The Homeschool Choice

By Lucky Tomaszek

“Where do your kids go to school?”

“Well, actually, we homeschool,” I answer a little hesitantly. “I really like being with my kids, and homeschooling works well for our family…” I’m trying to be PC, trying not to start another controversial discussion with this well-meaning woman at Chuck E Cheese. But after letting that last sentence trail off, the silence thickens. And I realize that there is more I would like to say. I want to tell her that I have been teaching my children since the day they were born. I know them better anyone else, and know how each of them learns. I am intimately aware of their strengths and weaknesses and I know how to push them a little farther, without pushing them so far that learning becomes a chore. But it seems my opportunity has passed as we both go back to laughing at the antics of our children ascending into neon colored tubes and dropping into the ball pit. After several minutes, she says…

“No offense, but why would you want to do that?”

To start with, my interest was piqued when a homeschooled child won the National Spelling Bee in 1997, and again when first, second, and third place were all won by homeschooled children in 2000. And a little later in 2000 I read an article by Helen Cordes that said that homeschooled children are accepted to Stanford at “twice the rate of conventional schoolers.” I did a little more research and discovered that the average homeschooler scored in the 75th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, compared to conventional schoolers who scored in the 50 percentile. I must admit that the tragedy at Columbine High School in April 1999, and all the other shockingly similar tales weighed in to my decision making.

Of course, there was also the personal journey I made as a mother. I stay home with my kids, and I have devoted a lot of time to guiding them through childhood and helping them become loving, generous, and freethinking little people. When my oldest daughter turned five, I put her into kindergarten. I had obviously thought a lot about homeschooling, but in the end I decided that it would probably be better for her if she went through conventional school. We gave it our all! We bought the cute ‘first day of school’ dress and the box of crayons. We took a lot of pictures that day, and she was adorable.

The first week went well, she seemed to enjoy school and had lots of new songs and finger plays to teach us at dinner each night. The second week was a little harder. She was more reluctant to go to school in the morning, and when I picked her up after school she had less and less to say about what she was doing all day. “What did you learn today?” I would ask. “Nothing,” she would respond. The third week was worse; she started crying when I dropped her off at school, and by the forth week she hiding under her bed in the morning. When I asked her what was wrong, she said she just didn’t like being gone all day, she missed me. I asked her teacher several times if there were any problems during the day and she said she didn’t see any, but would keep a closer eye on the situation. In frustration, I started hanging out around her classroom to see if I could discover the source of my daughter’s reluctance. It didn’t take me long to figure it out. My daughter was used to being one of three small children and suddenly she was one of 25. At home, she was a valued member of our family’s team and at school she was a number. Her teacher tried very hard, but with 25 five- and six- year olds, there just wasn’t a lot of time for individualized attention. There was a lot of focus on standing in line and raising your hand, which are valuable skills, ones that my daughter mastered quickly. But I felt like it was important for her to finish what she had started, so I tried to make it work. I arranged for my daughter to attend school half days instead of whole days like the rest of the K5 students at her school. I made a chart with stickers and a reward program. I praised her every day for getting out of bed, and I dressed her myself while reassuring her that she would have a good time at school. When all of these things failed, I resorted to yelling and threatening to take away privileges. We were both miserable and she was already learning to hate school at 5 years old. We stuck it out through the first semester and into the second semester when I realized that conventional schooling wasn’t working for us. I pulled my daughter out of school and started over.

Is that legal?

Homeschooling is legal throughout the US, with regulations varying from state to state. Some states have very strict requirements while others have almost none. Interestingly, the amount of regulation the state puts on homeschooling has almost no bearing on educational outcomes. According to a study by the US Department of Education released in the summer of 2001, homeschool battery scores in states with high government regulation were identical to homeschool battery scores in states with low government regulation (both groups scored a composite of 86). Here in Wisconsin, homeschooling is especially easy from a legal standpoint. There is a simple form that a parent requests from the Wisconsin Department of Education each summer and returns before October 15. On this form there is a box to check to signify that you agree to:

• Provide 875 hours of instruction (just over 24 hours a week during the school year).
• “Provide a sequentially progressive curriculum of fundamental instruction” in the required subjects (reading, language arts, math, social studies, science, and health), noting that any curriculum need not “conflict with the program’s religious doctrines.”

What do you do all day?

That depends on the day! When we first started homeschooling, I designed a lot of structure into our days. We read a story, and did an activity related to it. We practiced writing a spelling list and we did math worksheets. It was a lot of fun. I was surprised by how quickly we were able to get through all of our ‘work.’ When you take out raising your hand and waiting to be called on, calming down a group of 25 kindergartners, standing in line, handing out snacks, taking trips to the potty en masse, and other mainstays of group education, you can accomplish in about two hours what it takes a conventional school class a whole day to do. We finished up my daughter’s kindergarten year following this plan. The next year, I was a little more relaxed about doing book work and focused on experiential learning. We did a big unit on bugs, buying lives bugs from an educational retailer. We planted a million seeds and watched them grow. We read a lot of stories and discussed current events. We kept up on the academic stuff too, but mostly we followed our kids’ interests and taught them what they wanted to know.

What about socialization?

This is the concern most often raised. People have been told for a long time that children need to be with other children who are the same age in order to be properly socialized. But this isn’t really how the rest of the world operates. When you leave the confines of high school, you are immediately immersed in a world full of people of all different ages, and suddenly you have to know how to get along with them. Conventional schooling doesn’t address this situation very well. But homeschoolers have a decided advantage in this area. According to Stanford University Admission Counselor Jon Reider, “they (homeschoolers) tend to be more emotionally mature (because they hang out with more adults) and are inclined to be independent learners who “take responsibility for their education.”

So how do we handle socialization? In our case, we met a few different homeschooling families and started doing more things in groups. I was a little surprised at how many homeschoolers we met, but then I learned that homeschooling is growing in popularity. In the 2000-2001 school year, approximately 1.5 to 1.9 million children were homeschooled in the United States and that number is growing by about 7�er year. Our little homeschooling group takes a lot of field trips to the Public Museum, the Zoo, area parks, and even the local bowling alley. We do big craft projects, like making homemade soap to donate to a local charity auction. In each of the families we’re learning with, the children are included in almost every aspect of daily life. The kids help make grocery lists and do the shopping, cook meals, fold laundry, and work in the yard. The older kids know they have a responsibility to help with the little ones, and they take it very seriously.

Our children, like most homeschooling children, participate in other extra-curricular activities with conventionally schooled children, like Girls Scouts, sports teams, summer camps, and church groups. According to the US Department of Education, the average homeschooled child engages in 5.2 activities outside the home per week, and 98�f homeschooled children are involved in two or more weekly activities.

“Do you like it?”

The woman at Chuck E Cheese asks me. “Yes, I love it,” I respond. “I love giving my kids all of my attention and watching them learn. And they teach me so much, too. I am constantly learning and constantly being reminded of the amazing world around me. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.”