please help save home education!!!!!

I can see why parents would want to home-school their kids...in the UK loads of the schools are crappy. But if you're home-schooled wouldn't you miss out on meeting other kids regularly (if you're cooped up at home all day)?

Saying 'home schooling could be a cover for abuse' is bollocks, like 99% of abused kids go to school.

 

I wonder, is the reason schools need standardized tests because the school system can't count on getting teachers who go the extra mile to make sure each kid gets exactly the amount of learning they need? It's one thing to say we need engaging, interesting, and interested teachers, and it's quite another to convince those people the job is worth all the crap that comes with it. I notice that a lot of business executives are engaging, interesting, and interested.

 

From how it was explained to me, standardized tests are put in place to make sure that students are all learning the same thing at the same speed, regardless of which school they go to. I understand that to a point, but there are always going to be students who learn at slower/faster speeds, and while the faster-learning students often end up just fine (there are plenty of accelerated programs available), it seems like the slower-learning students often just get thrown under the bus when teachers have to explain why their performance is not where it's expected to be.

 

The problem with the UK system is that there is no single system. And neither Scotland nor England is going to adjust to suit the other. Even though the latter has no parliament and its education system has historically been one of the worst in Europe and far behind other parts of Britain, the outcry against any merge of the education system will concern things such as 'national identity' and 'the rights of the natives,' with some justice.

But I think the UK systems combined are better than the US public school system. As far as I'm aware, the US still has a 'one size fits everyone' policy and prioritises students who appear to be good whilst leaving the others behind.

 

I'm rather torn on the idea of home-schooling.

When my family moved from Hawaii to Florida, my brother and I came within an inch of being home-schooled for the remainder of our education due to the laughable state of Central Florida schools during the mid 80's. It's a retirement state, the focus is on golf courses and canasta, not trig & analyt.

Anyway... didn't get home schooled because mom could not afford to quite work.

And then, there is my cousin Maribel who was home-schooled and the poor thing is a big bag of hot mess. She is so poorly socialized that she makes trouble with herself!

 

Home schooling should be a right of all parents. That doesn't exempt the "students" from meeting government mandated standards of academic progress. Whether kids learn in public school, private school, the "new" charter schools or home schooling does not matter. All kids should be expected to meet minimum standards for reading, writing, math, social studies, art, music, history, physical education, English, one foreign language and one or more of the basic sciences. It doesn't matter how the kids gets the "learnin" so long an it gets done. Government should simply apply the same scholastic tests for home schooled kids as for any others. In fact, it is the public school system that STOPPED demanding academic standards for promotion through the grades when they changed to "social promotion" theory instead. It was (and remains) a disaster as it awarded illiterate kids a high school "diploma" just for showing up in classes...while they failed every class.

As far as socialization, there are countless ways for home-schooled kids to learn about functioning in society. Church youth groups, scouting, after school sports, "field trips" to historic sites, involvement in extended family, chores, part time jobs...the list is endless.

 

Not many of those would appeal to everyone...some, such as Church youth groups and chores, would actually make them more inclined to one particular group of people or just have a disadvantage.

Also, a day out does not equal years spent learning how people interact and talk, or about the personalities of particular people.

 

You missed the point. There are many ways to promote socialization and a public school is NOT necessary for adequate social development. In fact, children in most public schools end up in small cliques with all their socialization confined within that limited social group. I remember being an outcast in a new school in fifth grade. Only after I kicked the crap out of the class bully did I get "accepted" by the others. Then, I told them all to go to Hell because I never wanted to hurt anyone in the first place. Great socialization!

 

Saulty, you always have the best stories!

 

A day out still doesn't equal years of socialising - it's not who you socialise with, it's what you understand about people. Time is more important than who you spend it talking to.

 

social and academic

The academic superiority of homeschooled children, on average, isn't really argued anymore by people that know the stats. I've done enough source quoting to back up what I've said.

Five-year-olds, on average, don't read books. In fact, a problem with the adult population is that so many are functionally illiterate.

The only thing left arguing is "socializing" benefits of Public Schools. Public Schools are probably the most worse abusive areas to put your child in.

Also, homeschoolers advocate putting children in clubs of their interest for the "social" benefits.

In fact, there is data that supports that home schooled children have better social skills then public school children.

It's odd, attacking and monitoring parents that homeschool their kids, while have bullied underachieving kids in public schools doesn't cause outrage. Home schoolers should set standards for the public school system, not the other way around.

 

As anyone who has studied statistics will be more than happy to tell you, its extremely easy to get them to say whatever you want. Just look at all the completely contradictory statistical studies that occur all over the world across virtually every field.

Five year olds do read books. I don't know how you got the notion that they don't, but its simply not true.

As for functionally illiterate adults, while I'm sure there are some people who slip through the schooling cracks and do leave school without a sound knowledge of reading, a quick look at any census data will tell you that the USA, UK and majority of other western countries have a literacy rate of about 99%.

2% of Americans are home-schooled. That sample size is tiny. You cannot reasonably carry conclusions based on a sample like that into a discussion about educating all children. This is one of the many reasons statistics are so often misleading. What is true for some of 2% of children cannot be proven to be true for the majority without a far larger sampling, and even then, proving that it is home schooling as a system that accounts for any hypothetical improvement is virtually impossible as you cannot establish definite causality from a statistical survey like that.

 

I don't think anyone is trying to "attack" parents who decide to homeschool their children. And as for monitoring them, why shouldn't they be monitored? It seems like it would be just as easy, if not easier, for a kid to skate through their schooling and never learn a thing if they were exposed to sub-standard home schooling than if they attended a public school. If parents were not held accountable for what they taught their kids, then their kids might not learn the things that they're supposed to.

True. If you are looking for results that show homeschooling is superior to public schooling, you'll find them. However, if you were looking for the opposite, you could find those, too. Throwing out that kind of "proof" that you're right and everyone else is wrong doesn't really prove anything. Ultimately, while homeschooling may be great for some kids, there will always be others that it won't work for. Everyone learns in different ways.

 

I've shown several sources showing homeschooling academic superiority to public schooled children. Do you have data showing that public schooled children do better, academically, then homeschooled children?

I've never even seen proponents of the public school systems bringing up any statistics, in debate, showing that the general trend in the US is the public schooled children do better. So please, show me.

 

lol....our point was that statistics don't conclusively prove anything. Public education has hundreds of years of history and millions of perfectly normal, well educated and socially adjusted graduates as evidence of its success.
A handful of studies may "show" that home schooling is better, but its going to take a lot more than that to discredit public education.

 

And even if the academic results are higher, there are still the multitude of other factors that make it an unviable alternative to the school system. While education should be the main focus of this debate, it certainly isn't the only one, and as a system, public schooling is able to overcome the limitations of home schooling.

 

1. There is a difference between functionally literate and literate. 99% of American's are not functionally literate.

2. To make this precise. Only 13% of the American adult population were proficient. Someone proficient was defined as someone that "can perform complex and challenging literacy activities." This is taken from the U.S. Department of Education. Unfortunately, we don't know how many of those were immigrants.

This was stated, "If you are looking for results that show homeschooling is superior to public schooling, you'll find them. However, if you were looking for the opposite, you could find those, too."

All I asked was, where is the opposite? Where are the statistics showing academic superiority of public schooled children over home schooled children in the USA.

When I was asked "where are you getting your information? Is it personal experience, or have you read about studies that yielded those results?" I gave my evidence in response. Then I'm told by the same person "if you were looking for the opposite, you could find those, too." Now I ask, where is she getting her information from?

I'm not even asking it for argument sakes, I just curious. I'd like to see the other results. Jeez.

 

I don't know of any studies, ask that poster, but even then I would be just as skeptical of them as I am of your cited studies. You simply cannot trust statistics.

The majority of the studies of homeschool testing performance is done on a voluntary basis; that is, researchers invited homeschooled students to participate and they were free to decline, meaning that only those children who wanted to take the tests' results were considered. These were paired with the average results of mandatory tests (in some cases not even the same tests) from public schools. Self-selection bias obviously discredits any such study, and yet these are the studies being spouted by pro-homeschool advocates.

Beyond test statistics, there are far more troubling factors that are revealed in other surveys. For instance, a 2000-2001 study by Barna indicates that homeschool "teachers" (a term I'm very reluctant to use...) are 39% less likely to be college graduates, have an income 10% below the national average, and most troublingly, 91% describe themselves as Christian. Given the abhorrant ways Christian (Creationist) views have already corrupted the public education system, I can't even begin to fathom how biased a fully Christian study of science, literature, art and history would be...and given that many states have no specific legislative guidelines for homeschooling, there's no way to prevent such a biased education being given....

 

Get all this from Wikipedia? You're not accepting peer-reviewed journals, but you take Wikipedia!?! I not even sure if you understand what peer-reviewed journals are. After all, when you didn't understand the difference between illiterate and functionally illiterate, as you said "As for functionally illiterate adults, while I'm sure there are some people who slip through the schooling cracks and do leave school without a sound knowledge of reading, a quick look at any census data will tell you that the USA, UK and majority of other western countries have a literacy rate of about 99%."

The other thing is, if you click on the source in Wikipedia, it leads you nowhere. What's worse is that you plagiarized parts of the website. If you're going to copy and paste phrases, you need to put them in quotations.

Did you even read the rest of the website? If you read a bit below, you would have seen this:

In contrast, Lawrence Rudner's (University of Maryland) 1998 study shows that homeschool parents have a higher income than average (1.4 times by one estimate),[53] and are more likely to have an advanced education. Rudner found that homeschooling parents tend to have more formal education than parents in the general population; that the median income for homeschooling families ($52,000) is significantly higher than that of all families with children in the United States ($36,000); that 98% of homeschooled children live in "married couple families"; that 77% of home school mothers do not participate in the labour force, whereas 98% of homeschooling fathers do participate in the labour force; and that median annual expenses for educational materials are approximately $400 per home school student.[64]​

 

Ok, just to clarify, when I asked that earlier in the thread, I wasn't asking for a list of your resources. I was merely trying to clarify whether you were talking about things you had read or things you had experienced/heard from other people.

Have I read things in peer-reviewed journals that show that public schools yield better results than homeschooling? Yes, I have. Am I willing to go dig through all my notes and research from while I was in school to list them for you? Sorry, but no. Whether or not I post sources that back up my opinion, there will still be sources that support both sides of the argument. That's the only point that we're trying to make. A person can say that 'x' is true all they want, but there will still be people who disagree and who have valid reasons for doing so.

 

Why waste time quoting stats when half of your point is that stats cannot be trusted? If I understood him, he probably didn't even have any particular ones in mind, simply that you could create them if you wanted to.

In an earlier post, someone claimed that promoting kids is bad. It really depends on how you do it. In Ontario, we've seen just how detrimental it can be to children being held back. I've seen just how bad it can be to put kids in "special" classes. Besides, if they couldn't succeed once, how is having them repeat the exact same thing helping? In Ontario, we determined that it's better to keep them in their age group while also adressing the areas they need extra assistance with them. It's not just passing them along.

 

I was kind enough to back up what I was saying with sources, I was just hoping for the same hospitality. Anyone can say anything and say, I have evidence for it, but I just won't show it.

I never said stats can't be trusted. What I said was that anyone that knows the stats knows that homeschool children outperform public school kids academically.

 

Please keep the discussion respectful and friendly. If it becomes contentious, it will be closed.

 

It doesn't really matter which educational choice is "best" and that cannot be proved because there are some excellent public schools (usually in affluent neighborhoods) and there some terrible public schools (usually in low socioeconomic areas). The ONLY important part of this discussion is the parental freedom to choose. Public school, parochial school, private school, "magnet" school, Charter school and, yes, home school. All formats have good and bad considerations, and all should be left to the discretion of the parents, not imposed by government.

 

I apologize that I don't have easier access to the articles that I read while I was working on my degree. If I did, I would happily list them for you.

I agree, parents should be able to choose what type of schooling their children get. I also think if a parent chooses to homeschool their child, there should be someone outside the situation monitoring what the child is being taught and how well he/she is learning.