Posted on 10/20/2006 1:24:53 PM PDT by achilles2000
If you like sexually transmitted diseases, shootings and high teen pregnancy rates, by all means, send your children to public schools. That's the word from a leader in the fast-growing movement within the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention for parents to pull their children from those schools in favor of homeschooling.
Pastor Wiley Drake
The program is called Exit Strategy and Pastor Wiley Drake, whose home state of California has done some things especially offensive to Christians this year, is a leading promoter.
In an interview with WND, he said that those problems and others are prevalent in public schools, and some Christian leaders even have said it could be considered child abuse just to register children in such a facility....
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
Me like, but I don't got no chilrun to send! What to do?
"Me like, but I don't got no chilrun to send! What to do?"
That's easy: go yourself. If you're in New York, you can go as a teacher, and no matter what you do, it'll take them at least six years to fire you.
Nice try in making in seem like there are TONS of research out there.
http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000010/200410250.asp
http://www.naturalfamilyhome.com/homeschooling-statistics.html
http://www.homeschoolfoundation.org/homeschooling/rudner1999/rudner5.asp
http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/rudner1999/default.asp
These four links refer to the same study.
http://www.scaihs.org/pdf/act%20scores.pdf
This article compares 26 home-schooled students to 13,000 state students and 1 million nationwide students. Anyone who knows something about statistical analysis knows that comparing such a small sample to very large samples render the study meaningless.
http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/ray1997/default.asp
This link has NO study listed
http://www.ontariohomeschool.org/comparison.shtml
This article states: "median score of home schooled children was low in mathematical computation (42nd percentile)". Oops!
http://www.csj.net/~mkwoods/good.htm
An essay by a ninth grader is not legitimate research.
Even the studies that you did post (I'm sorry, the ONE legitimate study you posted) fail to prove your assertion that "research demonstrates that homeschooled 'Christian' children out test the stuffing out of national averages."
Why don't you go find "From the Extreme to the Mainstream" by Patrick Basham. It is a publication of the Fraser Insitute in Vancouver BC that gives a summary of the research up through, perhaps, 2001. Basham is now with a DC think tank.
"...homeschooling may require less instructional time that the typical parent wastes conforming his and his family's life to the demands of government schools."
I'll second that. I made the mistake a few years ago of having a foreign exchange student. He attended our local government school. I homeschool my two children, and putting up with the public school rigamarole for one student easily took as much time as teaching two did. Why people are so willing to put up with the public schools' running their lives, I'll never know. Freedom, thy name is homeschooling.
Try nheri.org. The National Home Education Research Institute has pages of high quality research. IIRC, the organization was started by a University of Maryland professor who set out to prove that homeschooling was bad, and ended up proving the opposite.
I have no doubt that homeschooled children taught by educated parents are superb to public school students... but that's not what unspun said.
Actually, the Baptists have debated this for a number of years. It's only in this last 2 years that a consensus seems to be developing.
But...that makes sense.
It's not like the public school system is serving us well; especially in urban and suburban areas.
It's this kind of nutty rhetoric that makes all Fundamentalist Christians look like the Taliban.
The public school system can only do so much. Hundreds of thousands of children graduate public school each year and go on to college and have the skills needed to succeed in life, so it's not like it is a complete failure.
I suspect homeschooled children that do better on tests do so for various reasons. Perhaps they have college-educated parents that decide to provide their children's education. Or, perhaps they do better simply because their parents are more involved. Perhaps the child is a genius and the parents cannot afford a private school that will challenge him/her. I believe the kid that won the Spelling Bee a few years ago was homeschooled at an early age because he did not speak English.
But I do not accept that the simple decision of homeschooling a child consistently results in higher achievement, which is what this article suggests. I'd like to see the test results of children homeschooled by parents that barely graduated high school themselves.
My guess would be that the average homeschooled student does better academically than his middling public school peer if only because of the intense focus on the part of the parents, the relative lack of distractions from their peers, better classroom disclipline, and the increased quality of the educational materials available to homeschoolers. However, the elite private schools and the honors programs in the public schools in affluent communities probably produce a better educated young person than the best homeschooling program because of selective admission and high caliber teachers.
Those taught by parents without high school diplomas do just about as well. The secret is the tutorial approach to learning, the ability to fit the pedagogical approach to a subject to the student (e.g. there are several approaches to doing math)rather than the student being forced into a "one size fits all" approach, flexibility, and the excellent curricula available, ranging from traditonal books to curricula built around DVD instruction, satellite broadcasts, internet enabled multimedia platforms, and other technology. Many of the curriculum providers provide "turn-key" solutions that include lesson plans, testing, record keeping, etc. The cost of curricula with all the bells and whistles is low - $435-$1195 (you can spend more, but there is no need to). Add on top of this sophisticated coops and dual credit programs and it isn't hard to see why homeschoolers, including those with parents without much formal education, do very, very well. The only bedrock requirement is that parents need to want to homeschool. Because homeschooling is voluntary, however, the parents self-select for that trait. It just comes down to desire.
One additional thing you should be aware of is that many public schools are now telling dropouts to say that they are leaving to homeschool so that the schools can maintain the illusion of a lower dropout rate than they in fact have. In addition, there was a minor scandal involving Army recruiters who told dropouts to claim they were homeschooled in order to make recruitment goals.
***1.) Home schooling ain't that difficult.***
AIN'T! Two demerits!
Your nation was mainly founded and settled by evangelical Christians. As a "rebel", perhaps you should also be reminded that Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, etc., were devout Christians. If you find this offensive, perhaps France, Germany, Sweden, or some other more nation more de-Christianized and socialist than America would be preferable for you.
I don't think academic performance is the gripe that religious parents have at the forefront in their rejection of public education: it's the anti-God, anti-religious, anti-family, anti-authority, anti-freedom philosophy that first gets their attention.
Then, they don't care if they're lesser-educated folks themselves; they just know that they can't do to their kids what is in so many places in our public schools.
That's not to say that ALL public schools are that way. Some are decent. Parents must decide on a case-by-case basis.
The drugging of the children, the mainstreaming of homosexuality and promiscuity, and a host of other things happening in the schools are child abuse. What is presented as "sex education" to children in many schools today would have gotten someone arrested in 1960. This doesn't begin to touch on the problems of the substantially underreportted levels of crime and violence within the schools, which affects students and teachers.
The problem is institutional, and it can't be fixed. The problems are so bad that 40% of new teachers leave within 5 years. Those who stay tend not to have other job prospects or, in a declining number of cases, are tenaciously committed to teaching, even as the institution spins further and further out of control.
As for Lee, he had too much personal honor and integrity for me to ever consider him a complete Fundamentalist : )
Which part of this do you think is un-representative of Baptists: "Christ-minded," or "congregationalist," or "peers in the priesthood of believers"?
It's a funny situation in the SBC - most of the "leaders" don't want to acknowledge the problem because of the financial implications. The laymen, however, are forcing it on them. Al Mohler, Paige Patterson, Paul Pressler, and Rick Scarborough are some of the exceptions. I also know that many of the leaders know about the problem and will commment in private, but are staying in the closet. Any guesses concerning what percentage of the leaders or members of the seminary faculties have their children in government schools? I think that if someone checked you find it is quite high compared to Southern Baptists in general. Sorta looks like they know the Titanic is going down, they've gotten their children into the lifeboats, but don't want to share the information with the rest of the passengers.
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