Home Schooling and the Future Something I have said in the past about home schooling, there is a huge liability in the process : Kids miss out on important socialization experiences. Speaking personally, I would have hated to have missed out on interests that have been with me for my entire life, some very important, that no question about it, were the direct result of friendships that developed in grammar school. These kinds of developments are simply impossible if over 90 % of a child's educational "input" is from parents alone. I hardly ever give a second thought to those long ago years, they really do not interest me, but they left an indelible impression. All kinds of interests of other students rubbed off on me in that period of time. >From then until now, the effect was an opening of doors to ideas that have continually nurtured my mind, and, doubtless, millions of other Americans would say the same thing. Now, however, there are two strong trends away from public education, charter schools and home schooling, each at about 2 million students and growing. There surely is marketing opportunity in this, above and beyond the efforts of "Christian" publishing companies. Especially for computer companies. There also is a lesson in this story. "White flight," which first populated the suburbs, then the exurbs, now swells the demographics of states like Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Florida, Arizona, and Maine. For the fact is, even if because of Political Correctness, no-one can say so, when "minorities" become dominant in public school populations, standards of achievement go down the drain and crime rises dramatically in school districts. What is the solution to the problem ? Two answers, one is obvious, the other is conjectural. First, unless we become honest there can be no solution. And the fact is that lionization of "blackness" --think the popularity of Rap (ersatz) music, think affirmative action programs all over the map, think heavy recruitment of black students of merit, who are in very short supply, by elite universities like Harvard and Stanford, and so forth-- has compromised traditional essentially white culture and its norms everywhere. That is, high achievement traditions associated with America's traditional, 90% white, middle class, are under siege. They aren't under siege when Asians are involved since Japanese and people with India background, etc, often outperform white Americans on many standards, but as far as other minorities are concerned we all know the story. For every potential McWhorter or Angela Mayu among the black young there apparently are fifty who seem incapable of critical thought. Can't say as far as Hispanics are concerned but anecdotal evidence suggests a similar situation among recent immigrant populations, even if it isn't as dismal. Among second or later generation Latin-Americans, men and women of accomplishment are everywhere to be found, from ( very ) conservative author William _Grigg_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norman_Grigg) to liberal commentator Maria Hinojosa. Clearly Hispanic culture, in an American environment, can change in major ways such that the people involved can be approximately as much high achievers as anyone else. But otherwise the cultures of these groups are severely dysfunctional, certainly not in all particulars, but in far too many. We either address this issue or it will continue and possibly get even worse. Which would guarantee further white flight from public schools and more and more problems with respect to already troubled educational systems in the United States. Secondly, there ought to be some kind of Radical Centrist solution to the problem. If RC is as useful as many of us believe, then a Radical Centrist who is motivated ought to be able to at least suggest some new approaches to education. The key word is "motivation." Just telling someone to give it a try is not motivation. Hours and hours of work would be necessary, maybe weeks. Then what ? "That's interesting," and everything is immediately forgotten ? The point, though, is that there should be some kind of solution that RC thinking could generate that no other philosophy is capable of creating. You'd think this would be valuable. Billy =========================================== Hidden rival of charter school growth By _Jay Mathews_ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/jay-mathews/2011/03/02/ABnumxM_page.html) , The Washington Post
Public charter schools are a hot topic among us education wonks. Charters have been growing rapidly. They enroll more than 2 million students. Research papers on them proliferate. Editorials worry over what this exodus of kids and their involved parents is doing to regular public schools. Pop quiz! Cover the next paragraph, which has the answer. The question: What other fast-growing education alternative also now enrolls more than 2 million students? This alternative seems just as important as charter schools, but education experts rarely discuss it and researchers pass it by. Give up? It’s home-schooling. The decision by so many parents to remove their children from local schools and teach them at home raises many issues, but we know little about it. Home-schoolers are beyond the reach of school district data collectors and federally required exams. They are scattered around the country, rather than clumped together in a big-city districts like charter school families. In the District, Virginia and Maryland home-schoolers outnumber charter-schoolers about 90,000 to 46,000. So it is good to see _Vanderbilt University scholar Joseph Murphy’s_ (http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/bio/joseph-murphy) new book, _“Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement,”_ (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/145220523X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&crea tiveASIN=145220523X&linkCode=as2&tag=washingtonpost-20) the best work so far on this phenomenon. He begins with a refreshing confession of ignorance. “There is not an overabundance of solid empirical work on homeschooling,” he says. “Much of the literature in this area comprises testimonials and pieces that explain _how to successfully start and conduct a homeschool._ (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/08/three_smart_rules_for_h ome_sch.html) ” His analysis exposes an odd difference in the way we talk about charters and home-schooling. We think _home-schooling is about the parents_ (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/04/extra_credit_school_systems_ar .html) — their motives, their skills, their strengths and weaknesses. The charter movement is also a story of parents, but we don’t talk about it that way. The charter schools are the heroes if we like the charter movement. The charter schools are the villains if we don’t. We rarely praise or blame parents for what charters have done. This gets at the heart of why home-schooling has blossomed. “The hallmark issue in the home-schooling movement is control,” Murphy says. “As power and influence were passed from parents and communities to government agents and professional experts throughout the 20th century, real costs were experienced by parents, costs calculated in terms of loss of control over the schooling of their children.” Commentary on home-schooling often examines the religious motives of parents. They want God to be more a part of education than modern public schools allow. But research shows, Murphy says, that in the growth of home-schooling “ideological rationales in general and religious-based motivations in particular, although still quite significant, are becoming less important.” Scholars say parents are more likely to switch to home-schooling if they see the academic quality of local schools decline or low-income students in those schools increase. The average incomes of home-schooling families are above the public school average. Like most such parents their children’s achievement scores are better than the national average. “Greater wealth is positively associated with additional home-schooling, most likely because higher income provides the opportunity for one parent to stay at home,” Murphy says. “But past some point on the continuum, home-schooling turns downward as costs of forgone income by keeping one parent out of the labor force rise to unacceptable levels.” Such families, the research indicates, then look for private schools. Most of us public school people wonder if home-schooling stifles social development. What little data are available say no. “At a minimum this concept is likely overblown and more likely is without foundation,” Murphy says. So home-schooling grows with the same surprising speed and volume as charter schools. Our debate about charters is rooted in some useful data. By contrast, we still don’t know much about home-schooling. Nor does there seem to be much effort to close that information gap. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
