Washington Post series on homeschooling

[FilleMondaine]

You rock, @Ozlsn! Super good article.  I am a clinical therapist for first responders—and that includes teachers now. I also have had CPS workers, along with police and fire who have removed abused kids. Professionally and personally, I know what shitty homeschooling does, along with the denigration of teachers.

A couple of commenters talked about supporting teachers—THANK YOU!

[Caroline]

18 hours ago, Hane said:

@Caroline, amen! Kids do best when there’s a healthy level of communication and mutual support between parents and teachers.

One problem I’ve seen in many bigger public schools is that the school buildings, number of teachers/administrators, and student populations get so big that communication breaks down, to everyone’s detriment. This happens in both impoverished and upper-middle-class school districts, and I’ve seen it firsthand.

The ideal would be more, smaller schools in the students’ neighborhoods, but we know that isn’t going to happen because of the perceived financial benefits of the “economy of scale” that occurs when school districts opt to consolidate students into fewer, bigger buildings.

The school district where I work (one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school) has around 1,000 students in total. The communication is better than average for this reason. About ten years ago there was a push to get the town's high school (300 students)  to consolidate with a much larger neighboring community's high school. The town turned out in force and voted down the proposal even though it costs them more to run their own high school. There are definitely advantages to larger schools in terms of services and extracurriculars for kids, but at a time when kids and parents are really struggling emotionally, it makes more sense to me anyway that our schools remain small. There are a lot of programs popping up that involve neighboring  schools: an ice hockey team, a ski team,  a sailing club, and several service clubs all allow kids from any school in the area to participate. That benefits everyone and makes these less popular activities possible for all. 

I attended a high school of 2,500 in the 70's. I hated it because I felt absolutely invisible. I was an above average, hardworking, well-behaved kid and was hardly noticed. I've never worked as a teacher in a school of more than 500 kids. It just works better for my personality. 

When the school shooting in Parkland, FL happened, I was horrified to see that the school consisted of so many buildings. No wonder things were so confusing that day. I know that school shootings can happen anywhere, but it seemed obvious that the larger the population the less likely staff would know there was a problem with a kid. 

[JermajestyDuggar]

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

The school district where I work (one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school) has around 1,000 students in total. The communication is better than average for this reason. About ten years ago there was a push to get the town's high school (300 students)  to consolidate with a much larger neighboring community's high school. The town turned out in force and voted down the proposal even though it costs them more to run their own high school. There are definitely advantages to larger schools in terms of services and extracurriculars for kids, but at a time when kids and parents are really struggling emotionally, it makes more sense to me anyway that our schools remain small. There are a lot of programs popping up that involve neighboring  schools: an ice hockey team, a ski team,  a sailing club, and several service clubs all allow kids from any school in the area to participate. That benefits everyone and makes these less popular activities possible for all. 

I attended a high school of 2,500 in the 70's. I hated it because I felt absolutely invisible. I was an above average, hardworking, well-behaved kid and was hardly noticed. I've never worked as a teacher in a school of more than 500 kids. It just works better for my personality. 

When the school shooting in Parkland, FL happened, I was horrified to see that the school consisted of so many buildings. No wonder things were so confusing that day. I know that school shootings can happen anywhere, but it seemed obvious that the larger the population the less likely staff would know there was a problem with a kid. 

I’m glad we don’t live in an enormous school district. I have a good friend who teaches in an absolutely huge school district. It’s so big my brain can’t wrap my head around it. At least her elementary school is smallish. But there are 15 elementary schools in the district! And it’s so spread out. I’m glad our kids don’t go to a big district. I wouldn’t say it’s really small. But it’s not big either. But unfortunately we are outgrowing the middle school and one of the elementary schools. It’s pretty cramped. They will have to do some construction in the coming years. Old school buildings are probably pretty hard to update. 

[GreenBeans]

On 12/30/2023 at 1:13 AM, Ozlsn said:

Yeah I would love to see the justification on the last one. "We were studying physics, practically!"

Many home schoolers tend to do that a lot, and it annoys me. They just go about whatever activity and claim it’s “school”. Yes, you can practice maths by calculating percentages of discounts while shopping or fractions while baking, or learn about history while visiting a historic site or museum. But that’s what most parents of non-homeschooles children do ON TOP OF actual schooling, not IN LIEU OF.

Edited January 1 by GreenBeans

[Ozlsn]

On 1/1/2024 at 5:13 AM, JermajestyDuggar said:

But there are 15 elementary schools in the district! And it’s so spread out.

Our education system is organised at a state level, so districts tend to be large in non-metro areas as they're roughly population based. It still stuns me how big some metro schools are though, my high school (years 7 to 12) was ~650 students, anything over 1000 students is enormous to me!  Primary schools here are often locality based, with students starting to travel for school when they reach year 7. Quite a few of my high school friends went to elementary schools with 100-200 students, a couple were at even smaller schools.

On 1/1/2024 at 5:13 AM, JermajestyDuggar said:

But unfortunately we are outgrowing the middle school and one of the elementary schools. It’s pretty cramped. They will have to do some construction in the coming years. Old school buildings are probably pretty hard to update. 

My child's school has been building new classrooms all last year and I really, really hope they are ready for the start of term 1!! So much hassle with parking being shifted around to accommodate things.

On 1/1/2024 at 3:59 AM, Caroline said:

it seemed obvious that the larger the population the less likely staff would know there was a problem with a kid. 

We have a current local situation where several schools have been merged and the new school is having problems because some students who were coping in a smaller school with staff they knew well and who knew them and their history/issues are now not coping in a larger environment with a lot of new staff. It is insanely frustrating because these exact issues were raised before the merger went ahead and apparently no strategies were implemented.

[bea]

We live in a major city and my kids go to the largest high school in the city (4,000 students).  Both came from little grade schools and weirdly, they love the school - but it's incredibly well funded, as it's a test-in school and one of the best in the country.  On the balance, we've been pleased with it.  But part of that is because the facilities blow my mind.  They have nicer science equipment than most universities, including a hydroponics lab (which I sneak into every so often to visit the fishies) and a theater program.

Of course, the school system has incredible inequities and if my kids went to their underfunded neighborhood high school, it would be a mess.

We know people who have homeschooled and their kids just get entirely overwhelmed in the weirdest places.  They're at home with mom all day every day, and museums/plays/movies/etc are just too much for them. I cannot even IMAGINE what it will be like for these kids to even consider going to college, and I imagine they won't.  It's an extremely useful way to keep that whole "at home until marriage" pipeline going, because your kids can't handle anything other than being home or in a small place with other people who have also been homeschooled.  I think that's part of the reason the fundie families homeschool.  No exposure to any other kind of life.  No figuring out that actually you have no tools to live in society, or get a job anywhere but in the community doing manual labor or basic administrative work.

 

[Caroline]

7 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

It is insanely frustrating because these exact issues were raised before the merger went ahead and apparently no strategies were implemented.

This is most of the reason for why our school decided not to merge with a much larger one. In all the districts around us where merging happened, the kids from the smaller district where not easily welcomed. The smaller communities and therefor the students are thought of as 'less than' even now several decades after a merge. 

[JermajestyDuggar]

I probably would have liked going to a bigger high school because I like to blend in. I wasn’t in a tiny high school but it was kind of smallish. Because I lived in a small town with only one high school, I knew a lot of the kids since kindergarten. And I just like being anonymous. I had friends. I wasn’t a loner. But I hated that I literally knew everything about everyone because of how small our town was. It could get gossipy and mean. No one ever talked about me because I never had a boyfriend or big fights with my friends. I also didn’t do drugs and rarely drank. I didn’t skip school either. But if I ever had done any of those things, I am sure there would have been gossip. 

[Alisamer]

The big issue in my area seems to be just keeping up with the number of students. When my mom was in high school (in the 1960s) there was one school, in a couple different buildings, and that was it. (For the white kids. The black kids had a different school that stayed open for a while after integration so only moved over to the "white" school in small numbers at a time.)

When her youngest sister (13 years younger) started high school, they'd built a separate high school for 9-12 grade, fed from two local small town elementary schools that were K-8th.

By the time I was in school (I'm 12 years younger than my aunt) there were 2 new elementary schools K-6 and two Junior Highs 7-9 (one of which had been the previous school for most grades), and the high school was 10-12. And we already were adding trailer classrooms. And a few private schools had opened up locally.

About 10 years ago after all the local high schools were bursting at the seams another high school was built that pulls from a variety of local middle schools. I attended their chorus concert last month and they had the kids raise their hand about which middle school they came from, and there were at least TEN different ones represented! 

And I think this new school is already pretty full up. I'd have gone to the new school, if I was that age now. Even though the old one is much closer (I can sometimes hear the band practice on a clear day). 

There are just SO MANY KIDS. New housing developments are popping up constantly here, the most common post about the area on Reddit is "Hey, moving there, where should I..." type questions, and even the church is bursting with preschoolers and elementary age kids. I have no idea how the school system is attempting to keep up.

[Expectopatronus]

 My high school had 300 kids in it. A lot of kids had dropped out of complete immersion by then or been kicked out due to behaviour. Now, it is a lot bigger as schools can no longer expel students or recommend switching to English.  My daughter’s school is nursery to grade 8 and has just under 300 students. I love for her; the older kids are nice to the little ones, they are polite to parents and the whole teaching staff knows that my girl has severe allergies so she is safe. I teach in a dual track English/Immersion school and the discrepancy between the English and French classes is huge. The teachers are great in both programs but the English kids have more behavioural issues, parents are less involved and they trail the immersion kids in all subject areas. This speaks to the difference parents make as the English classes are smaller and the kids get more teacher attention but are still behind. 

[keen23]

My high school was pretty small. At one point the town had three fully functioning high schools (educating the boomers), but by the time the 90's rolled around the population was dramatically aging, and there weren't a lot of kids. My high school had only three grades in it (10-12), and had maybe 1000 students, and that was the only high school in the town. Buildings were aging too, and schools were seemingly being closed randomly, and then repurposed. One of the older high schools became the town wide middle school grades 4-7, while the 8th and 9th graders were in the old Jr high. Then after I graduated, the old Jr High, became the high school and the high school I was in became the Jr High (the buildings were 7 miles apart too).

[Father Son Holy Goat]

On 1/1/2024 at 3:06 AM, GreenBeans said:

Many home schoolers tend to do that a lot, and it annoys me. They just go about whatever activity and claim it’s “school”. Yes, you can practice maths by calculating percentages of discounts while shopping or fractions while baking, or learn about history while visiting a historic site or museum. But that’s what most parents of non-homeschooles children do ON TOP OF actual schooling, not IN LIEU OF.

You hit the nail on the head, fundies think they can do these educational activities in lieu of school, not in addition to school. 
 

My high school physics class did do a one day trip to Great America at the end of the year, as a fun way to practice physics. This was in May, after nearly 2 semesters of classroom education. 

[hoipolloi]

1 hour ago, Father Son Holy Goat said:

You hit the nail on the head, fundies think they can do these educational activities in lieu of school, not in addition to school. 

Which is also why they believe they can "do research" and know more about health issues & treatments than a qualified medical professional. 

An incredible combination of delusion, arrogance, and  ignorance.

[FiveAcres]

42 minutes ago, hoipolloi said:

Which is also why they believe they can "do research" and know more about health issues & treatments than a qualified medical professional. 

An incredible combination of delusion, arrogance, and  ignorance.

One of the appalling instances of this is with the "influencer" Morgan Hawley Ollegies. She had a very hard time finding a midwife who would attend her "home birth" of her first child. According to her, the ones she spoke to made her feel stupid. She finally found someone (unlicensed) who apparently didn't push back on Morgan's idiotic beliefs. After Morgan labored at home for a long time with the assistance of this incompetent "midwife" she had to be hospitalized to deliver her son. 

[JermajestyDuggar]

14 minutes ago, FiveAcres said:

One of the appalling instances of this is with the "influencer" Morgan Hawley Ollegies. She had a very hard time finding a midwife who would attend her "home birth" of her first child. According to her, the ones she spoke to made her feel stupid. She finally found someone (unlicensed) who apparently didn't push back on Morgan's idiotic beliefs. After Morgan labored at home for a long time with the assistance of this incompetent "midwife" she had to be hospitalized to deliver her son. 

This also describes Nic Nog. She was lucky she didn’t die with her last birth. 

[Columbia]

On 1/1/2024 at 1:06 AM, GreenBeans said:

Many home schoolers tend to do that a lot, and it annoys me. They just go about whatever activity and claim it’s “school”. Yes, you can practice maths by calculating percentages of discounts while shopping or fractions while baking, or learn about history while visiting a historic site or museum. But that’s what most parents of non-homeschooles children do ON TOP OF actual schooling, not IN LIEU OF.

I remember in one of the Reformation of Food talks Beall recommended Mercola,com as a good resource, and said that she used his RSS feed as part of "science" for their homeschooling.

[klein_roeschen]

22 hours ago, hoipolloi said:

Which is also why they believe they can "do research" and know more about health issues & treatments than a qualified medical professional. 

An incredible combination of delusion, arrogance, and  ignorance.

I'm a pharmaceutical technician and work in a public pharmacy. I use any chance to further my knowledge to be better at my job and medicine/ the human body is a personal field of interest for me also. But the amount of knowledge I have is tiny compared to what I don't know and will never know. The times where medical research could fit into some books to read to further your knowledge is long gone. Their idea of research is to read "resources" that fit their ideas and worldviews as well as produced in a way they understand. Because reading real research papers and articles is very difficult and hard to understand, because scientists mostly write for other scientists and not the layperson. So their idea of research is watching some youtube "expert" or reading some blogs that tells them what they want to hear and sprinkled with a good dose of delusions of grandeur to feed of their supriority complex. And if you do your own research and only use legitimate sources and comes to the conclution that is contrary to theirs, you used the wrong sources. I meet such people all the time at work and trying to inform them is more often than not impossible, so I mostly gave up. Only if they want something that is proven to be really dangerous I try or even refuse to sell them what they want. And it's not only costumers, but also coworkers who follow different woo and conspiracy stuff. I learned fast that homoepathy is the most harmless.

[bea]

I did a bunch of research before I decided on my upcoming ankle surgery - but actual research, reading peer-reviewed articles and checking Pub Med for literature reviews.  The poor surgeon's face when I said I'd been looking at the research, though.  He was EXTREMELY relieved when I told him I'd written my thesis on PubMed when I was getting my masters in Library Science and had taken classes in medical research. 

And Morgan almost died during her delivery.  Because she developed a severe infection due to an unlicensed midwife who let her labor at home long after her water had broken and she started running a fever.  Now she's pregnant again, unexpectedly, and who knows what kind of boneheaded plan she's got this time.

Since I pay for Washington Post and NYT accounts, whatever I see that might be homeschool related will be posted in this thread, but do people also want to see fundie-related articles?  I get a certain number of "gift" articles that bypass the paywall that I almost never use. 

[Ozlsn]

I'd be interested to see what is being covered, if you're happy to post them. 

6 hours ago, bea said:

The poor surgeon's face when I said I'd been looking at the research, though. 

Heh, that's funny. "Do your own research" has become such a trigger for me - sure, your filtered google search is totally the same as a literature review. /s

[AverageGiraffe]

23 hours ago, bea said:

I did a bunch of research before I decided on my upcoming ankle surgery - but actual research, reading peer-reviewed articles and checking Pub Med for literature reviews.  The poor surgeon's face when I said I'd been looking at the research, though.  He was EXTREMELY relieved when I told him I'd written my thesis on PubMed when I was getting my masters in Library Science and had taken classes in medical research. 

And Morgan almost died during her delivery.  Because she developed a severe infection due to an unlicensed midwife who let her labor at home long after her water had broken and she started running a fever.  Now she's pregnant again, unexpectedly, and who knows what kind of boneheaded plan she's got this time.

Since I pay for Washington Post and NYT accounts, whatever I see that might be homeschool related will be posted in this thread, but do people also want to see fundie-related articles?  I get a certain number of "gift" articles that bypass the paywall that I almost never use. 

I would absolutely love to read anything you think might be of FJ interest that you can gift. I really enjoyed the homeschooling articles, and unfortunately WaPo and NYT subscriptions are out of my budget right now. I always run out of free articles every month! 

[bea]

You can always hit me up for stuff if it's towards the end of the month and you run out, I can gift-link stuff here.  That's why I started this thread, honestly.

(I pay yearly for the NYT food section, I think I might be able to gift recipes too?)

[Expectopatronus]

Ooooo. That would be awesome! Thanks for gifting the links to the articles. I can’t afford the subscription but enjoy reading the series that you have posted. 

[FilleMondaine]

The Guardian has a new story up about homeschooling in the UK. It is ostensibly an opinion piece, but with good stats.

Would someone help by posting it? I had to go the hospital, again, and can’t figure out doing it.

the UK debate is interesting because the questions is IF homeschooling should be ok, and it is neat to see the ground floor.

in the US, we flew by the IF, to the detriment of so many kids.

[Ozlsn]

I think this is The Guardian article - titled "Yes parents have the right to educate their child at home. But children have rights too." The opinion piece is in response to this article published last week, where the Labour Party are proposing a homeschool register if they are elected later this year. From the second link:

"Tackling historically high levels of absence since the disruption of the pandemic has become a priority issue for political leaders in what will almost certainly be a general election year, with more than a fifth (21.2%) of pupils in England “persistently absent” – missing 10% or more school sessions – across the autumn and spring terms 2022-23."

...

"Unions, local authorities and child protection charities have long pushed for a mandatory national register of children not in school to help keep track of them and ensure they are receiving a suitable education.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary at the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “The sooner this is delivered, the better. All education settings and parents should have a duty to provide information to local authorities, enabling them to maintain an up-to-date register.”

Many in the home schooling community oppose the idea. Education Otherwise, which aims to provide support and information for families whose children are being educated outside school, said: “Yet again we see an inappropriate and frankly mangled conflation of home education and absenteeism.”"

The first link goes into some of the factors that would need to be addressed with a register including a clear definition of educational standards, who the responsibility for assessing this would lie with and what powers they would have.

 

Edited January 23 by Destiny
removed formatting that made it hard to read on spectrum

[Marmion]

On 12/19/2023 at 3:41 PM, Red Hair, Black Dress said:

A friend of mine who taught upper level HS math in a semi-rural area told me over 30 years ago she could always tell who in her math classes had been home schooled.* These were kids who joined public school as juniors/ seniors in order to get a state HS diploma for college applications. She had at least 1-2 in every one of her classes for years.

She said::

1.  They were not prepared at all for upper level math or much beyond basic math (8th grade/ pre-algebra)

2.  They were convinced of their education superiority and convinced of their math education prowess/ superiority even when shown to be giving the wrong answers.

3.  They would argue with the teacher that their wrong answer was correct and that the teacher was wrong.

4.  They had very poor social and interpersonal skills.

5.   It did no good to speak with the parents as they too were convinced the child was a math genius, and that the teacher was just wrong and should just pass the young genius with the "A" they so obviously deserved.

 

* You may decide for yourself if the home schooling was designed to keep the child away from the evil world and its evil influences and was heavily religiously-based.

Hint:  Yes. Yes it was.

 

 

This reminds me of how I discovered just how unusual Accelerated Christian Education is , especially as it pertains to Math.  I shared this math equation , involving order of operations , that I found on Facebook , that had been causing so much controversy.  To my surprise , she informed me that in A.C.E. they just work from left to right , unless it's set off by brackets or parentheses .  When I informed her how she is an outlier , and that standardly others use something called PEMDAS , she derided it as "outcome based education" , or common core.  So yes , there can be some homeschoolers that might use methods that run contrary to standard operating procedure , and they will just take it on faith that their authority is sound .  P.S. For any who may be interested , this was the problem in question .  Depending upon the order in which you work it , you will get a different answer , which people on Facebook then argue over in the comments .   

 

Spoiler