State standards should ensure that all the kids are all right. As in public schools, all students should be assessed on the basics. The point isn’t to eliminate home schooling or to pick on families that want to educate their own way. Pennsylvania has a similar but slightly more flexible system. New York has a robust model in which individuals providing instruction must be “competent” but needn’t have any teaching qualifications, and students must be assessed annually either by standardized test or portfolio evaluation. Yet, tightening of policy would benefit even those children whose parents are trying to responsibly educate them. These grisly stories are probably rare exceptions, and abuse can go undetected by public schools, too. Pediatricians have even shared concerns along these lines with politicians. Other abusive parents, it turns out, have seized on home education as a way to avoid catching the notice of social service agencies. His stepmother was “home schooling” eight children in her household, but at best they played video games all day - and at worst, as in Roman’s case, they were locked up, tortured and starved. The Post chronicles the life and death of one boy, 11-year-old Roman Lopez. This, they were instructed, was a woman’s place, and accordingly, they were mostly taught how to bear and raise children. Many women from religious families who were home-schooled say their schooling focused on just that: the home. But where there’s no oversight, there’s no guarantee that children will learn skills considered foundational in public education and essential to adult life. Some home-school curriculum developers, for example, offer for purchase “unschooling” modules that allow children to direct their learning according to their interests and at their pace. Part of the allure of home schooling, for many parents, is the ability to depart from the typical path drawn by public education. Sometimes, that’s a question of academics. More recently, studies have found mixed results, though there is one through line: a relative strength in the humanities alongside weakness in math and science.īut it’s not the average home-schooler policymakers should be worried about - it’s the child who is left far, far behind. For another, home-schooled kids generally tend to come from wealthier backgrounds. Home-school advocates have tended to cite research by, well, home-school advocates, and even disinterested academics have had a hard time accounting for self-selection: The home-schooled students who take standardized tests tend to be the ones more likely to perform well on them, for one thing. The science on home schooling has always been iffy. It only means that when it’s a bad choice, fairly often no one finds out - much less intervenes. None of this means that home schooling isn’t a good choice for plenty of children. Only five states, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, have “thorough” regimens. Most oversight that does occur is minimal. And even if a state keeps track of who is learning from the kitchen table, it is not necessarily monitoring those students’ well-being: Fewer than half of states require any sort of assessment of home-schooled kids. By The Post’s count, 11 states, including Texas, Connecticut and Illinois, don’t even require notification when families choose to educate their children at home. But the influx of funding hasn’t been accompanied by a matching increase in oversight - and states that aren’t funneling dollars into home schooling are scarcely paying attention to the practice at all. Several states are encouraging this trend, with at least six extending vouchers to home-schoolers, offering parents thousands of dollars per year to educate children outside the public school system. Many home-schooled kids today play competitive sports against each other, go to prom and don caps and gowns for graduation. Cooperative arrangements called microschools, for example, are cropping up parents coordinate activities through Facebook. Home schooling includes not just parents teaching their own children in their own homes. Some parents are disturbed by politics in education others are concerned about safety from shootings others still see it as the best choice for their kids who don’t feel comfortable in the classroom. Now, it has increased by what The Post believes might be as much as 51 percent over the past six academic years - across geography and demography alike. Home schooling was once a niche practice, attractive mostly to religious households dissatisfied with the secular public school system.
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