Homeschoolers Forum

TxBec | 07/23/2002 | TxBec

[TxBec]

Do you think she can take on both? Maybe she can just do the Latin exercises/puzzles/games at www.quia.com ..

It won't be as formal, but she'll probably find that they help her with Spanish. I speak Spanish and I have two young boys who are learning it (grudgingly.) I point out the similarities between everyday Spanish words and their Latin counterparts, even ones I never stopped to think were almost exactly the same. If she excels in Spanish, Latin should be much, much easier when she gets to the point of formal studies.

[Artist]

Thanks for your #264. Great ideas!

I buy distressed art books at yard sales and cut the pictures out for my kids to use in various projects. It seems to make the art more personal for them, and they can identify different artist's styles quite readily. I'll never forget my youngest (as a toddler) yelling "Mommy, Mona Lisa!" everytime we ran across her. :^)

[homeschool mama]

I'll check out that site later this week, Tx. Hubby and I took time last night to look over everything and we do need to streamline some areas. I appreciate your suggestions and encouragement. :o)

On my way to see my nephew sworn in to the Navy. :o) Electronic Warfare Intelligence will be his field. They're getting an awesome young man that will do this country proud.

[TxBec]

I'm bouncing off the wall here... (in a good way)... I called today and I have TICKETS! It'll be a Loo-oo-ng drive, but well worth it!

[homeschool mama]

Oh sure...just gloat all you want, Tx! LOL...this is way cool! When're you going? You *must* tell all after you visit, ya know! I saved the site so we can peek when studying that era this year.

[ppaul]

Click on pic for

Another wonderful resource:

[TxBec]

thanks!

[TxBec]

A couple links...

Plan would shield home-school information

Virtual schools hit turbulence in state (WI)

[TxBec]

ping (had to re-do my *gasp* deleted ping list)... think I have all the names back on now. whew.

[TxBec]

I'll give you a full report! I'll be going in about two weeks.

[TxBec]

found this link about latin programs and thought you may want to see it

[TxBec]

Came across this ...

---

From: OHEC (Ohio Home Education Coalition)

Many of you may be aware that charter schools are becoming a booming business in Ohio. And jumping full force into the ring is Bill Bennett's K12 Corporation in the form of Ohio Virtual Academy. Who has been courted and flattered relentlessly these last few months? Homeschoolers, as you are well aware if you've gone to your mailbox recently.

Bennett attended and spoke at a Columbus open house for K12 in June. There he said:

“Make no mistake. If you enroll in The Ohio Virtual Academy, you will no longer be a homeschooler. You will be enrolling in a public charter school.”

We agree. If you enroll in OHVA, you will not be homeschooling, but enrolled in publicly-funded school and accountable in the same manner as required by public schools. As we have stated before, homeschooling has never been determined by the building.

State-aligned curriculum is delivered on-line. OHVA parents will keep daily attendance logs which track the number of minutes logged each day in each school subject, tightly tracking state attendance requirements. Performance requirements will also be tracked as well to meet state standards. OHVA enrollees will take both the Ohio Proficiency Tests and will voluntarily take the coming Ohio Diagnostic Tests (required of traditional public schools but not charter schools, yet), to be administered beginning in kindergarten.

Also, most parents in the homeschooling community consider themselves to be a parent who loves being with and learning with their children and dedicated to their lives. In the K12 contract, however, parents are "guides," "academic coaches," or "team members." Hired teachers are the "team head." Among the so-called advantages to the "team teaching" approach are the "alignment between school and home" and "greater teacher insights into student's home and personal issues."

Bryan Flood of K12 is quoted in "Cyber Schools Find a Niche" by Greg Toppo:

"This is not home school - this is public school with a parent being the primary instructor," He stated further that the schools use only certified teachers and a "...rugged, rigorous assessment system."

Since K12 freely admits that enrollment in a charter school is not homeschooling, perhaps you feel that we should leave well enough alone. After all, homeschoolers have for years supported educational choices for all families. But, other choices should never be at the expense of true educational freedom in homeschooling. Clearly, homeschooling as we have known it in Ohio will be transformed into enrollment, unless homeschoolers reclaim homeschooling. Why?

Well, despite Bennett's no-doubt-about-it statement above, the registrar at the very same Columbus open house asked attendees as they volunteered their mailing addresses: "How many children will you be homeschooling this fall." A presenter at many venues other than the Columbus open house in June was a homeschooling father from Tennessee (where charter schools are not established in law) who uses K12 curriculum. During all the presentations, homeschoolers are held up again and again as models of success.

Additionally, K12 was first established as a curriculum provider to homeschoolers (at one-sixth the cost to taxpayers, by the way). And, remember those multiple mailings already coming to your home and probably NOT coming to your neighbors who don't homeschool.

In very short order, Bennett has positioned himself to be perceived as a spokesperson for homeschooling, instead of the marketer of products. The August, 2002, edition of Better Homes and Gardens magazine includes an article entitled “Learning from Homeschooling Families” (pp. 78-79). Like thousands of "homeschooling" articles before this in mainstream publications, it opens with the reference to a named-homeschooler who is succeeding at home instead of attending public school, tells us “how many” we are, what percentage of homeschoolers are getting into college, our performance on tests and that homeschoolers win spelling bees. Typical and tedious...until you turn the page. There, a picture of Bennett and text which certainly suggests that Bennett is a “voice” for home education, telling us the “most important lesson” of homeschooling and stating that his for-profit K12 is “for homeschoolers.”

Requests by K12 to be included in homeschooling conferences as curriculum vendors, in Ohio and other states, are being declined, including: Christian Home Educators of Ohio, Christian Parents Education Fellowship (Findlay, OH), Wisconsin Parents Association, Illinois Christian Home Educators, and the Christian Home Education Association of California. In fact, in keeping with their stated mission, CHEA of California canceled K12 founder, Bill Bennett, as their keynote speaker last year because of the linkage between K12 and publicly funded programs.

K12’s intent to capitalize on the homeschooling “market” is evident when, after being declined by conference planners, they booked open houses in the Columbus hotel where homeschoolers were lodging while attending the Christian Home Educators of Ohio annual convention. (K12 used this same tactic during this year’s conference for the CHEA group in California.)

Those marketing these schools to homeschoolers and those now using these charter schools and wanting to call them homeschooling claim we have no copyright on the good name of homeschooling. They fail to realize that homeschooling is so much more than school at home. How do you "copyright" each family's own educational philosophy?

It has been suggested that if homeschoolers do not like that the name homeschooling is being taken, maybe we should create and craft a new term. Our questions in return: If what a charter school has to offer is so superior to true homeschooling, why not widely market to everyone? Why not readily and repeatedly be forthcoming that this is a means of school done at a site remote from a traditional building? Why not proudly call it school? Why not market it with presenters who are actually charter school participants, who don't dance around very clear distinctions? Why make any references to homeschooling at all if that is not what you are?

Could it be that homeschoolers paying $1,200 to K12 for the curriculum doesn't touch the $5,800 OHVA/K12 will receive in state and federal funds for each child they enroll this year? Other charter schools are receiving similar amounts. We do not know yet if they will be successful, but to be sure, they are public schools, schools in the home that are controlled by public school regulations and paid for by our tax dollars.

Because of K12's massive homeschooler database and targeted mailings, you are probably already well aware of the mailings going out this week. Beginning August 16, more open houses around Ohio are scheduled (see below). Bill Bennett will travel to several of these additional venues around Ohio to promote the OHVA school. It is very important that homeschoolers take the time to attend one of these meetings and ask some of the important questions we have raised above.

Much as we would like to deny it, the only way to protect the good name of homeschooling in Ohio, and therefore, to preserve the long-standing regulations we have enjoyed, the only way to not allow homeschooling to be equated with charter schools, cyber schools or any other publicly-funded school is to reclaim homeschooling now.

Ohio Virtual Academy (K12) Parent Information Sessions
Fri 16-Aug Toledo_2:00 p.m.
Clarion Hotel Westgate
3536 Secor Road
419-535-7070
Bennett will speak.

Mon 19-Aug Columbus 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
Holiday Inn Worthington
175 Hutchinson Avenue
614-885-3334
Bennett will speak.

Tue 20-Aug Dayton 1:00 p.m.
Marriott Dayton
1414 S. Patterson Blvd
937-223-1000
Bennett will speak.

Tue 20-Aug Youngstown 2:00 p.m.
Holiday Inn Boardman
7410 South Avenue
330-726-1611

Tue 20-Aug Cincinnati 7:00 p.m.
Embassy Suites Blue Ash
4554 Lake Forest Drive
513-733-8900
Bennett will speak.

Wed 28 Aug Columbus 12:00 noon
Holiday Inn Columbus
4560 Hilton Corporate Drive
614-868-1380


Thu 29 Aug Toledo 1:00 p.m.
Holiday Inn Toledo West
2340 S. Reynolds Road
419-865-1361

[Lyford]

In very short order, Bennett has positioned himself to be perceived as a spokesperson for homeschooling, instead of the marketer of products. The August, 2002, edition of Better Homes and Gardens magazine includes an article entitled ?Learning from Homeschooling Families? (pp. 78-79). Like thousands of "homeschooling" articles before this in mainstream publications, it opens with the reference to a named-homeschooler who is succeeding at home instead of attending public school, tells us ?how many? we are, what percentage of homeschoolers are getting into college, our performance on tests and that homeschoolers win spelling bees. Typical and tedious...until you turn the page. There, a picture of Bennett and text which certainly suggests that Bennett is a ?voice? for home education, telling us the ?most important lesson? of homeschooling and stating that his for-profit K12 is ?for homeschoolers.?

K12 is a curriculum provider. K12 is not a charter school, private school or home school. It is a curriculum, available on-line. Period.

[OldFriend]

I am pretty sure he said each year of his curriculum costs about $1,000. Pretty steep for families with several children. However, some may very well feel it's well worth buying Bennett's expertise.

[goodieD]

Thank you so much for this heads up. I had no idea this is what Bennett had in mind. When I first heard about this, I was kind of hoping he had become so disenchanted with public schools, that he found an alternative. This is just online public school.

[hsmomx3]

I like to think of myself as being in control of my kids education. I also prefer to pick and choose my own curriculum.

I know a woman who is using Bennett's program, and she said that it is a lot of work, especially for a 2nd grader. She said it takes all day to complete a days worth of work.

[Lyford]

I am pretty sure he said each year of his curriculum costs about $1,000.

I think that's about right, if you purchase the entire curriculum. They've been around $895 at home school fairs. But you don't have to buy the whole thing. We're using the science curriculum. (I forget how much it is for the one subject, but it's sure not $1000...)

[Domestic Church]

We've had Bill Bennett's K-12 here in PA as a cyber charter for a year and it is stacking up better than some of the other cyber charters but last year many in the HS community who tested the cyber charter waters jumped back into the heavily regulated HS community when they really got a feel for the yokes in cyber PS schooling.

The beauty in HSing is the flexibility around the needs of the child and family. If a curriculum or book doesn't fit, we search and glean and try something else right away. No need to go through channels and give elaborate reasons to an educrat.

There will be a need for cyber PSing especially if we have bioterror but once a family gets a HSing taste of real learning in freedom according to the particular family philosophy or faith, these cyber charters are too limiting for those not already in the PS system.

[Lyford]

We've had Bill Bennett's K-12 here in PA as a cyber charter for a year

To reiterate - someone may be running a cyber charter school, using the K-12 curriculum, but it's not K-12. K-12 is a curriculum company. They'll sell it to public, private, charter or home schoolers, but it's just a curriculum.

[TxBec]

Some can sail over high school

By Laura Vanderkam

Noshua Watson has crammed much into her 24 years of life: four years in college, four years in graduate school at Stanford, close to three years reporting for Fortune. She recently entertained an offer to teach college-level economics. Her secret? She never went to high school. Instead, at age 13, she enrolled as a freshman in Mary Baldwin College's Program for the Exceptionally Gifted in Staunton, Va.

"I expected more from myself," Watson says. "Being able to finish high school early, or not go at all, opens a lot of doors."

Teenage college grads remain rare — Mary Baldwin graduates a dozen or so wunderkinder a year — but interest in early college or college experiences is growing. The Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities, a public residential school that emphasizes college-level work, reported its highest number of applicants ever this year. And the California legislature will vote this month on a bill that would allow any gifted student, at any age, to take the state's high school proficiency exam and be considered a graduate.

Kids who bypass all or part of high school ruffle feathers. "Because high school is such a big part of American culture, people are offended when I tell them I didn't go," Watson says. How, they wonder, could she have skipped football games, lockers and homeroom? America is a fragmented society, and high school is the closest we get to a common cultural experience.

But it's a shame to rely on nostalgia to hold the country together. For anyone who's different, high school can be an act of mental violence. For them, at best, it's a waste of time. Gifted students are getting fed up and leaving early. As they do, smart parents and teachers alike should seize the chance to rethink the institution of high school and whether this common cultural experience is the best way to achieve America's educational goals.

High school, as glorified in movies from Grease to Clueless, is a modern invention. In the early 20th century, most people didn't earn degrees; work in factories and farms didn't require them. Now, high school is nearly universal, and most graduates go to college.

Through this change, the goal has stayed the same: producing independent-minded, self-sufficient citizens capable of sustaining a democratic society. In recent years, however, the education system has failed to meet that goal. Companies still hire high school grads, but a 1996 study by researchers at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that half of 17-year-olds lack the skills these employers require. As for an independent-minded citizenry, only half of eligible Americans vote, and most don't understand controversial issues well enough to give consistent opinions to pollsters. Schools even shortchange the brightest.

The Higher Education Research Institute's 2001 survey of college freshmen found an all-time high of 41% reported being frequently bored in high school. While 44% received "A" averages, fewer students than ever did even an hour's worth of homework a night.

Educators and politicians are aware of these woes. Their response has been to lengthen the school day for more instruction, or lengthen the school year until summer vacation lasts little more than a month.

But if the goal of education is nurturing independent minds, spending more time in the current system is not the way to do it.

Consider the all-American high school. You're warehoused with 1,000 other students, herded like cows in the hallways, forced to move like Pavlov's dog with each bell. After Columbine you're anxious for your safety; many schools operate on the prison model in which you can't just leave. You're surrounded by other teenagers whose myopic view of the world creates a teen culture in which the cut of your jeans matters more than the content of your character. Preps, jocks, nerds, goths: Boys enforce conformity with violence; girls shun and shame.

Such conditions might be tolerated if students truly engaged their minds. But at many high schools, even academics reek of the brainless. My 10th-grade honors English class, for instance, read John Knowles' A Separate Peace aloud, each student reading a paragraph in turn, for seven mind-numbing weeks. Eventually you learn that curiosity only makes you miserable.

"In 30 contact hours" — that is, one-on-one teaching time — "you can teach a kid to read so well, the kid will be self-teaching from that point on," says John Taylor Gatto, the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year, who now advocates home schooling.

More math than most adults use takes just a bit longer. "So what are we doing the rest of the 12 years?" he asks. "We're teaching habits of obedience. We've extended childhood to an insane degree because it makes people more manageable."

Lost years can't be reclaimed. "A lot of research shows that if gifted people aren't challenged, after a while they lose interest in challenging themselves," says Judith Shuey, head of Mary Baldwin's program. They stop growing. They stop caring. And it's not just the bookish types who falter. Nothing destroys a love of learning like forcing a kid who wants to fix engines to spend his youth memorizing the kings of medieval France.

But it doesn't have to be this way, with secondary school serving mostly as a way to mark time. Learning is a joy when it's driven by curiosity, not enforced in a prisonlike environment. Instead of being confined to a classroom, students interested in construction or cooking, for instance, could spend their school days apprenticed to professionals. Gatto found spots for his kids in Manhattan's hospitals, charities and acting schools, fighting the New York school bureaucracy the whole way. "I never met a kid who wasn't intensely interested in something," he says, and he helped kids dabble until they found that match.

For those with less practical passions, smaller high schools would allow students to pursue their own projects; if a teacher sees 120 kids a day for 50 minutes apiece, she'll never spend hours critiquing a student's fiction, or letting a kid finish her physics experiment instead of leaping at the bell. Likewise, the culture of A's for laziness must go. If the brightest surpass the schools' resources, there's nothing sacred about the four-year plan. They can be shuttled to community college or work or whatever interests them most.

Against an entrenched education lobby of everyone from administrators to construction companies, such change won't be easy. But the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is already funding the creation of smaller, personalized high schools, and the growing number of home-schooling families will inspire other parents to demand more individualized education for their children.

Millions of students will start high school in the next few weeks. Blinded by movies and back-to-school sales, few will ask whether what they gain justifies the investment of time.

Noshua Watson asked. "Because high school is so idealized in the media, I've tried to learn everything I can about it," she says.

And what did she discover?

"I didn't miss a thing."