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Home Schooling
Tarranon
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Registered User regular
My, education threads are certainly fashionable these days:
So, home schooling. I've been looking around the interwebs, and to the best of my knowledge the above summary is indeed accurate. According to the ruling, parents must send their children to fulltime schools, or have an accredited tutor teach them. Personally, I feel like this is a gross over correction.
As long as the home schooling program is accredited, and the child is performing well in his standardized tests, I see no reason why home schooling can't remain a viable alternative to those who would benefit from its availability, whatever reasons they may have. I'm as worried as everyone about parents preventing their child from receiving an adequate education, like the ones in the article, but I don't think these are reasonable concerns in a properly functioning, accredited and regulated home schooling program, which theirs obviously was not.
So, what do you guys think? Is the law a reasonable one? Should it be overturned? If it was law all this time, why did it take so long for it to be challenged?
(03-06) 14:26 PST LOS ANGELES -- A state appeals court has struck a blow against the home-schooling movement, ruling that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home.
The ruling was issued by the Second District Court of Appeal in a dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Phillip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who have been home-schooling their eight children. Mary Long, who has no state credential, acts as their teacher.
The Longs said they have also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy, which considers them part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year. A juvenile court judge looking into one child's complaint of mistreatment by Phillip Long found that the children were being poorly educated but refused to order two of the children, ages 7 and 9, to be enrolled in a full-time school, saying parents have a right to educate their children at home.
But the appeals court said state law has been clear since at least 1953, when another appellate court rejected a challenge by home-schooling parents to California's compulsory education statutes. Those statutes require children between 6 and 18 to attend a full-time day school, either public or private, or to be instructed by a tutor who holds a state credential for the child's grade level.
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So, home schooling. I've been looking around the interwebs, and to the best of my knowledge the above summary is indeed accurate. According to the ruling, parents must send their children to fulltime schools, or have an accredited tutor teach them. Personally, I feel like this is a gross over correction.
As long as the home schooling program is accredited, and the child is performing well in his standardized tests, I see no reason why home schooling can't remain a viable alternative to those who would benefit from its availability, whatever reasons they may have. I'm as worried as everyone about parents preventing their child from receiving an adequate education, like the ones in the article, but I don't think these are reasonable concerns in a properly functioning, accredited and regulated home schooling program, which theirs obviously was not.
So, what do you guys think? Is the law a reasonable one? Should it be overturned? If it was law all this time, why did it take so long for it to be challenged?
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On a more general note, home schooling is wildly abused in the US. Your dipshit religious beliefs don't entitle you to fuck your kids out of most chances at succeeding later in life and exposing them only to your wildly fringe belief system. There are cases where, for whatever reason, a parent decides they child can get a better education at home while still receiving normal exposure to society, but for every one of those there are ten poor bastards who's only exposure to science is the Creationist museum because the jesus hating government is going to use the men in black to steal their money/land/dental fillings.
I've noticed that whenever this point is brought up, those supporting homeschooling always go "but we make sure they're in sports and Scouts and stuff!" which misses the point entirely.
Also, all the home school kids I ever met were weird. Clearly, being home schooled makes you weird.
Right, but the law looks to be encompassing accredited home schooling systems to. Take Setan for example. Their students have to take yearly aptitude tests, namely, the California Achievement Test, published by the California Test bureau, and they have to perform well on them to pass, otherwise you've got trouble, and other accredited home schooling programs follow a similar path.
Unless you've got a problem with bad schools getting accredited when you don't think they deserve it(which would be more eloquently solved by just tightening accrediting standards), I don't think concerns about a lack of a decent education are well founded.
As to them being socially inept, it's a fair enough point, but I don't think that's the school's responsibility, and there's obviously a precedent for abnormal character molding in some private schools that perform well academically.
You think kids are getting much intellectual stimulation in poor public schools? I'm not saying that one option is better than the other, but I am saying that I think the choice should be available for people who for whatever reason aren't served well by public schools.
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When you don't interact with kids the same age as you during the larger portion of your day you end up different compared to the kids who did.
I do think that you can get shit done alot more efficiently with one on one teaching then in a classroom, so parents who want to teach their kids an excessive amount of stuff (such as spelling on a national or state level) often end up homeschooling their kids.
This is heading deep into territory where it's the exact details of the precedents cited and the laws in question that determine how right or wrong this was, but I would assume that part of any accreditation program is some measure of examination of the person who will be doing the teaching. It's well within the state's rights (in the interests of best serving the needs of children in their state) to say regardless of how smart someone may be, that even if they could pass certain milestones with no help or with detrimental influences they should be in the care of someone who meets a minimum level of knowledge 5 days a week.
Again, I may well be wrong, but as I understood it from another article I read about this case, the program in question was shady to start with, the mother had not met state requirements to home school her children, and the children were failing their required testing. In cases like that I do think it's appropriate for the state to step in if the situation is not fixed on the parent's authority.
Yes, yes I am. They're certainly getting far better intellectual stimulation than they'd get cloistered away at home with a pair of (nearly invariably batshit crazy) parents censoring everything they see. Given that the vast majority of the time, the reason why parents "aren't served well by public schools" is because the parents in question are crazy religious fundamentalists, I don't think there should be a choice, no.
I do believe that an accredited private school should be an option, but we need stricter standards of accreditation, too. But that's for a different thread. And don't tell me "but private schools are too expensive." Private schools are indeed expensive but they are nowhere near as expensive as having a parent stay at home full-time instead of entering the workforce, and if the parent that is educating the children is unemployable, how the fuck are they supposed to properly educate their children?
Oh man, a thousand times yes. The program was obviously crap, and by all account should be scrapped immediately. But the law, as far as I know, will affect all home schooling programs, from the top notch to the non accredited crazy fundy homeschool #9. I'm arguing that I think the law should make exceptions for the former type. As long as it's accredited and regulated(which I don't think this religious academy was...? Regardless, the mother certainly wasn't a part of any accredited program), I think it should remain legal.
As to your first paragraph, I'm not entirely sure what you're saying?
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As for home schooling, there's definitely a point in which being in public school is inefficient as far as education is concerned, especially if your kid is more than 10% above or below average. As for the social aspects of it, at some point kids need to learn how to ostracize peers who are different, and that authority figures are often incompetent.
My solution: have the kid get home schooled during class time, socialize with kids during class change.
Just have to convince a parent to spend 5 days a week at school.
This is complicated.
Let's take a moment to think about why that is.
What about being religious would convince parents of the need to homeschool their kids? What, specifically?
Now that we have our answer, you can see why this is not a good reason, and why the state should work to prevent those types of situations.
I'm not buying it. According to your area, public schools are enormously overpopulated, and the classrooms are so large that the kids don't get the individual attention they need. I've been in classes where we were treated as just one huge single entity. That's not demonstrably better intellectual stimulation, and you seem to be taking as axiomatic that home schooling necessarily precludes intellectual stimulation when you don't have a leg to stand on. Not all home schooling parents are religious fundamentalist, and even if they were, it's far easy enough to keep an iron grip on a child's intellect even when they are exposed to opposing view points.
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Table 5
Reasons Given by Parents for Choosing Home Schooling:
1996 and 1999 Home Schooled Children: NHES Surveys
In my extremely tired and convoluted way, I'm saying that while I agree there is a perfectly valid role for home schooling (though I think the bulk of people who home school their children do it for the wrong reasons and to the child's detriment) the state has an equally valid right to regulate WHO can home school. If you want to take your child out of a system that is free and at least theoretically meets their educational needs, a bare minimum requirement should be that you prove to the state you know what you are doing.
Testing the child isn't enough, because even if the kid is smart enough to past tests either on their own or with the parent filling their heads with gibberish, they could still be harmed. Einstein could theoretically pass 8th grade biology if you gave him a book and locked him in a room alone for 10 hours a day 5 days a week, but that wouldn't make it any less of a case of child abuse.
One could quite reasonably argue that self reporting to the system people are objecting to isn't the most accurate means of getting at people's motivations.
That makes me so mad.
According to my area? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Getting the viewpoints and opinions from more than a maximum of two people is demonstratably better intellectual stimulation. I'll freely admit that this pretty much only applies to secondary school and not K-5, which could probably be homeschooled fairly safely. I'm going to take Doc's survey there and lump "Religious reasons", "Object to what school teaches", and "To develop character/morality" into one group, because they all mean the same thing: "I need iron-tight control over what my children read, see, and know, because I need to brainwash them into thinking in exactly the same way as I do." That's over half of homeschooled children, according to that survey. That's not alternative education, it's child abuse.
That's definitely fair enough. I'd be all for making sure the people teaching were accountable and certified to a reasonable degree. I don't think the system is perfect by any means, and it could always use more reform, but I am definitely not comfortable with throwing it out all together.
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In that light, in my view, if you want to home school your kids you'd better damn well be a teacher yourself. As in, be certified to teach, have the minimum qualifications that teachers in your area need to have to teach whatever level you will be teaching. Even then it should only be in extreme cases. It should NOT be the way it is now, which is "hey, you wanna home school your kids because they might learn about evolution? go right ahead, just sign this form! yippy!"
Not you, specifically. I probably should have said,"According to one's area, schools can be enormously over populated"
And by the time kids are in secondary, you honestly think they're still being cloistered? Not even most fundamentalists can keep their kids that censored, and the ones that can, I guarantee you it wouldn't matter if for 99.9% of the kids if they were exposed to different ideas. I've met plenty of crazy religious fundamentalists in high school, and I can't say that opposing ideas have gone a long way to moderating their opinion. If anything, it's entrenched it.
I guess I'm trying to say that if parents are of a mind to, they can brainwash their kids extremely effectively even if they're in public school.
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Nowhere near as effectively, I'd reckon.
It depends on how proactive they are, I imagine. Like I said, I've known enough crazy fundamentalist in grade through high school to know that church communities can and are largely able to insulate people from opposing ideas.
I'd be up for any sort of regulations that would discourage religious people from brainwashing their kids in their homeschooling, but at the end of the day I think that's more the job of society than government.
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I went to a string of private and charter schools until my junior year of high school.
Self assessment:
I am happy with how my social abilities have turned out. I didn't really accelerate the growth of my social network until my final year of high school, but I've ultimately turned out more than satisfactory on that front so far.
I am bad at math with lots of variables. Simple algebra is about the extent of my abilities, but I can grind through tests adequately enough. I just have to study harder, generally, than my classmates, and a lot of stuff isn't intuitive for me.
Everything else- language skills, intellectual curiosity, blah blah, I'm super happy with.
I think I got incredibly lucky, as I had excellent parents who not only cared for how I was affected, but were liberal and hands-off enough to not skimp on anything.
Of course, my parents aren't morons. That probably helped.
Not quite sure what you're getting at here, Shinto, but none of my high school teachers were certified teachers. They were amazing teachers, but they all had their masters in the discipline they taught, were not unionized, and were not accredited.
Ahh. I thought this, but just wanted to back up the claim incase you were.
:roll:
GOOD ARGUMENT DUDE!
If homeschooling is as effective as proponents say it is, the graduates should all be fucking geniuses, not just slightly above the curve. Also, that census is not accurate. A vast majority of homeschoolers (somewhere to the tune of 75%) are in it for religious reasons. There is a reason for the socially inept homeschool kid stereotype.
It's not just with homeschool, it's with anything. I can guess with almost perfect accuracy if one of my new kindergarteners has had a form of preschool without testing them academically. Kids that have just been raised by nannies and had no exposure to other kids are equally awkward.
I'm not opposed to homeschooling if the alternatives are really really piss poor. Like the Las Vegas school system is pretty awful, go ahead and homeschool. Schools with a really high student/teacher ratio, schools that score poorly on testing (though this is largely tied with economics). But if you think you're going to be doing your child a huge service by holding him back from a perfectly fine school because you don't want them to have to deal with any douchebags, you're not helping.
Even if you are a wonderful homeschooler, you're missing out on some genuinely great teachers that do things you can't do. Teachers like me. I dance the shit out of the place. Can you dance like me? I don't think so.
Although I am indeed sorely lacking in what you "normal" folks call "the social skills" :P
Of course, my mother was certified by the state to be teaching my sister and I at the time, so that might have something to do with the fact that we actually learned stuff.
She wanted to tech us herself because we moved around a lot for various reasons.
Also, we did indeed usually live in the type of horribly underfunded violent inner-city areas where everyone gives up on the students anyways.
Despite what some people claim, there really are some perfectly valid reasons for wanting to teach your own children, like wanting them to not get the living daylights beaten out of them on a daily basis - hell, at least it's better than the "average" American parents who want as little to do with their children's educations as possible.
You know, the type who use their TVs as baby-sitters because they can't handle their own brats.... :x
I can see not wanting to let some religious crack-pots to keep their children essentially uneducated for the sake of said crack-pot religion, but the real problem is having "fair" rules to determine what's a valid reason to homeschool and what isn't.
That's where things get difficult....
I will say this though: I've known a rather large amount of other homeschooled children, and at least they can frikin' read...
I swear no one even bothers teaching their kids to read these days.
I know a few people who've graduated from the local highschool recently that can't even usually tell the difference between "there", "they're", and "their".
They can't even spell the average 5 letter words either.
Which makes me wonder.... How in the hell did they even pass graduation!?
Do public highschools not even bother paying attention to anything students write?
WTF? O_o
Some of the smartest people I know can't spell for shit. Not making excuses, but this isn't a terribly uncommon phenomenon.