Posted on 03/30/2020 7:59:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
Kevin Huffman, a former education commissioner of Tennessee and partner at a nonprofit which promotes public schools, has written an op-ed in The Washington Post bashing homeschooling. In “Homeschooling During the Coronavirus Will Set Back a Generation of Children,” he claims that the children sent home due to the coronavirus causing school closures are going to suffer academically.
But he isn’t even talking about real homeschooling. He is referring to distance learning, where the kids are taught online by their teachers. He cites a report which found that “Full-time virtual schools are not a good fit for many children.” Unlike homeschooling, in distance learning parents don’t get to pick the curriculum for their children. So their kids may get stuck with teaching that’s not conducive to learning at home with parental assistance. That study may be accurate for distance learning, and even then it’s questionable since thousands of people successfully get online degrees every year.
Then Huffman launches into a tirade about how summer break hurts learning, since students fall backward from where they were at the end of the school year. But again, this has nothing to do with homeschooling. He’s trying to make the outrageous claim that the two are equivalents, saying homeschooling puts children behind academically just like summer breaks.
If this was true, why do homeschoolers perform better academically than their peers in public schools? It’s true that some parents don’t do a good job of homeschooling their kids. But since homeschooled kids on average do better than public school kids, it’s unfair to lump all homeschooled kids in with the ones whose parents aren’t doing a very good job. We don’t lump all public school educated kids in with the worst performing ones.
Huffman points out that some families don’t have computers or internet access, so their children will have a hard time learning from home. Again, this is not representative of homeschooling. Parents lacking in the resources to homeschool aren’t likely to homeschool. Forcing parents to accommodate their children learning virtually from their teachers is not homeschooling.
Similarly, Huffman says the lowest income children are less likely to have a parent at home to help with the virtual learning because the parents are less likely to work from home — so those kids are going to do the worst. Another strawman argument. Parents aren’t going to homeschool if they are unable to stay at home to homeschool!
Huffman goes on and on about all the remedial action that will be necessary in order to make up for the poor learning experience children will have at home during the pandemic. He makes it sound like a terrible disaster, one that is unfairly discriminating against minority children. So now homeschooling is racist too.
The truth is that if certain students were performing poorly in the public schools, they’re probably going to perform poorly at home with distance learning too. Fortunately, the kids are probably only going to be at home for two months. The article went into hysterics over what will amount to a hiccup.
This could end up being a positive experience, despite Huffman’s bias toward public schools. Some parents may discover that they want to look into real homeschooling. Both parents and children may find they enjoy spending extra time with each other.
This could present a great opportunity to educate people about homeschooling and refute the stereotypes. For example, there is a stigma that homeschoolers are socially awkward since they aren’t around their peers all day. It’s not true. Homeschoolers do better than public school kids when it comes to social, emotional, and psychological development. They participate in a lot of group activities with other homeschoolers. They get interaction with others participating on field trips, scouting, 4-H, political drives, church ministry, sports teams, and community volunteer work.
Huffman’s article is nothing more than taking the most distorted, untrue view of homeschooling and saying since there are flaws, homeschooling is bad. Yeah, trying to force distance learning on students whose parents are unable to accommodate it doesn’t work perfectly.
Since the article doesn’t even address real homeschooling, one has to wonder if Huffman’s editors at WaPo changed his title to attract attention through outrage.
The knowledge level required to teach, K thru Bachelors Degree, is quite attainable for anyone with average intelligence. The ability to teach is not. We know the ability teachers is not uniform. So let's stop acting like all teachers are valuable.
Solution: take the best teachers (those that can get the information into minds full of mush) and have them deliver instruction via distance learning. Spend 95% of effort on 5% of teachers delivering excellent multi-modal lessons of vetted hard-core curriculum devoid of PC/anti-progressive propaganda. Make the lessons viewable by parents. This offers transparency that allows parents to weed out the crap teachers spew today. Pay online educators immense salaries. ($250k plus per year) But make online educators accountable to parents. Require that parents grade the teachers. If they fall below 90% approval, fire their asses. They'll be plenty of talented teachers in line to replace them.
That’s awesome! Ours “dual enrolled” in college during their final years in high school...a great benefit we have in Florida (and other states, too) so they “graduated” high school and received an Associates Degree at the same time and went on to their Bachelor’s.
Ah come on man, we all know the entire DNC (and its RINO tutu circus), are merely appendages and tumors, of the press and media —
The pretend media hates an educated person it’s a speed bump for the dumbing down agenda.
I can attest to this as I helped my wife home school our children. It is amazing how little time is actually needed when material is broken down into manageable sized lessons and there are not any distractions. It is amazing how those manageable sized lessons build into huge bases of knowledge. Plus, naturally curious kids will explore related material on their own. I contend most kids are naturally curious when they haven't been stomped down by peer pressure.
YOU are brilliant! Congratulations on educating your children. No wonder the powers that be do not want kids to be schooled at home. They will learn too much.
Public education as a whole has already done that for several generations in this country.
Several months of home-schooling can only be a plus. And hopefully it will also result in many realizing they don't need public schools and can do a better job themselves.
Why on earth is there a need for a non-profit to promote public schools?!
Your son is clearly not a specimen of any state school in Detroit, Chicago, or any other “rustbelt” city.
What’s wrong with you... :)
Great job by the way!
True, and as they are all products of J-schools and mass comm majors, they provide prima facie evidence of the failure of public education in our country.
Proggies know that parents learning firsthand of how little the kids actually do daily, of the things their kids should know but don’t yet, of alternate online ed resources that work and of how much they, as patents, can teach...is NOT good for their guverment pubic ejucashun facade.
Watch NEA go into high gear now to fight this. Watch for NEA and proggie groups’ ads on our media glorifying government schooling.
Absolutely amazing, coming from TownHall?
They are normally left leaning.
Thanks for the post.
We know for a FACT that what they have been doing for the last 40 years has destroyed education in America.
They know what works. But their purpose is indoctrination, not education. They have been successful.
It was determined to be fake news right here on FR...
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3829583/posts
If they have truly learned the material they would not fall back.
Only those that have temporarily memorized and not learned the material will appear to fall back.
My two girls suffered tremendously from home schooling them. They had to start college at 13 and 14 years old.
A$$holes. They closed the schools, so all education now is In-Home-Schooling. Do they know the meaning of the word “home”?
They want total control.
I ws talking to my sixth-grade grandson last week, who is doing on-line lessons during the closure. I asked if he was ready to go back and he said no - at school they have to sit in each class for an hour, but he can do the lessons on-line in 20 minutes.
I think that’s what they’re afraid of.
Parents may find out how “teachable” their child is, and be surprised at the speed of progression their children have through homeschooling them.
I sent a family a dozen or so educational books and lessons, some were grade appropriate, some more accelerated, since they wanted to keep up the child’s learning while their school was shut down (private school) by state mandate.
They are realizing how “held back” their child has been when it comes to regular classroom learning and how quickly they learn and move through the grade level books, workbooks, flashcards, etc., and are moving toward the higher grade level books.
I think they may have caught the “homeschooling bug.”
That’s why we homeschooled (many moons ago), it was so gratifying for parent and child.
Dumb? Not evil on purpose.
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