Thoughts on Homeschooling in Alaska & Promoting Educational Diversity

Circle of Youth & AdultsThere is an extensive article in today’s online edition of Education Week, Critics Question Alaska Home-Schooling Success, from the Associated Press on issues with home-schooling, particularly state regulation of this educational path in Alaska.

The article starts out stating the issue clearly and succinctly…

If Alaska parents want to home-school their child, no paperwork needs to be filed, no phone call made. No one need be told. As for the student, no specific subjects need to be studied, no number of hours need be logged behind a desk, no tests taken… Alaska has the most lax home-schooling law in the country… No one even knows how many Alaska children stay home instead of attending a public or private school — they aren’t tracked or monitored.

Okay… so confessing my left-libertarian bias, I am mostly okay with this approach, except with not having to let someone in the larger community know that you are homeschooling your kids. Here in California I think we maybe have it right by requiring homeschooling families file with the state, but have no monitoring beyond that, other than the existing infrastructure (such as it is) of child protective services charged with monitoring that parents are taking the appropriate minimum responsibility for, and respecting the basic human rights of, their kids.

Given my bias, I understand that most other politically progressive parents and other progressive adult members of the community are not where I am on this. They are concerned that parents are not qualified to “teach”, or will otherwise deny their kids the opportunity and resources to learn to read and otherwise prepare to become functional self-supporting adults.

BTW… I don’t think any of us have any true idea what our kids think about this issue, because most adults think kids are unqualified to have a valid opinion on the subject of their own development.

I am imagining a great discussion on this issue of say 30 people, including youth and adults, homeschooling and brick-and-mortar schooling families, plus some local school teachers and administrators and non-parent adult community members. How would we come to some kind of consensus on this if we had the responsibility to come up with a solution? Would the discussion disintegrate into irreconcilable differences and questioning each other’s motives like it seems to often do on the national level with difficult issues like health care reform?

I am imagining that we could talk it through and at least come to some common ground while agreeing to disagree in other areas.

Maybe a homeschooling family in the discussion would make the case for unrestricted homeschooling like the McBride family in the article. Their 16-year-old son Connor…

May spend four hours a day playing the piano and not touch his history books for a month. He learns on his own schedule, and has ever since he officially began home-schooling in kindergarten… So far, it seems to have suited him. He’s completed more than half a year of college courses, is enrolled in calculus and chemistry classes at a local college this fall, is teaching himself Italian, and plays the piano, drums and clarinet.

So the school administrator might come back with an anecdote of concern regarding the other side of the coin, like Spike Jorgensen in the article, superintendent of the rural Gateway School District in Alaska with at least 1000 homeschooled kids…

One girl he recalled still couldn’t read by the fifth grade, not because she had a learning disability but because she and her mother did not get along, so mom couldn’t teach her. A professional could have had the child reading in a month, he said.

So the group would have to ponder this. How can we ensure that this does not happen to other kids? Someone might note what they do in New York…

One of the strictest in home-schooling laws, the law drills down to very specific required subjects from English and math to substance abuse and traffic safety. Parents have to maintain attendance records and file quarterly and annual reports. And when home-schooled students take New York standardized tests, they must score above the bottom one-third of pupils in the state or risk losing their privilege of being taught at home.

So some of the adults in the discussion might chime in that that sounded pretty reasonable, but then that same homeschooling family might come back with…

“It would be a tragedy if the state intervened,” said mother Linda McBryde, an anesthesiologist who works during the day and teaches the kids literature at night. Her husband, Brett, is the primary teacher and stay-at-home parent… They say they couldn’t have given their kids the educations they have if they lived in a state with more restrictive home-schooling laws.

So why slow a kid like this down by going against his natural interests and forcing him to learn the state-mandated curriculum instead? What level of larger community concern and oversight might be appropriate to prevent neglect of kids and their development but not stunt the growth of others?

In my mind, the consensus to try to go for in this room of 30 might turn out to be that we first acknowledge that because “it takes a village to raise a child”, the overwhelming majority of at least the adults in the room believe that the community has a legitimate interest in making sure that every kid has the appropriate opportunity to learn. Beyond that, other than very basic stuff like learning to read, to write, to speak, some basic community history and the responsibility and mechanics of adult citizenry, we cannot come to agreement on what constitutes an appropriate education for every kid.

Beyond these very basics, what subjects a kid should learn and when they learn them, and whether what they learn should take into account their interests and talents as a primary factor, is something we cannot come to agreement on. You say advanced algebra and geometry are critical for all. I say I lived my whole life without using any of the things I learned in those subjects, 95% of which I have forgotten anyway. You say the only efficient way to educate and effectively monitor the education of a big population of kids is teach everyone the same thing and learn it at the same time. I say make the conventional fixed school curriculum available to kids and their parents who want it, but don’t mandate that as the only educational path.

We are wrestling with so much here. Promoting diversity while still trying to find some common ground. Ensuring that everyone have some set of basic life skills while letting people explore and fully develop their unique interests and talents.

And what of the youth in our room of 30 people? What would be their take on this discussion? Assuming for a minute that we were going to give some real weight to their opinions, not minimize their thoughts as “childish” and lacking the wisdom of age. Would they want the freedom to chart their own course with at least the advice of adults who know about this stuff and care about them and their development? Would they instead want adults to tell them what was best and then “just do it”? Maybe some of the youth would fall on different sides of those questions.

Anyway… this is just the tip of the iceberg, but this is a discussion I think we need to have at every level of decision making in our country. Adults and youth need to come together and seriously talk about this stuff. Lacking these discussions, I see a growing gulf and looming conflict between liberty and social responsibility when it comes our individual and societal development.

3 replies on “Thoughts on Homeschooling in Alaska & Promoting Educational Diversity”

  1. As an Alaskan, I can tell you that one of the main reason for such lax homeschooling requirements is the influence of the religious right us here and the general attitude of not wanting to be told what to do.

    Another more legitimate reason is the isolated nature of the rural parts of the state. Now that more and more of Bush Alaska has internet capability it might be time to revisit this issue, but effective homeschooling regulation was not previously practical in small and isolated subsistance villages.

  2. Eldest son “could not” read when almost 9.

    (Truth is that he could, if threatened with disemboweling, read signage and other stuff just fine. He simply didn’t care to, didn’t want to, found it to be work, and has a stubborn streak wider than the Amazon in flood.)

    When the right text finally got slid in front of him (a 3rd grade level book all about giant squid, which were the coolest thing in the whole universe at that time…), he read it–with very little assistance. And the over and over andoverandoverandover for about a week. It may have fallen apart. But from then on, he’s been a reader–and rapidly progressed from adequate to acceptable to advanced to way beyond grade level.

    Maybe a professional could have “taught” him to read and “corrected” this earlier. But I doubt it. My father tried–when he had him more or less alone for two months the previous summer. It was frustrating for dad, and sheer hell for eldest. He didn’t come out of it reading, and was in fact even more resistant to the idea….

    I suppose if the professional were given a range of techniques approved by John Yoo, maybe.

    So, here we are. What’s the loss in that eldest didn’t read “when” he should have? He did lots of other stuff that was valuable, important, meaningful and educational. And we read to him and his brother. And still, in fact, were permitted (now and then) to read fiction aloud to them when he was 14.

    He’s picked up a smattering of German, seems to be teaching himself Faeroese (don’t ask…) and is bright, creative and relatively well educated–in the opinions of over-concerned grandparents and interested acquaintances.

    But we could have Made Him Read When He Should Have.

    Society will feel that loss for a long, long time, I’m sure.

  3. You go Ogre!

    Us, too. Three homeschooled boys. and while one read at three, one read at nine. Both are fine students and when they entered the mainstream school system at the highschool level were floored with the lack of expectation of excellence. The eldest is now applying to Harvard and MIT after being hotly chased. The middle is in high school, currently at the “Homecoming” game for the local HS and having a ball. The youngest is doing extremely well at the local “homeschool school. Life is good.

    How do we monitor this? I have no idea. But we trust a whole slew of folks to raise their own kids. How is this a whole lot different?

    Let people do what they will. Most of the will be amazing.

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