The Washington Post has a lengthy article on the flawed research being used by Evangelicals to claim that home-schooling provides a better education than public schools do.
That link is a gifted one, so y'all should be able to read it even if you don't subscribe to the Post. But the gist of the article is that the studies being used by Evangelicals are flawed. The non-Evangelicals who look at the research point out that the samples are small, and the Christian "researchers" are cherry-picking their data.
Interestingly, when Nebraska put forth a proposed law saying that any home-schooled student who scored under 40% on the standardized tests should have to be moved to traditional schooling, the Evangelical homeschoolers fought the proposal. It's almost as if they don't believe their own propaganda about their kids scoring higher than traditionally schooled kids on such exams.
I hate standardized testing, too, mind you; and my own kid was homeschooled for four years, as long-time readers know. But we hired a math tutor for him during those years, and an art tutor, and he sat in on some of my university classes. And we didn't do it because we thought the public schools sucked, but for other reasons.
Meanwhile, though, because Arkansas does require every homeschooled child to show up once a year and take a standardized test, I got to meet some of the local parents doing homeschooling. I wouldn't have trusted most of those people to raise a dog, frankly, much less educate children. And in my years here at this university, I have met many, many home-schooled children. Some were very well educated -- but, as the Post article notes, these are kids, like mine, who probably would have done well in any system: kids with educated parents from middle-class or upper-class families. Those aren't the kids we need to worry about, in other words.
No, it's the ones I met on standardized testing days -- the ones whose parents aren't educated, who don't have funding to provide books or tutors, or who have so many children that their kids end up serving as maids and nannies instead of being educated. I've had those students, too -- ones who have been miseducated by their parents, ones who can't understand the difference between fact and opinion, or evidence and belief: who insist that belief is, in fact, evidence. Those are the children being failed by home-schooling.
It's true that public school also has its flaws. No one denies that. But for a large segment of children -- the ones who won't do well in any education system -- it's going to be better than homeschooling.
And that's not even mentioning the homeschooled kids who are subject to isolation and abuse. That's an entirely different post.
2 comments:
I was shocked about how easy it was to do homeschooling here. We have no regulations. Nothing. Like they say certain things must be covered, but we never had to say how we were covering them or prove that we covered them. It's a system ready for abuse. But many people in the state see children as having less agency than livestock.
We had to register, and take the yearly exam, but that was it. No other oversight. Appalling.
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