Barbara Frank

I just finished watching “Waiting for Superman,” the recent documentary about American education, and I find myself frustrated as I think about what I saw.

Not that it wasn’t a good film: it was. It vividly depicted how adults look out for themselves instead of the children they teach, suggesting they are a major stumbling block for educational change. I don’t disagree with that; watching the film made me very glad I homeschooled my kids.

My frustration lies in two areas: first off, the families depicted in the film have put all their faith in public schools. They try to get their children into better schools; those that fail think their children’s futures are doomed. Those that succeed think all their worries are over and their children will be just fine. That faith in schools is misguided, and the fact that they are so sure of this is just plain frustrating to me because I know from experience that you can work with your own child and help them, whether after school or instead of school. So you do have options.

I think of the inner-city single mom I once met who worked as a police officer on the third shift, came home and slept a few hours and then taught her son during the day. She wouldn’t let him out of their apartment without her because their neighborhood was so dangerous. But she was determined to give him an education and keep him out of gangs. She didn’t look to schools to save her son. She took it upon herself. I wish the parents in “Waiting for Superman” would figure this out instead of relying on the school system to save their children.

My other frustration is with the common attitude displayed in the film (and most everywhere else these days) that the only way out of poverty is a college education. How well I know from my research for my latest book that only about 20% of the job openings predicted by the federal government for the next ten years will require a college degree. Telling every child that a college education is their ticket to success is just plain cruel. That myth is perpetuated in this film, and I hate to see that happening. It’s just not fair to children. Yes, some should go to college because they have an aptitude for higher learning and a desire to excel in a career area that requires a college diploma (doctor, lawyer, etc.) But to tell all children they must go? It’s outdated advice that will lead many of them to become overburdened with college debt and unable to find a decent-paying job to help them pay back what they owe.

So if you want to see a movie that will make it clear why you shouldn’t send your child to school, you’ll like this film. Otherwise, it will probably just make you sad….or frustrated like I am right now.

One more thing: while the makers of this film were more than willing to criticize lousy teachers, they also put good teachers on a pedestal. I get so tired of that attitude. Yes, good teachers are important. But so are good cops, and good doctors, and good cooks. A child’s success in life is aided by the influence of many people, not just teachers, and primarily their parents and others who love them. And even children whose parents are not exactly Parents of the Year can be positively influenced by others who are not their schoolteachers. Besides, it’s not that hard to teach kids to read, write and do math if you haven’t put them somewhere (like school) where their inborn desire to learn has been snuffed out.

The highway that runs through the town we live in is the one Democratic members of the state legislature took recently when they ran like cowards from the state capitol of Madison to cross the Wisconsin/Illinois border so they wouldn’t have to vote against the teachers’ unions.

That event was still fresh in my mind this morning when I heard on the radio that Indiana legislators are now copying the Wisconsin chickens by crossing the border into Illinois to avoid voting on school vouchers.

How interesting that they’ll go to such lengths because they don’t want parents to be allowed to direct their tax dollars to the educational institutions of their choice.

The reason, of course, is that if all parents were to do that, the already shaky public school system would weaken, private schools would thrive, and homeschoolers would be able to use tax dollars to pay for the cost of homeschooling their children.*

I know many parents would still send tax dollars to the public schools, and that would be their right. It would also force public schools to cut back on the ridiculously high administrative costs they incur; I’m betting that the current $10,000+ per student per year average cost would drop dramatically. And that would be a good thing.

After all, when I was a kid, and we Baby Boomers clogged up schools all over the country, a school could be run with just a principal, a couple of secretaries, a librarian, a gym teacher and a few custodians. Also, there was no huge bloated district office running our school district; just a superintendent with an office staff. Why can’t this happen again? It should happen again, because in this economy, who can afford continually rising property taxes to pay for schools that can’t even teach most kids to read well?

*Personally, I wouldn’t take money from the government to homeschool my kids, because I don’t want them telling me what to teach. But all homeschooling parents should certainly have that option.

ACT Inc. has announced that the average homeschooled student taking the ACT scores higher than the national average.

I know that this merely emphasizes what has been shown in previous studies and tests, which is that homeschooled students do better scholastically than public school students in general. But it’s always nice to add to the pile of evidence that homeschooling works.

I wonder how long it will take for the education establishment to admit it?

I heard on the radio this morning that 40% of the unemployed have been out of work for over a year. I don’t know how they come up with these statistics, but a quick mental survey of the people in my family and social circle makes me think that 40% is close to accurate or maybe even a little on the low side.

Am I the only person who thinks these people could take advantage of their downtime by homeschooling their kids? Given the state of the schools today, it seems like a win-win situation: the unemployed person finds something worthwhile to do with their days, and their child or teen actually learns a few things by working with their parent. Many of these parents aren’t going to find a job anytime soon. Given the changes in our economy, homeschooling might even turn out to be a long-term solution for both parent and child.

After all, homeschooling isn’t that hard, and teaching a child can be done much more efficiently at home than in a classroom of 30 students (62 if you live in Detroit.) Considering that many high schools students now text their way through class, it’s pretty easy to learn more at home than at school these days.

With all the great educational tools available in public libraries and on the Internet (for instance, there’s a nice free math and science education just waiting for young people right here), what can the schools do for kids today that we parents can’t? (Please don’t tell me that football games and proms are essential, because an entire generation of homeschooled adults have shown that they aren’t!)

Some people believe that the public schools are already going down, as Gary North has stated in his excellent article on the subject. The quality of education continues its slide into the abyss, and funding is likely to be cut, thanks to the financial problems most states and the Feds are struggling with.

I think that dying schools and unemployed parents could be blessings in disguise for American families. Unemployed parents who decide to take advantage of their newly found free time to facilitate their children’s learning can develop closer relationships with them while giving them a better, more individualized education that they can get in school. At the same time, they’ll combat the demoralizing feelings that come with being unemployed because they’ll be spending their days doing something that’s important and personally rewarding. They may even find that they feel better about themselves than they did when they were employed. Win-win, indeed!

So, homeschooling parent, think your teens are learning as much at home as they would learn in high school?

We know from our own childhood experience that the school day is full of interruptions and inconsistencies. Whenever you put 30 kids in a room, you create an environment that’s not exactly conducive to concentration.

But something’s changed since we were young, something that makes it even harder to learn: cell phones. Where I live, the high schools banned cell phones until 2007, when they allowed students to carry them as long as they were turned off and put away during class.

Guess what? It was too hard to enforce that rule, so now kids text throughout class. Teachers are worried that students could be texting test answers to each other. Perhaps, but at the very least, I think we can assume they aren’t paying attention to the teacher if they’re busy texting:

“Cell phone use continues to grow. Texting is more common, and many students are adept at sending silent text messages from their pockets. They don’t even look at the keypad.”

One teacher said, “Every kid has one, and they’re used covertly, regularly.”

I understand that today’s kids are good at multitasking, but I doubt that they can absorb much information while they’re busy corresponding with other people via texting.

Homeschooling parents needn’t worry whether their kids are learning as much as their publicly schooled friends. I’d say they’re way ahead of them if their home life affords them regular uninterrupted periods of time for reading, writing and doing math. Seriously, if kids can text during class, public high school has become a joke.

Regardless of how you might feel about testing, can we all agree that when a state’s Board of Education has to reduce the number of points needed for schoolchildren to advance to the next grade in order to pass enough kids, that the kids probably aren’t learning much during the school year?

Schools are increasingly reducing the amount of history taught to today’s children. A while back I noted in one of my newsletters that in North Carolina schools, there’s a proposal to stop teaching events in U.S. history that occurred before 1877. Meanwhile, in England they’re reducing and sometimes even eliminating the study of history in schools.

This is tragic. Are 21^st century citizens so self-centered that they think they’re too sophisticated and technologically advanced to learn anything by studying the past? It’s starting to look that way. I guess the educrats who make these decisions have chosen to ignore George Santayana’s warning that “(T)hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Thank goodness homeschooling families have the freedom to choose to study history. I like to think that many of our homeschool grads will use the wisdom they’ve acquired from studying history to help straighten out our country when they become adults. We’ll certainly need their help, the way things are going these days.

President Obama recommends  shorter summer vacations for U.S. schoolchildren so they can attend school for more days than they do already, because he believes that they’re at a disadvantage compared to students in other countries.

His Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, says more school hours will “even the playing field” when it comes to comparing our schoolchildren to those in the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, homeschoolers excel with far fewer hours of instruction than most public schoolchildren receive. So is it really more hours of instruction that schoolchildren need?

First off, President Obama’s assertion appears to be inaccurate:

Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

“Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,” Duncan told the AP. “I want to just level the playing field.”

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it’s not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests – Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

Apparently children in the countries that outscore ours in math and science attend school for more days per year but fewer hours per year. So the suggestion by Obama and Duncan that a longer school day results in “gains” (test scores, which do not necessarily equal learning) is not backed up by the foreign countries whose kids outscore ours. They actually have shorter school days.

But if you read the entire article, you find that merely educating kids isn’t really the point anyway. Here are your clues:

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

Summer is a crucial time for kids, especially poorer kids, because poverty is linked to problems that interfere with learning, such as hunger and less involvement by their parents.

That makes poor children almost totally dependent on their learning experience at school, said Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, home of the National Center for Summer Learning.

Aside from improving academic performance, Education Secretary Duncan has a vision of schools as the heart of the community.

“Those hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents,” Duncan said. “They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table.”

Do you see it? What we’re talking about here goes way beyond merely educating a child. This is about raising children because their parents have been deemed unable or unwilling. This is about schools becoming publicly subsidized daycare centers for school-age children, even on the weekends.

What it’s not about is how many hours of instruction it takes to educate a child so he can beat the math and science scores of kids in other countries. Homeschoolers have already demonstrated that.

Last week I wrote about indoctrination in the public schools. Here’s another example, but one from the past: a man shares a vivid example of how the public school personnel of 40 years ago “coerced me into sharing private family information — that my father smoked — in order to serve the agenda of the state.”

If you doubt John Taylor Gatto’s assertion that public schools are all about indoctrination, not education, here’s something for you to consider.

The U.S. Census Bureau has announced a plan to educate schoolchildren on the benefits of the U.S. Census, and why they should nag their parents to answer the census takers who will be arriving at their front door next year:

Between January and March, the Census Bureau will help plan a week of Census education in schools. During Census Week, teachers will devote 15 minutes every day for five days to the topic by discussing such things as civic participation, confidentiality or geography. Beginning in mid-March, more than 120 million Census questionnaires will be delivered to residential addresses.

The Census Bureau is partnering with Sesame Street to extend the 2010 Census message to preschoolers and adult caregivers. Under consideration: Using Sesame Street characters on Census materials and having characters participate in school events and public service announcements.

Aside from the fact that the school day is supposed to be spent teaching kids how to read, write and do math, I have to wonder why the government is coming after kids with this Census Public Relations campaign. I understand that some students have non-English speaking parents and can explain the census to their parents. But they are the minority of students, and really should not be expected to do the government’s job.

But there’s something a bit more disturbing here. Consider what it says in the U.S. Constitution:

Representation and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers … . The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”

– Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States

The Census Bureau quotes this part of the U.S. Constitution right on its site. Note the use of the word “enumeration.” According to Dictionary.com, “enumeration” means “to determine the number of; count.”

Now take a look at a sample of the census. Note that “How many people are living in this home?” is only the first question. Then the government wants to know the following about every person in the household:

First and last name

Sex

Age

Date of Birth

Hispanic or not?

Race

Whether each person sometimes lives somewhere else

How they are related to each other

That’s one heck of a lot more than just enumerating. It’s actually pretty intrusive, and certainly not specified in the Constitution. But the government wants this information badly enough that it’s got a plan for pressuring schoolchildren to get their parents to answer all of these questions.

In other words, they’re indoctrinating and using kids for their own purposes.

Yet another reason I’m glad to be a homeschooling parent. How about you?

I wonder if the average citizen really understands just how cost-efficient homeschooling is?

Back when I was homeschooling all four of my kids, the most I ever spent in a year for “school” was probably $1500, and that was when my two older kids took high school by correspondence.

That was a while back, but I have a hard time imagining someone today even spending $1000 per child to homeschool them. The thing is, educating a child costs far more in time than in resources, and we moms don’t invoice for that time.

As for resources, a Bible, a public library and some good museums are really all you need. The rest is gravy.

And there’s plenty of gravy in the public schools. Get a load of this, from today’s Wall Street Journal:

The state now spends roughly $13,000 per public-school student in Chicago, but the money has done little to reverse a dismal high school graduation rate of 51%.

Holy cow! For $13K annually per child, most homeschool parents could homeschool their children through graduation, and pay off the mortgage early with the money left over.

Elementary School Children with Heads Down on Desk During Rest Period in Classroom

I don’t get it. If something doesn’t work, why would you want more of it?

President Obama recently spoke about his goals for public schools*. He acknowledges that American students have fallen behind young people in much of the rest of the world, but his solutions include longer school days and a longer school year. He said this even though he also admitted that his mother had to augment his own education by making him get up to study at 4:30 a.m.

I’d go on about this but someone else has already done a fine job of it. Check out Judy Aron’s take  comparing President Obama’s speech to hearing a real expert speak about what’s wrong with public education: your friend and mine, former public school teacher and homeschool advocate John Taylor Gatto.

* where he chose not to send his own children

It’s been nearly two weeks since the presidential election. President-elect Barack Obama’s supporters are catching their collective breath and planning excitedly for the future. Republican voters are in mourning. And third-party supporters are resigned, having known full well before the election that they would not be happy with the outcome because it was unlikely that a third-party candidate would win.

Everyone is forming their own opinions about what will happen to the economy, the war on terror and our country in general over the next four years, now that we know who will be president during that time. What I’m wondering is, what will happen to homeschooling?

What has me worried is the very real possibility that Obama could choose his friend William Ayers as Secretary of Education. Phyllis Schlafly suggested this a few weeks before the election:

After all, Ayers is a friend of Obama, and Professor Ayers’s expertise is training teachers and developing public school curriculum. That’s been his mission since he gave up planting bombs in government buildings (including the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon) and assaulting police officers.

I lived in the Chicago area for my entire life until last year, so I’m well aware that both Obama and Ayers are part of the same social circle that congregates in Hyde Park on Chicago’s near South Side. I know better than to believe those that claim Obama and Ayers barely know each other. I’ve read enough Chicago newspaper articles to know that Barack Obama has been deeply entrenched in the South-Side liberal Democratic network for many years.

Ayers is pro-socialism. His post-terrorist career has been based on training teachers to indoctrinate kids into groupthink, particularly in regards to certain social issues.

If Ayers becomes Secretary of Education, do you think he’ll have a problem with homeschoolers and our freedom to teach our children the way we see fit? I do.