A question on our HEM Networking list over the weekend brought up the issue of research and homeschooling families, and I thought my response, which was simply a selection of excerpts from a column by Larry and Susan Kaseman, might be worth sharing with this broader audience. I wrote:
Just for perspective, and a little food for thought:
Does Homeschooling Research Help Homeschooling?
- Larry & Susan Kaseman
Excerpts:
When homeschoolers agree to participate in research, they are also agreeing that homeschooling can and should be measured by the categories and terms that researchers choose. In other words, homeschoolers who participate in research are agreeing that the important parts of homeschooling, or at least the criteria by which it should be judged, are things like number of hours spent “teaching” or “studying,” standardized test scores, etc.
The most insidious outcome from this condition is that people no longer trust their own knowledge, experience, and judgment about themselves and their children. Homeschoolers become an illustration of some research study rather than the richer reality they really are.
The rights of parents to educate their own children have a solid foundation. By agreeing to research that will evaluate the “success” of homeschooling, homeschoolers are implicitly agreeing that they need to be judged and assessed. They are thereby surrendering important rights that do not need to be justified.
…research categorizes and labels homeschoolers and seeks out the differences among them. It divides them into lots of little subsets instead of emphasizing their common commitment to securing the best education for their children. It even divides homeschoolers by raising the question of whether to participate in research.
A grassroots organization is strong because a group of people realize that they can take responsibility for some aspect of their own lives, such as the education of their children, and carry it out. In opposition to this, research encourages people to turn over private thoughts and personal details to “experts” who will then put them into some form (which the people could not do themselves, according to the researchers) and present them to others, such as school officials and legislators who will then decide what is best for the people to do and require them to do it. This weakens people and encourages them to become dependent, to surrender their strengths and accept the requirements of others.
There’s one more excerpt I meant to include, and will post there now:
Many important parts of homeschooling (the look of joy on a child’s face as he or she discovers something, the recovered self-confidence of a child who had been labeled “learning disabled” by a conventional school) cannot be captured and recorded in quantitative or “scientific” studies. Therefore research gives a misleading picture of homeschooling when it claims to show the strengths of homeschooling but fails to study or report the most important ones.
Tags: homeschool, homeschool research, homeschooling, homeschooling research, Kaseman
April is National Poetry Month, and while I’ve never been a poet, I do love poetry, and my mother was a poet, which probably comes as a surprise to many members of our family. Mom didn’t share her poetry much, and I only know about some of it because every once in a while I’d find a poem scribbled on the back of an envelope or grocery list. I think she wrote them primarily for her own enjoyment, which seems to me the highest form of poetry. Just the simple joy of how words can fit together into something lovely, funny, inspiring, memorable.
Mom wrote beautiful long poems, short poems, haiku (the smallest literary form, and with the most rules!), freestyle verse, rhyming poems and those that didn’t rhyme but were just lovely to read and gave one something to ponder, to enjoy, to remember long after the poem had been lost to the trashcan or the fire. Being a homeschooling mom, and unschooling specifically, that was the subject of some of her most memorable poems, for me anyway, and I wish I still had some of them I could share. But alas, after all these years I have only the fond memories of poetry about children snug on cold winter days, and her reading to them by the fire while they enjoyed her fresh warm oatmeal cookies and mugs of steaming hot cocoa.
While I was mailing some things at the post office the other day I noticed a new display they have on American poets, and it was so interesting that I looked up some more information when I got home. Here are a few good sites I found; a few minutes on any of them will provide some inspiring reading:
Famous American Poets and Poems
And then there’s poetry for kids:
In that category I must share a really lovely blog I came across when looking for poetry information: Smallworld Reads: Reading Poetry with Children
From that site, this lovely bit:
“Whatever you do, find ways to read poetry. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it.” ~Eve Merriam
The wonderful world of poetry is fun to explore, and most of us have many good memories relating to poetry in some way or another. Remember The Cat in the Hat, The Highwayman, The Raven, The Road Not Taken, The Ants Go Marching, Paul Revere’s Ride, Jabberwocky, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Lorax, Trees?
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree…
I dunno. The poems my mother wrote were really lovely…
Tags: Helen Hegener, homeschooling, poems, poetry, poets, Unschooling
Welcome to our new site design! If you’ve been with us awhile you’ve seen us shift gears like this before, and hopefully each time we do it enhances and improves how you interact with our website. If you’re new to our HEM site, welcome again – and please poke around and familiarize yourself with what we have here.
We’ve spruced up the looks of the site and re-organized some of the navigation, on our way to publishing the complete archives of Home Education Magazine online – that’s twenty-six years of published content – while we continue to broadcast timely news, great homeschooling resources, and plenty of valuable information from the HEM blogs.
The header across the top of this page remains in place for the most part as you move throughout our site. There will be exceptions as we continue to move stuff around between our old site and this current version, but we’ll try to keep things as clear and easy to follow as we can. This Editor’s blog will be the newsy ‘here’s what’s happening’ guide to using this site and the place where we note and explain the ongoing changes as they happen. Check back here often or – better yet – link to our RSS feed for regular updates and information.
Remember to change links and RSS feeds if you have them:
Old link and feed to this blog:
http://www.homeedmag.com/blogs/editorial
http://www.homeedmag.com/blogs/editorial/feed
New link and feed to this blog:
http://homeedmag.com/editorial
http//homeedmag.com/editorial/feed
Tags: Helen Hegener, HEM blogs, HEM Editor, HEM Editor's blog, HEM RSS feeds, Home Education Magazine
What is that light down the road?
The further you back away the better your perspective. At least that is what I have always told myself. In physical terms it is true – I always want the camera to back away so I can see the larger context whether it be sports or a news event. The ‘bigger picture’ has always drawn me, has always fascinated me for human events too. In fact, I feel very uncomfortable forming an opinion on any issue without an exploration of that bigger picture.
I suppose what you risk in backing up for perspective is getting so far away you actually lose sight. Yet, for me, I have been rewarded too many times with one of those “I get what is going on here!’ moments, or, been rewarded by being moved to ask the better questions. Another risk in that bigger picture perspective is that it often challenges the dominant thinking. I am not suggesting that I have experienced anything like realizing the earth isn’t the center of the universe and subsequently suffering the wrath of the dominant theology; yet some days have been very dark with ridicule.
I had been watching the news about the collapse of Wall Street when the title lines on the homeschooling news feeds were peppered by the National Center for Educational Statistics report of growth in homeschooling numbers – it took Google 0.29 seconds to come up with 29,027 blog articles about the growth of homeschooling. I will confess to not being thorough and reviewing each of these blogs, but the predominant sense in my random review was the bloggers by-in-large felt this was great news, three cheers for us:
1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007
In this Brief, students are considered to be homeschooled if their parents reported them as being schooled at home instead of at a public or private school for at least part of their education and if their part-time enrollment in public or private school did not exceed 25 hours a week
Over the years HEM has dissected a large number of surveys and a review of this survey questionnaire doesn’t make me want to shout for joy. They leave a lot of room for misinterpretation. A look at the NHES:2007 SCREENER sheet tells me the key term, enrollment, is mentioned in the notes for surveyors, not in the direct questions to parents. I am sitting in Wasilla, Alaska as I type this; our home offices are in Washington state. Both states have public school programs which have advertised themselves as homeschooling. The wording of this survey would lead participants of these programs to reasonably identify themselves as homeschoolers for this survey.
We can, have and will debate whether enrollment in public school programs is homeschooling or not. We have taken a lot of criticism over the years for holding the position that enrollment in public school is not homeschooling. But I think this argument may very well be just an academic exercise at this point. I fear the autonomy we enjoyed while homeschooling our kids may be a thing of the past, as homeschools are driven toward acting more and more like schools.
What does this have to do with the collapse on Wall Street? To get a perspective on this question, I have to tell you I backed up to 1969. As a college kid taking a Short Story and Novel English course, it dawned on me that the regularly scheduled tests were written by the Teaching Assistants, who all appeared to be working on their Doctorates. My TA wrote the first test, which was based totally on his lesson plans. So after a little poking around I came up with a list of which TA was responsible for which test. Then ’success’ in this class was a simple matter of attending the TA’s class in the week leading to the test. No study necessary, no understanding of the material was needed – just listen in class and regurgitate. I gamed the system, got an A. For the buddies who I let in on my ’secret,’ and my parents, who were paying for this schooling, it was a great and celebrated success. The real lesson I took away was that gaming the system (corruption) pays. So Schooling 101: Corruption can equal success.
The temptation is to draw strict hard lines, but like I suggested earlier, perspective can be dangerous – be careful how you use it. I will not try to argue that school corrupted a generation, but at the same time there are parallels between my schooling and the corruption in the financial sector. Both systems have high stakes for those in them, expectations and demands of success are as real for a school kid as they are for a CEO, and rewards for meeting these expectations are tangible. I may express a reluctance to draw a straight line between school and the stories coming out of the financial sector, but we hear educators and politicians drawing direct lines between schooling and success, based on a promise of greater accountability.
The calls for more accountability in our education system promise a better educational system. Yet, I just keep thinking of that A in English, and, from my perspective, I have to wonder if there isn’t systemic corruption inherent in the way we choose to measure success? As homeschoolers are being pushed to be more like schools, can we challenge the measure of success for our kids? Is our goal raising kids or raising test scores?
Tags: accountability in our education system, Google, growth of homeschooling, Hegener, HEM, homeschooling, homeschooling numbers, National Center for Educational Statistics, perspective, public school programs
There are twelve years of archived articles from Home Education Magazine right here at the HEM website, free for the reading and right at your fingertips! From the Jan/Feb, 1997 issue – we’d already been publishing for 13 years by then – through the current Nov/Dec 2008 issue, the HEM archives offer a wonderful assortment of writing from the oldest homeschooling magazine still being continuously published.
The feature article writers and regularly scheduled columnists who’ve written for HEM over the years provide a very broad perspective on homeschooling issues, and they’ve tackled some tough subjects for our readers, such as the openly questioning article by Ruthe Matilsky titled “On Unschooling and Life,” from our March/April, 2001 issue:
How unsettling it is sometimes when I think that we have scoffed at the script and now we have to take responsibility for how it all turns out. If we’d done what was expected of us, nothing would ever be our fault. Right? Of course my husband and I don’t believe that, but I can’t help worrying. The standard good-parent line is, “All I want is for my child to be happy.” That’s easy to say when the kids are little, but what about a twenty-one-year-old daughter who is not on the college track?
Then there was “Dropping the Bombshell,” by LauraJean Downs in 1998:
Those of us who homeschool are the experts in in-law relationships, right? We simply get on the phone and say something like,”Hi Mom! I just wanted to let you know that we are going to homeschool all of the kids next year. Have a great day!” The relationship just continues as smoothly as it always did, right? Wrong!
Another complicated subject was tackled by M.S. Beltran in “Homeschooled Teens Can Rest Easier,” from March/April, 2004:
My daughter’s late rising has brought about a great deal of eye rolling and gaping disbelief from those who cannot imagine life outside the pre-set hours of institutionalized education, even though they are aware our child is not a part of that institution. Is it stubborn adherence to tradition that keeps people holding the early bird in such high regard, while the night owl is chastised for being lazy?
A favorite article was “Reflections of a Homeschooled Homeschooler,” by Rebecca Bangs Amos, Nov/Dec, 1999:
When my parents shared their plans of moving to a 500-acre farm in Northern Vermont where they would educate their children themselves, their friends responded with, “Are you crazy?” My friends wondered how I could even consider having my mother and father for teachers.
Issue after issue, year after year, Home Education Magazine’s feature article writers captured the essence and the excitement of homeschooling, the concerns and the questions of homeschooling families. Visit the HEM archives and do some reading – it’s all free – and learn why HEM is “More than just a magazine…”
Tags: Hegener, HEM, Home Education Magazine, homeschool, homeschooling
