Home Education Magazine

July-August 1998 - Columns

Older Kids - Cafi Cohen

"How Do We Know When We're Done?"

If you attend high school, it's simple. From roughly the ages of 14-18, you sit in a chair six hours a day for 180 days each year. You study carefully balanced amounts of English, math, social studies, and science, and take extras like foreign language, physical education, and drama. Do all that with passing grades, and they give you a diploma.

But how do homeschooling families decide when their teenagers have completed high school? What combination of academic work, accomplishment, and time is enough? How do families evaluate their teenager's learning and decide What's Enough?

External Criteria

Some homeschooling families decide What's Enough by adopting someone else's standards for a high school diploma. The two most commonly used external criteria are (1) tests, like the GED, and (2) diplomas from independent study schools.

In California, homeschoolers may take the California High School Proficiency Examination (CHSPE). A few other states offer specialized high-school-diploma-equivalent tests. In addition, California and most other states offer the GED, tests of General Educational Development. Many colleges and employers recognize a passing GED score as the equivalent of a high school diploma.

Some homeschooling families subscribe to external standards by enrolling their teenagers in diploma-granting independent-study schools. These families adopt the independent-study school's criteria for graduation and the end of homeschooling.

What is enough for these independent-study high schools? Like government high schools, they generally require a certain number of units in math, English, social studies, and science for graduation. Depending on the school, enrollees must earn anywhere from 16 to 28 credits for a diploma, a credit being the equivalent of a one-year high school course.

Other schools, which I call umbrella schools, may not have specific subject requirements. Instead they require documentation of work - usually as hours spent - within very broad categories. Most umbrella schools award one credit for anywhere from 90-180 hours of work. Many are very flexible with respect to what counts. They grant fine arts credit for volunteering with a community drama group, science credit for a 4-H animal project, English credit for self-selected reading, and history credit for watching video documentaries.

Using external standards, as determined by a test or independent-study school, has advantages. You, the parents, get to feel safe. You can say, "We've covered all the bases." Tests and external diplomas provide independent-of-the-family certification of your teenager's competence with respect to high school work. And your teenager is responsible to someone outside the family.

The downside? While the resulting paper trail is pretty, some kids find the actual educational experience less than inspiring.

Family Criteria For Graduation

There are alternatives, the first being a radical idea for those used to thinking in traditional terms: many homeschooling families decide for themselves what constitutes high school graduation. These families use one or more of the following criteria to set goals and make decisions about finishing high school:

*local high school diploma requirements;

*college recommendations;

*time spent;

*age of the homeschooler;

*ability to support oneself financially;

*teenager's evaluation of his readiness to move on.

High School Diploma Requirements

The first sources many new homeschooling families consult to answer the questions "What?" and "How much?" are the local high schools. Homeschooling parents examine typical programs and see four years of English, three to four years of math and social studies, two to three years of science - plus a smattering of foreign language, physical education, art, and music. Then these homeschooling families assemble their own materials, using high school requirements as a guide.

College Recommendations

For the traditionalists among us, a second (often better) source of information of Who Learns What When in high school is the suggested course of study recommended by your teenager's first choice college. Most high schools based their requirements on preparation suggested by colleges. For that reason, I suggest that all homeschoolers who use traditional diploma requirements as a guide bypass the high school filter. Read college entrance recommendations for yourself, and make your plans accordingly.

Go to the library, and examine The many college review guides, like Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. When you read the lists of recommended preparatory work from different colleges, you will notice three important points.

First, when referring to high school courses, most colleges do not list requirements (they reserve that word for standardized tests, completed application forms, proof of US citizenship, and so on). Instead colleges suggest or recommend courses of study. Why would they recommend rather than require certain high school subjects?

For one simple reason: not all public and private high schools offer all courses. Most colleges want the flexibility to offer admission to applicants whose high schools may not offer Latin or Advanced Placement Physics. Because colleges suggest courses of study rather than require them, absence of one or more particulars in your homeschooler's portfolio or transcript is not critical. Suggested courses of study are just that: suggested.

Second, as you peruse the recommended preparation for different colleges, note the wide variation. One school suggests three years of English plus two years of social studies, science, and math. Another more competitive school recommends four years of English, social studies, math, and science - plus at least three years of foreign language. Why prepare for Harvard when your teenager plans to attend the local state college?

Third, consider a point not explicit in colleges' guidelines: there are an infinite number of ways to address recommendations in each discipline (English, social studies, science, math). Take the recommendation for, say, three years of science.

Traditional high schools offer biology, chemistry, and physics to help their students satisfy recommendations for science study. Yet other scientific topics are just as acceptable. Consider meteorology, geology, microbiology, ecology, oceanography, parasitology, hematology, electricity and electronics, herbal medicine, and botany. Pursuing projects in depth impresses college admissions officers just as much as taking the standard science sequence.

Similarly, how kids tackle subjects - whether through volunteer work or hands-on projects or textbooks - is not critical, at least to college admissions officers. For example, working with a wildlife rescue team and documenting the effort is a valid way to address biology.

One college admissions officer says, "With students from small private schools, we are very interested in seeing how they handled the lack of foreign language or laboratory science. The same holds true for homeschoolers. The more creativity and initiative an applicant shows with respect to educational challenges, the better."

Time On Task

Another way to decide when your teenager has completed high school involves keeping track of hours spent on each subject and relating the hour totals to a certain number of credits. For example, when our daughter accumulated 90 hours of self-selected reading and 30 hours of writing (correspondence and creative fiction), we called that 120 hours or 1 credit of English.

Similarly, another teenage homeschooler spent 300+ hours working on a community drama production. Her parents, in their homebrew transcript, gave her two high school credits for a course they called Drama.

Schools, for the most part, operate this way, giving credit for seat time or time on task. While that is enough to make many of us leery, we should remember how easy it is to rack up hours and how positively colleges and employers view the resulting documentation.

Age

Another criterion some homeschooling families employ to delineate the end of homeschooling is the teenager's age. Families arbitrarily decide that graduation will occur in June (or any other month) of the year their homeschooler turns 18 (or 17 or 19 or whatever they feel is appropriate).

While this almost sounds too simple, too good to be true, it works very well in some circumstances - probably because those are the ages that kids are want to take on the world, ready or not. Like writer Raymond Duncan says, "The best substitute for experience is being 17."

Trade/Self-Supporting Skill

The most interesting approaches I have heard to the "When are we done?" issue comes from a homeschooling mother in Georgia. She told all her children that they could consider themselves graduated from high school when they had a trade that would allow them to support themselves. This woman's oldest daughter became a piano tuner, using this skill to work her way through college. Her next child, a son, built a WEB page design business.

Trailblazers

As we approach the next millennium, tens of thousands have segued from homeschooling to college and the workplace. In deciding what constitutes high school homeschooling and how and when to make the transition, many homeschoolers find it helpful to read about the experiences of these trailblazers. Grace Llewellyn's first two books, The Teenage Liberation Handbook and Real Lives, contain some excellent profiles of homeschoolers moving into the larger world full time.

Additionally, at my website, Homeschool-Teens-College http://www.concentric.net/~ctcohen, I have several college admissions essays written by teenage homeschoolers. Read these to see a wide variety of approaches to high school, including what these teenagers' families deemed to be enough.

Back At 'Ya!

Some families rely on their teenagers' sense of when they are ready to move on. The kids graduate at 15 or 18 or 20 years of age. It all depends on when the homeschooler's activities and interests dictate a move away from parent-facilitated learning.

In one homeschooling family, the kids began attending classes at the local community college at age 14 or 15. That was it - graduation and the end of parent-directed homeschooling, in the sense of mom teaching the kids.

In our family, an overseas travel opportunity beckoned, and our daughter left home for the first time at age 16 to spend several months in Australia. That really was the end of her homeschooling, although we did not know it at the time.

"I'll always be a homeschooler."

Some homeschoolers never graduate in the sense that there is no sudden change in lifestyle, no clear-cut graduation. While their parents may award a diploma at some point, these homeschoolers continue living as they have been, following their noses, going to college, finding employment, and gradually moving new areas of interest and experience.

One grown homeschooler I spoke with said that she always wondered when she would stop being a homeschooler. Currently she attends college part-time, works part-time, and does some volunteering. At age 21, she's come to the conclusion that she will always be a homeschooler: she will always spend her time finding those with similar interests to help her pursue her goals.

What Works

All of the above approaches work. It all depends on your priorities and your teenager's interests and goals.

And, as the parents of several homeschoolers have pointed out to me, it's okay not to clearly define the end of high school. Often, the end emerges naturally, just in the course of living. This is scary, but it works well for some families. Other families will prefer clearly delineated goals - and that's okay, too.

How to decide? Should you establish goals? If you do set goals, which goals? Or should you subscribe to somebody else's standards? Consider the following:

*Listen to your teenager's ideas. If your daughter persuasively argues that she should spend all her time with, say, horses - and if she convinces you - go for it. Let her do her thing, sit back, and enjoy the show.

*Make teenagers aware of your ideas with respect to their teenage years. The more you discuss this topic, the more clearly your homeschooling will reflect the best that both you and your teenager have to offer.

*Research external standards - those listed by local high schools, colleges and universities, independent-study and umbrella schools. Examine these lists critically and ask questions.

*Similarly, read books, and access on-line bulletin boards to research the experience of other homeschoolers.

*If the thought of anything non-traditional makes you apprehensive, use an independent-study school, like American School in Chicago, Illinois. If you would like an externally-generated paper trail together with a lot of flexibility, consider an umbrella school like Clonlara in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

*Consider your experience with education and the relationship of formal and informal education to life. And then - here's the hard part - trust yourself. Do what makes the most sense for your situation.

© 1998 Cafi Cohen

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