It’s A Start

Homeschooling triples during the pandemic.

It may be the closest thing we have to a good side-effect of this past year.

The state – SD? FL? – who makes tax money given to education completely portable for things like home schooling (individual or group) or vouchers will see an economic and population boom like this country hasn’t seen since the days of Ellis Island.

17 thoughts on “It’s A Start

  1. All the homeschool families that I know real a benefit no one seems to talk about: close knit loving relationships.

    Homeschooling is a labor of love, and if taken as seriously as it should be it is labor.

    Homeschooling kids isn’t clearing dishes off the breakfast table and opening books. It takes planning and preparation.

    The homeschools I’m familiar with have an area of the home, usually the basement, set up as a classroom. There’s an emotional as well as financial investment that has been made by both parents, and it shows.

    Immersion into a common cause, naturally brings families together. The families I know that homeschool are healthy, wholesome and happy.

  2. At least you don’t hear about homeschooled children being punished because of their race — something the public school establishment admits happens in thousands of schools across the country, every day.

  3. I remembered a factoid I’d once heard about about people in education degree programs and how their SAT scores were pretty abysmal — then I went down a rabbit hole and found an interesting study on racial disparities in the SAT: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/01/sat-math-scores-mirror-and-maintain-racial-inequity/
    The authors of the piece, without evidence, say the unequal results are “a likely result of generations of exclusionary housing, education, and economic policy.”
    That is because there are no exclusionary housing, education, or economic policies. Any such policy would be illegal on its face.
    But, anyway, check out the stats, and ask yourself what kind of government would be necessary to reduce the “SAT racial gap” to zero, keeping in mind that in Cuba, a communist dictatorship where the government has virtually unchecked power to dictate policy for three generations, STILL has a strong racial achievement gap between people of European, mestizo, and black ancestry.

  4. Ah, of course; moderation.

    It’s a pity we cannot put more than one link in our comments. Try as I might to avoid it, the point sometimes requires more than one.

    I suggest we adopt a word amongst ourselves to stand in for the hyperlink header http / / w w w

    How about “hyperlink.site.com”?

  5. My son and his wife banded together with other parents in their suburban subdivision to hire a retired school teacher to give their grade school children in-person lessons in the basement of her home.

    They’ve re-created the one-room schoolhouse from 100 years ago. And it’s working: the teacher has the skill set to keep little people on task and the kids learn better in-person than over the laptop.

    Now, about that $15,000 per student per year that the State has been giving the school district . . . .

  6. In Minneapolis the public schools cost $20k/student/year, with abysmal results.
    No accountability on behalf teachers and admin, of course. They blame their epic failure on this mystical, magical thing called “white supremacy.”
    But I can’t figure out why whites would design a system that rewards East Asians and Jews more than it rewards whites. Can anyone help me out here?

  7. I’m starting to lose my respect for teachers. Of course, I never did have respect for their union.

  8. That’s good stuff, JD. I hope they continue it after the wretched public system pays off the teachers union and re-opens.

  9. jpa has a point. I’ve been reading more and more stories from the left that depict homeschooling as a threat to national security.

    I don’t think they will be able to ban it outright, but as with firearms, they can make it so expensive and cumbersome many will give up.

  10. Per my previous suggestion, I re-post this:

    People who are interested in helping minority kids do better need first to read this:

    hyperlink.aei.org/society-and-culture/charles-murrays-splc-page-as-edited-by-charles-murray/

    Then this:

    hyperlink.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299

  11. They’ve re-created the one-room schoolhouse from 100 years ago.

    My grandfather was born in 1915, and was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. His classmates included two men who went on to become engineers, one who became a doctor, and another who became a historian He himself came back to teach in a one-room school in the community, but gave it up over the incessant battle to get one more dollar a month in pay, and went on to become a successful business man.

    My mom became a teacher and then an elementary school principal, and earned her Ph.D. She retired more than 20 years ago because even then the politics was getting too insane. We home-educated both of our daughters, and the one with kids also home educates, and for the last few years has also been a teacher in a home-school co-op one day a week. There was no way she was ever going to put her kids in the public school system.

  12. One thing to keep in mind here is that those who are against homeschooling are getting smarter. I’m a homeschooling dad myself, and previously, those who were against homeschooling were mostly NEA types who would submit a bill or two each year in state legislatures, whereupon homeschoolers would learn about it and flood legislators’ offices with emails, mail, and phone calls–and that would generally be the end of it.

    Now many of them are going to the courts, trying to find a sympathetic (e.g. Obama appointee) judge who will create a right to public education out of thin air. Since they don’t need to be re-elected, it’s much harder for the standard response to work.

    Except, of course, to persuade those sympathetic to homeschooling to oppose legislators who will vote to approve activist judges. That’s a bit tougher, but it can work.

  13. I’m starting to lose my respect for teachers.

    Well boss, they sure proved to us all they are neither essential nor heros. Time to cut their salaries is what I say.

  14. One other interesting thing with homeschooling—and this has to do with the “anti-homeschooling activists are getting smarter” theme as well–is that there is growing concern that a certain portion of child abusers “choose homeschooling” to hide their abuse.

    To that effect, I found a website that was endorsing increased supervision of homeschoolers that listed about 170 fatalities in the past couple of decades (hsinvisiblechildren.org), and what I found there is that the strong majority of those cases were people already well known to social services, families in the process of breaking up, or cases of mental illness. It also stands to reason that, at about 8 fatalities per year, homeschooling is strongly under-represented in this macabre statistic, thankfully–by about 75% or so.

    All in all, what they proved, in my view, is that if you want to reduce child abuse fatalities, take a look at how to help social workers track suspect families across state lines, deal with mental illness, and keep an eye on families that are breaking up.

    The absolute wrong thing to do; constant surveillance of the overwhelming majority of homeschooling families that aren’t abusing their children. That would simply worsen the problem by diverting attention from real problems to harass the innocent–it’s quite a recipe for career dissatisfaction among social workers too, I’d guess.

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