Posted on 07/10/2024 6:06:58 PM PDT by DoodleBob
The number of children being educated at home has been growing for the past few decades. No one knows by how much, and that is part of the problem. Homeschooling is barely tracked or regulated in the U.S. But children deserve a safe and robust education, whether they attend a traditional school or are educated at home.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that by last count, in 2019, nearly 3 percent of U.S. children—1.5 million—were being homeschooled. This number, calculated from a nationwide survey, is surely an undercount because the homeschooling population is notoriously hard to survey, and more children have been homeschooled since the COVID pandemic began. Eleven states do not require parents to inform anyone that they are homeschooling a child, and in most of the country, once a child has exited the traditional schoolroom environment, no one checks to ensure they are receiving an education at all.
Homeschooled students have won the National Spelling Bee; one was the most prolific mathematician in history. Many are well-rounded and well-adjusted children who go on to thrive as adults. But others do not receive a meaningful education—and too many have suffered horrific abuse. The federal government must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in homeschooling across the country.
When a traditional classroom setting cannot meet the educational, social or emotional needs of a child, homeschooling can allow parents to take over. For children facing bullying or gun violence or who need more challenging or more advanced schoolwork, a homeschooling environment may be best.
But many parents are attracted to homeschooling because they want to have more say in what their child learns and what they do not. Nearly 60 percent of homeschool parents who responded to the 2019 NCES survey said that religious instruction was a motivation in their decision to educate at home. Some Christian homeschooling curricula teach Young Earth Creationism instead of evolution. Other curricula describe slavery as “Black immigration” or extol the virtues of Nazism.
Some children may not be receiving any instruction at all. Most states don’t require homeschooled kids to be assessed on specific topics the way their classroom-based peers are. This practice enables educational neglect that can have long-lasting consequences for a child’s development.
In the worst cases, homeschooling hides abuse. In 2020 an 11-year-old boy in Michigan was found dead after his stepmother used homeschooling to conceal years of torture. A small study of children who had been seriously abused found that eight of 17 school-age victims were ostensibly being homeschooled. In these cases, homeschooling was a farce—a hole in children’s social safety net for abusers to exploit.
Although it’s impossible to say how commonly homeschooling conceals abuse, data from Connecticut paint a concerning picture. Following the abuse and 2017 death of an autistic teenager whose mother had removed him from school, Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate found that 36 percent of children withdrawn from six nearby districts to be homeschooled lived in homes that had been subject to at least one report of suspected abuse or neglect. Not one state checks with Child Protective Services to determine whether the parents of children being homeschooled have a history of abuse or neglect.
Homeschooling advocacy organizations promote studies that claim to show equal or higher levels of academic achievement among homeschooled students. But these studies often are conducted by homeschooling advocates and are methodologically flawed. It’s difficult for social scientists to recruit representative samples for more rigorous research because of lax reporting requirements and the underground nature of homeschooling, making the kind of sweeping comparison between homeschooling and nonhomeschooling students that some groups report impossible. Still, studies of different homeschooled populations have shown that children’s success depends heavily on their parents’ education background. Despite this, in 40 states parents do not need to have even a high school–level education to educate their children at home.
The federal government usually leaves issues of education for states to decide, and homeschooling is no exception. A dizzying maze of laws and legal precedents governs parents’ ability to homeschool, and the rules differ in each state and sometimes even differ between school districts. Whenever a piece of state legislation is suggested or introduced to regulate some aspect of homeschooling, advocacy organizations such as the Homeschool Legal Defense Association fight back. This year Michigan’s Education Department proposed a registry of homeschooled students in the state and was met with fierce pushback. In 2023 Ohio removed all assessment requirements for homeschooled students. South Dakota, Vermont and New Hampshire have also removed some oversight requirements in the past few years.
It is clear that homeschooling will continue to lack accountability for outcomes or even basic safety in most states. But federal mandates for reporting and assessment to protect children don’t need to be onerous. For example, homeschool parents could be required to pass an initial background check, as every state requires for all K–12 teachers. Homeschool instructors could be required to submit documents every year to their local school district or to a state agency to show that their children are learning.
Education is a basic human right. We need to make sure kids have chances to investigate what makes them curious, study history and science and reading, and ask questions and learn from others. We want them to reach adulthood ready to take on the world.
Sorry, but homeschooled kids learn to read and write before they graduate. So they will reject your uniform standards.
The public/private school kids are still a year or more behind thanks to the China flu shut downs.
“Uniform”, meaning some dumb liberals that screwed up public education want a piece of screwing up homeschooling too!
Exactly.
That’s right.
This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
But others do not receive a meaningful education—and too many have suffered horrific abuse. The federal government must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in homeschooling across the country.
After seeing how the federal government handles public schools and the fruit of their efforts to set standards and keep kids *safe*< thanks but no thanks.
What with the literacy rates public schools are producing, they are in no position to point fingers.
A wise man once said, “Take the log out of your own eye first ...”
Gee they are advocating for actual education standards, or for the lack by teachers unions.
Home school kids win spelling bees. They get the highest SATS.
Maybe Trump should gut Education and Federal education all together.
I was homeschooled, and received a proper classical education in spite of the onerous regulations of Pennsylvania.
What they really mean is: We want total control of young minds!
But we can’t indoctrinate them of they are schooled at home!
The hypocrisy of that statement is breathtaking.
Government schools need to be abolished ... they’re a failed experiment.
The only Uniform Standards were that jammies were fine as long as BIC (Butt in Chair) time was properly observed. Properly observed meant the animals were fed, eggs collected and they had eaten breakfast.
We home schooled for 13 years. Both our kids are very successful in their chosen careers. They are both millionaires AND they are nice people too.
That statement is a classic anti-homeschooling and anti-Christian talking point. But regardless of what one believes about how we arrived at the point we are on Earth, the premise of the statement is that publicly schooled students don't believe incorrect ideas, like "Young Earth Creationism".
But in reality publicly schooled students often don't even know who Charles Darwin was, and lack the reading skills to even read his writings. And they often believe all kinds of incorrect or false ideas, and lack basic knowledge of math, science, religious history, and many other things.
Many high school students and most adults can't correctly answer the question "how old is the Earth?"
Also, for just about any career except perhaps a petroleum geologist, how the Earth got formed and came to be in its current condition is unimportant. Most of us will find that our knowledge of topics like the long term history of the Earth has no effect on our daily life.
If knowledge of the history of the Earth is really that important the authors would note that publicly schooled students actually don't know either, instead of attacking some small subset of Christian parents who believe in a recently formed Earth.
I homeschooled my children for two years.
When I put them back in school, they were ahead of their peers.
We continued to supplement their education at home and deprogram them from the daily brainwashing.
What would they like to foist on parents now? The common core math disaster? The ridiculous “whole language” disaster?
Sod off!
No, but the local school district sure does. My family was harassed and threatened by CPS when I reached mandatory attendance age. They wanted every detail of extended family history, including medical history, vaccination records, home inspection, anything they could hang a hat on. They demanded a physical exam and a look at my bedroom. Or else. (Or else they'll call the police and you're looking at possible arrest and foster care within an hour or so.) They finally accepted that they'd picked the wrong fight. Most families subjected to such treatment would probably not be so fortunate.
That was some 20 years ago, but I don't think it's any different now.
Their brand was dead in the 90s, much like National Geographic’s.
So says the article. They’re not getting a safe and robust education in government schools, far from it. Public schools are graduating children that can’t read, write or perform arithmetic after 12 years of public schooling. That’s not robust, it’s rubbish education!
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