Why we’re homeschooling high school

There are some homeschoolers who start in high school. Usually these are students who realize that they are wasting their time doing what someone else thinks is important because they have specific interests of their own that they want to pursue. Sometimes new high school homeschoolers are kids who are just having trouble figuring out which direction they’re going in.

But at the same time that new homeschoolers are starting, a sizable group of kids who have been homeschooled from a younger age go back to school during their high school years. The reasons that parents cite largely fall into a few categories: 1) lifestyle needs – usually a parent who needs to go back to work; 2) homeschooling anxiety – the parent fears that s/he isn’t advanced enough to teach a high schooler; or 3) college fears – parents start to worry that their student will not be “well-rounded,” will look too unusual to colleges, or won’t be able to fulfill requirements.

We’re now nearly a full school year into our first year of homeschooling high school, and I wanted to write about how we have managed all three of those objections. Homeschooling high school is working fabulously well for us and for our son.

Lifestyle needs

I completely understand a parent’s need to get on with a career, have more flexibility, or just more personal time. Since my son has been maturing, I have felt a strong urge to focus more on my work and spend less time carting kids around from one destination to another.

Our high school homeschooling style, however, works perfectly with my needs. One of the things that I’ve focused on since he was in sixth grade is transitioning the burden of his education from me to him. What I mean by that is that traditionally, parents, teachers, and schools take on the role of pushing education into students. In homeschool, however, the goal should be to have students take on more and more of the responsibility for their education. Now that my son is in 9th grade, he is able to do a lot of his educational activities with very little involvement from me. I am “teaching” him two subjects: geometry and literature. Next year, that will be cut down to literature. By 11th grade, I fully expect him to be learning largely independently from me, with support only in the areas of scheduling and transportation.

And even in those areas, he is gaining independence. This year he started to take the bus for some of his transportation, freeing him to be able to take classes at times that are inconvenient for me. And because we use a shared online calendar system, he has been able to take on a larger role in maintaining his schedule.

Homeschooling anxiety

I remember the day when I realized that my son’s knowledge of programming outstripped mine. I had put together a club of kids who wanted to learn programming, and we were learning Alice, which is a visual programming environment built on top of Java. My son was able to explain why something didn’t work in terms of the underlying Java, and I didn’t get what he was saying. That was the day I stopped trying to “teach” him.

Community college
Spot the homeschooler! Lots of homeschoolers take classes at community colleges, where their classmates are often surprised to find out that they’re younger.

Yet his computer science education has not stopped. It doesn’t matter that I can no longer teach him—I have been supporting his learning in other ways. I’ve helped him find appropriate classes, work with mentors, and hook up with other young programmers to do activities with.

A lot of homeschoolers look ahead to the high school years and get worried that they won’t be able to “teach” their children anymore. But I tend to use that word in quotation marks when writing about homeschooling because the ultimate goal of homeschooling should be that the parent doesn’t have to do any teaching. The parent is there as a guide and mentor. So yes, of course like everyone else I have anxiety about whether I am able to offer an appropriate education for him, but I try to channel that anxiety into finding new ways to access the education he needs. So far, we’ve been successful.

College fears

The major concern that homeschoolers cite for their high schoolers is that somehow homeschooling won’t prepare them for college, or that they won’t get into good colleges. I think this fear can be separated into two categories: truly putting together a good, rigorous high school education for your student, and then making your student look like s/he has had a good, rigorous high school education when it comes to filling out applications.

I have no concerns in the first category—I know that my son is getting an excellent education. Certainly, it’s not the same education he’d be getting in high school, but in most ways I think it’s superior. He has the time to delve deeply into the subjects he is most passionate about, and homeschooling allows him to just do the basics in areas he’s not so interested in. Schools require equal time for all subjects, resulting in kids who find much of their day boring and pointless. In homeschool, students have the time to shine in their areas of passion.

Concerning the college issue, I’m currently going on something like faith: First, every study of homeschoolers shows that they get into college and they do just fine. The studies are small and hardly rigorous, but homeschooling certainly doesn’t seem to have any measurable negative effects on college acceptance and performance. Second, I read about the experiences of homeschoolers who are further along in the process than we are, and I know that they in fact do get into college. Just like school kids, many of them get into their top choices, while others end up going to their backup schools. Just like school kids, many homeschoolers love their college experience, while others find that they’ve chosen the wrong school or the wrong major and need to readjust their plan part of the way through. Given all that I’ve read and seen with homeschoolers I know, I’m really not worried about my son getting into college. Now, whether he wants to go to college or straight to a high tech start-up is another question we may have to face…

Overall, I feel that our choice to continue homeschooling is the right one. As I see many of my son’s peers peeling off to attend schools, I feel no insecurity about our choice. As for our son, he has no hesitation. Each summer I ask him, “So, do you want to keep homeschooling or would you like to try out school this year?”

Without fail, he gives me an incredulous look and answers, “Go back to school? You’ve got to be kidding!”

Unreasonable expectations, part 2

This is a second in a two-part piece about the current state of educational testing in our K-12 schools. The first half covered the reliability of standardized testing, whether we should be using standardized tests for younger children, and digital educational design. Click here to read Part 1.

The tests don’t test what we think they test

My informant pointed out a huge problem with her third graders taking the test: much of the test had no audio component, and assumed that they could all read and write well enough. But as anyone who has taught children to read will tell you, some kids just learn later. They don’t learn worse and it has nothing to do with their intelligence overall. Late readers are not less successful in life.

The test will now assess one skill ahead of all others: typing.

But here’s what she had to say about her group of kids: “There was no audio component to the math, so a lot of the test was really a reading test. If they couldn’t read the paragraphs, they couldn’t answer the questions. And they sure as heck couldn’t write a paragraph.” The Common Core assumes that if you understand something, you should be able to write about it. (I won’t get into the question of why any reasonable 8-year-old would actually want to write about math!) But clearly, the less able readers were not being tested on their understanding of math—they were being tested on reading, which depressed their math scores.

On top of that, this test is also a test of a skill most kids don’t learn until middle school: typing. “And OMG they have no typing skills. I’m not sure a 3rd or 4th grader needs typing skills in general, but they were not ready to type for a grade. It was painful to watch.” Again, their math skills took a backseat to something the test designers didn’t even take into account. If we really wanted to find out their mastery of math, we’d let the teachers read the instructions out loud and type for the kids, or install voice recognition software so they could dictate.

Unreasonable expectations:
Standardized tests have been around for a long time, and over those long years, we have learned a lot about them. Here are some things we know about the tests themselves:

  • They are inherently biased. They can be made better and better through tinkering, but they can never reach the stated goal of being instruments that find out “what a child knows” because some children, for a variety of reasons, will never do well on them regardless of their mastery of a subject.
  • They are not good predictors of much of anything except how well a child will do on his next standardized test. The SAT, a much better test than any ever designed by a state government, is retooling itself because of the much-publicized research that shows, conclusively, that a good SAT score predicts absolutely nothing. Except, maybe, a good GRE or LSAT score!
  • They do not measure the worth of a teacher. Great teachers have all sorts of effects on their students’ lives, but improving their students’ standardized test scores is not a given effect. You can have a great teacher who does amazing things with kids who does not bring up their test scores.
  • They do not measure the effectiveness of a school. There are so many other factors that are as important or even more important than test scores. Test scores are one tiny factor that administrators can use to judge schools, but they are not the most important factor by far.

Yet our unreasonable expectations of this test are that it will somehow:

  • Be better at testing all children at their own level. See the point above about the inevitable bias. These tests won’t do any better than other tests. Sure, the kids who have trouble tracking from a test booklet to the correct bubble to fill in might do better, but these tests will inevitably end up biased against some other group of kids.
  • Predict a child’s success outside of test-taking. No, these tests will not predict any such thing. They will merely predict how well the child will do on the next standardized test. Period.
  • Show how well a teacher is teaching. This is absolute idiocy and any idea that teachers should be punished or rewarded based on test scores is rooted in a deep cultural distrust of teachers, not in any sound educational theory. Some teachers may indeed bring up their students’ test scores, but I sure hope those teachers are also doing something useful for their students.
  • Give us a way to “rate” schools. I have my own personal way to rate a school. I walk into the school and watch. In a great school, the students will be happy and relaxed. Yes, they may also be deeply focused on what they are doing, but that doesn’t mean they’re not also happy and relaxed. The parents will enjoy the school and feel welcome there. The teachers will feel energized to come to work; they will feel a partnership with the school administrators, other teachers, their students, and the parents. None of these important factors is represented in a composite test score. Yes, the score is a useful piece of information, but it alone does not rate a school.

Until we as a culture deal with our unreasonable expectations, it doesn’t matter how “good” the test is. A standardized test is a measure of how well students take standardized tests. In other words, it’s a measure of how much vocabulary they have heard in their few years on this earth. It’s a measure of what their parents discuss at the dinner table, assuming they have parents, a dinner table, and food to put on it. It’s a measure of how often the people they spend the most time with (and this is not teachers) talk about numbers in real life so that they become comfortable with number sense before being required to learn other skills that build on number sense.

A standardized test is also a measure of a child’s personality—nervous, anxious children don’t test as well regardless of their background. A child who didn’t have protein with breakfast won’t test as well. A child in the first day or two of coming down with the flu won’t test as well as she would otherwise. A child who lives daily with the fear that his older brother will be shot by his friends won’t test as well as he should. A child who is told he is too stupid to learn won’t do well on tests, and a child who has been overpraised about her intelligence (ironically enough) won’t test as well.

In conclusion, there are simply too many factors within the messiness of one person’s little life to put such weight on the results of a test. Sure, let’s make a better test, because we always need to improve the information we gather. But let’s not think that this test is going to solve any educational problems we have. It’s just a test, imperfect, limited in scope, and vulnerable to bias and technical problems. Education is just too important and complex to be judged by such a narrow, flawed instrument.

Unreasonable expectations, part 1

This is the first in a two-part post about the new tests being administered through the Common Core. To find out more background on these tests, visit the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium.

It’s that season again, the one that used to involve lots of filling in of bubbles. This spring, Google is giggling all the way to the bank as our schools purchase carts full of Chromebooks to have their students take the new, Common Core-aligned computerized tests.

Reports have been filtering in from around the country, with tales of crying children, broken software and hardware, and lots of overworked IT guys. But I wondered how things were going locally and talked to a teacher from a shall-remain-unnamed local public school. (Not my daughter’s school—her class hasn’t gotten to take the test yet because the district is worried about too much net bandwidth at one time so they’re spreading out the pain.)

The tests are new, and this year they “don’t count,” which actually doesn’t mean that they aren’t taking data from the results. The data, in fact, will be very important. We the parents, however, will not get to see our children’s scores, nor will the scores be used to fire our beloved, hardworking teachers. Not yet, at least. The data they’re taking is supposedly going to improve the test itself, and from what my teacher-informant tells me, there’s room approximately the size of California for improvement.

Reliability of the test itself

This is the issue that, it seems, the state is most concerned about, but frankly, it’s the least of our worries. My informant tells me that there were questions that required answers to proceed, but the test offered no spaces in which to put answers so the students couldn’t proceed. OK, that’s a simple software problem, but since the teachers aren’t supposed to “help” the students in any way, kids like my very literal daughter would have just sat there, unable to proceed.

There was no way for my informant to judge the quality of the content of the tests, but I’m sure we’ll find out that these tests have all the same problems as other standardized tests: multiple choice questions for which there are two, truly valid answers; deliberately misleading questions; fuzzily worded questions that don’t actually have a valid answer, etc. That’s par for the course in state-designed tests, and I really don’t know that there is a fix for it.

Appropriateness of the test for the age group
examcomicFrankly, I don’t think any standardized test should be administered to any child under the age of, say, 12 except in situations where you really need certain specific information. The very word “standardized” says it all—by creating a common standard you end up judging seals by how well they climb trees.

However, that said, if we must test younger children we can do two important things to make sure the test is appropriate:
1) Don’t make the test too long.
Let’s face it, even if the above-average 3rd-grader can sit for an 8-hour test over three days, most kids suffer.
2) Don’t create a test the requires tools that some kids might not have mastered.
For example, the old bubbles were a challenge for some kids, especially those with trouble tracking their eyes from the booklet to the answer sheet.

This test fails miserably on both counts. This year’s test was shorter and my informant said her 3rd-4th graders did OK, but she can’t imagine them hanging on for next year’s 8-hour test without some of them suffering terribly. Just because we adults have become office drones attached to our computers doesn’t mean our 8-year-olds need to be! If we really want to know their achievement level, why do we administer tests in such a way that will make it impossible for them to do their best?

And then there’s the whole question of asking young children with varying degrees of familiarity with technology to be able to use a computer with a trackpad, little tiny icons, and little tiny boxes they have to click in. Imagine the difference between the speed of a well-off kid who owns her own iPad and a kid who has no computers in the home—this is clearly not fair and clearly not developmentally appropriate. The number of hours of exposure in school is not enough by third grade to expect mastery of these physical skills by kids who don’t practice at home.

Digital educational design
I had a very bad feeling when it was announced that our tests would all be delivered by computer. Yes, there are some great aspects of this. No more tracking from booklet to answer sheet. No more one-test-fits-all since computers can adaptively offer questions at each student’s level. No more checking patterns of erasure after the teachers have had unmonitored access to the tests.

On the other hand, I started in digital educational design in the 90’s, creating the first online classroom materials for our local community college. The teacher I worked with on one project had learning disabilities and was a passionate advocate for his learning disabled students. Instead of a paper textbook, he and I created a website that had resizable text and also audio versions of the text. (Since screen reading software wasn’t advanced at the time, he recorded the whole thing!)

This experience led me to be keenly aware of the fact that online educational tools create very different challenges, and not everyone who is hired to design these tools is really qualified to do it. (I’ll save my rant about the quality of educational IT in general for another time!)

My teacher-informant reported a shocking first fact: Her school had “chosen” not to let the students take the tutorial that teaches them how to use the test environment first. How is the state letting this be a choice? Obviously, any school administrator who looks at the enormous pile of curriculum they’re required to get through is going to try to “save” tutorial time for something else. But in order for the tests to be effective, each and every student should be required to use a tutorial until s/he reaches a minimum standard of proficiency on the tools. Any student who can’t get up to speed on a tutorial should not be allowed to continue with the test.

This should be obvious to the people who designed the test, since (theoretically) we’re not designing these tests to prove that economically disadvantaged students are “stupid,” right? (Or are we?) You might think that I’m exaggerating how much trouble these kids have with the technology. However, my informant’s students are largely not low-income, yet she reported a number of problems, most of which she was not allowed to help with:

  • In the first part of the test, the students themselves are required to type their name in all caps (Chromebooks don’t have a caps lock key), an i.d. number with mixed numbers and letters, and a session passcode that had both 0’s and O’s in indistinguishable type.
  • And then there’s the use of icons with no text, one of my major pet peeves. Yes, there are those who think in pictures, and they all love Ikea’s instruction sheets. The rest of us, though, need language. I’ll let my informant describe what it was like to watch kids with varying levels of exposure to modern technology deal with this: “The kids don’t know the speaker icon is for hearing stuff. Some can’t read the directions. For example, they are given a paragraph and the directions are, Highlight the sentence that is out of place. They don’t know that they are supposed to highlight a sentence. They are looking for the dot to click or the space to type something. AND I CAN’T TELL THEM they are supposed to highlight a sentence.” Cuz that would be helping, right? And God forbid we let teachers help… the kids might learn something.

Continued:

Click here to read why the tests don’t test what we think they test, and why our expectations for this test really are unreasonable.

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