Home schooled children outpacing public school students

[Skull Pilot]

Rightwingers like the idea of homeschooling because they know that the rightwing ideology is too whacked to compete in an open arena of ideas,

therefore,

the best alternative is to isolate children in an ideological concentration camp where the right's crackpot propaganda can be infused without outside interference...

...from reason, logic, and truth.

Prove that all home schoolers are right wing wackos.

 

[ClosedCaption]

If both parents work, homeschooling is not a practical option.

It depends.

One parent could work nights I guess it all depends on what you want for your kids.

Those that want to home school will find a way.

I find the vitriol hurled at parent who home school to be telling though.

What the fuck do you people care if some parents want to home school especially since the stats show that home schooled kids outperform their public school counterparts unless of course if that better performance is the problem.

Who will do the home schooling once the divorce goes through because they never see each other?

 

[JakeStarkey]

True...This is why home schooling and classes over the internet are better

The state must require back ground checks for all adults that frequent home school homes.

Why? Background checks are not required for parents of public school students.

Because now in home schooling they will be the educators.

Parent educators should also pass the public state certifications for educators in general fields.

 

[Borillar]

Smart parents are starting to realize just how bad the public schools really are:

Home schooled children outpacing public school students

Do you know there are 10 and 12- year-old students already attending college classes in America? It is happening every day as parents flee the public schools and instead educate their children at home.

All across the U.S. home schooled children continue to surpass children subjected to the dumbing-down process that is offered by public education. The results are by the time home schooled students are in the 8th grade, they are four years ahead of their public/private school counterparts.

Parents who are aware of Common Core curriculum (one size fits all) that was created by the Obama administration are leaving the public school system by the hundreds of thousands and if a charter school is not available are turning to home schooling.

The statistics about how far ahead home school children are may be ignored by some school boards however consciousness parents are becoming aware that their children are falling behind home schooled students. If these parents cannot force Common Core out of their schools, they are finding there are other ways to educate their children and home schooling is one of them.​

Not surprising really. We home schooled our daughter for 3 years while she was in elementary school (grades 2 - 5). We did it for medical reasons rather than curriculum concerns. This was during the Bush administration. This really benefitted her as we inculcated study habits and discipline. This has served her well now that she is back in the school system. Home schooled kids have the advantage of individual attention, and parents actively involved in their child's education. Public schools seem geared to the slow kids which leaves bright kids bored and unmotivated. Doesn't really have anything to do with who is president or what the latest education fad happens to be.

 

[Skull Pilot]

If both parents work, homeschooling is not a practical option.

It depends.

One parent could work nights I guess it all depends on what you want for your kids.

Those that want to home school will find a way.

I find the vitriol hurled at parent who home school to be telling though.

What the fuck do you people care if some parents want to home school especially since the stats show that home schooled kids outperform their public school counterparts unless of course if that better performance is the problem.

Who will do the home schooling once the divorce goes through because they never see each other?

Irrelevant unless of course you can prove that married couples working different shifts have a statistically significant higher than average divorce rate that is.

 

[Alfalfa]

Although I have no doubt many HS kids will do better academically than PS counterparts, if for no other reason than the parents are involved and motivated, almost all stats on differences in testing between the two are built on shaky ground...and for one reason.

How do you "test" HS kids? Well, you rent a big hall and then invite parents to bring their kids down fro testing. Guess which kids/parents don't show up? The ones doing poorly or a bad job. In other words, the test group for the HS kids is self selecting. It's like taking an internet poll.

The only way to responsibly compare the two is to also ask the parents of PS kids to bring them down for testing. Guess which ones will show up? But that isn't how PS testing takes place, ALL KIDS have to do it.

To date there has been NO effort oa any kind to reliable test and compare the scholastic differences between HS and PS, the closest we can come is the differences in college ACT and SAT scoring, but even that may be suspect since the kids voluntarily, or not, identify themselves as HS and many had a combination of the two.

That being the case, ACT and SAT may be the best info we have go on. I checked to see what I could find but the pickins were meek. This is the best I could do.

"By contrast, SAT and ACT tests are self-selected by homeschooled and formally schooled students alike. Homeschoolers averaged higher scores on these college entrance tests in South Carolina.[41] Other scores (1999 data) showed mixed results, for example showing higher levels for homeschoolers in English (homeschooled 23.4 vs national average 20.5) and reading (homeschooled 24.4 vs national average 21.4) on the ACT, but mixed scores in math (homeschooled 20.4 vs national average 20.7 on the ACT as opposed homeschooled 535 vs national average 511 on the 1999 SAT math).[42]"

Homeschooling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If anyone has any updated info on the differences in ACT and SAT scores, it would be appreciated.

Then there is...

Home Schooling ? Rob Reich

The New York Times is running a Room for Debate forum on whether the federal government should provide a tax credit to families who home school their children. The Fordham Institute chief Checker Finn and Home School Legal Defense Association legal counsel William Estrada are among the contributors.

In my contribution to the forum, I express no quarrel with a tax credit so long as it comes with accountability strings attached. The main point I tried to make is that we know astonishingly little about the academic performance of children who are homeschooled. The sad truth about home schooling is that we have little more than glorified anecdotes.

The word limit for contributors is strict, so I could only baldly assert this in the NYT forum. Here’s the argument and evidence for the assertion.

For a quick overview, first check out the comprehensive and detailed site maintained by Professor Robert Kunzman of Indiana University. Kunzman has written sympathically about homeschooling, but he explains why the frequent claims that the “average homeschooler” outperforms public and private school students are unjustified.

For a more detailed argument, read an overview on why home schooling needs to be regulated a few years ago. Download a version of it here. It contains a discussion of the lack of evidence on the outcomes of home schooling.

Why do we lack such evidence? The reason is related to the massively de-regulated environment for homeschoolers. Because existing regulations for home schooling are either so minimal or so little enforced, many parents do not notify local educational officials when they decide to home school. At least ten states do not even require parents to register their home schools. A great deal of home schooling occurs “under the radar”, so to speak, so that even if local officials wished to test or monitor the progress of home schooled students, they wouldn’t even know how to locate them. Researchers and public officials have, quite literally, no sense of the total population of home schooled students. This is the primary obstacle to studying home schooling.

A further concern is that an appalling amount of the research conducted on home schooling and given publicity in the media is undertaken by or sponsored by organizations whose explicit mission is to further the cause of home schooling. Of course, that research is conducted by persons whose pay comes from organizations dedicated to promoting home schooling is no reason to reject the findings out of hand. I would suggest, however, that we treat the findings of their research on home schooling in the same way the people treat the research on nicotine addiction funded by tobacco companies: with a very large dose of skepticism.

Consider one of the most widely publicized studies in the home school research literature, the 1999 report by Lawrence Rudner entitled “Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home Schooled Students in 1998.”[1]

Rudner’s study was funded and sponsored by the Home School Legal Defense Assocation. It analyzed the test results of more than 20,000 home schooled students using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and it was interpreted by many to find that the average home schooled student outperformed his or her public school peer. But Rudner’s study reaches no such conclusion, and Rudner himself issued multiple cautionary notes in the report, including the following: “Because this was not a controlled experiment, the study does not demonstrate that home schooling is superior to public or private schools and the results must be interpreted with caution.” Rudner used a select and unrepresentative sample, culling all of his participants from families who had purchased curricular and assessment materials from Bob Jones University. Because Bob Jones University is an evangelical Christian university (a university which gained a national reputation in the 1980s for its policy of forbidding interracial dating), the sample of participating families in Rudner’s study is highly skewed toward Christian home schoolers. Extrapolations from this data to the entire population of home schoolers are consequently highly unreliable. Moreover, all the participants in Rudner’s study had volunteered their participation. According to Rudner, more than 39,000 contracted to take the Iowa Basic Skills Test through Bob Jones, but only 20,760 agreed to participate in his study. This further biases Rudner’s sample, for parents who doubt the capacity of their child to do well on the test are precisely the parents we might expect not to volunteer their participation. A careful social scientific comparison of test score data would also try to take account of the problem that public school students take the Iowa Basic Skills Test in a controlled environment; many in Rudner’s study tested their own children.

Rudner himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentation of his work. In an interview with the Akron Beacon Journal, which published a pioneering week-long investigative series of articles on home schooling in 2004, Rudner claimed that his only conclusion was that if a home schooling parent “is willing to put the time and energy and effort into it – and you have to be a rare person who is willing to do this – then in all likelihood you’re going to have enormous success.” Rudner also said, “I made the case in the paper that if you took the same kids and the same parents and put them in the public schools, these kids would probably do exceptionally well.”[2]

Absent rigorous, social scientific data on the outcomes of home schooling, we are left in the realm of anecdote – the home schoolers who win the National Spelling Bees – and the occasional ethnographic study of small populations of home schoolers.[3] But neither can give us any picture of whether home schooling “works”. The very best research on home schooling – the combination of random samples of large populations and ethnographic studies, yields some good information about the reasons why people home school and demographic characteristics of their households. But when we look at the academic performance of home schooled children, the bottom line is that we know virtually nothing.

 

[bodecea]

Nothing. It's not our day to watch them. Seriously, how many parents do not want their children to learn? Your thinking reflects the elitist attitude of liberals everywhere.

Kids want to learn. Have you ever watched them play? Engaged with them?

Besides, you're taking for granted that we have a citizenry equipped to make intelligent voting decisions. We don't.

You think all people with children think like you. That is not the case. Children not in school are problem children. I hope you wouldn't mind having your house broken into while you are at work.

I guess we need the gestapo to herd them into factory schools or none of us are safe.

Please.

That sounds like what YOU are advocating.

 

[Samson]

you rightwingers and your beliefs are pathological. Sick, demented fucks who don't deserve to live in America.

Why are homeschoolers so defensive, so hyperbolic, so paranoid, so victimologist??.

Yeah.....

I will not hesitate to respond in kind to those who insist on personally attacking me when they can't make an intelligent on-topic post.

And I'll do it better than they do.

Go ahead and roll around in the gutter.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Yeah.....

I will not hesitate to respond in kind to those who insist on personally attacking me when they can't make an intelligent on-topic post.

And I'll do it better than they do.

Go ahead and roll around in the gutter.

Why don't you tell me why you're giving me grief, but not the people who have personally attacked me in this thread?

My assumption is that you consider them to be beyond help. lol

 

[NYcarbineer]

If both parents work, homeschooling is not a practical option.

It depends.

One parent could work nights I guess it all depends on what you want for your kids.

Those that want to home school will find a way.

I find the vitriol hurled at parent who home school to be telling though.

What the fuck do you people care if some parents want to home school especially since the stats show that home schooled kids outperform their public school counterparts unless of course if that better performance is the problem.

You need to go back to the OP in this thread and educate yourself on where the vitriole begins.

Then you need to ask yourself, why aren't you giving the author of this thread shit for the vitriole he's spewing?

 

[Samson]

I will not hesitate to respond in kind to those who insist on personally attacking me when they can't make an intelligent on-topic post.

And I'll do it better than they do.

Go ahead and roll around in the gutter.

Why don't you tell me why you're giving me grief, but not the people who have personally attacked me in this thread?

My assumption is that you consider them to be beyond help. lol

Actually, didn't mean to deliver grief, but found it ironic that on the one hand you threaten "rightwingers" and on the other, wonder why they're paranoid.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Oh, and while we're on the subject of public schools...

...why is it that most of the best states for public education are liberal?

why do notoriously blue states like Massachusetts, and my own New York always rank near the top of state by state school ratings?

We know why.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Go ahead and roll around in the gutter.

Why don't you tell me why you're giving me grief, but not the people who have personally attacked me in this thread?

My assumption is that you consider them to be beyond help. lol

Actually, didn't mean to deliver grief, but found it ironic that on the one hand you threaten "rightwingers" and on the other, wonder why they're paranoid.

Go back and read the 1st post in this thread. Before I've said a word here.

 

[Samson]

Why don't you tell me why you're giving me grief, but not the people who have personally attacked me in this thread?

My assumption is that you consider them to be beyond help. lol

Actually, didn't mean to deliver grief, but found it ironic that on the one hand you threaten "rightwingers" and on the other, wonder why they're paranoid.

Go back and read the 1st post in this thread. Before I've said a word here.

Ok I read the OP, and read nothing similar to

you [leftwingers] and your beliefs are pathological. Sick, demented fucks who don't deserve to live in America.​

I do disagree with the characterization of Core Curriculum (Core Knowledge).

 

[NYcarbineer]

Actually, didn't mean to deliver grief, but found it ironic that on the one hand you threaten "rightwingers" and on the other, wonder why they're paranoid.

Go back and read the 1st post in this thread. Before I've said a word here.

Ok I read the OP, and read nothing similar to

you [leftwingers] and your beliefs are pathological. Sick, demented fucks who don't deserve to live in America.​

I do disagree with the characterization of Core Curriculum (Core Knowledge).

I told you I was better at it than they are. I didn't start it. The OP starts it.

You're the referee who misses the first punch and then throws the flag on the guy who punches back.

Wake up, noddy.

 

[Samson]

Oh, and while we're on the subject of public schools...

...why is it that most of the best states for public education are liberal?

why do notoriously blue states like Massachusetts, and my own New York always rank near the top of state by state school ratings?

We know why.

Because they have so many private schools?

Private Schools by State - A List of Private Schools in U.S. States

Alabama (43)
Alaska (11)
Arizona (68)
Arkansas (14)
California (522)
Colorado (20)
Connecticut (205)
Delaware (27)
Florida (217)
Georgia (136)
Hawaii (22)
Idaho (5)
Illinois (147)
Indiana (22)
Iowa (13)
Kansas (11)
Kentucky (19)
Louisiana (23)
Maine (17)
Maryland (128)
Massachusetts (220)
Michigan (36)
Minnesota (50)
Mississippi (20)
Missouri (27)
Montana (5)
Nebraska (19)
Nevada (12)
New Hampshire (21)
New Jersey (56)
New Mexico (7)
New York (402)
North Carolina (91)
North Dakota (5)
Ohio (44)
Oklahoma (19)
Oregon (23)
Pennsylvania (258)
Puerto Rico and the USVI (6)
Rhode Island (14)
South Carolina (25)
South Dakota (6)
Tennessee (57)
Texas (137)
Utah (22)
Vermont (25)
Virginia (95)
Washington (90)
Washington, DC (30)
West Virginia (8)
Wisconsin (38)
Wyoming (5)
.

 

[Samson]

Go back and read the 1st post in this thread. Before I've said a word here.

Ok I read the OP, and read nothing similar to

you [leftwingers] and your beliefs are pathological. Sick, demented fucks who don't deserve to live in America.​

I do disagree with the characterization of Core Curriculum (Core Knowledge).

I told you I was better at it than they are. I didn't start it. The OP starts it.

You're the referee who misses the first punch and then throws the flag on the guy who punches back.

Wake up, noddy.

There was no punch

 

[gallantwarrior]

Public Education started for the children of people who could not afford tutors or private school. It has always been the "fall back" form of education. Most families, for a variety of reasons, use that "fall back" now. Why do people expect the "fall back" position to lead in excellence?

Why shouldn't people who opt for your "fall back" position NOT be able to expect, demand even, that their children receive a quality education? Excellence should be the goal of public schools, producing well-educated, lettered young adults who are capable of performing at a more advanced level than 3rd grade. Alas, government, and unions, have co-opted public schools and have made them de facto mills where success is punished and the worst dregs are coddled and promoted. Little is earned, all is given without merit.

Why are homeschoolers so defensive, so hyperbolic, so paranoid, so victimologist??

Jesus, everyone's out to get you. boohoo. Grow up.

Why are you?

 

[gallantwarrior]

Public Education started for the children of people who could not afford tutors or private school. It has always been the "fall back" form of education. Most families, for a variety of reasons, use that "fall back" now. Why do people expect the "fall back" position to lead in excellence?

Why shouldn't people who opt for your "fall back" position NOT be able to expect, demand even, that their children receive a quality education? Excellence should be the goal of public schools, producing well-educated, lettered young adults who are capable of performing at a more advanced level than 3rd grade. Alas, government, and unions, have co-opted public schools and have made them de facto mills where success is punished and the worst dregs are coddled and promoted. Little is earned, all is given without merit.

These are the things parents can do to ensure their child receives a quality education:

1. Homeschool

2. Quality Private School

3. Public school with the following:

a. join school board or go to school board meetings
b. join PTA or Site Council
c. come to school often to observe student in classes
d. inquire nightly about their child's progress
e. provide their child with a quiet place to study
f. turn OFF the TV and video games
g. take their child to enriching activities like libraries and museums
h. make sure their child gets decent meals and a good nite's sleep



How many do that?

If parents aren't doing at least some of those things, why are they not? There are several things on your list that any parent is capable of doing. I could not afford private school or tutors. The PTA was a farce, quite political, quite liberal, comprised of a bunch of whiny pissants. As far as the rest of your list, I did frequently attend my child's classes and observed the abysmal conditions for normal, decent children. I provided my child a lovely place to study, monitored her progress and homework, restricted access to TV and video games, took her to all kinds of interesting extra-curricular activities, and fed her. She was still bored shitless in a classroom to full of brats with no parental guidance and to whom the school administration catered. She was learning very little of academic nature or true value. I made the sacrifice of time and effort and assumed the responsibility required to provide her a quality education at home.

So why don't parents become more involved in their children's lives?

 

[gallantwarrior]

If both parents work, homeschooling is not a practical option.

It depends.

One parent could work nights I guess it all depends on what you want for your kids.

Those that want to home school will find a way.

I find the vitriol hurled at parent who home school to be telling though.

What the fuck do you people care if some parents want to home school especially since the stats show that home schooled kids outperform their public school counterparts unless of course if that better performance is the problem.

Who will do the home schooling once the divorce goes through because they never see each other?

Not every couple is that immature and selfish.