Advocating for home education is aplenty for me. A decade ago, I decided to make home education my focus rather than “school reform.” However, I still pay attention to efforts to reform public education. One of the latest is the high profile campaign, Get Schooled.
The Get Schooled website is snappy and well-edited. There’s no chance [...]
Reading through the current issue of Education Revolution, I found an interesting article by Elana Davidson titled “Moving Beyond Age Discrimination,” with this highlighted quote:
“Children are the only classification of citizens in our society against whom discriminatory abuse is not only legal, but actually encouraged and carried out by laws themselves.”
What is age discrimination? The [...]
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 calls for more accountability in our education system promise a better educational system. Yet, 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?
