Question to homeschool advocates

[Thoeting]

I have a question to homeschool advocates.

I teach English to students with learning disabilities in a small (500 students) middle school. I work mostly with 6th graders. These are students who are 11-12 years old.

This September, we had 6 students enroll who were previously home-schooled. Each set is coming into the public school system for different reasons. In 2 families, the parents have split up and both parents must now work. The others either just wanted to try it, or were tired of home. or moved from a large city. Of the 6, 1 enrolled in the school's gifted/talented program. Of the others, all 5 are coming in with deplorable skills. 2 of them (siblings) are unable to recognize all letters of the alphabet, and are also quite weak in math. They can count to 100, and do 1 digit addition and subtraction. Of the other three, 1 cannot recognize cursive, 1 can spell nothing beyond four letters, and the last one reads at about a 2nd grade level.

Everyone one of the 5 that I work with have "iffy" social skills. None are comfortable around large groups, and 3 of them are actually afraid of the other kids. All of them prefer to be with the adults.

I work with these 5 in an English class. Because of their discomfort with large groups, I requested to have only these five for this year. I enjoy their personalities greatly and I am thrilled every day to watch them grow. However, even though they are of normal intelligence, it is likely, that most of them will not learn to read at a 6th grade level before leaving middle school, which means they will continue to be behind considerably into high school.

I know that there is a large homeschool contingent that read FreeRepublic and I would like to know if anyone here has seen a situation like this before. Is there anyone out there looking out for kids to make sure they are actually being instructed? At what point do homeschool parents start to get worried? Is there any type of agency that oversees homeschool parents? As I have conferenced with these parents over the course of the year, NONE were aware that there was a problem! Yet some of these children were up to 6 years behind.

Please don't take this as a slam against homeschooling. Obviously something went wrong in these situations, but I think (or at least hope!) that the majority work well.

[Doctor Doom]

Don't hijack the thread with your superstitions. Stick to the subject.

[No Truce With Kings]

You sure are eager to bargain away my rights as an American and for what? You’re trying to decide what my kids learn and it’s none of your concern. Are you one of those moderate conservatives that have contributed to flushing my rights as a free American?

Nope. I am just using political ju jitsu -- making a reasonable-sounding condition that is impossible to meet, if examined. The liberals use this all the time.

Think about it -- could you really get a public school system to shut down a school and fire all the faculty if a small fraction of the students failed? Of course not. So how can it be fair (liberals love that word) to hold individual homeschoolers to a higher standard than the government?

[F.J. Mitchell]

The question should be: At what point should parents of kids in Public school aka indoctrination centers become alarmed. Were any of those 6 home schooled children you refer to, including one, who was placed in an advanced class, ever have Islam stuck down their throats and change their names to Ali, Muhamid or Usama, while dressing up as critters out of "Lawrence of Arabia" or something? Had they been taught that homosexuality is normal and that only homophobeic bigots proclaim that only a penis and a vagina are rationally compatable with one another for purpose of intercourse? Were they taught that America is evil and the rest of the world is better? Were those six kids just too damn normal to fit into a public school in the opinion of the sick, liberal, warthogs of the education establishment, who define the reality of illusion as the real world?

Crawl back under your rock-your identy as a homeschoolingphobe is exposed.

[Khepera]

Seems I had you all wrong. Thank you for your wise council.

[Khepera]

Hear Hear! You sir are a true American and I am proud to stand here with you.

[Doctor Doom]

Funny stuff.

[Thoeting]

They are considered to have learning disabilities due to the discrepency between ability and performance. If a 12 year old child reads at a 2nd grade level and is found to have an I.Q. of 100, he/she can be determined to be learning disabled in the field of reading. All of these kids tested manner such as this.

It is more involved than this, of course, but this is the most concise version I can give.

[Doctor Doom]

Nice job.

[DaiHuy]

Here is a thought, maybe it was the parents, not doing what they should have been doing, or maybe the parents just taught them what THEY learned in public schools.

[BlackElk]

You may well be a good guy, a conservative, a Christian and seriously so in all cases, but you work in the government's school system. For triple your salary no homeschooling parent ought to want to be caught dead doing what you do where you do it. If you could understand the depth of the homeschooler's despising of government schools, it would be obvious to you that none of us would ever, under any circumstances, lend aid and comfort to government schooling.

There is no point in dialogue. There is only the commitment to protect our children from exposure to government schools and their agendas and the commitment to resist being forced to fund government schools and their despicable programs and agendas. We have the government's gun to our heads to confiscate the tax dollars that support the monstrosity that government education has become. We may have no choice but to fund it until we have succeeded in shutting it down altogether. So far, we still have the freedom to protect our children from it and to urge others to do so.

If you are actually conservative and actually Christian, get out of a system that encourages abortion, wncourages homosexuality, mangles history, and serves only to provide education for drones while perverting the minds and morals of its charges, and, whatever you do, get any kids out of such a system if you can.

Governemnt schools are the parochial schools of secular humanism and worse. Remember Christ's words to those who would harm children that they would be better off having a millstone hung around their necks and be cast into the sea.

If you are tempted to assume that I am just some ignorant anti-government school bigot, I will leave that for you and others to decide but I am an alumnus of a Jesuit prep school so long ago that the Jebbies were still Catholic and have a doctorate in law. My wife graduated Yale. No child of ours has ever set foot in a government school. May that always be the case.

[F.J. Mitchell]

Thanks my friend, they haven't beguiled us all.

[Lizavetta]

Everyone one of the 5 that I work with have "iffy" social skills. None are comfortable around large groups, and 3 of them are actually afraid of the other kids.

Why are you presuming that it's "iffy" socially to be uncomfortable around large groups? Think about that for a minute. Large groups of students are ALWAYS TALKING, usually with vulgar language, and are loud. Why is an aversion to this negative, in your eyes?

As far as them being afraid of other kids, think about that for a minute too. Today's students are more reckless, less inhibited, and as students have always been, they are cliquish, very peer dependent, and oftentimes cruel. How would you feel in an environment like this? Honestly?

I'm getting the impression that you are dissatisfied with them because they DON'T CONFORM to the rest.

[Khepera]

God bless you sir! Keep up the good work and know we are behind you and ever vigilant on your behalf. Lets rip the lies from their lips with the saber of truth and make a fortress of our resolve.

Your a true American.

[Malcolm]

Thanks for posting this. Aside from some of the nuttier posts on here, this has been educational. If I ever had kids I would either home school them or send them to private school, and maybe even a Catholic school, although I am not of that denomination. The public schools are a joke, full of people with agendas, but not overflowing with Christians nor of teachers with sincere concern for their education, the very reason the children are there. Throw in sex-ed, and the whole enterprise stinks to high heaven. As for the other poster who thinks Genesis and the other 65 books are a joke, I've got a punchline waiting on you on J-day; see you there!!!

[hsmomx3]

It sounds like these kids did not have parents who were 100% committed to homeschooling. There are some great curriculums out there. I,too, am surprised at the level of these kids. By the way, is it possible that they were using a curriculum that was too advanced for them and this may have hurt them? I know many who have used a curric. such as ABeka and it is very advanced for some kids. Just a thought.

[bota]

I understand how there could be many different things that these children's shortcomings could be attributed to including whether or not the parents were really serious about teaching. Our children take the standardized test each year in order to be allowed to home school. I don't really mind the test requirement because it let's us know how we are doing.

I know of a small community in another state where there are 300 family's who all keep their children home so they can draw "crazy checks" from the government. They laugh about their "crazy" children while depriving them of any chance of a better future.

What I don't understand is why we have met several high school graduates who could not read more than a stop sign. We have tutored two in the last year and the thought of reading a comic book was a dream to them. These kids set in school for 12 years and was never held back. They were supposedly tested at several different grade levels. It only took 4 months to teach them using phonetics(not the inappropriately named alphaphonics) to a level that they could read at a sixth grade level and give them the foundation to enable them to improve daily by themselves. Now tell me what happened at the public school where many teachers were being paid my tax dollars to teach these kids and evaluate their progress. They couldn't read their diplomas.....

[Registered]

ditto

[TomSmedley]

My question was more along the lines of what keeps it from going very very bad as in these situations?

Nothing, nor should there be. Children are not the property of the state, nor are their parents.

Freedom must include freedom to fail. Liberty is the nursery of excellence.