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Jan. 8, 2006
Why I Home School
August, 2002. Armed with a degree that the State of Kansas says prepares me to teach German at the secondary level and a six week crash course in elementary education, I stand in a room full of four year olds. I am supposed to get them ready for kindergarten. Some don't speak English. One is a foster child. I will call CPS regarding some of them. Others I will wonder about. CPS is a strange monster. You hear stories of investigations and children taken into custody for no reason. And then you stand in a border town stricken with poverty. Some of these children have no floors in their homes, no running water, no clean clothes. Food is sparce and when my children come in Monday morning, not having eaten since lunch on Friday, Iam advised that it is "not unheard of," that CPS has different standards in this community and to keep crackers in my file cabinet.
In my two year stint with Teach for America, I was not an exceptional teacher. I failed at many things, but I was dedicated. I gave everything I had to teaching those children and learned more than I could ever imagine.
First of all, money is not the issue people make it out to be. Spending money on education will NOT fix the problem. Some stats according to On the Issues:
- Public school spending is $5,200 per student, staying about even with inflation.
- Parochial school costs $4,200 per student, not discounting church-provided buildings & other subsidies.
- Private school costs $8,500 per student, not discounting scholarships or other financial aid.
(Newsmax.com puts the figure at $10,000 per student in public schools in a more recent statistic.)
Teacher pay is also a smaller issue than some make it out to be. While the average teacher makes about 40% less than similarly educated adults "in the market," they make 25%-100% more than private school teachers. And they have a pretty nice benefits package.
Parental wealth is not the issue people make it out to be. Yes, children from wealthier parents do tend to do better in school and on testing, but it is not the money talking. It is not the idea that a child cannot concentrate on his homework with his stomach growling. My liberal friends in TFA will probably have a heart attack if they read this (just look at the front page of their website), but a lot of it has to do with why some of these families are poor to begin with. My student who had not eaten all weekend had been to several (very innapropriate...Scary Movie, among others!) movies. His parents did not have much, and I could see where providing basic care would have been difficult on a regular basis. But they found the money to spend on what was important to them. That was not their child.
It is not about the teacher. I gave a great deal of my time and effort into the classroom with mixed results. Some children took off, but looking at other factors, who took off was very predictable. I utilized the technology available...in fact, it was due to a simple request for a cable for my COW (computer on wheels) that the principal discovered that no one had been using all this brand new technology available in every grade level because there were none of these cables in the entire school. I knew how to make enemies of my fellow teachers! I planned lessons, differentiated instruction and spent hours after school preparing my room and talking to students. I structured my day so that I could spend maximum one-on-one time with those who were struggling most...while others, in some ways ignored, took off. It was not about me.
What I discovered was that parental involvement was key. If the parents placed an importance on education, the child excelled. Homework was done, the child was attentive and class work was at least acceptable. At the first parent-teacher conference, I knew who would succeed based on who showed up. I spent my entire second year teaching trying to gain parental support, something that is not easy when the population you are working with is leary of the state and has little education. Parental involvement is the great equalizer. While statistics may show a relationship between wealth and reading, analysis of those statistics show that the relationship is closer between the number of books in your home. In poor communities, the proximity to a public library actually is a tremendous indicator of future reading success.
The main reason that wealthy children tend to do better in school is that their parents tend to be more involved. They show up at meetings, greater punishments waits at home should junior earn a detention, and they sit at the table with junior when he is struggling...possibly even hire a tutor. Some of my families struggled putting food on the table, but they did these things. And their children succeeded despite the environment.
I was a Christian, but had never really thought much about home schooling. My daughter was two at the time, and we were not yet sure about how she would be educated. I very much had a public school mentality, but it took teaching in one to realize how little all the environmental factors I had been conditioned to look to really had to do with education. Teacher salary, access to technology, teacher training, well-designed classrooms, expensive curriculum and manipulatives and wealthy suburban parents...those were the keys to success in education according to what I had been taught. But suddenly I realized (duh), it was all about the parents, and the values they demonstrated to their children.
That really is why I first began considering home schooling. By the time my daughter was old enough to start thinking about how we were going to do this, I had done a bit of research on what was out there. I was shocked to find how much of it looked just like the public school. No wonder unschooling is gaining such popularity, even among Christians...it seems to be the only alternative, if you really want to get away from that sterile environment with the teacher delivering information to the little sponges who are supposed to accept it. My husband wanted something classical in nature; I wanted something biblical. We finally found exactly what we both wanted in the Principle Approach, which is predominantly what this blog is about...amidst my personal ramblings
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