Should Parents be Licensed?
One of the more interesting and semi-ironic aspects of “No Child left Behind” legislation is that some teachers who were never pushed to continue their educations now have to. In fact, I never taught at an institution where you were not required to do so, though I know schools existed where teachers could sit back and watch the grass grow. Overall, this is one of the few good things out of NCLB.
Here’s the irony: NCLB is certainly a push for private schools and homeschooling. The legislation, as written, puts every public school on the clock to be listed as failing, since inevitably, each school is required to have 100% of its students (irrelevant of how recently they have learned english, no matter what their situation is in terms of being in drug treatment, no matter if they are in a severely bad psychological state of depression) pass a test (which is different in different states). Everyone in the know is aware that all public schools in the country will eventually earn a “failing” label. It is only a matter of “when”. Thus, the indirect message is: get your kids into a private school or homeschool them, as these are exempted from NCLB. None of them can ever fail.
In California, a case is moving through the courts which could eventually pave the way for parents who homeschool to receive mandatory training in education. Needless to say, the representatives of homeschoolers are pretty upset.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080308/us_time/criminalizinghomeschoolers
I have a good friend and his wife who have been pretty vocal about homeschooling, and they will very soon need to make a decision as their wonderful little daughter (not so little any more) gets ready to enter the schooling years.I know there are a variety of reasons for homeschooling: some people live in an area with poor schools, or in communities where education is a far cry from a priority (as long as the football/basketball team wins, the school is #1, WHOO!). In other cases, the parents want to exercise the write to avoid any other adults from having any affect on their progeny. In other cases, there is no institution that will teach their religious faith, or they feel the schools would undermine that faith. Finally, some just don’t like the way their schools teach, and they feel that they can do a better job. Even as a public school teacher, I can’t argue with some of these positions. I have seen some students who were homeschooled and turned out to be outstanding. I have also seen the opposite. Is homeschooling good for some? yes. Is it good for all. No way. I am not anti-homeschooling.
The question is: should a parent who wishes to homeschool be required to take some level of course work? The answer is clear: yes.
Why? I think the real question is: why not? If someone places education at such a high level ….. such that they are willing to rotate their entire family around their child’s education in the home, I would think that they would not start off by saying “I know all there is to know, and don’t need to learn anymore.” I think if there is one thing education teaches anyone, it is not that they have learned so much, but rather it is that they can look themselves in the mirror and honestly say “I don’t know nearly as much as I think.” Why then would someone so pro-education be resistant to learning more?
Now, I could see that if the law required an undue burden (like potential homeschoolers are required to attend 50 credit hours of classes, earn a new degree, etc) that this is counterproductive, and an indirect way of trying to block homeschooling. That is certainly not a good thing. On the other hand, education has undergone a revolution in the past 15 years. While it has not reached everywhere, there are a great many methods of instruction that not al parents and teachers are aware of, and could learn that would make any educational experience better. I would say that resistance to that is also counterproductive.
I know there is a long standing legal aspect: to what extent does the state have the right to interfere in how a parent raises a child? Certainly vaccinations can be required to enter school. Certainly if the child is being abused, the state can step in, even if the parents believe that their abuse is part of how they raise their child. On the other hand, not educating a child could be considered a form of mild abuse, as you systematically cut off that individuals chances of being able to make choices about their future. In any event, this is a case I am hoping to follow a bit and see where it goes, though I suspect that it will end with the courts siding with parents.
Hello! I’m pretty sure that I’m the SIL of the good friend and his wife, and aunt to the not-so-little daughter; and I’m a CA homeschooler myself (kids 12 and 8 and a toddler coming along) and a progressive as well, so not at all of the bent of “keep our kids away from the dirty rotten state”. Your question, “Why then would someone so pro-education be resistant to learning more?”, is not really the crux for homeschoolers. Every homeschooling family I know, the parents are learning right alongside the kids, even in mine where the parents have degrees from Ivy League level institutions. Education is not what I and many of us are standing against; it is schooling. So then it is not that we are critical of education requirements, but of schooling requirements, on parents and on children alike.
Schooling is a particular form of education that is so structured and standardized as to make difficult a lot of true learning. Most kids (including you, myself and hundreds of millions of others) come out of it just fine and having quite a bit of successful learning, but at what cost? Schools of the “free democratic” variety (aka Sudbury Valley or Summerhill) have demonstrated that kids can cover years of school-style learning in mere weeks, when they come to it at their own time. My own kids demonstrate that anecdotally on a regular basis. What does that say about all the wasted time, and about our disrespect of children that we are so profligate with it?
I actually am in favor of one regulation upon homeschooling parents, though I am absolutely not lobbying for it because it would never stop there; the repercussions on the entire community would be far too damaging to make it worth ferreting out what must be an incredibly small demographic, given the reasons motivating the choice. It is the requirement that parents demonstrate a minimum proficiency of literacy and numeracy, via either academic credentials or a simple (sub-GED) test-out if those aren’t available. I do not know any illiterate or innumerate homeschoolers, and perhaps I am disregarding the ingenuity that folks who cannot read or do basic math have for coping (wasn’t there a long-time, maybe Georgia, teacher who revealed last year that he was illiterate?).
I cannot imagine that many homeschoolers would be unable to meet this requirement without any additional training. In general, homeschoolers who are considered to be “not educating” their kids are not uneducated themselves; it simply means their content is not as broad as many would like. (Code words: creationism/intelligent design; see also fundamentalism, homophobia, etc.) And as bone-chilling as that is, it is a society-wide problem that isn’t going to go away by forcing those kids to attend school (especially since the kids could always attend a private religious school offering the same content). I do believe that parents have the right to raise their kids, even in a radically religious environment. Our child welfare laws are enough (or should be) to protect kids from physical and emotional neglect and abuse, and to bring kids out of such families if they want to escape (which seems to be the situation in the case at the center of our California homeschooling controversy).
Well, my pre-kids hour is almost up and I haven’t read the comics yet
I hope we meet again before their silver wedding anniversary!
There are a few problems with requiring homeschooling parents to attend conventional education classes.
1. They’re not really aimed at the same goal. Parents don’t need to know techniques for teaching 20 or 30 students at once – they have only a few students to work with, so they can afford to pursue “quirky” or individualized paths to cover the material. Conversely, few classroom teachers need to know how to balance the educational needs of a handful of students of very different ages, but any homeschooling parent with more than one child has to face this problem.
2. They may be total busywork (and inconvenient at that) for many homeschooling parents. If a parent has already studied educational methods and cognitive development, requiring the credit hours is unlikely to do them much good. At the very least, they should be able to “test out” of such classes.
3. Sometimes parents need to act too quickly for it to be feasible to take classes before starting homeschooling. It’s one thing for a parent who has decided from birth that they will commit to homeschooling their kids to take evening classes or otherwise prepare as they approach school age, but it’s entirely another for the parent who finds their child in an inappropriate or even dangerous situation in the public schools and has to pull them out immediately.
Oh, man, I’m two weeks behind… Just a couple additional comments.
I generally agree that there should be some educational requirements for those who home school. While licensure is probably a little too much, a minimum intellectual level is probably a good idea for someone who is going to teach children.
But there are some hurdles to this. Do you test the parents? Sure, that sounds great. Unless you need to get the kids out of their current school in a hurry, and the next test date is six months away. Make the parents get a degree in education? That would require a lot of advance planning, and a lot of cash on the part of the parents. And what about me? With a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering imminent (knock on wood), I think I’m pretty qualified to home school my kids. What I don’t know I’ll be able to pick up along the way. But none of these things ensure that the kids will learn what they need. (Which is another discussion entirely – start it any time you like, Tom!)
Not all home-schoolers have the right motivation. In our local (rural) public school district, parents often remove their children from school in retaliation for some action on the part of a teacher or administrator (a lot of the parents already have bad experiences from the same teachers when they attended the same school). These students frequently return to the school in the next year or two (after the pain has worn off and the parent has had enough of dealing with their child), and the child is at the same scholastic level as when they left. Two years behind. So while the rights of the parents to decide how their child is educated has been protected, the child suffers for lack of any reasonable intellectual leadership at the “home school”.
An effective means of protecting the student might just be frequent aptitude testing to make sure he is advancing as required by the state. (If a home-schooled student makes the same progress as students in formal schools, then I don’t know if I care what the educational background of the teacher is.) If the home-schooled student is not advancing at an appropriate rate (barring MR, LD, or other situations), then the home-school option can be taken away. If the testing is timed correctly, deficiencies can be addressed before the student falls more than six months behind.
Without getting into the debate on how to do so, measuring student performance is a good way to allow parents the flexibility of home schooling while protecting the student from inadequate scholastic progress.