Homeschooling

[grandvizier1006]

In my opinion, you should be careful with homeschooling. It can go great or horribly wrong depending on how you do it. Some parents can do a great job and make great educators, others are better off sending their kids to a legitimate school. I think the motives and the curriculum are the most important aspects to consider: are you doing this because your children can't learn in a public school (reasonable) or are you afraid of the secular word? ( a bit more paranoid). I've run into some homeschoolers and some seem like great people with a lot of intelligence and talent, and yet I feel like maybe their parents made them miss out on important things in regular school.

My two years of semi-homeschooling (which didn't involve my parents teaching at all) were difficult because I was kind of isolated. I want to dispel the myth that homeschoolers have no social skills--those develop in a person's brain (or not) regardless of whether they interact with family or strangers. But you do have to worry about what sort of beliefs they grow up with and how that will affect them in the future. If you live in a blue state and you raised them on the five fundamentals...well, things might not go well for them.

Another thing is that I think most states need requirements that the parents be certified teachers, if the parents are the ones doing the teaching. Some places won't notice or care if your children never showed up the next school day, but I think that's dangerous.

 

[beaverpond]

I used to be a school teacher at the elementary education level. My daughter has struggled in some subjects and could not keep up. The school principal used her test scores and publically humiliated her in front of other staff, students, and parents. I went ballistic how a principal could do this to a student. The principal then tried to do this to me. It backfired on her. As I would not allow her to do this to me in a public setting. I said to her that if you have something to say to me, you will do so in a conference room and not in a public setting and if you have a problem with that I can bring in my attorney and we can all sit down to discuss this with the school board present in an executive session. When we were done, within a month we put in for a transfer of school and were denied, then we put in for transfer of district and were denied...we were denied by the old superintendent and current principal. However, when the new superintendent came on board he was willing to allow change of school to one that was 24 miles one way. That just did not work for us. So we decided to homeschool. Our neighbors before they moved had given us all their homeschool textbooks from grade 4 through grade 8 as well as other resources. Our daughter was at grade 2 in language arts and tested at grade 5 at the end of the year, this was a weak area when we started. Another weak area when we started was math, and she started off at grade 1 and tested at grade 4 at the end of the year. In history and science she tested at grade 6 at the end of the year and started off at grade 4. She may be a little of all over the place, but she technically is going into 5th grade this year. So when looking at how much ground she gained this year, I think she did well. In our state we have to state that we will be homeschooling and send in our test scores at the end of the year. I know some states there is no accountability, but our state is not one of them.

I have talked to other parents and staff at this school that have seen this happen before and have heard other parents tell of similar stories. Staff has said that since the superintendent has come on that a lot of administrators and staff have left the district, unfortunately not ones I like to see gone. When the new superintendent took over I did have a private meeting with him telling him what happened. He said that this is not the first time he has heard about this type of situation and it will come to an end. No student will be treated this way is what he told me. He told me that in the past there was no accountability for the administrators and there will be. The only accountability was with the teachers is what he told me. He told me he had drawn up an extensive yearly appraisal form for all district employees, from custodians to kitchen workers to bus drivers to teachers to secretaries to administrators and more. This is something that should have been done a long time ago. Before under union contract there were automatic pay raises and therefore no need for a yearly appraisal.

Yet, when you look at those parents and families who are homeschooling. We have to register, we have to show what grade our kid(s) will be in, and what their test scores are at the end of the year. This kind of speaks how the parents are doing at homeschooling their kids. Mind you these tests have to be given by a state certified teacher from within the school district that you live in and the parents must pay the fee that goes along with it.