With over a million kids and growing at double-digit rates, homeschooling is no longer a fringe activity for the religious and rebellious. Increasingly it’s a sensible answer to chaotic and dysfunctional schools.
Homeschoolers reflect “the virtues of the old American frontier settlement or the Amish barn-raising — we co-operate in self-reliance. My wife and I have been teaching our children ourselves for more than 15 years, and we’ve found that home-schooling opens doors that schools leave closed,” writes homeschooling father of six Gregory J. Millman in a compelling essay in the Washington Post. “Today, a well-established and widespread infrastructure of home-schooling groups, Web sites and networks has made home-schooling accessible to a broader population, people who wouldn’t consider themselves either particularly countercultural or particularly religious. People like my family,” he says.
With six children, one income and priced out of the better school districts in New Jersey, to say nothing of private schooling, Millman turned to homeschooling rather than send his children to school in Plainfield, “an elegant old central New Jersey city with typically poor urban public schools characterized by bureaucratic mismanagement, low teacher morale and student violence.”
Continue reading ‘There’s No Place Like Homeschool’
School officials in Massachusetts want to redefine failure. Literally. “To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure,” the Boston Globe reports. “Instead of calling these schools ‘underperforming,’ the Board of Education is considering labeling them as “Commonwealth priority,” to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale. Schools in the direst straits, now known as ‘chronically underperforming,’ would get the more urgent but still vague label of ‘priority one.’”
Leave it to the lone student representative on the board to speak truth to power. “Why are we spending time on this?,” said Zachary Tsetsos, a 17-year old senior at Oxford High School, who said he finds the debate frivolous. “I don’t want to tiptoe around the issue. I’m not concerned about what title we give these schools. Let’s work on fixing them.”
In the South Bronx community where I taught, I used to say that the schools came in three flavors: bad, worse and holy #$@!. I don’t suppose those would be useful distinctions. But they might be more accurate and convey a more appropriate sense of urgency. If it’s not a school to which you’d send your child, they only term that obtains is unacceptable.
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