Tag Archives: HSLDA

Military families embracing homeschooling

26 Oct

Moi wrote about homeschools in Homeschooling is becoming more mainstream:

Parents and others often think of school choice in terms of public school or private school. There is another option and that is homeschooling. Homeschooling is one option in the school choice menu. There are fewer children being homeschooled than there are in private schools. There are fewer children in private education, which includes homeschools than in public education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the vast majority of students attend public schools. Complete statistics can be found at Fast Education Facts http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

The question, which will be discussed at the end of this comment, is: What is so scary about school choice? After all, the vast majority of children are enrolled in public school and school choice is not going to change that.

What is Homeschooling?

Family Education defines homeschooling. http://school.familyeducation.com/home-schooling/alternative-education/41106.html

Homeschooling means learning outside of the public or private school environment. The word “home” is not really accurate, and neither is “school.” For most families, their “schooling” involves being out and about each day, learning from the rich resources available in their community, environment, and through interactions with other families who homeschool.

Essentially, homeschooling involves a commitment by a parent or guardian to oversees their child or teen’s educational development. There are almost two million homeschoolers in this country.

There is no one federal law, which governs homeschooling. Each state regulates homeschooling, so state law must be consulted. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has a summary of each state’s laws. State Homeschool Laws http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp The American Homeschool Association (AHA) has resources such as FAQ and the history of homeschooling at AHA
https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/homeschooling-is-becoming-more-mainstream/

Kimberly Hefling of AP reported in the story, Military Bases Open Their Doors To Home-Schoolers:

Some military families also cite the same reasons for choosing home schooling as those in the civilian population: a desire to educate their kids in a religious environment, concern about the school environment, or to provide for a child with special needs….
Participating military families say there’s an added bonus to home schooling. It allows them to schedule school time around the rigorous deployment, training and school schedules of the military member.
“We can take time off when dad is home and work harder when he is gone so we have that flexibility,” McGhee said.
Sharon Moore, the education liaison at Andrews who helps parents with school-related matters, said at the height of the summer military moving season, she typically gets about 20 calls from families moving to the base with home schooling questions. She links them with families from the co-op and includes the home-schooled children during back-to-school events and other functions such as a trip to a planetarium.
“It comes down to they are military children and we love our military children,” said Moore, a former schoolteacher. “We recognize that they have unique needs that sometimes other children don’t have, and we want to make sure that we do our best to serve them and meet those needs because they have given so much to this country.”
This kind of support for home schooling by the military was uncommon in the 1990s, said Mike Donnelly, a former Army officer who is an attorney with the Home School Legal Defense Association, based in Purcellville, Va. He said that changed in 2002 with military-wide memo that said home schooling can be a “legitimate alternative form of education” for military member’s children. Most military bases today are friendly toward home-schoolers, he said….
Home schooling in recent decades has grown in popularity in the general population, with the most recent government statistics estimating that about 3 percent of school kids are home-schooled in America.
Within the military population, Donnelly said his group estimates that from 5 percent to 10 percent of military kids are home-schooled. An estimate by the Military Child Education Coalition, using very limited research data, estimated that up to 9 percent of military kids could be home-schooled.
The vast majority of military kids attend local public schools, with a much smaller percentage attending Department of Defense schools and an even smaller percentage attending private schools or home schooling, the National Military Family Association estimates.
Like home schooling parents in the general population, military families at home often use online curriculum and materials to enhance instruction. Some hire tutors for areas such as advanced math or foreign languages.
Home schooling, of course, isn’t for every military family. It requires a parent who can stay at home, and it can create an extra level of stress for the parents at home if the spouse is deployed, some spouses have told researchers.
For military families and others who do opt to home-school, there’s very little scientifically rigorous research about the long-term social and academic effects, said Joseph Murphy, an education professor at Vanderbilt University who wrote a book about home schooling.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/26/military-home-schoolers_n_4166073.html?utm_hp_ref=@education123

School Choice is Good for the Education Process

Homeschooling is not a conspiracy, it is simply a choice. There is a difference between “education” and “schooling.” “Schooling” is defined as:

• the act of teaching at school
• school: the process of being formally educated at a school; “what will you do when you finish school?”
• the training of an animal (especially the training of a horse for dressage)

wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

“Education” is a much broader concept. It is the process of continually being curious. Eric Hoffer aptly distinguishes the difference between “schooling” and “education.”

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.

Many of our children are “unschooled” and a far greater number are “uneducated.” One can be “unschooled” or “uneducated” no matter the setting. As a society, we should be focused on making sure that each child receives a good basic education. There are many ways to reach that goal. There is nothing scary about the fact that some parents make the choice to homeschool. The focus should not be on the particular setting or institution type. The focus should be on proper assessment of each child to ensure that child is receiving a good basic education and the foundation for later success in life.

Related:

‘Hybrid’ homeschooling is growing
https://drwilda.com/2012/08/16/hybrid-homeschooling-is-growing/

New book: Homeschooling, the little option that could
https://drwilda.com/2012/10/12/new-book-homeschooling-the-little-option-that-could/

Homeschooled kids make the grade for college https://drwilda.com/2012/07/02/homeschooled-kids-make-the-grade-for-college/

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New book: Homeschooling, the little option that could

12 Oct

Moi wrote about homeschools in Homeschooling is becoming more mainstream:

Parents and others often think of school choice in terms of public school or private school. There is another option and that is homeschooling. Homeschooling is one option in the school choice menu. There are fewer children being homeschooled than there are in private schools. There are fewer children in private education, which includes homeschools than in public education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the vast majority of students attend public schools. Complete statistics can be found at Fast Education Facts

The question, which will be discussed at the end of this comment, is: What is so scary about school choice? After all, the vast majority of children are enrolled in public school and school choice is not going to change that.

What is Homeschooling?

Family Education defines homeschooling. 

Homeschooling means learning outside of the public or private school environment. The word “home” is not really accurate, and neither is “school.” For most families, their “schooling” involves being out and about each day, learning from the rich resources available in their community, environment, and through interactions with other families who homeschool.

Essentially, homeschooling involves a commitment by a parent or guardian to oversees their child or teen’s educational development. There are almost two million homeschoolers in this country.

There is no one federal law, which governs homeschooling. Each state regulates homeschooling, so state law must be consulted. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has a summary of each state’s laws. State Homeschool Laws The American Homeschool Association (AHA) has resources such as FAQ and the history of homeschooling at AHA  https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/homeschooling-is-becoming-more-mainstream/

Jay Mathews has written an interesting Washington Post article, Hidden rival to charter schools:

So it is good to see Vanderbilt University scholar Joseph Murphy’s new book, “Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement,” 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.”

His analysis exposes an odd difference in the way we talk about charters and home-schooling. We think home-schooling is about the parents — 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 their children’s educations 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 their local schools decline or the number of 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 children’s social development. What little data is available says 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. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/hidden-rival-to-charter-schools/2012/10/07/b07bc498-0f24-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_blog.html

See, Homeschooling Research Notes http://gaither.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/a-new-book-that-surveys-almost-all-extant-homeschooling-research/

Many of our children are “unschooled” and a far greater number are “uneducated.” One can be “unschooled” or “uneducated” no matter the setting. As a society, we should be focused on making sure that each child receives a good basic education. There are many ways to reach that goal. There is nothing scary about the fact that some parents make the choice to homeschool. The focus should not be on the particular setting or institution type. The focus should be on proper assessment of each child to ensure that child is receiving a good basic education and the foundation for later success in life.

Related:

‘Hybrid’ homeschooling is growing                                        https://drwilda.com/2012/08/16/hybrid-homeschooling-is-growing/

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART © http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda Reviews ©                           http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

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