public school children. And not so tough to find private school children. But it's a lot of work to find homeschoolers. We don't all congregate in big brick or cinderblock buildings by the hundreds, or even the thousands. We're usually at... HOME. Or at the park. Or the zoo. Or the aquarium. Or the museum. Or at co-op. With literally dozens of kids in a single place!
It's just a lot more work. And if your work is going to draw scorn from the educational establishment, why work so damned hard to do it? Why would a researcher make his life harder than it has to be?
In the meanwhile, I haven't seen any studies that seem to suggest the contrary, that public schooling is superior to homeschooling.
In fact, I find many folks who criticize the methodology of studies that find in favor of homeschooling (”too Christian,” “too white,” “not representative sample”), but no studies that find to the contrary. LOL. As for complaints about demographics, the larger studies report results for sub-populations. The same study that cites an overall 86th percentile shows a 77th percentile for black children, compared with a national average of something like the 28th percentile. Ouch. Too Christian?? LOL!! That's sort of a telling criticism as it seems to cede the field to Christians as being innately academically-superior. Let me tell all those [predominantly-non-Christian] Tiger Moms, Asian Dads, and Indian parents.
Another criticism is that “these studies aren't scientific experiments.” LOL!! Of course not. It's very, very hard to do actual experiments regarding educational outcomes in large populations. One wouldn't expect a scientific experiment in this sort of study.
And of course, if we're discussing these pieces of research in a scholarly environment, we should then provide the standard caveats like, “correlation isn't causation,” "we have to look for biases in the sample," etc.
That's fine.
But for all those problems, still, the studies come up overwhelmingly in favor of homeschooling. And there's not really any counter-evidence going in the other direction.
So, to homeschooling critics and those who dispute the general superiority of homeschooling, put up or shut up.
sitetest
Wonderful post. Especially the last paragraph. Thank you.
There’s nothing in this world that the government can’t screw up once it gets its hands on it, education included. that alone should be reason enough to prohibit governmental control of education.
Tens of thousands of homeschool parents across this country have been proving for decades now, that they can do a better job for less money educating their children than any teacher or politician or other government bureaucrat. An education degree is not needed to be able to teach and government control of curriculum is not demanded to ensure a good education.
Control of public education is not a power enumerated to the federal government.
IOW, the government has no Constitutional authority to meddle in public education. Public education then becomes a states rights issue at the most.
Hiyas, mm.
For decades, statistical relationships between the richness of education experienced in the real world, especially at the behest of parents, has been a root cause of higher IQ scores across the board. It only makes sense. What you teach your own child at your knee impacts what he learns and how fast he learns. For the rest of his life.
In the sense of it as an educational institution in itself, yes.
And who benefits when you and others like you remove yourself from the equation? Unless like minded people get elected to school boards etc.... then the monster will continue to grow. Sure you will all be able to sit back and congratulate yourself on how prescient you were to remove your children but then the whole suffers even more.
I was thinking about this. As I said I know about 40 or so families that homeschool. That translates to about 60-63 kids. As I said 12 of them are exceptional and 3 are complete buttheads. Right off the bat that means that just under 30% are well above the norm.
I would have to say that another 5-7 are above average and another 5 are below the average. These 5 are homeschooled for special educational reasons. The families have pooled resources and received assistance from the county to meet their needs. The only "institution" that could take them is the Children's psych center and non of those children are in need of that. The rest of the children I would rate as average.
Now as to the ones I referred to in New York that 90% failed the basic Earth Science test. This was in a very isolated rural community and those families were part of the kook fringe. But this was my main exposure to homeschoolers except for one family that lived in the city of Buffalo. That family the son had great difficulty and went through a rebellious stage but the younger daughter did very well with the program.
Most people learn what they need about earth science by sticking their head out the window.
And who said that people have to learn about the earth's mantle by age 12? (Ans: The Carnegie Foundation) The Carnegie Units were established by industrialists who wanted to improve "Academic and Industrial Efficiency."
Compare the industrial approach to education to Aristotle's classical approach, centered around grammar, logic and rhetoric.
Education hasn't been the same since the behavioral psychologists, industrialists, and Socialists took control of the University of Chicago and Columbia Teachers College in the late nineteenth century.
I highly recommend John Taylor Gatto's "Underground History of American Education," which is available to read on-line for free. He also has videos all over YouTube.
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