The Learning Umbrella

A scary trend that I’m seeing is for the school systems to “dump” failing or difficult students and send them off to be homeschooled.  As funding for schools becomes more closely tied to test scores, rather than to attendance, there is more incentive for a school to get rid of students who will bring down their averages.

You might think this is all just anti-school paranoia, but I know of at least one case where this did happen.  My mother runs a tutoring center, and she was recently approached by a desperate mother.  This woman’s daughter was failing highschool, and the counselor told them to go to Running Start.  They went to the community college, and this girl failed all the entrance tests for the Running Start classes.  The family went back to the Highschool, and were told that they were going to have homeschool now.

I love homeschooling, and I think that homeschooling could help a lot of students who are having problems in school.  But that assumes that the parent can do it, and that the family wants to do it.  Among the many reasons that homeschooling must be voluntary:

1. It involves a large sacrifice for the family in time and possibly in income because one parent will need to be home with the kids.

2.  Even though we don’t have to be experts in every subject we “teach”, some parental education is a big help in educating your own kids.  Not all parents have even an adequate education.

3.  The homeschool parent/child relationship is a very complex one, and not all parents have a good working relationship with their children.  Especially for a teen that has been schooled thus far, a parent may be unable to serve as their teacher.

These are just the most obvious reasons why it would be grossly unfair to tell a parent that they “must” homeschool.  Never mind that it is obviously unfair to shift the “bad statistics” onto homeschooling.

Homeschoolers have fought for educational choices, most notably our right to choose to keep our children home.  Many of us have strongly negative feelings about the schools, and believe the best place for a child is at home.  However, we should be wary of situations where people are denied access to schooling because homeschooling is an option.  It’s an option for the parent to choose – not the school system.

If you’re wondering what happened to that girl, there is a sort of happy ending.  The family lived on the edge of two school districts (there is a whole undercurrent of race and economics here that I won’t get into).  My mother knew the counselors of the other school district, and she hooked them up with this family.  The girl was enrolled, and she can finish failing high school in this other school district.  I said it was a “sort of” happy ending.