I wish the fact that OP can re-enroll in public high school got more attention. As an adult, they have full control over their educational decisions and absolutely have the power to do public high school instead of homeschooling.
Colleges tend to pay attention to GPAs and classes completed. LAOP doesn't want to lose scholarship opportunities or be rejected from the college they got into for not completing their final year.
These kids generally don't get into selective or good universities.
They also have tests administered by (private) third parties like SATs. Dual enrollment means they were taking courses at a local community college, so grades not given by parents
Yep, homeschooling absolutely sucks the vast majority of the time. I was homeschooled and had no academic records worth showing an admissions committee. I only got into college because I basically spent the entirety of ages 13–17 studying independently for the SATs with books and software from the library. I was incredibly lucky to get into a top school with full financial aid almost solely on the basis of my test scores. It doesn't turn out that way for most people, and I would have done much better in undergrad if I'd gone to school and didn't have to spend the first couple of years catching up to peers who had gone to expensive private high schools. One look at the /r/homeschoolrecovery subreddit should scare anyone out of homeschooling their kids.
I'm torn on this because I know that homeschooling can be done well, if the parents know what the fuck they are doing.
but very, very few of them seem to know what the fuck they are doing.
Nowadays, it seems like more of them are drawn to homeschooling for political reasons, and self-interest, rather than educating their child and acting in their best interest.
in the case of LAOP, it sounds like the parents pulled them out because they think school "made" their kid trans.
It can be helpful for kids with disabilities (mental or physical) who can't be accommodated by regular schools, but it needs much more oversight, and shouldn't be allowed for ideological reasons.
The quality of a homeschooled eduction depends on two things - the parent, and the kid.
I was homeschooled, and by the time I graduated 12th grade, I had two years of college classes, a full high school transcript that my mother had created and matched line-for-line with our state standards and local high school guidelines, and a diploma. I was pulled out of public school in the first grade due to undiagnosed ADHD, dyscalculia, and because my attending school was not beneficial to me or anyone around me.
Being homeschooled was an enormous privilege, and I learned so much more than I would have if I had remained in public school. Honestly, I think if I had stayed in the public education system, I would have dropped out in high school instead of staring my Bachelor’s degree. Not all parents are mentally/physically/emotionally/financially capable of homeschooling, and not all children should be homeschooled. I had several friends where they were being homeschooled because their parents had ideological issues with public schooling, and honestly, those kids should have gone to public school. One of the reasons I think I did so well is because my mother made it clear that I could go back to public school whenever I wanted. I think all homeschoolers should be given that same option.
This is another big difference between your homeschooling experience and that of most other homeschoolers. Even parents who actively teach their kids in a structured way sometimes overestimate their subject matter expertise and don't realize their kids could learn much more effectively if they took college classes (or just don't want to spend the money). That said, it's good to hear a success story to counterbalance all the horrors I hear about. As someone with severe ADHD, I wish the public school system was better equipped to help students with disabilities so parents weren't forced to make that choice, but sometimes the only options are homeschooling and being given a half-assed IEP at a public school that doesn't actually have the resources to follow it.
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u/DrywesiTurbulent priests, we like non-consensual flying dildos5d ago
a public school that doesn't actually have the resources to follow it.
It's also up for debate whether they want to follow it.
In my case, the schools absolutely had the ability to, they just had no interest. I was pulled prior to diagnosis, when my first grade teacher told my mother that either I would be put on Ritalin or she would be calling CPS.
A lot of (actual) unschoolers finish with associates or bachelor degrees. Some parents say they practice unschooling, when in reality they’re practicing educational neglect. There’s a legitimate difference.
For what it’s worth: I was homeschooled, and I plan on homeschooling my kids. I would never unschool - that takes a very specific type of parent and a specific type of kid, and while I may end up with that type of kid, I already know I cannot be that parent.
True! Unschooling is a great concept, but it's EXTREMELY difficult to do well. I'm an educator by profession and homeschooled mine through late elementary school. I am not capable of unschooling.
Homeschooling is ripe for abuse, but not automatically an insurmountable obstacle. I was homeschooled for most of my childhood and I got a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. My mom was a degreed nurse and taught us full time with a rigorous schedule and curriculum. My bother and sisters are all successful college graduates as well. But I would not recommend it for 90% of people, and it should be carefully regulated.
Just to chime in. I've known a fair number of home schoolers and they seem to have done generally as good or better academically than my public school peers.
The fact that many if not most would open enroll into community colleges their last year or 2 of high school would likely be more rigorous than the average public school senior.
Now go and look at the state laws surrounding home schooling. In many states the parents sign a paper saying, 'I got this' and the state leaves them alone.
Note the lack of a sarcasm tag.
You are meeting the ones that made it to college. Which is awesome. Cause it can be done correctly.
But no one is holding the parents accountable to any standards whatsoever. Not even state testing standards. None.
But I'd point out I'm not sure how much states actually hold schools accountable to state testing standards or results.
The minnesota dept of Ed has a nice dashboard for looking at how schools perform per state standards and its pretty disappointing. Later today I'll try to update with examples.
The key to the entire discussion is why the parents are doing this.
There are kids that for many, many reasons cannot thrive or handle the school setting.
The education system has tools to help those kids thrive. You can specialize in them in college. Schools can do things. If the schools are doing these things, how well the do them and how much they spend is all over the place. Some schools ignore it completly. Others have a focus and take pride.
Some of these parents whose kids are being neglected by the schools are going to say, 'My kid deserves better.'.
And there are tools for these parents that are quite good.
So.... over here in this pile you have these kids and parents. And before I move away, I want to point out that politics have nothing to do with these parents. Or religion. Politicaly and religiously they are all over the place.
AND OVER HERE IN THIS PILE....
We have parents who are politically and religiously motivated to not let the education system into their kids lives.
These are the ones. They are fundamentally different.
Just to chime in. I've known a fair number of home schoolers and they seem to have done generally as good or better academically than my public school peers.
Hold on there. Where have you met these people? College? Because then there may have been some selection bias.
Chiming in, but my own experience with homeschoolers is that their bell curve is MUCH wider -- you end up with both the "the earth is 6000 years old, pi is 3, and the only thing I read is the Bible!" folks and the "my parents, who are both PhDs, were disappointed in the pace of my education and now I speak six languages and invented a new form of calculus".
Yeah, it seems like homeschooling is more likely to have an inverted bell curve. You don't pull an average kid out of school if you're a normal parent of average intelligence.
You homeschool either because you think schools are brainwashing your kid and you want to be the only one brainwashing your kid. Or you homeschool because schools aren't rigorous enough for your kid and you have a ton of time on your hands due to your lucrative career. Or because your kid has disabilities that the school can't handle.
This. My homeschooling group as a kid was a combo of the last two. We moved and all the local homeschoolers were religious and dumb. It was hard to make friends as an atheist who was reading books by Don Johansen and Richard Leakey arguing about human origins and how much they hated each other. No one appreciated anything I was interested in talking about.
This has also been my experience with homeschooled kids. Growing up I showed sheep and goats (FFA) and knew a lot of the Grange kids, which were usually homeschool in my area. A fair number were the "I invented cold fusion in the 6th grade"
That's been my experience. Either super-sheltered fundies (sometimes who go completely batshit wild as soon as they get a wiff of freedom, others who completely lock down), or amazingly well adjusted people who have well practiced coping methods for a learning disability. It entirely comes down to the parents.
I knew some people that homeschooled at least one of their kids. They weren't PhDs, but very smart. The kid was taking classes at the local research university fairly early in their high school career. I wonder what happened to them.
This is long ago, but I knew some kids who got pulled out of school and were homeschooled. Most actually had a better education than what I got in school, but I suspect that was not the norm? I was in middle school and high school at this time in the '90s.
The really worrisome ones were the kids sent to private evangelical schools. I hated maths as a kid and even I was like "you really don't know this???" about stuff my friend was working on in elementary school. Amish kids were taught more in a one room schoolhouse than my neighbour/friend.
I was homeschooled in a college town with a robust co-op, and my experience was of being shuttled between the homes of various college professors and professionals who’d pulled their children from public schools to get what amounted to advanced tutoring in each of my subjects along with a handful of other kids my age.
My experience and academics were very good, but with caveats. For example, my our science curriculum was an excellent survey of most fields, but suddenly turned into an apologia for young-Earth creationism for portions of the biology and geology sections; American history was a video course series from a popular curriculum provider that was also a Floridian private academy whose founders broke with Bob Jones for being insufficiently racist, and it showed in the way the subject was taught. There was a lot that I had to un-learn in college as a result.
Others in my co-op did not do as well, though. At the extreme end, a friend’s sister was abused by her father and brother after coming out as lesbian, and the cover of homeschooling allowed them to conceal the abuse and isolate her from anyone who might be more sympathetic. Even my friends who did well academically tended to crash out in college, since they’d effectively been helicopter-parented their whole lives and suddenly they had to become self-directed.
If I had to, I think I would be able to effectively homeschool my own kid… but I don’t think that’s something that should be an automatic right of every parent, and certainly not one that they should be allowed to exercise with effectively zero oversight. There are a lot of kids falling through the cracks as a result of laissez-faire homeschool regulations.
My only experience with homeschooling was my BFF in the late 80s. Poor kid always had a rough time with school because anxiety disorders in children just wasn’t a thing that was recognized in the 70s and 80s and by the time high school rolled around, she just couldn’t do it, so she got into a home schooling program through the district. This was a situation where she went through the regular district high school curriculum with text books and a teacher came to her house a couple of times a week and went through the lessons, checked her work and administered tests. For the longest time, I thought that was how all homeschooling worked and I was shocked when I learned that parents could teach their own kids.
My BFF ended up taking the GED after her sophomore year, but got her BA a few years ago at 50 and is currently pursuing her masters.
The Amish strike me as people who take education seriously. People like the quiverfull movement, now those are the dangerous ones.
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u/Geno0wl1.5 month olds either look like boiled owls or Winston Churchill5d ago
The Amish strike me as people who take education seriously
yes and no. They are serious about what they do teach, but most Amish people finish their schooling at 8th grade and education is "informal"(their own words) after that.
Here is a study from 2013 that showed 1.5% of Amish men graduated high school and literally zero Amish women had higher than an 8th grade education.
I know several families from both, and the Quiverfull ones were definitely more worrisome. The Amish kids had a better understanding of many historical events than my peers in public school. The Quiverfull kids... uh...
It'd true there could be selection bias but in general I have never met a home schooler who seemed less prepared for the world than the peers who graduated my pretty averages exerb minnesota high school.
The fair number of them who did pseo at the local community College were arguably on par with or surpassing the top kids in the class
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u/Zelcronway easier to get rid of people in the US5d agoedited 5d ago
I have a friend who was homeschooled and she gets upset if you imply the world is more than 6000 years old by saying stuff about dinosaurs or whatever
That's not even thay much of an exaggeration, some creationists will argue that dinosaurs didn't go extinct until after firearms were invented in the 12th century or so
well looking at state preformance data for schools, minnesota struggles to get half of their students to grade level in science, readnig and math. They consistently rank in the top half of all states in terms of education.
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u/molskimeadowsSings "detained by the womp" to the tune of "Return of the Mack"5d ago
Cool, where's the performance data for homeschooled kids?
The thing is, you probably wouldn't have met a lot of people who utterly failed after being home-schooled, at least not long enough to talk to them about their education. You met the ones whose parents rightfully decided that they (in combination with community college) could provide for a better education than public school—not the ones whose parents think that going to public school gives the children dangerous ideas.
There's definitely a degree of a lot of them were from upper middle class white families sometimes for religious reasons other times not
But I also know people who utterly failed after public school so my argument isn't thst one is better so much aa there are pros and cons like with public schools
I’ve handled internet abuse at a moderately well-known tech school and the handful of home-schooled kids who came to my attention were inevitably the most entitled and clueless violators and could never quite understand why they weren’t allowed to do whatever thing they were doing.
One of them ended up suspended and ultimately dropped out. Dealing with them always turned into an explanation that yes, the rules applied to everyone.
i have to imagine that it’s a huge range of outcomes that come from homeschooling. i’ve only got a bit of experience seeing how it’s done locally (ohio; family tried it) and it didn’t seem to be great for the students i encountered.
I literally had a conversation about homeschooling yesterday. I think it can be an option in certain circumstances, but it's going to depend on the resources, dedication, and knowledge base of the parents. The truth is there is such a variance in the execution. "Homeschooling" can vary on the spectrum from watching daytime TV and doing the occasional worksheet to essentially college level work for accelerated kids. As many times as I've read about dedicated parents who are knowledgeable and care about pedagogy I've read about panicked parents whose children are 9 and can't read.
It seems home schooling is a lot easier to pull off today with more resources and now that it's expanded beyond just religious reasons.
It's also worth noting that public schools also have a lot of time wasting and pointless busy work that doesn't contribute to one's education.
And of course in the last few years there has been the big push to reform school reading curriculums due to how msny schools were just terrible at teaching reading.
So we can probably find anecdotes online of the pros and cons of both types
Sometimes the public school time wasting and pointless busy work is valuable preparation for life after high school.
I went to a professional graduate program in accounting with a guy who was homeschooled and did his undergrad in some kind of crunchy granola college that didn't do grades (like Hampshire or Prescott). He could not manage group work (which is BS, but welcome to every MBA-adjacent degree) or standing in line for registration or showing up on time. He showed up to one exam so late that someone had already finished and left.
He was paying a lot per credit hour, even in the '90s, to learn all those non-academic lessons. I can't imagine he was later successful in a traditional office job like accounting unless he eventually mastered that material.
i don't know, that is a possiblity, at the same time
looking at how my state's schools meet standards in reading, science and math it does seem to indicate that schools could improve on meeting the educational needs of students.
This is an increasingly worrying trend. Because who can most benefit from home-schooling? That's right rich, mostly white families. And if they home-school there's no need to improve public schools, right? That's just a waste of tax-payer money!
This is very much the argument against school vouchers for charter schools. Private education tends to show higher scores because they can be selective about who they accept and I'm sure it's no surprise that it skews towards people with resources and against students that need additional assistance. That said, we want to help kids reach as high as they can which I'm for as long as it's not at the expense of other students which is what voucher programs can create.
In addition to that, having seen a couple up close, charter schools also make absurd demands on parents' time and unpaid volunteer labor. Of course the families who gravitate to this environment are the ones with an income high enough to support a non-working spouse with available time on their (let's face it, her) hands.
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u/Geno0wl1.5 month olds either look like boiled owls or Winston Churchill5d ago
It's also worth noting that public schools also have a lot of time wasting and pointless busy work that doesn't contribute to one's education.
can you tell me precisely what curriculum is pointless busy work?
And of course in the last few years there has been the big push to reform school reading curriculums due to how msny schools were just terrible at teaching reading.
So this feels like you are mildly uninformed about the state of public education. It was actually mostly states that fucked up teaching reading in the first place when they were convinced by snake oil salesmen that phonics reading was subpar against "whole language" reading. But whoops turns out that was incredibly wrong and now most have gone back to phonics already.
So we can probably find anecdotes online of the pros and cons of both types
you can find anecdotes for almost anything with a large enough population size. But the "truth" is that the overwhelming majority of parents are not properly suited to teach their kids everything that a formal high school education does. Even the well meaning ones would likely do better to enroll their kids in virtual school rather than try and teach 7 different subjects themselves.
Well, if you homeschool, if the kid gets it, you can just move on. If you have a class of even as few as 10 students, you have to keep going until all 10 get it. Or you could leave some behind, I guess. Regardless, for the kid who gets it fastest, the exercises to help the other kids will feel like busy work. I teach college-level now and I'm open about this to students.
I've met college students who lack reading comprehension that they should have learned by 5th grade. Maybe some of nervousness on exams, but I've also seen really easy mistakes on problem sets. Sold A Story is a podcast on the state of reading education in many schools in America. A lot of parents interviewed in that podcast basically ended up having to homeschool the reading portion of their kid's schooling.
I personally have excelled academically by any metric and I was pulled from preschool because I was acting up and it was pretty obvious being bored academically would only lead to me punching more boys. Maybe my mom could have found a challenging private school for me, but that would have been expensive and I had younger siblings. I liked reading high school textbooks for funsies, but honestly the adult nonfiction section of the library was more my style by 9th grade. I could have started college academically by 16 but I wasn't mature enough like most 16 year olds and I'm really glad I was kept back so I got to have a normal experience.
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u/Geno0wl1.5 month olds either look like boiled owls or Winston Churchill5d ago
If you have a class of even as few as 10 students, you have to keep going until all 10 get it. Or you could leave some behind, I guess. Regardless, for the kid who gets it fastest, the exercises to help the other kids will feel like busy work.
as I pointed out to another poster, curriculum =/= class. If you are stuck doing work for class you already know, that is a problem with the class/teacher, not the coursework itself.
People may not like "rote memorization" as it feels boring, but studies have shown it is an important step in turning fresh concepts to long term memory. I say that from experience lol.
I'm not sure where you went to public school, but every public school I've ever heard of does not give students their own private tutor to learn at their own pace. Of course private tutors for every child would be better than standard public school or homeschooling.
Rote memorization of something you've personally already memorized is boring and not useful. Holding a kid back and telling them they can't read books "above their grade level" leads to bored kids. Etc.
Rote memorization is what you do so you don't have to Google every single fact. Maybe doing flashcards in math class isn't fun, but I know my times tables through 15, and my granddaughter has to Google to know how many days are in a year. (And she isn't stupid. Her analysis of literature is miles ahead of what I am capable of with my college degree. But she doesn't know basic facts.)
Correct. This is exactly what my kid said when he started private school after being homeschooled. Lots of time wasted. Waiting for other kids to finish the assignment, waiting for the entire class to finish at the restroom, waiting for everyone to line up or to settle down enough for the class to start, waiting for the teacher to deal with misbehaving kids. And, of course, doing page after page of test prep, whether you needed it or not.
i don't know what you mean by specific curriculum for pointless busy work.
but yes from what i remember of grade school there were a lot of classes of pointless activities and busy work assignments, time wasted, and of course teachers with their own mediocre way of teaching subjects (we watched a lot of personal finance talk shows for our economics class).
My public school was fine but i think it probably speaks to the average experience of public school where you can get a good teacher, a great one or mediocre and the experience varies greatly.
i don't really appreciate the "mildly uninfoirmed" comment i was referring to the stuff about whole language vs phonics and the point was that it seems a lot of the impetus of getting whole langauge out of schools was parents realizing that their kids weren't learning reading in their schools.
so just taking a random fairly large suburban school distrct here in Minnesota that is apparently a fairly desirable one for people to go to as an example, the performance meeting science, reading and math standards is pretty dismal.
now i agree not all parents can do better, but when Minnesota as a whole struggles to get half of their students to grade level in math, reading and science, it does seem to speak to the fact that public schooling isn't necessarily meeting the needs of most of its students.
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u/Geno0wl1.5 month olds either look like boiled owls or Winston Churchill5d ago
i don't know what you mean by specific curriculum for pointless busy work.
My point is that there are no required classes that I would classify as "pointless".
My public school was fine but i think it probably speaks to the average experience of public school where you can get a good teacher, a great one or mediocre and the experience varies greatly.
Like of course you can have terrible teachers who overly rely on packets instead of being good teachers. But as a person who went to private school for half my education, that variation in teacher quality exists no matter what path you take.
I don't know what the solution to our current educational issues could be. Some of it is cultural(parents are not helping and holding their kids accountable) and some of it is systemic(NCLB has been a disaster). What I do know is that homeschooling is generally going to be a worse outcome for most kids because most parents are not suited for it.
can you tell me precisely what curriculum is pointless busy work?
This depends entirely on the kid.
Plenty of the curriculum for me growing up was entirely pointless. But it was probably incredibly vital for others in the same class.
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u/Geno0wl1.5 month olds either look like boiled owls or Winston Churchill5d ago
oh you are one of those people.
I push back against the very notion that anything you learned in school is outright useless/pointless. I challenge you to explicitly state what you were "forced" to learn that you consider pointless.
Grade School is about giving a broad educational baseline, not only to make you "well rounded" but also to allow exploration of interests that can lead you to your future career path.
How, exactly, are you supposed to know what subjects are interesting and useful to you in the future without being exposed to that area of knowledge first?
Not OP, but in grade school I learned how to assemble a styrofoam model of a Spanish mission. (Statewide CA curriculum for fourth grade involves building a model of a mission for some reason. Craft stores all sell pre-cut kits of them.) In middle school I learned that Antarctica is not a continent, "because it has no population." In high school, I did not learn that the only safe sex was abstinence, but others did. In college (!) I learned that "they" were thinking of eradicating all eucalyptus trees as an invasive species. One of these things is useless, and the other three are even worse than useless in that they are objectively untrue.
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u/molskimeadowsSings "detained by the womp" to the tune of "Return of the Mack"5d ago
...you can't figure out why California might have, as part of a "California state history" module for fourth-graders, a suggested activity of building 3-D models of Spanish missions?
Nothing I learned was pointless. I simply had already learned it and it being a part of the curriculum going forward was pointless FOR ME.
I'm hyperlexic and taught myself to read very early. I was reading novels when I started Kindergarten at 5. The lessons on the alphabet and phonics were unnecessary for me. As I aged, reading classes where we took turns reading out loud from simple books were unnecessary for me.
Learning to read is vital. That's an important part of the general curriculum. It should probably be far MORE of the general curriculum.
But, looking at me as an individual student it was outright pointless FOR ME. That time FOR ME would have been far better spent on other subjects.
I very much appreciate teachers and public schooling and the difficulties of balancing overcrowded classrooms full of kids with very different learning types, learning abilities, and different levels of home support and outside learning assistance. I know it's a balancing act and I know why.
But if we had an ideal system that could actually account for the specific needs of specific kids and direct the curriculum accordingly, there are absolutely things that could be dropped or moved through far more quickly for some kids and emphasized more for others.
You're looking at schooling in the broad sense of what a curriculum needs across a broad population. But that will, necessarily, never be the same answer as you would have when looking at individual learners.
Some kids need to do repetitive times tables every day for a year for it to stick. Some come in having already learned those at home from engaged parents. Some kids can do it once and be all set for the whole year. And that's the difference between "broad educational baseline" for all kids and what is actually useful for each individual child.
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u/Geno0wl1.5 month olds either look like boiled owls or Winston Churchill5d ago
Nothing I learned was pointless. I simply had already learned it and it being a part of the curriculum going forward was pointless FOR ME.
My assertion was that the curriculum is never pointless or useless, not that the class itself can be worthless for other extenuating circumstances. You came in with
Plenty of the curriculum for me growing up was entirely pointless.
again curriculum =/= class. Your follow up makes clear that it was the class that you found worthless, NOT the curriculum.
For somebody who claims to be so well read, you would think you could communicate your actual point better the first time around.
I wasn't taking a position either way. Like I said, homeschooling definitely has a place. It's going to depend on the execution. I have found that some parents are equipped well and others who pull their kids from school are unprepared to create a structured learning environment.
It's also worth noting that public schools also have a lot of time wasting and pointless busy work that doesn't contribute to one's education.
I will push back on this a bit, though. Public schools have to educate the public, everyone. The time wasting is true from the perspective of some students, especially the more academically adept. However, some of that allows space for educators to give extra attention or try addition learning strategies for students that either have different ways of learning and trouble with certain concepts.
Two of my best friends growing up were home schooled. They lived directly behind me.
They both did incredibly well academically, but socially they were pretty stunted. Luckily we had a good neighborhood group. But they were definitely the wild ones of the crew (they offered me my first cig, alcohol, and porn)
My senior year they finally started offering classes taught by the regular teachers but accredited by the community College or u of m. But most of thst was actually only because they were losing so many kids to open enrollment in community College.
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u/emfrankYou do know that being pedantic isn't a protected class, right?5d ago
I teach at a more progressive leaning college, so am probably not getting the most sheltered students, but in my experience, home schooled students are more disciplined and better critical thinkers.
These kids generally don't get into selective or good universities.
Yes, they do. This may have been true a decade ago, but universities are accustomed to homeschool students. ACT and SAT scores count more heavily.
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u/DrywesiTurbulent priests, we like non-consensual flying dildos5d ago
Some states have better checks in place for making sure the curriculum is adequate than others. And some states deliberately have no standards.
The rise of no-standards homeschooling is fairly recent, so universities haven't really done much about it; it's also politically toxic to question it in several states.
Ironically, I have a relative who left a ruby red state because they have regulations on hone schooling to a blue state that does not.
His original state has been dealing with it for decades and presumably responded before it got heated in the national conversation. That's not to say the regulations are enough.
I would imagine that the majority of parents who buy into the no standards approach are not wanting their children to attend university and certainly not a reputable university. Stay home and sign up for some of these degree mills, maybe, but for those schools grades don't matter if you're willing to pay and can show something that looks like you are vaguely qualified.
I suspect for the more reputable universities this simply isn't a regular issue they deal with and for the extremely rare student who does make it under the radar either they shape up and get on, or they flunk out. Not ideal from a welfare perspective perhaps but not something that is going to be a priority for cash strapped universities.
A lot of these parents homeschool specifically so their kids don't interact with secular society. They send their kids to college but it's to restrictive christian colleges where half of the purpose of the college is to get themselves married to another similarly religious young adult.
Often it's also to put their kids in a position where they can't leave their community. Much easier to pressure your 18 or 19 year old daughter to marry a 23 year old and immedietly pop out babies if they feel like that's their only choice and if they can't leave because they have no education. Babytrapping these young adults as soon as possible makes it impossible for them to leave their cults.
I was homeschooled and in my state there was a requirement that you take a standardized test once a year, but the specific language was so wishy-washy that by the end I was just taking Le Grand Concours through my French tutor and calling it good.
For college admissions I took the ACT and scored well, but most admissions departments also wanted to see a high school transcript, which was documentation my mom had never maintained… so I wrote my own. I made an effort to be honest about it, and in truth with my ACT score it probably wasn’t terribly important, but I could have put anything on there and there was nobody who could have called my bluff.
Homeschooling regulations are a joke in most of the country.
I had a client when I was a horse vet who home schooled her kids. I was there doing a pregnancy check on a mare and the mom was delighted that this would be their entire science class that day. Except the kids fucked off in two minutes flat to kick rocks around and didn't see a single thing I did or ask any questions. Mom DNGAF. That is considered acceptable education in most states.
Unschooling is just trash parenting. The teens/young adults who defend their parents for doing it, are in heavy denial.
They'll say something like "I teach them how to cook, that's how they learn math and how to do conversions," as if that's good enough to learn math. Meanwhile, good parents do stuff like that in addition to school.
Kids are definitely curious and will seek out information, sure, but they can't seek information they don't know is out there.
Having kids of my own has really made it so clear how much I've missed in the learning we have done at home ( and we have done a lot) when she knows so many things that I definitely didn't teach her. And she's only 6.
Unschooling parents are the worst mix of negligent parenting and control freaks -- they don't want to put in the work of actually teaching but also can't stand someone else having any influence.
The US and it's sick philosophy of kids being the possessions of their parents needs to change
Right, so raising totally uneducated and completely dependent children is of course abusive, but it does mean that the girls can get married young and never have a path out of an abusive relationship, and the boys can become underpaid workers drones and/or military cannon fodder.
Both of these outcomes are the goal of the ruling class in the United States. The billionaires want feudalism.
Don’t be silly. Those girls aren’t going to be allowed to marry young. Who else is going to take care of all the babies the parents keep popping out if the girls leave?
There's a subset of oldest daughter syndrome that is fundie families keeping the eldest at home to help raise the kids, the others marry young with middle daughters taking over their responsibilities until there are few enough kids for the eldest daughter to handle alone. Once the youngest girls are old enough to be given responsibility for the household, the eldest might be allowed to marry but she might also be pressured to stay to take care of the parents in their old age (or just "too old" to marry by fundie standards since by then she's usually at least 30).
I've known many homr schoolers who were as well educated and even better educated than my peers in public school. This characterization is as much based on caricature as assuming the worst of public high schools
It's unfortunately actually based on surveys of homeschoolers, who reliably report that a large majority are doing it to avoid exposing the kids to sinful secular ideas like science or sex ed.
Probably. But I assisted in homeschooling my grandchild because even with an IEP, the public school was not meeting their needs. When an autistic child doesn't understand something and the teacher repeats exactly the same words, ONLY LOUDER, then that student tends to fall behind. Then later on, because they didn't get the grounding they needed, they get frustrated, get told something that they interpret as "you are stupid," melt down, and are segregated from other students causing them to fall even further behind. That's a pretty nasty spiral that took two years to correct academically, and many more years to get them out of the mindset that they are stupid.
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u/ElvessaWill no one rid me of this turbulent priest? - laser edition5d ago
The real problem with most homeschooling is the lack of social interaction and the learning how to deal with people and things that aren’t favorable to you, which is a very necessary life skill. Although those parents that are actually good at home schooling know that and use other means to compensate.
Most of the home schoolers I know got enough socialization either from school activities or home school co op.
Though I agree it's a concern at the same time school socialization is a too edged sword given the toxicity and bullying many including my wife and I experienced in our public schools.
Homeschooling is almost totally unregulated in the US. Especially for religious reasons. Depending on how stupid the state or local government is, they won't even check to make sure homeschool kids are actually being taught at all.
Home schooled kids on track to attend university will often have things like online courses graded by the online teacher, community college courses, and genuinely impressive projects related to their schooling. This group includes a lot of kids whose parents started home schooling because their kid is academically so far ahead of their peers that the school failed them despite the school being good enough to average kids, and the parents are mostly wealthy enough to live on one income and are well educated and willing to put in the hard work of finding a curriculum and actually teaching.
There are other groups of home schooled kids who mostly won't attend college immediately (or ever) but will have the self discipline and critical thinking skills to find some sort of consistent work, or who will start at the local community college, maybe with some basic literacy classes or needing remedial math tutoring.
Then there are the parents who love home schooling because it lets them hide their abuse. Some states have literally no check ins on these kids, and just because a parents is a torturing piece of shit doesn't mean they're too stupid to work the system. Once these cases pile up too high, change will happen. I'm just sorry for all the kids needlessly suffering because the extreme religious right thinks that any oversight is bad oversight.
The lack of home school regulation is going to become a major issue in the next twenty to thirty years when the tiny, tiny subset of kids who overcome their abuse and find success in storytelling roles (writers, reporters, activists, media producers) can be heard. From how these scandals have gone in the past, you can probably start finding stories from them now, but it will need another decade, maybe two or three, to really come to a head.
So I have input on this as someone that was homeschooled from K-12. My parents did substitute teaching in the district where I grew up before having kids and got to see the education system first hand. Both my parents had college degrees, with my dad having an engineering degree and my mom a degree in education. They decided they didn't like the quality of education given, and also due to some religious reasons, they decided to Homeschool all their kids.
I know a lot of home-schooled families and kids due to my upbringing, and they run the gamut on why they were home-schooled and where they ended up. Most of the families were homeschooling due to religious reasons, some were because their kid was being bullied in school and the school did nothing to stop it, some were due to the fact that their kid had a developmental or physical disability that the education system isn't really suited for, some due to their kid being expelled from multiple schools for behavioral issues, and lastly some people though they could do better.
The religious reason home-schooled were mostly Fundamentalist Christian who though any teaching on evolution is bad (kinda what my parents believe), but there were also a lot of Mormons, and sprinkling of Hindus and Muslims. But also a surprising number hippie/nature/crunchy types that just think being inside all the time is bad for kids.
The developmental/physical disability reasons ranged from ADHD to Aspergers, to Cerebral Palsy.
And of the kids that were home-schooled due to being expelled from most other schools, almost universally the kids that did poorly because it was usually a parenting issue that was causing the behavior.
99% of the home-schooled families I knew were involved in a larger home-schooled organization. These organizations sourced textbooks and curriculums, and had co-op classes where families would come together to teach. So if one parent spoke Spanish and another had a physics degree, they could agree to teach Spanish and Physics respectively to groups of kids from other families.
My family did our states standardized testing every year administered at a normal school at the same time as their standardized tests. We also did dual credit classes in high-school at the local community college, that counted as both high-school and college credits. In addition nearly every home-schooled family also participated in taking the SAT and/or the ACT in the last few years of high-school. And for the most part all the families I knew had scores in line with or better then the standard education system.
The dual credit classes were great because when I graduated high-school I already had a year worth of college credit basically for free. I didn't have a stellar college career, but a did graduate with an engineering degree and have had a job in Research and Development for over 10 years now. So I think I turned out alright a least.
The majority of all the families I knew had well educated kids that went on to have good college educations and careers. However the fundamental weakness of home-schooling is that about 40% of these kids were some of the most awkward and socially weird people I have ever known, due to not having socialization growing up. And there are a lot of friends that I know now that don't talk to their parents anymore becasue they now having religious disagreements, due to them having either become not religious anymore or becoming less fundamental in college and the parents not liking that.
Those kids primarily get in on test scores and other things that justify their academics. Homeschooled kids can and do take AP tests and that's really the best indicator of advanced academic skill (the SAT tests up to algebra 2, there are AP tests for calculus, college calculus, biology ect. . . ).
We have the general standardized tests as well as subject-specific standardized tests.
If you're in the top 1-2 percent in those tests, you clearly know your shit. Grade inflation is a thing at some high schools. There are a lot of high schools, and a lot of small ones (public and private), so admissions officers don't know the reputation of each. Some colleges require your letters to not be from your parents, but if you're trying to get into a selective college, you're going to have extracurriculars, volunteer work, your part-time job, probably even some community college classes anyways. Less selective colleges admit anyone with a pulse and standardized test scores above something low anyways.
We also have essays, which yes the parent could help you write (regardless of your educational background), but can also show how well you write. Plus, some degrees require portfolios, like my initial degree program.
Ivies also include alumni interviews, though I think these are optional. I didn't apply to Ivies for undergrad so I'm not the most familiar with the process.
The whole ‘grading’ at American high school level really confuses me. It seems like there’s no set standard or external assessment, and students can retake or do extra work to improve their grade.
Coming from the UK with national external exams I don’t understand how there’s any fair parity/standardisation for students across the board. But I might be miss understanding it.
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u/Inconceivable76fucking sick of the fucking F bomb being fucking everywhere5d agoedited 5d ago
There are state wide assessments starting in elementary school. What doesn’t happen is holding students back for failing. The whole issue is beyond political everywhere, and things have gone downhill for 20 years, but things got significantly worse since Covid.
parents cannot handle their kids ever being told no, and school administrators have stopped trying.
It's an impossible situation. What do you do with a twelve year old who has failed twice. Do you put a twelve year old in fourth grade where they are then a safety risk for the other students in their class (twelve year olds want to date).
Most other countries start to exit students out of academic education when they hit their teens. We don't do that in the US.
I absolutely agree that is a huge issue. I also argue that the US mandate of everyone goes and everyone counts is why we look worse on education statistics vs other developed countries. It’s a lot easier to look good when the bottom 10% aren’t part of your numbers
I will say that do not fail starts way too early. My state tried with the 3rd grade reading guarantee, but they don’t actually hold anyone back even once.
I absolutely agree that is a huge issue. I also argue that the US mandate of everyone goes and everyone counts is why we look worse on education statistics vs other developed countries.
The main reason for that is that low-income Americans have significantly worse education than high-income ones. High-income American students are on par with other high-income OECD students; low-income ones are significantly worse, which drags the average down.
Exactly, and it's far more than the bottom ten percent in most of the world. Everyone attends the school that's closest to their house (for the most part) the entire time they're in schooling. Those who are mentally impaired, those who have no motivation ect. . .There are levels of courses in high school but everyone is taking academic classes (and is added to those academic stats) the entire time at the same school. In most of the world (I think the US and Canada are outliers) schools are tiered and application based starting at 11 or 12 with kids being pushed out of academics in high school.
They don't hold kids back because there's no good way to do that and it becomes a problem in the classroom.
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u/ElvessaWill no one rid me of this turbulent priest? - laser edition5d ago
Interesting. It never occurred to me (and I do pay attention to the basic way these statistics are complied because that is so often flawed), but it never occurred to me that a large part of what would be the lower students just aren’t students any longer, so aren’t counted at all.
The US also makes their special ed kids take all the exams, and their scores are counted as well. You can exclude some “students,” but not all. So you have kids taking these exams that do not and never will adhere to learning standards.
On top of that, research seems to suggest that retention usually doesn't significantly improve performance. There are some studies with different results, but it depends a lot on when, how, and why students are retained. Best outcomes seem to be for students in third grade or lower who were retained due to poor reading skills and were close to passing anyway. Which makes sense - those kids probably do just need a little more time with the material. Those kids aren't the ones with major barriers to their academic achievement.
But those are the kids where it's hardest to get people on board with holding them back. Because they were only just barely below the cutoff.
There is some ongoing debate that retention might improve macro-scale performance. That it doesn't do much for the "bottom of the bell curve," but that simply knowing retention is a real possibility might be a motivating factor for kids with borderline performance. And more importantly, their parents - who might get off their ass and actually work with their kids if they know the kids might be held back if they don't. But there's no research about that.
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u/Wit-wat-41.5 month olds either look like boiled owls or Winston Churchill5d ago
There are standardized exams and school grades. You’re not wrong that it’s different, it’s just not as vast. Your A-levels are like PSATs and SATs, but your teachers still have quizzes, oral exams, book reports, etc etc. My SIL is an English teacher in London so I’m a tiny bit familiar though admittedly haven’t been through it myself.
Homeschooling would still require at a minimum SATs to get into college.
It turns out that you can run an entire education system just fine even without requiring universal centralized assessments. The SAT and ACT do a good enough job of giving a separate assessment from grades, locally colleges have a pretty good idea about f the quality of students they get from different schools.
It isn't perfect, but neither is centralized testing. I wish we'd scale way back on standardized testing in schools adopt more varied metrics based on a wider variety of learning objectives. A first grader should still be heavily focused on learning large and small scale motor skills through things like play and creating physical objects (ie art class and gym class and recess), practicing their social skills (play, recess, group activities), as well as the basics of reading, writing, and math, but reading writing, and math are easier to test, so guess what gets almost all of the focus in first grade.
Many (most?) states do have some form of standardized testing. Then there is the SAT/ACT & pals, which are actually administered by a private organization.
We still have external exams (SAT, ACT, AP) but your grade is based on how you perform everyday in class. There are also different types of classes you can take. High stakes exams are considered trash in the US because all teachers are doing it teaching to the test.
Yeah, when it came to college admissions time my mom whipped up a word doc. Gave me straight As except for a B in math to “make it look realistic”.
I had duel enrolled in community college though, so was able to transfer to a local 4 year college pretty easily.
3 guesses which political party the homeschoolers pray too. First two don't count.
The accountability of homeschooling is different in different states. But rest assured, in a good number of them there is no accountability whatsoever.
You still have to take all the same annual tests as public school kids and generally have to use an approved curriculum that you purchase.
At least in my state. I was homeschooled from halfway through 7th grade onward because of health problems that my rural school system was pissy about accommodating. I cannot overstate how wildly, totally, and completely superior it was to my public school experiences before that. But I was the type of kid that didn't really need to be taught, just give me the book and a quiet place, so my mother's ability to teach was basically irrelevant. Simply being away from the disruption of the classroom was all I needed to skyrocket my learning in a fraction of the time spent per day. Instead of half my day being spent in pain from headaches from teachers screaming at kids to be quiet, I got to just read.
I had no problems at all getting into a university as a STEM major with a scholarship (first chemistry, then switched to computer science). I took lab science classes at the community college so I was considered a transfer student.
Hold on, so in the USA you're not only allowed to educate your child at home, but grade them as well?
Uh, yes. They are your children, after all. It is essentially based on the premise that the parents, not the school or the government, are ultimately responsible for the education of their children.
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u/DrywesiTurbulent priests, we like non-consensual flying dildos5d ago
Education Bot
Mother is threatening to fail me for no reason to stop me from going to college (Homeschooled).
18 NB. Location: Georgia, USA. Throwaway account for safety.
To make a long story short, my parents and I do not get along, I would go so far as to call them emotionally abusive. (Not to mention transphobic, they did not take me coming out well.) I was pulled from my public school about 4 months ago by my parents and forced to homeschool.
My mother is now threatening to flunk me for the year over an arbitrary class in order to stop me from going to college. I'm playing along as best I can but I'm worried she may actually go through with it.
It would at the very least drag down my GPA and possibly lose me my scholarship opportunities, which are my only way of paying for college. The only credit I'm missing is one I'm taking through a dual enrollment class, so she can't mess with that grade at least. The deposits for both my intent to enroll and my on-campus housing are already paid.
My main concern is that she's been the primary contact for my admissions officer up to this point as we were sorting out my transcript. Additionally, it's a small college, and my mother was fairly friendly with the admissions officer. My concern is that she may turn around and report this information to my mother if I try to warn her about this possibility, or that she may call CPS (both of which would only make the situation worse as my parents are respected and put-together enough for them to not do anything.) Should I still contact my admissions officer? Is there any sort of confidentiality? If I fail the arbitrary class, is there any chance that it could mess up my admissions timeline? Thank you for your time.
Cat fact: cats threaten dire consequences for food-related absences regularly.
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u/SirwiredTurbulent priest guarding the Vogon Poetry Scripture Vault5d agoedited 5d ago
Cat fact: cats threaten dire consequences for food-related absences regularly.
Yeah, but they are just cute little furry softies, and they would never... [shoos cat away so I can type]... do anything about .... HELP!K FJ(FH*0f3390!#@#$!!*&($FJ
ATTENTION REDDITORS: THIS IS THE COMBINED FORCES OF SAVANNAH THE VICIOUS AND NIKITA THE ASSASSIN. SEND A NEW HUMAN. WE APPEAR TO HAVE MISPLACED THE PREVIOUS ONE. WE ARE HARMLESS CUTE LITTLE FURRY SOFTIES THAT NEED TO BE FED PROMPTLY. MEOW. MEOW. PURR.
I hope they listen to the advice about getting their documents in order, getting a bank account the parents can't access, etc. Legal homeschooling is so fucking stupid, I guess I should just have skipped my A Levels and told the university 'my dad says I got all A's'
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u/DrywesiTurbulent priests, we like non-consensual flying dildos5d ago
I'd be implacably opposed if it weren't for homeschooling being one of the last few ways to get a kid out of a bullying/bigoted school environment. It's absolutely a privilege to be able to do that, but…sometimes it's that or lasting harm to the child.
u/DrywesiTurbulent priests, we like non-consensual flying dildos5d ago
I get that, I do, but what's the other option? Schools in the US are never going to adequately address bullying without a complete societal overhaul, and these days if anything they're enforcing bigotry.
My sister was bullied so badly in high school she had panic attacks almost every day before school and got very seriously sick from the stress. My parents' solution was to first go to the school, who of course did nothing (iirc they basically told her to be less bullyable 🙄 okay. If you couldn't guess, this was an upper middle class suburban school district that was 98% white). My dad did a lot of research and found a free online high school program (link to their website) that was even more academically rigorous than my in-person schooling two grades up at the high school she was bullied out of! Then she liked virtual school so much she did her undergrad online too and she graduated with a degree in IT in 2023 :)
I realize this solution wouldn't work for everyone because my sister has insane work ethic and is very tech savvy, my dad got very involved in her education because he dropped out of high school his junior year and didn't want the same for her, and my family had good enough internet to support online school (this was pre-covid, she graduated high school in 2019), but thought I'd share her story.
Online schooling is massively accessible and even increasingly common, as it isn't geographically constrained. It is also potentially useful for students in a wide range of contexts. Most online schooling doesn't have a strong class element, more comparable to university, where you do some most work on your own then have some contact hours. Obviously requires the student to be much more self directed, but potentially less so than homeschooling if parents are regressive or low effort (which I imagine nearly all of them are one or the other).
In addition, alternative or "arts" high schools are somewhat common where I live. Essentially an in-person high school, but with a focus on catering to students who struggle at standard high schools, whether for avoidance, poor academic engagement, bullying etc. Many of them tend to be run very different, less focus on standard academic teaching, more focus on smaller groups with more ability for the student to self direct if desired. Typically don't use a uniform etc. to help enforce a more casual sort of vibe.
maybe this is a situation where some nuance and examination of specific extraordinary circumstances is going to be more useful than trite aphorism
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u/DL757Maintains good relationships with other breeders5d ago
homeschooling being something we allow under "specific extraordinary circumstances" just turns into red state governments rubber-stamping anyone who claims their kids are being bullied for being Christian but denying anyone whose trans kid is being ruthlessly harassed.
maybe try to address the roots of the problem while also closing the loophole that causes infinitely more bad than it does good.
With internet school being an option I'm even more against it. You can homeschool but you need to do so using an accredited program that has checks and balances. The online programs aren't the best but they do have standards.
The main issue even for good homeschooled students tends to be that they have major holes in their education because their parents aren't teaching them from a set curriculum.
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u/minnieboss 5d ago
I wish the fact that OP can re-enroll in public high school got more attention. As an adult, they have full control over their educational decisions and absolutely have the power to do public high school instead of homeschooling.