A GOOD REVIEW OF HOME-SCHOOLING FROM A MAINSTREAM NEWSPAPER:

Excerpts

Home schooling, best known in modern America as a movement of the left in the 1960s and a conservative Christian trend in the 1980s, is now becoming a mainstream education revolution, increasing from 7 to 10 percent annually across the nation. In 2003, an estimated 1.1 million students are home-schooled in the United States, an increase from 850,000 in 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In Minnesota, 17,533 students were home-schooled in 2003-04, an increase of 7.4 percent from the previous school year.

There is no one reason parents choose home schooling. Some want to nurture a gifted child or a child with learning disabilities or health problems. Some cite reasons of faith or remote physical locations. Others are concerned about the school environment, from negative peer pressure to school violence to large class sizes to budget cutbacks. Often, it's a combination of reasons. But at the heart of home schooling's renaissance is the growing acceptance that it is simply one more viable option — along with private, public, charter and online schools — from which parents can choose. "Home schooling is a real possibility now for many people who wouldn't have considered it 10 years ago," says Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute. "And that's because resources are everywhere. Home-school organizations are everywhere, support groups are everywhere. It's in the news, it's on Web sites, it's everywhere."

Home-schooling parents used to be afraid to let their children play outside during the school day, worried that neighbors would report the kids as truants. In the early 1980s, home schooling was expressly legal in only four states, says JoAnn Vender, a Penn State graduate student in geography who is studying home schooling. That changed when fundamentalist Christians and other religious groups adopted the practice with vigor, pushing states to legalize the practice in the 1980s and 1990s, she says. For many conservative Christians in that era, home schooling was a way to protest the increasing separation of church and state.

Minnesota adopted a law in 1987 that clearly established the legality of home education. In 1985-86, an estimated 654 Minnesota children were home-schooled. This year, that number is 18,000. Today, Minnesota has some of the stricter laws overseeing home schooling.

Lorin Velikonja, who recently wrapped up her tenure as president of the Minnesota Homeschoolers' Alliance, has had a unique vantage point from which to gauge society's changing attitudes. "MHA has had a booth at the State Fair in the Education Building for about 10 years, and when I first worked shifts there, you'd get people who would walk by and give you the eyeball and say, 'You people are crazy,' " Velikonja says. "But over the past few years, it's changed dramatically. Now, people stop by just to say, 'Oh, my grandchildren are being home-schooled! They're wonderful!' Or, 'We're getting married in June, and we're already thinking about home schooling.' "You still get a few people who challenge you," she says. "The big question is, 'What makes you think that you're trained, that you have the credentials to teach your child?' "Overall, I think people are just more positive about it now.".....

Home-schoolers must excuse Tom Keating, Minnesota's 2004 Teacher of the Year, if he favors a public-school education. That's not to say he doesn't believe there isn't a place for home schooling. He just wants parents considering it to think it over carefully. "The question for parents is, 'Why do we want to do this?' It's a serious gut and heart check," says Keating, who teaches at Turning Point alternative school in Monticello. "Because, if we're running from something, that would be a little scary. If we're raising a generation of kids in cocoons, we're in trouble." Keating says some of the home-schooled students he has met make the transition into public school at the high-school level when the subject matters become more challenging. They adapt nicely, he says, after sometimes struggling to learn to work in a group dynamic.....

Home-schooled students learn to be passionate about what they're studying, too. Many show a thoughtful maturity. One recent morning, for instance, seven home-schooled teens and pre-teens settled into the sitting area of a Minneapolis bookstore for their weekly Philosophy Club discussion. One of their mothers served as moderator. Arlo Sherbitz, 12, curled up in a wicker chair, shoes off, and opened the session with the first question: "Is there such a thing as a just war?" "No," said his brother, Dylan, 14. "That's a good question," said Nora Cox, 16. "I think war is part of human nature." Across the metro, every day, home-schooled students gather together like this to learn. Some meet through formal home-school "co-ops," founded by parents who hire teachers to give instruction on biology, music or art. There are regular sessions, field trips and waiting lists — similar to school but more flexible and on the parents' terms. Others are more free form, offering classes taught by parents who have expertise in a subject like science or math.

For many years, Northwestern College, a Christian liberal arts school in St. Paul, has actively recruited home-schoolers, who make up 10 percent of its student body. It was a unique strategy — until now. "Until recently, a number of colleges and universities were very skeptical of home-schoolers; they just didn't know how to approach or deal with them," says Ken Faffler, Northwestern admissions director. "That was fine with me; we wanted all of them we could get," Faffler says. "We could see, on average, they're above average … on SAT and ACT exams. And they also seem to have a slightly higher level of maturity — all this worry about socialization is something we knew we didn't have to consider."

Now, Ivy League schools, businesses like Apple Computer, PBS and many others are reaching out to the home-schooler. In the case of PBS, the network has been focusing in the past five years on alerting home-schooling parents about "TeacherSource," which provides free lesson plans and activities tied to PBS programming and correlated with local and national curriculum standards.

Statistics show today's typical American home-schooling family is white, middle class and conservative Protestant with more than two children, and the mother is primarily responsible for the children's schooling, says home-schooling researcher Vender. But home-schooling demographics are changing. "The most rapidly growing segment is the non-Christian group," Vender says.....

Danielle Reedy, 17½, is a home-schooler who has dabbled in public education, and she sees the upside and downside of both options. She is the oldest of four children of Donna and Tim Reedy of Hudson, Wis., who began home-schooling Danielle in kindergarten, mostly for religious reasons. Since starting high school, Danielle has begun taking a few classes at the public school as allowed by the district. Last year, her sophomore year, she attended school full time because the family budget couldn't stretch to purchase curriculum after Tim lost his job, but now she's back to home schooling. "At home, I've liked reading all the books," Danielle says. "She soaks up literature," Donna says. "I like just learning and not being exposed to all the garbage at school, swearing and drinking and cliques and middle school," Danielle says. "At home, you don't have that pressure." Danielle will return to high school for her senior year. When asked why, she says, "For the fun. And there are so many classes I want to take, like more art classes and a law class, which is an area I'm interested in. "I like the structured classes at school, where there are teachers there every day when you need them and they are experts in that area," she says. "And I like having all my friends at the school and being able to talk to people and meet new people. Whereas if you're home-schooling, you're home all the time. I'm a people person, so I like lots of people around me, not just my family. "But there are things I definitely don't miss about school, like the bomb threats," she says."






"FUNDING" CLAPTRAP A MASK FOR LETHARGIC TEACHING

Lawsuits with union backing and demanding more tax dollars to provide for an adequate public school education are becoming more common place. However, according to Doug French in his piece about Nevada's K-12 education, "High per-pupil spending in America often correlates with pathetic educational results-witness New York City, Washington, D.C., and many other union-dominated jurisdictions. On the other hand, low per-pupil spending is often linked with relatively high educational success-as with our neighbor Utah, and with private and parochial schools."5 He warns us that, "The best defense is often a good offense. And so, a constant drumbeat about supposedly inadequate per-pupil taxpayer subsidies has proven an effective way to shift the blame, maintain the political initiative and, perhaps most importantly, keep the money flowing."

People who are not educated on both sides of an issue and continually subjected to only one ideology or viewpoint make it easier for those with power and influence to have a greater effect on their opinion. For so many children an abridged education starts early in life because labels, like "politically incorrect" censor fairy tales like The Boy Who Cried Wolf; deemed no longer appropriate to teach morals such as to be wary of false accusations. Parents hand their children over to public education institutions earlier and earlier. The result, special interest groups like the NEA are able to maintain a lot of power and influence, even having long outlived their usefulness.

Going back to Doug French's piece, he writes, "The quality of the individual teacher is by far the most important factor in student success." He continues, "Vast millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted each year by school district administrators and union bosses through the [salary] grids. They could move to measuring teacher quality by tracking individual students' improvements year by year. But it's so much less threatening to the union to just look at longevity and trivial teacher college degrees-neither of which, research has shown, significantly helps student achievement."

Doug French gives the very reason why NCLB is so important to reforming the public school system. The law requires districts to implement what does work. As French puts it, "It is this-Nevada's chronic spending to purchase what is known to not work-instead of what does work-that is this state's fundamental education problem. And it has persisted for decades because it grows directly out of the debased role of the modern state as the servant of well-organized special interests."

State courts legislating from the bench order legislatures to provide, what the NEA considers "adequate funding" to the public schools. In New York, Robin Rapaport, the President of the NEA reminded the Senate Finance and Assembly Ways and Means Committees that, 'Our state's constitution mandates that "the Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated."'

She was critical that the Governor slashed funding for BOCES (vocational) funding cuts and for creating charter schools. She asked that education retirees continue to receive the same health insurance benefits as active educators and to re-enact the section of the law which would phase out with a sunset provision. She suggested state leaders find new revenue from the wealthiest private and corporate citizens.

In response, the legislature restored the Governor's cuts, and passed a budget, "that will provide over $848 million more in funding to public schools than last year - approximately $354 million more than the governor proposed." It is because of testimony such as Rapaport's that Kansas, Montana, and New York are, "currently under orders from their highest courts to fix their school finance systems." In New York, the state is planning to appeal the trial judge's order to provide $5.6 billion in operating increases over four years to fix the New York City schools.

The idea that the court can tell politicians to appropriate more taxes to assuage special interest groups is quite frankly, frightening. This is judicial activism at its worst. It has not been proven that greater funding will solve the problems inherent in the public schools. Certainly the court can determine the legality of an action but to determine how our tax dollars are spent seems out of its jurisdiction. "Whether the court has the authority to require us to appropriate money is a major constitutional question. The answer will be keenly anticipated by many. The prevailing view is that the court lacks the ability to do that."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughley indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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