California Superintendent Jack O’Connell says the state will allow homeschooling, despite a state appeals court ruling that parents who teach their children at home must have a teaching credential.
Prior to the appeals court decision, the state allowed parents to home school if they filed papers establishing themselves as small, private schools, hired a credentialed tutor or enrolled their children in an independent study program supervised by an established school.
The governor already has declared his support for maintaining a flexible policy on homeschooling. The parents’ lobby has a lot of clout.
This is no solution to the problem, though. Nothing stops an individual school district from using the court ruling to go after any homeschoolers it feels like targeting. Nothing stops a vengeful parent from going after his or her homeschooling ex, using this court ruling.
I say again, why do homeschoolers have to have someone credentialed but private schools do not?
This ruling won’t stand. It’s hard to get in a snit over a ruling that will so obviously be overturned.
Darren:
Because there are court decisions in California that say so.
I’ll add: it’s nice that the state and the Governor’s office are in favor of homeschooling, but that’s not where truancy cases arise. Instead, they are initiated by local school districts, who now may believe that they have case law in their favor.
In previous years, in a previous administration, the state Department of Education, under former Superintendent Delaine Easton, was vehemently anti-homeschooling and sent out memos announcing that homeschooling using the Private School Affidavit was illegal. Easton also tried to get the legislature to change the homeschooling laws. But she never went after individual homeschoolers.
The key is embarrassment.
If there are no home schoolers, there are no examples of how much better an uncredentialed parent’s work is.
Richard says teachers know that homeschooling parents are superior to credentialed teachers, but the teachers want to suppress that fact by outlawing homeschooling. This kind of demonizing of teachers is not useful. Better to recognize that many teachers genuinely believe (however incorrectly) that uncredentialed teachers cannot teach effectively.
Anyway, stopping homeschooling doesn’t stop uncredentialed teachers from teaching. Many private school teachers are uncredentialed. So the embarrassment potential would still remain even no students were homeschooled.
Cardinal.
You presume that private schools are not on the target list for, at least, credentialing.
Anyway, whether the teachers believe it sincerely or not, the fact that they are wrong is manifest. One way to deal with it is to see what the home schoolers are doing right. Another is to try to shut down the home schoolers.
In the meantime, it’s more money for the public ed biz.
That’s never a consideration, is it?
“One way to deal with it is to see what the home schoolers are doing right.”
Well, one thing the homeschoolers are doing right is having close to a 1:1 teacher-to-student ratio. Which means that homeschoolers are *tutoring*, not *teaching* a class of 20+ kids. If Benjamin Bloom’s paper, “The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring,” is correct, then one-on-one instruction moves an average student’s scores from the 50th to the 98th percentile. *This* is what homeschoolers are doing (among other things).
Unfortunately, I don’t think *anyone* knows how to get equivalent results in a classroom environment.
-Mark Roulo
[Of course, if the paper is correct, then there *are* a number of things that can be done in a classroom to teach more effectively. Many of these things are not being done ... :-(]
Mark,
I don’t see how the Bloom paper can be right. Plenty of parents hire SAT tutors. Though the students do see improvement in their scores, 50th percentile students don’t usually get boosted up to 908th percentile students.
Cardinal,
Since the SAT is taken at the end of 11ish years of school, the appropriate measure would be to have SAT tutors for the tutored kids for those 11 years. I think. Usually, the SAT tutors step in during the last year (or last few months). That’s not what Bloom was investigating.
If the SAT was something that was *totally* new, then I think the tutored vs. untutored over a short period of time as seen by the SAT tutors would be valid. This is what Bloom did (or tried to do) … teach something fairly new to groups of kids using different approaches.
[I also believe that the SAT-V is basically a crude IQ test and thus much less 'teachable' than the SAT-M]
-Mark Roulo
But still, the claim seems overblown. There are studies that show that homeschoolers do somewhat better than schoolers on various academic tests (though the studies should be taken with a grain of salt, because the sampling methods are questionable) but there are no studies that show the average homeschooler is at the 98th percentile. Anecdotally, the homeschoolers I know are probably doing better than they would have if they’d been schooled, but not that much better.
“…no studies that show the average homeschooler is at the 98th percentile.”
Yep. My guess is one of three things:
1) Bloom overestimated the tutoring effect.
2) Homeschooled kids give back something (maybe 1/2 - 1 standard deviation?) because their tutors *are* amateurs.
3) The Bloom study spent the same amount of time for both tutoring and normal classroom instruction. I don’t know any homeschoolers who spend 6 hours/day on academics. My child spends less than 1/2 of that.
If (2) and (3) each give back 1/2 a standard deviation, then if the average homeschooled kid scores at the 84th percentile, Bloom is correct.
Play with factors for (1) - (3) as desired
Still, even if Bloom’s effect number is *high* I’ve got to believe that tutoring is much superior to a 20+ kid classroom environment. There isn’t much the schools can do about that.
-Mark Roulo
I am related to a ridiculous number of public school teachers.
One day, my son’s mother in law (teacher) said she would not be surprised if her oldest daughter (teacher like her two sisters) put the oldest girl, now 5 1/2, in a Christian school. And she did.
The problem is not only academics but the sordid, fetid aspects of society which the schools either cannot keep out or seek to inculcate.
I would be interested in a study of home schooling parents on the question of whether they would consider it a success if their kid was about as accomplished academically as if he’d gone to public school, but was protected from some of the crap that goes on there.