Home Schooling Exploding if You Were Taught Math at Home
The innumeracy hurts.
A WaPo report titled “Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education” is making the rounds. It’s topped by this graph (the original of which is animated):
It begins
Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.
and is followed by this handy-dandy infographic:
Immediately, I’m surprised that WaPo is making sweeping pronouncements based on such incomplete data. There is no data presented for 19 states, including some of our most populous. Still, there’s been an explosion in places like DC, New York, and California that aren’t exactly teeming with the Evangelical types we tend to associate with homeschooling.
They assert:
The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.
Let’s put a pin on that for now.
As to the missing states:
Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.
The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country’s school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison.
The resulting analysis — which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.
So, this is obviously wildly problematic in terms of education policy—it’s simply nuts to abandon children who aren’t enrolled in public schools while hoping for the best—there’s obviously not much researchers can do about that. To be sure, it makes extrapolating the findings to those states an iffy proposition but we can still draw useful conclusions about the districts for which data is available.
And boy do they draw conclusions:
- In states with comparable enrollment figures,the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
- Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography anddemographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city ofAnderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
- In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.
- Despite claims that thehome-schooling boom is a resultof failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increaseswere similar regardless of school performance.
The last of these doesn’t surprise me in the least. On an entirely anecdotal basis, I live in and adjacent to some of the most highly-rated school districts in the country and constantly hear parents complaining about the quality of the schools. This has escalated considerably, including in my own household, since the school closing fiasco during the pandemic, which highlighted just how much of the high-performing nature of our schools is a function of highly educated, affluent parents rather than superior teachers and administrators.
Regardless,
Because they do not cover every state, the figures cannot provide a total count of the country’s home-schooled children. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling’s dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate.
Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.
By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
Well . . . okay.
But here’s the thing: all of this sturm and drang is based on percentage growth. Which is rather meaningless without a baseline, which very little of this very long report attempts to provide.
The Census Bureau reports that 75.2 million students were enrolled in school during the 2021-22 school year. So, “between 1.9 million and 2.7 million” is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.6 percent of the whole. That’s not a staggering amount.
Since the Post is based in DC, we get this helpful infographic:
DC’s 108% increase is the biggest in the country. But that’s starting from an absurdly low baseline of 469. For the only school year for which we’re given the requisite data, 2021-22 (coincidentally, also the peak of the homeschooling phenomenon), we see 1126 homeschoolers our of 88,626 students—a whopping 1.27%.
This . . . does not seem alarming. Like at all.
And I come to that conclusion despite sharing the prejudices of the report authors and the interviewed activists sounding alarm bells. To wit:
Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.
Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.
“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”
The remainder of the report, which is quite long, is anecdotal and rather obviously cherry-picked. But, again, I share this concern:
Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.
“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and she is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice.
“I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”
Then again, given what the Florida government is doing to public schools in that state, I’m not sure the home-schooled kids aren’t better off. Even where an ideological agenda isn’t at work, there’s a lot not to like about public education, which is still operating on models built for a very different society. Long breaks that interrupt learning. A whole lot of emphasis on sitting down and shutting up. Constant standardized testing.
But it’s just nuts to think that the alternative is to let parents, of whatever qualification, design their own curriculum and hope for the best.
Just want to point out that highly educated, affluent parents have the time, the resources, and the desire to focus on their children’s education, while parents in the lower economic strata are more constrained in what they can and cannot do, they just don’t have the resources to make a difference in their child’s education.
Even the best of teachers can only do so much to make a difference, and I can guarantee that even the most dedicated parent is going to hit some walls in their child’s education.
Test scores across states as disparate as California and Oklahoma all dropped, with no correlation between the state’s closure policies (or general redness-blueness).
I’m not going to say that it wasn’t a fiasco (Washington State had bars open, but not schools…), but it looks like the bulk of the drop in measured education was due to other reasons than simply school closure. (Trauma, dead teachers, the existence of masks, phase of sunspot cycle… lots of possibilities, some more plausible than others)
I get it, closures should be a major factor, but the data we have doesn’t seem to bear that out. (If there are more granular studies at the district level rather than just state data, perhaps it paints a clearer picture)
This bit of “common wisdom” about closures is a pet peeve of mine because I think we have a generation that might need help and we are not really concerned with the real causes (which I assume to be trauma related, but have no evidence…)
U-S-A! U-S-A!
I suspect this post will be catnip to at least one regular commenter. I’m popping some corn and looking forward to a hearty defense of the idea that any parent is more qualified to create an excellent curriculum than the liberal bureaucratic ideologues who run our school systems.
There are days I think innumeracy must be a requirement for J school. Or law school. The smallest component of whatever is often the one with the highest percentage growth, simply because of the low base number. Also, too, the growth of public schools is determined by growth of the school age population.
We just had a massive, national level experiment with homeschooling and the results were not good. Most parents arent especially good teachers and most kids dont learn well that way. For the combo of good parents and good teachers it is probably better than most schools. My family is huge and largely evangelicals so there are several parents homeschooling. For one cousin his kids have done very well, couple of engineers and teachers. 2 others did OK. Then there is my brother who decided that since the girls were going to grow up to stay home and raise families, they didnt teach them any math beyond multiplication and division. Almost no science. They did end up needing to work so they joined Mom at McDonalds. Nothing especially wrong with that but they ended up with pretty limited options.
Steve
@steve:
I wonder if it ever occurs to people there’s more to teaching than knowing a subject or reading from a textbook. And whether those who attempt home schooling also go in for home plumbing, car repair, surgery, accounting, etc.
Oh, and even well educated parents can be abysmally ignorant. One time in the 80s discussing diet at the table, one of my siblings asked my mom, “do you even know what cholesterol is?” She replied she did, and showed him a magazine Kellogg’s add that said “cholesterol is a substance found in blood.”
Full Disclosure – We homeschooled our kids for a year while traveling full-time, and did a hybrid program with one of our sons for another year (pre-covid). For our younger son, we also did a virtual program through the state of Florida. Our two oldest are now in college, and the younger son is in the local public school.
Homeschoolers generally perform better on average on standardized tests than public school kids.
But there are a lot of caveats.
– Homeschoolers tend to have parents who are more educated and are wealthier.
– Homeschoolers generally are not single parents.
– Homeschooling is difficult, so a certain type of motivated parent will stick with it, and this type of person is more likely to be successful.
– Homeschooling works well for parents in certain situations – in my own experience, I knew a lot of military families that homeschooled because of the disruption of constant moves of military life. Homeschooling provides more stability, and the military lifestyle is often hostile to the military spouse having a successful career, making it a more viable option.
There are more. Of course, people will always point to the handful of nuts that teach their kids bullshit, but on the other hand, one can point to public schools that are utter failures as well.
@Matt Bernius:
Not everything is about curriculum. I tend to think curriculum is less important than other factors. It’s also important to point out that many districts outsource their curriculum to the private sector because it is cheaper to buy a curriculum (and associated materials) than to develop it in-house. And a lot of homeschoolers also buy off-the-shelf curricula. The incentives for purchasing off-the-shelf curricula may not align with things other than best education practices.
Anyway, I’m probably in the minority here in that I don’t think there is anything wrong with homeschooling. We did it for a short time to align with our situation, but it’s not something that’s right for our family – but a lot of that is because we selected into a great public school system.
I agree with James that the industrial one-size-fits-all model of public education doesn’t work for many kids. When we moved back to Colorado after retiring from the military (and our year of travel), we chose a school district that had several alternative school options as part of the public school system. And those options became essential for us during Covid for our middle child, who could not handle the remote and hybrid options that were available at the standard school. He would have had a “lost year” were it not for that option or, absent that, our ability to suck up the cost of private school or go back to homeschooling during that time.
Point being, kids aren’t all the same, and they have different needs and don’t all learn the same.
@OzarkHillbilly: @Gustopher: I’m not making any macro-level judgments about the impact of closures per se on educational outcomes. It just opened a lot of our eyes to just how lazy and mediocre most of our kids’ teachers were. My oldest’s teacher moved to her beach house and managed to have Internet outages half the time and thus be unable to do her job. No consequences. They took every Friday off, just because (this was school policy, not the teacher). When schools were finally opened, months after vaccinations were provided to teachers, they did it in the most half-assed way possible. Many parents came away with the not unreasonable impression that the teachers were not in this thing for the kids.
Seems many parents are taking heed of advice from the civil rights era
But also, we are in the area of diversity. And in diverse areas, the public school is deeply political and even was a century ago:
Mises is writing of what he saw such mixed nationality public schooling causing in the mid-1910s Europe and the aftermath.
In the modern era, we have seen the result of desk audits by students where they record what they do in 10-15 min increments which revealed that only about 15 minutes of the 50 minute class period even in a well disciplined class is on actual instruction, the rest being settling, admin, diversions, etc. A student wanting to learn can better spend their time with online classes, as Glenn Reynolds’ daughter did, home schooling, etc. And they have time for other life enhancing activities such as internships rather than pep rallies.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen lawsuits over the schools lack of maintaining the learning environment through effective school discipline. After all, failing to control a disruptive student is depriving the other students of their right to an education. Or is the “right” to schooling with the incentive of compliance and getting good grades as Paul Graham wrote about in his December 2019 essay, ‘The Lesson To Unlearn’?
After all, a school can limit what a student wears if it is deemed to disrupt the learning environment, but schools are permitted to fail, year after year, to maintain a learning environment in the classroom with reasonable efforts made to end disruptions. Schools now will remove all the students who are there to learn from a classroom and leave the misbehaving student in the room. So how does that maintain the learning environment for the kids trying to learn? A lawsuit should be filed with the settlement a court mandated voucher program for students to leave a school that can’t or won’t maintain the learning environment.
The real change is coming. Kids who haven’t been broken to the classroom as those in classroom instruction are by 3rd grade are coming up and since they haven’t been trained to passivity in learning great things might be in the offing.
@JKB: I’m curious now. What is the idea or ideas that you think are promulgated by public schools and that you object to? I’m really looking for a short list, not a catalog.
@JKB:
This could explain how so many citizens have fallen for the total ignorance and depravity that is the siren song of your boyfriend Trump.
An anecdote: Around a decade or so ago, I was in a book club that had a varied membership. Two of the women were homeschooling. One was a secular home schooler, who had a teaching degree and simply realized that her two kids were not learning what they needed to be learning in a traditional school setup. She home schooled both of them, augmenting with a program called VLACS (virtual learning academy charter school) when she needed to, particularly when they reached advanced high school courses. The other was a religious home schooler, who thought the public schools were “godless” and wanted her kids’ education to be rooted in Christianity. I couldn’t even read emails this woman wrote, they were so replete with spelling and grammatical errors.
There’s a likely a fairly limited number of parents who actually know what they are doing when it comes to educating their kids, and a lot more who think they know what they are doing.
@Andy:
I’m going to contest this, especially the “educated” part considering the significant religious segment that homeschools. If one is second-gen or more home schooled that maybe went to Liberty or Covenant, are we counting them as “educated” given what the term is meant to convey?
We really need a term for homeschooling for the benefit of the child vs homeschooling for religious or political reasons. I suspect you’ll find the former is a better match for your assertion then the later.
Texas is debating voucher scheme where state money would be available to subsidize parents sending their kids to private schools. There is even money (about $1000) being proposed for homeschoolers. However:
Voucher proposal spurs mix of excitement, wariness in Texas home schooling community
No one ever thinks they can do brain surgery, but everyone thinks they can teach. It’s one of those occupations that will always be disrespected because on the surface it looks like Mom talking to kids. Rather like how people think they can write a book because they know lots of words, or think they can work in a restaurant kitchen because everyone loves their lasagna. But jobs tend to be less about the superficial and more about the grind.
When I used to tour on YA books I could waltz into a school, set up my laptop and projector, ignore anything like a curriculum, put on a 40 minute show with cool video and pix and stories and comic bits, drop in some anarchy, and maybe do two shows. I’ll never see those kids again. How they do in school is not my problem. All of that is easy, and I’ll get laughs and applause and sell some books.
And if that’s what teaching was, yes, anyone could do it. But if you told me I had to put on that same show five or six times a day, five days a week, for eight or nine months? That’s not just a difference of degree, it’s a difference of kind. Can I teach a single class one time? Sure. Can I teach a year of school? I’d hang myself first. Teaching is best done by teachers.
@KM:
There are many college-educated people who are also religious, and the vast majority of those didn’t go to Liberty or Covenant. And the number of graduates from those schools is small compared to the number of people who homeschool. So I don’t think the implication you’re making has much merit.
@KM:
However, looking at some additional data, I think it’s valid to question some of my bullet points. I don’t have time to dig deeply, but the gist seems to be that parents of homeschoolers are both more likely to have a college degree or higher, but also more likely to have less than a high-school education. Income also seems to be a more complicated picture.
So I won’t stand by those particular conclusions.
@Andy:
Careful now! I said something similar long time ago and got kicked out of a fairly prestigious teacher’s program for it. (But yes, this idea is a real thing.)
@JKB:
As much as I don’t hate having to disagree about 15 minutes of “actual instruction” (by that do you mean direct instruction–teacher telling students how to perform a task, give targeted assistance, etc.?), fifteen minutes is pretty standard in remote, distance, online, incremental/progressive self-instruction, too, given that part of the “etc.” that you gloss over includes guided practice (which is often incorporated into the “actual instruction” portion of the hour) and independent practice (which greater numbers of students than in the past are finding themselves able to perform with almost complete autonomy–undoubtedly because of how bad their teachers are 😛 ).
On the other hand, I wait in breathless anticipation of you bringing your other killer citation to bear–where the professor (at UCLA???) decries how schools have turned into factories where students sit listening to dry lectures (direct instruction) so that they can memorize factoids when that time should be theirs to explore the topics and develop ways to use the information being presented.
@Andy: Looking at the data you provided, I would note that the practice of combining homeschooling with virtual learning settings and with part-time home/part-time in class instruction has probably expanded the opportunities for all cohorts of parents to avail themselves of whatever benefits they may imagine homeschooling offers. Until I came back from Korea, students and parents usually were compelled to pick only one–home, conventional classroom, alternative classroom. As options have expanded, opportunities have expanded. Maybe you’re onto something with that “kids aren’t all the same, and they have different needs and don’t all learn the same” idea. 😉
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
My personal experience supports that, especially with my middle child, who never did well in traditional school. Meanwhile, my oldest thrived in traditional school, and – so far – my youngest is doing pretty well.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’ve been told many times I should teach English.
Beyond fluency, I’m not qualified. I lack precise, structured, comprehensive knowledge of the rules of grammar, for one thing. I think my grammar is ok, as I usually can make myself understood. But that doesn’t qualify me to teach.
One time in high school, a teacher asked me to give a refresher overview on the basics of BASIC to some classmates he couldn’t fit into his schedule. This was in the mid-80s. The final exam would be all “write a short program that does X.” So aside from going over the list of commands, I set various examples of short programs (a chronometer, simple line geometry, etc.)
As luck had it, the examples I used made up about 75% of the test. So they all passed.
John Oliver just did a bit on homeschooling a few weeks ago. It’s interesting to see some of the concerns he covered being expressed here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI
@Kathy:
I’ve had suggestions that I should teach writing. Thing is: I don’t know how I do it, how the hell am I going to teach someone else?
How to write a novel according to me: 1) Come up with an idea that’s executable and potentially profitable. 2) Write it. 3) Cash check. 4) Piss it all away. 5) Do it again.
Kathy- We have a training program. What I have found is that not everyone is a good teacher and even among teachers aptitudes vary a lot. Some people are good at giving lecture, some horrible. Some are good at teaching principles one on one, other are not. Some are good at teaching physical skills, some are not. That last is very hard to do well. You need to let people try to do stuff but you cant let them harm the pt and you cant let them take all day since there is other work to do. Then some people worry about the feedback from students and residents if you dont let them try stuff.
Steve
“These trained teachers suck at their job! You know who can do better? My un-trained ass!”
Smart.
@Kathy:
Interesting thing (at least in my state)–people who want a credential to teach English/Language Arts (2 different subject areas BTW) have to take at least one grammar course* for the credential because most native speakers lack precise, structured, comprehensive knowledge of the rules of grammar. We don’t call them rules anymore either. We usually call them “standards” or “conventions.” Noam Chomsky wrecked the whole rules of grammar thing when he observed that diction, word choice, grammar choice, vocabulary, pronunciation, and a host of other qualities change depending on
to whom we are talkingwho we are talking to, where we are, where we are from, what we’re talking about, and a host of other factors. Written discourse adds an additional degree of complexity to the task. Take, “you could teach English” as the compliment that it’s intended as.*I took 4 courses while I was in Grad School, but I just like the variations on the topic they all add. I never cared for diagramming sentences though–too labor intensive–until I was taught symbols that are superimposed over the block of text itself. Doing it that way is fun. (Part of what I liked about warehousing was that part of the skill was in discovering the most effortless ways to handle and stack the product for shipping. I lean toward lazy, given the opportunity.)
@Kathy:
I do a fair amount of proofreading for clients. There have been times when I’ve known something is incorrect, but had to look up the exact rule to explain WHY it is incorrect. It doesn’t happen often, but the need to explain things like parallel construction and transitive verbs etc. has forced me to back into learning more about grammar rules I just sort of…grok, because I write so much.
@Matt Bernius: @JKB: An hour and 5 minutes.
The Von Mises quote was an unexpected bonus.
@Jen: When I was teaching composition, I needed to consult both grammar handbooks and the MLA and APA handbooks frequently. Even if most of your day involves keeping track of that kind of information it’s hard to manage it all.
@Andy: I almost brought up some of the same points, but did not have personal experience with it. The people I know who have home-schooled generally joined a home-schooling group and had found/bought curricula to follow, and for older kids found ways to supplement with online or eventually sent them off to a real brick-and-mortar high school. Anecdotally, those families were either military or highly successful or both, but my sample points mean little.
At least you’re not JKB, who apparently views public school teachers as an enemy. Now that’s a sad way to go through life.
Oh, I’ll cop to public school administrators being the enemy. As for teachers, many parents take issue to the point Biden’s FBI run domestic terrorism operations against those who raise their voice at a school board meeting.
Better to pull your kid out of the public school, then no need to go hat in hand to your enemy on the school board. Or as some have done, throw the bums out and get elected yourself.
@Franklin: John covers all that in his video on home schooling. So your sample size while small is in line with the bigger picture.
@Kathy: @Jen:
Besides some very basic points, in my area we did not get taught many rules of grammar in English classes. We learned more English grammar in French class than we ever did in English class.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
@Jen:
@Pete S:
I took grammar in Spanish class all through elementary school. I couldn’t teach Spanish, either. I learned English with a private teacher, who probably also knew no formal grammar since he didn’t teach me any (and come to think of it, academically he probably wasn’t qualified).
I have a warm regard for him still, but his best lesson, which is also what I advise anyone learning a language, is to practice it by reading it, listening to it, and speaking or writing it.
Any person fluent in any language, knows good enough grammar implicitly. Otherwise they wouldn’t be fluent. The thing is that’s kind of acquired with practice as outlined above.
@JKB:
“Have you ever heard of… fluoridation, Mandrake?”
@Kathy:
And yet, I work with a rocket scientist* who cannot, for any amount of money or peer pressure, determine when to say “I” and when to say “me”. Flipping a coin would be more accurate. Native English speaker from Texas.
*Literally — PhD in Aerospace Engineering.
I usually try to avoid poking this commentator,, but sometimes…
@JKB:
Dude, there are several comments I would/could make, but I’m trying very hard to be a better Luddite (less sociopathic). I’ll just note the juxtaposition of Malcom X with Von Mises was unexpected and entertaining.
@JKB:
I don’t view admin as the enemy. Personally, I am perfectly capable of disagreeing with someone without vilifying them. On the other hand, I am not willing to view anyone who comes into a meeting of unarmed civilians with a weapon as anything other than a threat deserving of removal.
@DrDaveT:
Me find that hard to believe.
@Kathy:
I’d be making less money if this were true. I find quite a few grammar mistakes when I’m reviewing client documents–some of them enabled by Word’s “grammar check,” which *frequently* confuses its/it’s and others.
@Michael Reynolds:
And, of course, it’s not even doing that same show five or six times a day. It’s a new 6-8 hour show, every day, for 9 months out of the year. Sure, sometimes one day’s show will feed off of yesterday’s, but lots of times it’s a brand new one. Don’t worry though, you can repeat your shows once…a year from now when you have a new audience. So you got that going for you.
Also anytime an audience member has an issue, a snotty nose, a poopy butt, you also have to take care of that.
I’ve made a few smart decisions in my life, many dumb ones. One of the smartest was getting my teaching degree but declining to take the licensing exam. I graduated at the height of the great recession, when jobs were in short supply. If I was licensed to teach I would’ve joined the profession, ultimately hated it, and would have done a great disservice to whichever kids were my students.
@Franklin:
I’m a big fan of public education, but there need to be other options if public schools can’t meet the needs of all students.
@Andy: Agreed. We put our middle child in private school for good reason, I think.
@Neil Hudelson: I graduated the year that the Seattle school district cut its staffing by 70% over the summer. Fortunately, I’d been kicked out of the school of ed at my university (see yesterday’s comment) so it didn’t matter to me.
15 years later, instead of staying in the wholesale produce business, I took the road less traveled by and it did make all the difference. Mostly loved all 23 years even though I worked mostly term to term until I got to Korea.
I’m not that huge a fan of public schools, but most private schools have the same issue, from my perspective.
That is that they are modeled after the assembly line, with each student being moved from one station (we call them grades) to the next, where the next bundle of equipment (which is called learning) is installed.
In this computer age, we should not find it difficult to track what students are managing and what they aren’t, skills wise. Stuff that isn’t working gets more work, or maybe gets a pin in it meaning, “we’ll get back to it”. Stuff that is working gets noted and the student moves on.
And yet, I’m not a fan of homeschooling either. So much of the benefit of my own schooling was social in nature. I mastered the academic material easily, getting along with other kids was harder. It was worth the work, though.
@Kathy: I wonder if it ever occurs to people there’s more to teaching than knowing a subject or reading from a textbook.
In my experience as an educator it doesn’t. The parents inevitably know the RIGHT way to do it.
@Jay L Gischer: That is that they are modeled after the assembly line, with each student being moved from one station (we call them grades) to the next, where the next bundle of equipment (which is called learning) is installed.
Silicon Valley has a bunch of schools that are trying to address this problem. It’s unclear whether they have been successful. And at the same time, age-based cohorts are an excellent way to teach soft skills like kindness and organization. I really don’t know how we would set things up otherwise; we’re too big.