That’s interesting information about online homeschools. It sounds to me that if all that is going on, it’s the parents who are dropping the ball! If they’re like the homeschooling parents I know, they would keep an eagle eye on their kids and the work they’re doing.
It occurs to me, also, that you’re describing what goes on in thousands of public school classrooms: kids cheating, not really learning concepts, being passed on to make it easy for the teacher, teachers trying to avoid confrontations with parents. I guess whatever is “new” is just the same old, same old!
I prefer sitting down with my kids, refusing to go on to the next lesson until what we’re working on is finished satisfactorily. I prefer being able to model the correct way of approaching a problem, writing a sentence, etc. over and over again, if necessary to just throwing out information and hoping my kids “get it”.
I’ve been blessed with extremely smart kids who make me, the homeschooling mom, look good, but I’ve been on the other side of the fence as a public school teacher, frustrated with time limits, low parental involvement, and all the other ills of the system.
You are so right about rampant cheating in classroom schools. It has to be harder one-on-one if the parent is not totally abdicating their role.
From research papers downloaded to ipod “cheat sheets”, to students for hire, classrooms are no context in which to measure academic performance. The abdication of authority and consequences in the classroom has made public education obsolete. The penchant for social and political agendas of the teacher’s unions have made public education irrelevant.
Revival of public education would be based upon:
1. Objective and measurable standardized testing.
2. Eliminating the monopoly of public funding and generating free market competition through increased charter school development and private school voucher programs.
3. Eliminate the fat of EDDs and PhDs in thick layers of bureacracy in Administration so that increased funding can filter down to teacher salaries to attract the best and brightest. It is the “innovation” of EDDs and PhDs that has led to hair-brained philosophies and programs that created the mess we are in. Almost ANYTHING would be better!