Why Is the Press Attacking Home Schoolers?
wsj.com
wsj.com
My theory: With the huge number of home-schooled kids, there's a never-ending supply of outrageous & clicky "Home Schooler Does X!" long-tail stories for the Press to cash in on. Vs. grim stories about bottom-of-the-curve public school districts would both require the journalists to do more work, and attract accusations of racism & such.
What is more likely to be fixed especially when home schooling rates rise. So where should public attention be on?
The idea that parents would go out of their way to give a “superficial” education doesn’t make sense if you’ve ever been a parent. People care deeply about their children and their future.
I’d argue what is superficial is just going along with the easy default rather than examining what is best for your specific child.
(Also I hate that this article has just been censored on HN and most likely no one will read this reply).
But thanks to extreme lobbying by the HSLDA, we have no way of actually knowing that. We don’t know their test scores or even if they’re reading at their grade level.
And although Dave appears outwardly great, we don’t know if he neglects or beats his kids. Just no way to know that. Abusers don’t look or act outwardly like abusers, that’s how they get away with it.
Cmon man, think a little before sharing a personal anecdote that is just “my friend good guy”.
> We don’t know their test scores or even if they’re reading at their grade level.
We do know that only one in three students in (e.g.) Chicago Public Schools can read at grade level. Obviously reading at grade level isn't a very high priority.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2022/12/25/23523556/r...
In any case: who is "we" here? They're not your children, dude.
Fortunately, Smart people have studied these issues and found that the usual culprits are poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and family stress (divorce, parents unhappy, etc.). Kids do better when they get breakfast, lunch, and an afternoon snack/meal in school and have a safe place after school for studying and socializing. Teachers do better with enough money to eliminate their financial stresses and total funding for classroom basics such as properly maintained buildings, heating and cooling, and classroom supplies.
But instead of addressing these issues, some people shake their fingers at the teachers, proclaiming the teachers union is the problem.
Umm... that's highly questionable.
Besides, you are simply attempting to change the subject. The OP was (allegedly) concerned that home-schooled children wouldn't be "reading at grade level". In many areas, public school children aren't "reading at grade level" either.
If "reading at grade level" is the metric, then why would public school be preferred over the home school? No one has cited any evidence to the effect that 66% of home-schooled children fail to learn how to read.
Why they're not "reading at grade level" is irrelevant. Whether it's because of the reasons you claim, or other reasons, it is clear that the public schools a) cost billions of dollars and b) are ineffective at fixing the problem.
If a process or organization is ineffective at solving a problem, it's usually because it solves the wrong problem. Understanding why the problem occurs is part of finding the right solution.
You'd soon stop taking your car to that mechanic.
Blaming societal problems for failing to teach children to read is exactly analogous to the mechanic above.
Even if true, that just means they're taking money under false pretenses. Taking money from people when you know you won't/can't provide the services you are offering is generally known as "fraud".
Some research done in Australia found that homeschooled children performed above-average on standardised tests, including reading: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/homeschooled-kids-perfor... ("NAPLAN" is Australia's nationwide standardised testing program for years 3 and 5; the "HSC" is the state of New South Wales' statewide year 12 exams, used for university entry)
If you assume all families are gentle and kind, you are condemning children to misery and death.
Lack of love is a problem. School is quite clearly not a solution to that.
I agree. And they are among the best of teachers. But the ability of such a person to meet the love needs of a wanting child in the setting of schooling is near zero.
In a way, it’s a continuation of the mid-20th century conflict between mainstream Protestants (now their secular children), and Catholics/Evangelicals over public education.
Your issue is that you disagree with a plurality of educators on what American values should be. That's fine, but it's much more boring than the false controversy you present instead, where a shadowy cartel of educators is twisting what would otherwise be a values-neutral school system. That system never existed, and was never intended to exist. Conservatives just 20 years ago would have recoiled from that sentiment.
I didn’t claim there was anything improper about it, I’m just describing the dynamic that exists. I will disagree with you about “consensus.” I think people who hold this particular ideology are in the minority. But they are dramatically overrepresented in the education and journalism fields.
This is wildly untrue. In fact there was a huge battle to introduce a more "American" civics vs British/Eurocentric history in the early 20th century that wasn't really resolved until World War II when (for better or worse) American patriotism completely invaded public school curriculum.
Most people until ... let's say 1950 ... learned virtually nothing about the Revolution, "manifest destiny", the Bill of Rights (largely untested in court), or any other number of US cultural "values" unless they went to college.
Public school was the three Rs and the trades.
(1) Horace Mann's own words, in which he defines "education" as meaning "much more than an ability to read, write, and keep common accounts" --- and goes on to list, at great length, civic and moral virtues.
(2) The deliberate effort at the turn of the century to use public education to inculcate American values & civic culture into immigrants.
At any rate, Rayiner and I agree about this premise. Further, if I'm wrong, I'm clearly not "wildly" wrong.
When I met an old high school classmate who is a public school teacher in the district we both live in (300 miles away from where we grew up), she also said something similar.
This is especially true in large public schools that have to be "stack ranked" using NCLB-mandated test scores. This zapped any residual ability for them to do anything beyond the bare minimum because that would eat into time that could be used to review the tested material. Your 12th grader in "honors" classes will be given remedial lessons on how to use a Dictionary instead of reading Chaucer.
Homeschool kids can learn in 30/min per day what public school kids take all day to learn. Then they have more time to play or develop healthy interests.
Yes, the lack "kid-tracking" creates more room for abuse and brainwashing. That problem can be answered in ways that don't require kids to sit in a windowless room for 6 hours a day.
School is supposed to serve our kids, not act as an elaborate hazing ritual.
I have a relative (11 yo) is was an absolute gem of a human. I had noticed over the last 4-5 years she was becoming more reclusive, quiet, and sad in demeanor. She left public school and began homeschooling last year, and it has absolutely turned her life completely around. She is once again becoming more vibrant, enthused for life, and is thriving with new friends from her various weekly activities. I asked her if she liked her new coop school she attends (once per week) and of it she says 'there is way less drama'.
Why does anyone think the potential for abuse by the education system itself and peers therein is less likely than abuse by the family? In fact, my children are now legally allowed to become sterilized in the state of California during school time and that's allowed to be kept secret for me. That is legalized abuse.
For all the problems homeschooling might have, I believe the risks of 'unchecked child welfare' via family/community education FAR outweight the risks of the government run daycare centers on any day. Look at the outcomes: homeschoolers consistently score higher on standardized tests.
Citation needed. I can find no evidence that this claim is true. In all likelihood, I'm assuming you're talking about SB 107[0] (if not, please link to what you are referencing). This bill is is meant to protect transgender youth and their families who seek refuge in California from other states that discriminate against them for seeking gender affirming care. Which is not sterilization.
[0]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/oct/31/instagram-...
[1]: Not the forced sterilization program that ran until 1979, which has since ended and there are reparations available for. Sad, tragic, ultimately not what I think this is about though.
Since you appear to like leftist news rags (like politifact):
https://www.newsweek.com/california-attacks-parents-rights-u...
Puberty blockers cause sterilization.
https://wng.org/roundups/study-effects-of-puberty-blockers-c...
Cutting off a healthy boy's dick and testicles is sterilization. Do I need to link to something for that to back up that claim?
In the future, we will look back on the whole of 'gender affirming care' in wonder at how brainless and cruel we could have been to children.
This is not what I would call "an unbiased source", by any means, and critically the article itself lacks actual citations of the bill that support their position, instead citing a blog written by another conservative (also commonly considered far right) political organization named Alliance Defending Freedom (or ADF), which itself does not directly cite SB 107 either. Rather, it is pure conjecture on their part as to how SB 107 "violates parental rights".
SB 107, from its own text[4], seeks to protect the rights of those who seek gender affirming care will block the release of information, even under subpoena, if under the guise of civil or criminal action against a person or entity that allowed a child to receive gender affirming care or gender affirming mental health care. Meaning, for example, if parents are divorced and one of the parents decides to seek gender affirming care for their child in California, the other parent, if under the guise of such discriminatory law, were to subpoena that information, the state of California will block the subpoena and strictly prohibits law enforcement entities from knowingly making or participating in the arrest or extradition of an individual pursuant to an out-of-state arrest warrant based on another state’s law against providing, receiving, or allowing a child to receive gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care in this state [California].
This is no different than seeking other valid medical treatment in the eyes of California (and for FWIW, the majority of Americans) and is protected from criminality due to another states laws.
As for World News Group (or WNG as they are known) that is another conservative (in this case news media) organization that prominently advocates anti-LGBTQ+ politics, is not either an unbiased source.
Now as for the sources cited in the WNG, they either no longer exist (the supposed doctor's Tweets have since been deleted it appears and their own article link is no longer valid) or those studies do not say what they purport to say what they claim
For instance, the Endocrine paper[5] states the following
>Medical intervention for transgender youth and adults (including puberty suppression, hormone therapy and medically indicated surgery) is effective, relatively safe (when appropriately monitored), and has been established as the standard of care.
All the sources that supposedly back up the WNG position their links to the Twitter account for user "mlaidlawmd" are broken, missing or otherwise were taken down by the author, though I suspect this wouldn't be considered an unbiased source either.
As for the last piece, I couldn't find anything in SB 107 with regards to removing anyones genitalia, is not what Gender Affirming care provides in the first place with regards to LGBTQ+ youth specifically.
At the end of the day, the opposition to SB 107 is an opposition to LGTQ+ rights and sees gender affirming care and trans people as a problem (or worse yet, things that shouldn't exit). I do not see a way of interpreting SB 107 as a violation of parental rights without this underlying supposition. Replacing "Gender Affirming Care" with "Life Saving Intervention" or "Routine Medical Procedure", does anyone have the same reaction? Should for example, one parent be able to block access and receiving of generally accepted as safe medical care for their child if the other parent seeks it on their behalf, simply based on their beliefs?
[0]: https://www.heritage.org/staff/emilie-kao
[1]: https://www.heritage.org/staff/jay-w-richards-phd
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/15/project-2025-p...
[3]: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-her...
[4]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
[5]: https://www.endocrine.org/advocacy/position-statements/trans...
Of course there will be attacks.
Homeschooling resources have never been better due to technology, especially in regards to extracurricular meetups.
Also, families that travel a lot benefit from the flexibility.
Homeschooling can be awesome when done for the right reasons! Student-teacher ratios are awesome, the curriculum and schedule can be perfectly tailored to your child's needs, interests, and abilities, and as you mention it works far better for families that need to travel a lot and technology is making the downsides less significant all the time.
But it can be terrible when done for the wrong reasons. Increasingly, those wrong reasons are being used [2]:
> In the vast majority of states, there are currently no protections in place for children who are homeschooled. This is the case despite a 2014 study finding that 47% of children who experience child torture were removed from school to be homeschooled (and another 29% were never enrolled in school), and a 2018 Connecticut study found that 36% of children removed from school to be homeschooled were subject to past child welfare reports.
And those studies are even before the surge of people pulling students due to pandemic politics. These issues are the reason that the press is "attacking homeschoolers", not some conspiracy to get additional funding. The fact that the author does not mention this trend at all is concerning.
[1] https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/parents-sue-rockfo...
[2] https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/advocacy/policy/abuse-i...
The pandemic and subsequent politics of education has put a magnifying glass on the problems there and many parents are choosing to hit the eject button. There is a concerted effort to remove that button as it's starting to seriously pinch budgets anywhere a student can leave and take their funding money with them.
Currently my state board of education is looking at a rule change to do just that. This battle is just warming up. If you get involved, don't be on the wrong side.
> claiming the school kept their child's change in preferred pronouns and name from them.
And if you read further, they were purposefully switching the name of the student on paperwork presented to the parents to _actively hide_ the change.
That is not at _all_ how you characterized it.
But! We do get inundated by homeschool catalogues and materials.
Wow the Young Earth Creation crowd and the alternative history / alternative science crowds are well represented.
Based on the materials presented I'd guess 1/3 crazies to 2/3 people with unfortunate constraints or nonstandard schooling needs.
They used home schooling because they didn't want their kids to mingle with us heathens...
By law they are supposed to teach the kids a certain curriculum. But it turns out that they didn't teach the kids the material but thought them religious teachings instead.
Now they are adults and came out against their treatment and find themselves to be lacking in a lot of basic tools needed to live in modern civilized society.
As others mentionned. Homeschooling can isolate kids and exposé them to abuse and or neglect with no one to see it and denounce it like a teacher or another figure of autority.
Without strict guidelines and external supervision. Homeschooling can be a dangerous thing with the wrong people.
My brother-in-law is the stay-at-home homeschool dad for his two kids, while his wife works. Homeschooling is completely orthogonal to traditional gender roles, it's just historically been highly correlated with very conservative families.
Obviously as an anecdote, I can’t say how prevalent these types of issues are among homeschooling in general, but I do believe it’s enough of an issue to be concerned.
We already have enough people raised who have trouble understanding issues that are of vital importance to our society, and it’s only becoming more of an issue. In a democracy we need an educated electorate who can make some basic educated decisions when voting.
Public schools are not perfect by any means, but at least we have some say as a public about those curriculum, and have successfully fought things like intelligent design being taught in schools. A growing homeschooling trend takes those issues further out of the public’s control, and it’s in the public’s interest that kids all get at least some basic level of education.
We need to take steps to strengthen our public education system, and the trend of homeschooling is at the very least an extremely concerning indication that our public school system is failing. It’s a national crisis, and most certainly will affect the US ability to compete against countries like China with strong public schooling. (Studies consistently show that Chinese students beat American children in all academic categories.)
Also, evolution is not a belief, it’s a fact. Raising a population that can’t tell fact from fiction has profound consequences to us all. Those plumbers and electricians interact with us all in complicated ways, not just their jobs.
The PISA assessment by the OECD demonstrates that only 13.5% of American students age 15 were able to distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.
In a democracy, that matters more than plumbing and electrical job ability.
This is so important. Raising a generation of children who are so easily misled because they never learned to think rationally or to do research at any level is already biting this country.
Also, homeschoolers do better on standardized tests than their government schooled counterparts. So it seems like we should be advocating for and advancing homeschool interests if we actually care about education, since it is the homeschoolers who are 'doing it right', according to outcomes.
The problem is also that homeschooling has massively different outcomes for different kids. For some it’s a positive, for others it deepens divides.
Homeschooling is worse than a bandaid solution, and a regression for many kids. We can’t ignore those who are hurt by an ongoing deregulation of our educational system just because it works for some.
And worse, we need to look closely at how that system is being abused by those with specific agendas.
What's the distribution among public and home schooling?
Also what is the rate for adults?
I mean how often do we hear something along the lines of "I never used the algebra I learned in highschool" or calculus or whatever.
The reality is that while a lot of school is teaching you the basics, a lot of it is also just teaching you how to learn and how to think critically.
Or just giving you an appreciation for basic things (like science) so when you come across a new concept in your adult life you can better appreciate it and not dismiss it.
It does not appear that this is happening in government run schools as prevalently as you may want to believe.
Even if it isn't happening as much as it should be, doesn't change that there is still value in a proper science and math education.
We know that thanks to republicans many schools can no longer give their kids a proper education.
There are also people who do it for a 2-5 years and end up then putting their kid in public schools. I’m not sure 5, 6 and 7 year olds were meant to sit still indoors for 6-7 hours a day and there is a good argument for giving them more time for free play. Also the gap between specialized teacher knowledge vs motivated parent knowledge widens as the material gets more advanced. (Though with homework, you still end up needing to do remedial education on yourself in either context).
To be clear, I’m in Texas; and there’s been a push here for vouchers for example, and it’s all politically/religiously motivated.
So I’d just say we need to be aware of the bigger picture. The “need” for homeschooling is a red flag, and although for some students it’s a positive choice; for others it has massively negative consequences.
So awareness of those issues, and a powerful right wing religious lobby pushing an agenda shouldn’t be ignored because homeschooling works for some kids.
When these groups lost the battle for teaching creationism in schools, they literally took their textbook and did a “search and replace” with intelligent design.
Luckily that attempt got shot down in court. So they have moved on to vouchers and homeschooling in many states.
There shouldn't be a problem with home schooling in a perfect world, but the current situation is horrible.
At the very least we should expect that a student that is home schooled is taught the same basics as someone who is in the school system and we need to make sure that the student is physically ok. Properly fed and not in my physical harm. Something that going to a school provides if a kid has a very bad home situation.
The lobbying for home schooling is downright frightening just how much power they have and how much they fight against what should be basic protections in the name of "parental freedom" since apparently "parental freedom" for them includes abusing children.
It also doesn't help that much of the push for Home Schooling is also based an an asinine idea of "indoctrination" in the school system when many just want to indoctrinate their kids into their religion but stopping them from having a broader view of the world.
Evidence is strongly against public school students being taught the "basics", at least in large regions of the country.
Which is why I find it insane that we can't even require such a low bar as it is.
There's laws that actively kill people all the time in the millions and yet we discuss whatever current minor change to some inconsequential law triggers sensitivities and drives clicks. The press is all a business like any other business, they haven't gotten any more morals than Facebook or Monsanto, but we learn about journalistic integrity and codes from journalists and eat it up.
The lack of regulation is concerning. What's truly disturbing is how easily it is for children to fall through the cracks when there are no teachers to report possible abuse. Frightening.
You should go talk to some teachers at large school districts. "Regulation" can be both a blessing and a curse. There is plenty of bullying, drug use, etc. at large schools where nobody wants to deal with it.
It’s called calling 911 and calling CPS, or going to your nearest healthcare place.
There are tons of ways, to checkup on kids, even just a annual mandatory children checkup is enough, or neighbours keeping an eye out and reporting issues.
School neglect is often the very thing that lead children to failures, abuse from their peers, suicidal thoughts, gun violence, you name it.
Not sure if modern schools are the messiah.
I’m anti homeschool tho, i think parents are mostly incompetent at raising kids well, and if their children do not pass certain academic exams at grade 2,5 and 7 then they should be banned from homeschooling, an entire nation’s future depends on it.
Schools should also be less politicised, all this lgbtq , critical race theory, math is racist, etc should be removed from schools, I understand it’s meaningful in some ways and well intentioned, that children learn their history, that kids learn to be more tolerant of others, but these are all values that their parents should teach them, not schools.
Gutting out of advanced classes from school because too many white and asian kids got into it, instead of trying to improve outcomes for black and hispanic children, they just destroyed the advanced classes in major schools, and worsened the outcomes for EVERYBODY (I meant kids of masses, rich folks and politicians kids will still get top tier education at private school)
Schools != Parents Too many schools tried to become the parent
Now parents are starting to remove schools altogether. This will be bad for everyone in this country, but it was schools and government who started this mess in the first place.
Now they just wanna blame parents.
Whole heartedly disagree. It will be very good for some people and for others it will not be good.
We have been homeschooling for the last 8 years. Our kids are more mature and far exceed anything public school would have done for them. However, we see home schooling as a vocation and something we have to put effort into—not just something we sign up for on a website and then let our kid do all the work online.
Given the right reasons, homeschool will always be superior because the student/teacher ratio is so low. Plus you know your kids better and can adapt to their needs.
Given the wrong reasons, sure, it will fail people. But arguably those folks are already failing—and being propped up by a system which tries to support them but ultimately cannot.
Who is suppose to do this exactly? If you're raised in an abusive household, it is not entirely likely you are aware you can do these things, or even if you are there is alot of fear and psychological manipulation to overcome in situations of abuse. With no outside party to intervene, it is extremely difficult for abuse to be overcome.
This is why, for example in California (and other states that have this law), if a there is a domestic dispute call, it is mandatory by law that the police separate the people involved for at least 24, even if the victim does not press charges at that time. This gives room for a victim to stand up for themselves once the threat has been removed. Not perfect by any means, but this has saved countless lives and improved countless others.
With children, an even more vulnerable population, removing them out of public school with no recourse for checking in with that child in a safe setting, you will exacerbate child abuse further than it already exists. I think the trade off of home school being that there is child safety checks routinely built in over the school age of the child, would be something parents could weigh as a trade off.
Social workers being aware of abused kids at schools seems exactly the thing we want. Most abusers are parents or relatives. Hiding the problem in home schooling and then saying it doesn't exist because social workers never hear about it seems the utterly wrong viewpoint.
John Oliver is entertaining but he's also very strongly biased and misrepresents the situation. He talks fast and yells and mocks people to give the illusion of confidence and authority.
"lack of regulation" means freedom. That's what people find concerning? Looking at the current situation, I would prefer more freedom to less. To me lack of regulation is typically a good thing.
Your "freedom" is allowing kids to be abused since they don't have the checks of other adults being able to see them.
A bare minimum "are the kids physically ok" doesn't remove any of your freedom unless you consider starving and beating your kids a "Freedom" you care about.
What they are trying to do is to use scare stories about home schooling to scare people into giving up their freedom. It's the same tactic that's used all the time to get people to give up their rights, to get us into wars, and so on.
I want more freedom, not less. I won't let authoritarian fear tactics change that.
Children are incredibly vulnerable and we should be able to put basic protections in place.
It is not surveillance to require in some form that an adult in the system sees your child on some regular basis. This is something that your child simply being in school provides.
Either a way for an adult to notice that something is very wrong or a safe place for a child to report something.
That is surveillance in the same what that checking in with a probation officer is a form of surveillance. Just like encryption I'm not obligated to live my life in a way that makes detecting crimes easy or possible.
At what cost? Innocent until proven guilty means that we don't treat people like criminals until you have a reasonable suspicion at a minimum.
You don't get to load spyware on everyone's computer because someone, somewhere, committed a crime on a computer. You don't get to remove all end to end cryptography so you can snoop. No, just no. Our society is flirting with these ideas, and they are BAD ideas.
On balance, the abuse happening in homeschooling household is microscopic compared to the abuse happening in current public schools. Both the every day kind and the dramatic makes the news murders and suicides. Put them on even scales rather than putting the specs of dust on the other side under a microscope.
The logical end of that is not "public school". It's an elimination of the concept of parents raising their own kids, in favor of removing children at birth and placing them in government run facilities.
I am sure that what is shown here is in the severe minority, but I don't understand how we don't have some basic requirements in place. (well I understand how, but I can't think of a better phrasing)