How American Homeschoolers Measure Up
topmastersineducation.com
topmastersineducation.com
When you see this kind of statistics you immediately ask yourself who wants what from you and why. Of course the school district is more expensive, they have to maintain their buildings, transportation, and have to offer up remedial services by law. Most of all, they have to pay the teachers' wages, and the opportunity cost for the parent not taking work outside the home isn't counted.
If you want more of a comparison of how wasteful (non efficient) and ineffective public schools are - just compare them to equivalent private schools. They turn out better test scores and spend around 25% that of public schools per student.
I don't believe you. Proof?
Which ones do you consider "equivalent"? Private schools that are the default choice of school for their area and aren't allowed to be selective about what students they admit/retain?
I certainly hope that any parent would have earned far more than $10k working the same hours they spent teaching.
To be valid you'd really need to do a total accounting of time and costs. The means lost income by the parent offset by time not lost due to driving to/from school and such.
Ignorance is bliss, just like unsettlingly blissful homeschoolers.
I think the explanation is that homeschool parents are not providing "tutorial instruction" to their children most of the time (that's the 2 sigma effect). I don't know of good statistics of actual parent behavior but from my homeschool readings it seems like parents often provide something like "reinforcement", "cues and explanations", and "student time on task". Those are 1 to 1.2 sigma effects.
That said, most homeschoolers I know spend a lot of time and money making sure their children have opportunities to socialize with other kids, which is something you get for free with public schooling.
That said, I'd homeschool my kid if i had any. But not everyone can afford to do so (single parents, the poor). So instead of applying band-aids like homeschooling to our national education problem, lets fix public education once and for all.
Here's what's worrying: instead we got No Child Left Behind, we got the attendant testing, and no one has drawn any conclusions from all the testing that would have made an improvement to public education. If there were any you'd see them by now.
The only hypothesis that's left is that there is no political will to improve public education.
You're right, the subject has been studied. All we need to do now is replace our children with Finns.
Also it would be good to have a comparison of pupils from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Otherwise "homeschooler" might just be a proxy for well-off parents?
Further down, the text version says, "Consider politics and government too complicated to understand (4.2% / 35%)." I'm not sure how much to trust self-assessment here, and that phrasing makes it sound like this isn't even as strong a result as the infographic claims ("that isn't too complicated to understand" does not imply "I myself understand it well").
In my experience there is a strong bimodal distribution: one group does it because they don't want their kids exposed to the secular world until they are adults, and the other group is dissatisfied with the quality of the educational facilities available in their area.
For me personally, being homeschooled was excellent and I am thankful that my mother made the sacrifices that she did for my sisters and me.
My perception of regular school is that a pupil's daily schedule as a student is very much dictated and regimented with little freedom for self-direction.
As a homeschooler, this was not so for me. After my mother had taught me to read and write, I had a good deal of freedom to do my work when I wanted to do it as long as it got done. This is very similar to the results-only work environments that work so well in the software industry. I was in such an environment by the time I was 9 or 10 years old.
As for politics, from the time I was 11 or so I was a bit of an A.M. talk radio junky - much to my dad's dislike. I was able to listen to the radio throughout the day while working on my school. This most certainly shaped my verbal debate skills and made the political science classes in college way more fun.
The flexible schedule is also what enabled me to start teaching myself computer programing starting at 14 years. I devoured every computer book that I could find at the county library. I wrote lots of code, including a full invoicing and accounting system for my lawn care business using nothing but QBASIC in DOS 5. By my junior year in high school I was already doing web development for corporate clients and I started a web hosting business before graduating high school. The first contract that I ever signed, on the day after my 18th birthday, was a merchant agreement so that I could accept credit card payments for the business.
My education was not entirely directly from my mother either. The homeschooler community where I grew up was quite strong. There are schools designed around homeschoolers where the student is enrolled for various classes - math, science, classical logic, foreign languages, etc. I took all of these classes. The best part was that I had class all day, but only two days per week. This freedom is what let me market and build the Internet business that I had then.
There are many paths that education can take. My experience was that of being homeschooled within a Christian community and then going on to study computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In my personal experience, the whole homeschool process was a highly effective educational environment. It was not until my freshman year at Georgia Tech that I felt constrained by class schedules and having to show up everyday at certain times. However, I adapted well enough even to that and went on to earn both a bachelor and a master degree.
It worked out wonderfully for me and despite being a less common path, it made all of the difference!
It should be a bar graph instead.
That's if you use a computer. My opinion is that you do not need a computer, just a library card to a decent library. Or access to a local college library. I feel that the library is still the best place to get a free education.