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Homeschooling Produces Better-Educated, More-Tolerant Kids. Politicians Hate That


Muda69

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http://reason.com/archives/2019/01/22/homeschooling-produces-better-students/

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There's no better sign of success than an escalation in attacks by your enemies. Based on such evidence, homeschooling is enjoying a boom, as growing numbers of families with diverse backgrounds, philosophies, and approaches abandon government-controlled schools in favor of taking responsibility for their own children's education. As they do so, they're coming under assault from officials panicking over the number of people slipping from their grasp.

There's little doubt that homeschooling is an increasingly popular option. "From 1999 to 2012, the percentage of students who were homeschooled doubled, from an estimated 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent," reports the National Center for Education Statistics. While the government agency suggests that growth has leveled off since then, other researchers say data is hard to come by, since many states simply don't count people who homeschool.

"While the overall school-age population in the United States grew by about 2.0 percent from spring 2012 to spring 2016, data from 16 states from all four major regions of the nation showed that homeschooling grew by an average of about 25 percent in those states," counters the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), in response to NCES figures. "If the data from these states are representative of what happened in the other states during those four years, then homeschooling is continuing to grow in both absolute numbers and as a portion of the overall school-age population."

 

Just shy of eight percent of North Carolina students are homeschooled for example, in a state in which traditional public schools are bleeding students year after year to charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling.

Unsurprisingly, as the numbers of homeschooled kids grow, their ranks expand beyond the niche populations—religious families, in particular—that originally rejected public schools. Only 16 percent of survey respondents now say they started homeschooling to provide religious instruction, says the NCES, while 34 percent report "concern about the school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure," and others cited "dissatisfaction with academic instruction."

In North Carolina, one of very few states to ask homeschoolers to identify as religious or secular, secular homeschooling is outgrowing religious homeschooling, and now constitutes over 40 percent of the homeschooled population.

"Today's homeschool advocates aren't the Christian Right, trying to dismantle public education. Rather, they're parents who don't believe that the current school model is best, or enough, for their children," reports the Pacific Standard.

"Today's homeschoolers are more demographically, geographically, and ideologically diverse," agrees the City Journal.

From the responses to NCES's survey, families take on educational responsibilities for their children for a variety of reasons, including safety, educational approach and achievement, and philosophy. All are good reasons for stepping away from a one-size-fits-some government institution.

Let's look at traditional measures of academic achievement.

In 2014, SAT "test scores of college-bound homeschool students were higher than the national average of all college-bound seniors that same year," according to NHERI.

"Mean ACT Composite scores for homeschooled students were consistently higher than those for public school students" from 2001 through 2014, according (PDF) to that testing organization, although private school students scored higher still.

By contrast public school kids "bombed the SAT" reports Bloomberg. Mixed, but generally disappointing results since then have education experts worry that many public school graduates are unprepared for either higher education or the workforce.

No wonder colleges not only welcome, but actively recruit, homeschooled applicants.

...

"Students with greater exposure to homeschooling tend to be more politically tolerant—a finding contrary to the claims of many political theorists," reports research published in the Journal of School Choice. Defined as "the willingness to extend civil liberties to people who hold views with which one disagrees," this finding of greater political tolerance among the homeschooled has important ramifications in this factionalized and illiberal era.

"In other words," writes author Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas's Department of Education Reform, "members of the very group for which public schooling is believed to be most essential for inculcating political tolerance (i.e., those who are more strongly committed to a particular worldview and value system) actually exhibit at least as much or more tolerance when they are exposed to less public schooling."

All of that is very promising if you're a parent trying to do the best by your kids. But government officials see threat where parents and children find promise.

In states including Iowa, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Virginia, lawmakers and opponents of DIY education are calling for tighter restrictions and more-intrusive regulation of homeschooling families by government. In each instance, officials point to instances of abuse by adults who fail to educate the children under they charge or who, more horrifically, claim to be "homeschooling" children they're actually subjecting to abuse. The crimes are real, but isolated.

...

By contrast, the institutions that Rep. Staed and his colleagues want to set over parents are awash in victims whose names are lost in the overwhelming numbers.

 

"In 2016, students ages 12-18 experienced 749,400 victimizations (theft and nonfatal violent victimization) at school and 601,300 victimizations away from school," notes the Bureau of Justice Statistics in its latest report. "The total victimization rates were 29 victimizations per 1,000 students at school and 24 per 1,000 students away from school."

"Nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career," cautionsa 2004 report prepared for the U.S. Department of Education.

"A yearlong investigation by The Associated Press uncovered roughly 17,000 official reports of sex assaults by students over a four-year period, from fall 2011 to spring 2015," we learned in 2017. "Ranging from rape and sodomy to forced oral sex and fondling, the sexual violence that AP tracked often was mischaracterized as bullying, hazing or consensual behavior."

So government-run schools are academically inferior to homeschooling, riddled with crime and abuse, and producing graduates less tolerant than their counterparts who were educated at home. But rather than fix their pet institutions, politicians prefer to grab for power over people fleeing from their grasp.

Ummm… no. Not that homeschoolers have the time or inclination, but they have more standing to claim the right to oversee the floundering public schools. Instead of seeking to crush the competition, public officials should learn from it.

The government school teachers unions also hate homeschooling.

 

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41 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

http://reason.com/archives/2019/01/22/homeschooling-produces-better-students/

The government school teachers unions also hate homeschooling.

 

I think homeschoolers, like the rest of the population, have their +/- 1std as well as their fair share of +/- 3std folks too.  As for tolerance of political views, I've seen it both ways and wouldn't say that there's anything more or less differentiating than in the public schools.

I'm not sure that the issue of teachers and/or teacher unions hating homeschooling is a set guarantee either.  In a day and age where most homeschoolers tend to split duties with other schools once their kids get to high school, there's plenty of opportunity for interaction/integration of secondary education instruction from both avenues. 

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12 minutes ago, foxbat said:

I think homeschoolers, like the rest of the population, have their +/- 1std as well as their fair share of +/- 3std folks too. 

I believe that.  I once shared the story in the old OOB of a single parent I knew who pulled her 10-12 year son out the government school, primarily so he could help her in the mornings at the diner she owned.    Any homeschooling was then done in the afternoon or evening.    Wouldn't this help to teach the young man the value of physical labor?

 

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3 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

I believe that.  I once shared the story in the old OOB of a single parent I knew who pulled her 10-12 year son out the government school, primarily so he could help her in the mornings at the diner she owned.    Any homeschooling was then done in the afternoon or evening.    Wouldn't this help to teach the young man the value of physical labor?

 

Sure, it could teach them that ... although I'd think the lesson would be less about physical labor and more about juggling competing priorities, both of which are important.  Of course, for every one of those kinds of situations, there are also the ones that you hear/see about parents letting the kids off and not holding their feet to the fire to the work ... or providing the necessary structure.  There are some where the parent, by design, abdicates that responsibility and others where life just catches them off guard and the next thing they know their kid's behind and they struggle to get back on track.   Also, on the admin side, I've spoken with admissions folks at colleges that also have horror stories from some homeschool examples where the secondary school "transcript" is a list of books that the kid has read over the last four years.  An argument can also be made that similar things happen in public schools too where there are parents that are highly engaged in their kids' education and work with the school to get the most for the kid out of their educational experience and others who completely check out and abdicate even parenting requirements.  For whichever way the needle points, ultimately it's important for parental involvement to be part of the equation.

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17 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

C'mon man, you guys are missing the big picture. No bus trips rides in homeschooling, where the real education happens. 

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Just now, Impartial_Observer said:

That's part of it and we leaned to deal with it. 

 

You learn about it in homeschooling too ... my youngest is "in class" with his older brother ... and you know how older brothers are. 😀

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8 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

I was the youngest of three, I do.

Probably the smart one. 🙂

My theory on multiple boys in the a family ... three or more.

  • The first one is usually naturally fast or big.
  • The second one is usually the opposite ... if the oldest is the biggest, the second oldest is usually fast to get away from him.
  • The third one is the smartest one ... usually to get away from the oldest one who's bigger and the second oldest who's faster gotta use a little brainpower.  May also be the comedian to figure out distractions to avoid brotherly beatings.
  • The fourth one is usually just a pure survivor and a freak of nature to survive the older three growing up.
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3 minutes ago, foxbat said:

Probably the smart one. 🙂

My theory on multiple boys in the a family ... three or more.

  • The first one is usually naturally fast or big.
  • The second one is usually the opposite ... if the oldest is the biggest, the second oldest is usually fast to get away from him.
  • The third one is the smartest one ... usually to get away from the oldest one who's bigger and the second oldest who's faster gotta use a little brainpower.  May also be the comedian to figure out distractions to avoid brotherly beatings.
  • The fourth one is usually just a pure survivor and a freak of nature to survive the older three growing up.

None of those are true in our family, containing four brothers.

 

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2 hours ago, Impartial_Observer said:

C'mon man, you guys are missing the big picture. No bus trips rides in homeschooling, where the real education happens. 

You get to miss out on the real world experiences.....like this kid just got to experience....

 

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26 minutes ago, foxbat said:

Probably the smart one. 🙂

My theory on multiple boys in the a family ... three or more.

  • The first one is usually naturally fast or big.
  • The second one is usually the opposite ... if the oldest is the biggest, the second oldest is usually fast to get away from him.
  • The third one is the smartest one ... usually to get away from the oldest one who's bigger and the second oldest who's faster gotta use a little brainpower.  May also be the comedian to figure out distractions to avoid brotherly beatings.
  • The fourth one is usually just a pure survivor and a freak of nature to survive the older three growing up.

Oldest was the smallest. But intimidated the middle brother. 

Middle brother is the biggest, but also the biggest pu....He ended up being the smart one and going to college. 

After a while they figured out, they may be able to beat me, but at some point I would catch them off guard and they would pay dearly. Middle brother needs to thank his lucky stars I wasn't physically strong enough to throw that pitch fork at him, because my intent was literally to kill him. I ended up being the one with the long memory and the bad temper. 

Both of my brothers were considerably older than me, one is eight years older, middle brother is six years older. 

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5 hours ago, foxbat said:

Probably the smart one. 🙂

My theory on multiple boys in the a family ... three or more.

  • The first one is usually naturally fast or big.
  • The second one is usually the opposite ... if the oldest is the biggest, the second oldest is usually fast to get away from him.
  • The third one is the smartest one ... usually to get away from the oldest one who's bigger and the second oldest who's faster gotta use a little brainpower.  May also be the comedian to figure out distractions to avoid brotherly beatings.
  • The fourth one is usually just a pure survivor and a freak of nature to survive the older three growing up.

Pretty close; being a guy from a family of 5 boys (2 girls as well). I was the 5th boy. I give the others a hard time because with all of us loving football, only one of gots rings 🤣 and the first coming from the first one in the family to attend a public school too. We were not spread out like some other families though. The oldest was born in March of 60; me being number 6, was born in September of 66. We have tried putting mom up for Sainthood, Now word back yet from the Vatican though. 

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