Home Schooled

Parents of home schooled children have long baffled me.  I am a professional educator.  I have 130 graduate hours past the master’s degree.  I am certified to teach the entire realm of social sciences.  My wife is an elementary teacher and an expert in the instruction of math.  She has almost 40 years experience.  Neither of us perceives ourselves qualified to home school our children.  We do not know enough to provide them the depth of the curricular experience demanded today.

And, as parents, we were paying our taxes for public education anyway.  Why would we pay for a service then refuse it?  Why would we believe that somehow keeping our kids at home would provide a better learning environment and better learning opportunities than they would have at public school? 

Yes, parents of home schooled children have long baffled me.  I am disturbed to learn that there are about 1.5 million home schooled children in this country, and that number is growing about 7% each year.  How can this be?  How can we be going backwards?  In the earliest of days of our history and throughout our western expansion, most kids were home schooled.  The evolution of the full time teacher and the one room school house was perceived to be an improvement over that effort.  The development of the professionally trained teacher was perceived to be an improvement.  Full-fledged schooling with multiple teacher specialists, fine arts, psycho-kinetic arts, big yellow buses, cafeterias serving food, clinics dispensing health and safety and counselors providing emotional growth and succor are surely an advancement over the pioneer home schooled and the one-room school house.  And yet, the numbers of home schooled kids are growing.  How can this be?

Because I so totally disagreed with the notion I assumed the worst about such parents.  I assumed they home schooled to avoid the racial and economic diversity found in public schools.  I assumed they home schooled because the tenets of their religious beliefs were in conflict with what we scientifically know to be true.  I assumed they home schooled out of a sense of protectionism for their children that nurtured co-dependency rather than independence.  I assumed they home schooled out of a sense of arrogance, a sense that as an individual parent they perceived they could provide this opportunity better than our hallowed public institution.  I believe none of the above reasons are moral reasons and therefore viewed the home school movement as an immoral movement devoted to nurturing and developing young people who remain dependent and cocooned.  Worse, remain ignorant.  It made as much sense to me as home medical treatment when no one in the house was a medical doctor.  Would a parent perform an appendectomy on their own child?  Surgeons know better than to do that.  What in the world is going on?

Then I met a lady at church.  I liked her.  I knew her family. I held her in high regard.  Then I learned she home schools her kids.  She does not have horns.

And then I looked at the data.  Turns out that home schooled students perform overall in the 77^th percentile academically.  They are in the 79^th and 73^rd percentiles respectively in reading and math.  That is really pretty good.  That means they are outperforming 79% of their peers on reading tests and 73% of their peers on math tests.  How could we fault such outcomes even if the assumptions regarding the parental decision-making to shelter and teach at home are spurious?  

Then I got it.  70% of the parents who home school their children have 4 or fewer kids at home.  The results of home schooled children on standardized tests is less a measure of the knowledge base and skills held by the parental teacher and more a confirmation of what we have long known to be the impact of class-size on learning and the impact of a student-centered approach to learning.  And that makes sense to me.

In our elementary schools we literally train our students to synchronize their bladders and stomachs.  A child may not pee nor eat until it is time for all their peers to pee or eat.  We do that because the number of kids so dramatically outnumbers the number of adults, and our facilities are not capable of handling random peeing or random breakfasts or lunches or snacks.  School administrators must organize those events so that every kid gets to pee and gets to eat regardless of their needs.  Home schooled kids have no such organization.  It is hard to imagine a parent denying their own child the opportunity to go to the bathroom once the child reports the need to do so.  The facilities can handle it.  They are not likely to get into mischief between where they learn and the bathroom.  It is totally safe to let them transverse the distance in their houses sans escort.  The same is true of hunger.  The parent knows what the kid ate and when.  If hours later the kids reports hunger issues the parent most likely concurs and provides nourishment.  Not in public schools.  In schools, they must wait their turn regardless of the degree of stomach emptiness.  Likewise, for the home schooled child if the light is too bright it can be dimmed, if too dimmed it can be enhanced.  If the chair is uncomfortable the kid can move.  If the kid is hot the thermostat will be adjusted.  The climate and the facilities are totally under the control of the parent/teacher. 

 

Not true in public schools where central chiller systems are controlled remotely by computer and everyone is assigned a temperature of median comfort, not too hot, not too cold, and if anyone, teacher or kid, is uncomfortable with the median they must dress appropriately.  The temperature is governed by the masses not the individual.  The food is delivered on a schedule not based on the individual’s needs or tastes.  Even the trip to the bathroom is standardized.  None of this is true for the home schooled kid.  For the home schooled kid even transportation is in the comfort of a personal vehicle where the driver can be creative and independent, not a large uncomfortable bus that must follow a given route on schedule.  They and their parents are masters of their instructional climate and their learning environment. 

And how about actual instruction?  Regardless of the parent’s degree of expertise in the curriculum and/or training in lesson planning, classroom management, blood borne pathogens, suicide prevention, teen dating issues, use of technology, review of resources, differentiated instruction, inclusion, IEP’s, state standards and preparation strategies for state mandated high stakes tests, the parents somehow teach their kids.  I believe they do so because virtually none of the required knowledge imposed on public school teachers would make any sense if they had a class of 3 and the class was totally homogenous.  Further, the parent can instantly detect when any of their progeny encounters a problem and move quickly to facilitate learning.  There may even be some long term benefits to teaching kids total problem solving and analysis once the curriculum dramatically exceeds the parents understanding.  Hard to picture a parent equipped to teach calculus, British literature, chemistry and economics, not to mention Spanish or French.  If the kid can learn to teach him or herself then they are miles ahead of others.

Why miles ahead?  Schools are structured around the shotgun approach.  Teachers are given 20 to 40 kids and told to teach them a certain subject where the content most likely has been prescribed by a government mandate.  The notion of teaching such a large group takes a back seat to crowd control.  The ability of a teacher to instantly detect and correct learning obstacles is virtually impossible with those numbers.  The ability of a teacher to customize the learning for each and every student in such a classroom is literally impossible.  Kids must learn to conform in order to learn.  They must learn to be quiet, keeps their hands to themselves, avoid distracting others, and never to ask questions that are to be covered 10 minutes from now because the learning must be regimented like the bladder.  It must be regimented because we are so outnumbered.  We dispense learning in a regimented manner all too quickly, before the bell rings, before the bathroom break, before lunch and before the pep rally.  Teachers do not have the ability to decide they need a little more time on this concept, or perhaps a little less.  There is little time for individualization of the learning for each kid.  Should a kid fall behind in learning, we develop tiers and kids’ schedules are modified to accommodate another round of instruction in a smaller setting.  Guess what?  That tends to work.

I see the home school movement in a very different light now.  I see it as daily confirmation for the need to achieve a minimal class size and individualized instruction.  Most of the parental complaints I receive as an administrator have to do with our standardization requirements.  Those would disappear if we could get class size to about 4 to 1, even 5 to 1.  On the other hand, most of the complaints from our constituency outside the school are that we make exceptions.  The public believes if we have a rule it should be universally enforced regardless of circumstance.  Catch 22.

Why don’t we do that?  Why don’t we give each teacher control of his or her thermostat and the bell schedule?  Why don’t we allow kids to go to the bathroom when they want or eat when they want?  Because we cannot afford to do so.  Our AC system is the cheapest money can buy and controllable so we do not consume too much electricity.  Our cadre of teachers tends to be the fewest the law allows triggering the largest class size the law allows.  (We could have more teachers if we paid them less, or vice-versa.)  Our bathrooms and cafeterias are not equipped to handle the trickle in approach, no pun intended.  We are not designed to be a customized service agency.  We are a mass producer.  We are such because of funding.  We have about 50 teachers on an elementary campus of 800 kids.  That is about 16 kids per teacher which is really pretty good for a public school.  (In reality, the numbers are much higher after we take out the specialists, PE, etc.)  Were we to provide a teacher for every 4 kids we would need 200 teachers.  We do not have a facility large enough or designed in a way that could accommodate 200 teachers.  We would not need classrooms but a series of little conference rooms each equipped with all the technology we now demand per classroom.  Our cost of increasing the number of teachers by a factor of 4 would be astronomical.  The entire district budget would have to be 4 times larger to accomplish this up and down the grade levels.  We cannot afford it, nor can the tax payer.

The parent of a home schooled child can.  He or she does not need facility modification.  The salary is non-existent, the class size at the micro level.  In this light, if the home schooled kids did not do better than the public school kids there would be a serious problem.

The problem of course, is that few of our most challenging students come from homes with parents equipped at all to provide home school instruction.  We have many students with disabilities, many students whose home life is chaotic, many students of poverty.  If we are serious about educating all kids we must seek to provide a learning climate more like home schooled kids enjoy.  We must seek to provide a class size teacher/pupil ratio that resembles what home schooled kids enjoy.  We must seek to provide a kid-centered school, a school aware of and sensitive to the individual kid’s learning and needs.  I firmly believe if we did so we would totally outperform home schooled students.  And private schooled students and charter schooled students.

It just would cost too much.  America has somehow been sold on the notion that when it comes to public schools the solution for improvement is not to throw money at it.  I disagree.  We have never tested that theory, or if we have it has been using the drop in the bucket method.  My system has a $12 million dollar budget.  Some years we get an additional $100,000 and that is nice, but it does not allow substantial overhaul of our current system.  Give me revenue of $48 million and I could really make a difference.

I still do not support home schooling.  I still do not think that home schooling is the solution to our challenge of educating all kids.  I still do not think we should encourage parents to home school.  I still worry about what those kids really learn and what enrichment experiences they really have.  But at least I think I know why some parents are so successful with home schooled kids.  And I still value my new friend who home schools her kids.  In fact, I owe her for making me take another look.

I thought all this out at home.  Guess you know what that makes me.

However, I much prefer to be in a public school.  An administrator in public school whose heart is in the right place can move the system toward an individualized kid orientation and away from ever more standardized rule enforcement and regimentation.  In fact, an administrator whose heart is in the right place can do the same for teachers.  As we can make class size lower, we should.  As we can make the learning experience more customized to the individual kid, we should.  As we can empower teachers to be more in control and responsible for their learning environment, we should.  We have not done so.  Yet.

To pee or not to pee, that is the question.  Time we started arguing for the resources to provide the appropriate learning environment to always answer that question with, “It is up to you.”