Love in a Time of Homeschooling

I am sorry I missed commenting on your original article. Having been homeschooled (along with my 4 siblings) from age 9 on I have some strong opinions about the subject.

Homeschooling should be regulated. Parents should be held accountable to a homeschooling plan and a reasonable standard of academic development for their children.

Homeschooling is an enormous endeavor that too many parents see as an easy extension of the parenting they already do. This was the case in my family when my parents (one had a Bachelors in Engineering and the other an 8th grade education) decided all 5 of their children would be better schooled at home.

This is what happened:
- With no plan in place I was left to study what I wanted. This
resulted in an extremely lopsided education. By my teens I
couldn’t multiply or divide, had no concept of algebra, and had
trouble with basic rules of grammar but I knew the capital cites
of obscure nations.
- My family environment was rich in affection but poor in
organization. I never had access to curriculum or workbooks. Most
of the time it was hard to find simple things like a pen or a
piece of paper.
- When family life got bad (dysfunction, fighting, divorce) there
was no reprieve, no place to go, no other adults available to gain
support and nurturing from. I was a hostage of my family.
- I didn't have many opportunites to test my interests. No drama,
art, language, sports, or clubs. I did get to take music lessons
for one year.
- My sister’s learning disability when unnoticed and unaccommodated
until she was fired from a job as a cook in her early-twenties.
The reason? She couldn’t read the recipes she was to cook from. No
one in my family knew she couldn’t read. We just thought she
didn’t enjoy books.
- I did not experience an enriched environment. I stayed home days
upon days, bored, at loose ends. I grew up within an hours drive
of a major city with museums, mountains with hiking trails, 3
public colleges, and ocean beaches, but didn’t experience any of
this until I was old enough to get myself there. I visited a
college campus for the first time when I was 18 to take adult basic
education courses to prepare for the GED.
- I didn’t pass my GED until I was 21.
- I developed a deep fear that I was stupid that eroded my self-
esteem for years. I became deeply afraid of being discovered as
a fraud; I sounded smart but if you looked closely I could
barely perform basic math functions. It took most of my twenties
to get over this issue.
- It took 3 years of taking remedial classes and 5 more years of
college classes to finish my bachelors degree, When you add that
to all the time I spent doing nothing as a kid that is a lot of
wasted lifetime.

There is much about the public school system that should be reformed, but please do not mistake homeschooling as the panacea for a dysfunctional education system. Homeschooling can work, but individuals should not be left to detirmine how it will work. In Washington State there are different levels of mental health counselor state credentials that are monitored and regulated. I think a similar system would work for homeschooling. Parents could choose to be affiliate educators, working under the guidance of a school or education professional. This would provide parents the liberty to become more involved in their child’s education with less risk of off the grid education stories like mine.

Hi Laura,
Can you point to any data that shows parents with college degrees do a better job of educating their children than parents without? Can you cite any data that shows parents with high school diplomas do better than those without?

Also, can you cite any data that shows children in schools taught by accredited teachers get a better education than those who are not?

Is there any data showing that homeschooled kids from high-regulation states are more successful than those from low-regulation states?

I think it would be crazy to implement regulations in the absence of good data to recommend them.
Cindy

http://www.nheri.org/

The National Home Education Research Institute did studies on how a parent's own education impacts their homeschooled student's standardized test scores. They found that while parent education, race, and income makes a big difference on how well a public educated child performs, they made little difference with homeschooled children. Children who have a parent with a Ph.D. do better in a homeschool setting than a children with a GED parent, but the difference is small.

I've read the studies you mention before, and I described my some of my objections to them during the round of comments in my previous post. I don't think most of the data on standardized test results for homeschoolers is reliable, for many reasons, and it can't be compared to public school data, where the sampling is much larger, more random, and controlled. For instance, as a homeschooling parent I got to choose what sort of standardized test my daughter would take, I got to administer it myself (it's all on the honor system), and I could administer it over several days (some of my homeschooling friends gave their kids unlimited time). I know of others who take the standardized tests until they get a result they want to submit to their superintendent. There isn't a test-taking procedure that is in any way comparable to the public schools (which is a great thing, on many levels, since I abhor the excessive testing)--but for the time being all data on homeschooling is very incomplete.

Home educators should be held to the exact same degree of regulation as other private schools that do not receive government funding. If bricks & mortar private schools are not required to hire teachers with a bachelor's degree, then one should not be required for home educators.

FWIW, my sister-in-law is a teacher in a government-run school and she told me that the coursework for her B.Ed. was an absolute joke. As a country, we have been caught up in "credentialism" without stopping to determine whether the credential is worth the piece of paper on which it was written.

A post on this at Home Education Magazine's News & Commentary:
http://www.homeedmag.com/newscomm/4932/homeschool_regulation/

In states without any accountability for home school families, home schooling is in greater jeopardy than where there is high regulation.

Right now it appears that the state of Indiana has school systems that are coercing the parents of dropouts to register as home schoolers. This decreases the school's "dropout rate", protecting the federal funds schools receive only while their drop-out rate remains low. It harms the home school community because it floods the official record of people claiming to home school with people who are not educating their children at all.

If Indiana had reasonable regulation, such as annual testing requirements for home schooled students, then these "counterfeit home schoolers" would be discovered within a year. The local school system might be able to coerce a parent into registering their dropout as home schooled, but at the end of the year the truth would be revealed. Few people who haven't spent the year educating their child would be willing to pay for testing, test the child, and submit the test scores.

While no regulation for home schooling sounds good, it's vulnerable to exploitation in ways that we cannot anticipate. The situation in Indiana is bizarre. Who would have expected the public schools to coerce parents of dropouts to register their students as home schoolers? Yet now that they have, I think we can all see the consequences the home school community will face when one of the dropouts commits a serious crime during "school hours".

I'm very pressed for time today, and I'll be even busier in the weeks to follow. I simply don't have time to fully explore this issue. For the record: I don't like zero regulation. It's not just because of the problem in Indiana, it's because without regulation there aren't enough statistics available to make a valid case for the viability of homeschooling. Home schooling is in jeopardy when legal authorities and the home schooling community don't enjoy a common understanding of what constitutes acceptable home schooling.

As long as legal authorities can claim a dropout is being home schooled, and personality disordered parents can isolate, neglect and abuse their children in the guise of home schooling, legitimate home schools are vulnerable. Only well thought out moderate regulation can address these problems.

First of all, it IS possible to homeschool with no teaching taking place. That is a statement that reveals that you do not understand the culture of much of the homeschooling community at ALL. Homeschooling can be about learning, which is not at ALL about teaching. It is not something done TO children, it is something children DO. Some of the most gifted homeschoolers I have known (and I've been at this for years and years) were rarely "taught" anything by their parents, tho' they learned much FROM them.

Because of this, there is little hope that regulation with a nod toward the outmoded "school" model of education would do anything but interfere with the effectiveness of kids learning at home and in the rest of their world.

Homeschoolers don't use tax dollars and aren't accountable for using tax money. Homeschoolers choose to do things differently because the school ways don't work, and they are brave enough to admit it and do something different. Having homeschoolers regulated according to the ideas of a failing system they eschew is ridiculous, but it is evidence that the majority is willing to put the minority under its thumb because (whether the majority wants to admit it or not, they believe that --) the minority reveals that the emperor (public school) wears no clothes - that education can be done more effectively and more economically with less pathology than it can be done in government institutions.

Such regulation or credentialization is often done in the guise of "what is good for people" - there are so many examples of suppressing people who are "different" with this patronizing point of view -- "educating" Native Americans into the mainstream, tracking black & Latino kids into certain schools and classes, etc. I am not even the slightest bit socially conservative, but have to admit that regulating homeschool moms or dads by requiring certain minimum credentials certainly sounds like the ultimate liberal or, yes, socialist, do-good-ism, without regard for people's freedom to live and learn effectively and as they choose. I believe the decision to home educate children might actually be a significant opportunity for people who do not have high levels of education themselves -- but instead of supporting self-empowerment, we're going to box them out???

As for dropouts masquerading as homeschoolers, this is not a problem of homeschoolers - tho' it is a problem FOR homeschoolers. But the root of the problem is something incredibly different. Compulsory attendance. Why are we making people spend twelve (now thirteen) years of their lives spending the majority of their waking hours doing something that so many of them find no value in and choose to "drop out" of? (Approximately 1/3 of all students who begin public schools fail to graduate. This is 1/2 in urban schools and those with minority majorities). Don't blame or regulate homeschoolers to make drop outs easier to count. Change compulsory attendance laws or make school more relevant and valuable for its target audience.

It's no surprise that captives will try to escape. To blame a population that has people who might LOOK LIKE some of those captives with a punitive (oh, I mean self-protective) law, is just another example of the desperation with which our society clings to its outmoded educational practices. Regulate me out of teaching my kids because a school can't keep up with those who have escaped? I don't think so.

This kind of thinking is short-sighted and fails to go to the root cause of societal's schooling problems. It presumes that the "default" is the default because it is correct. In the case of education, this is not the case. Schools are the way they are because of history, government bureaucracy, compulsory attendance and complete ignorance of what we KNOW about how people learn and grow. Public schools do not function with relevance, value, economy, or effectiveness. Do some bright and functional children emerge relatively unscathed? Thank God, yes. And in some schools, yes. But until a true overhaul of education embraces the way people really learn (voluntarily, and what they see people they respect doing, and what they are interested in, and what is "next" for them in their own personal development), we are not going to see homeschoolers embracing any kind of credentialing as a self protection to the movement. That's bologna.

Please. Think more deeply about your assumptions. There were places in your book where you almost got there. There was hope. But you have failed to examine the underlying assumptions about public schooling and our society. It would have been too earth shaking for you - and I say that as an academic myself.

I am not anti-school. I am pro-education. Right now, that means homeschooling is the place I can go, best as I can in my state, to help my kids escape failing schools and the ideas promulgated by those who have not admitted that the whole "set up" of schools is nothing but a "set-up." If school personnel and government officials would like to learn a few things from homeschoolers, we could hold some workshops and award them certificates to allow them to continue to be around kids. The first requirement would be to read aloud to kids for hours a day in groups of three or four kids who can endlessly ask questions and practice critical thinking by engaging with someone who loves them more than anything in the world. Best educational opportunity ever, and it doesn't even take a GED.

And personally, I'm kind of resentful that a person with one year's temporary homeschooling experience and no background as a homeschooling advocate (have you served on any homeschooling boards? worked for any state-wide or national homeschooling groups? been a lobbyist?) has such a mouthpiece. Legislators reading your well-written but predictable arguments, which avoid the real rub, may be negatively influenced. You will have just made life harder for ME. Great. Glad school is working out so well for your daughter and that if you personally ever need to homeschool again, you won't be credentialed out of that possibility.

Having endured (and endured is really the right word) teacher education classes for certification in a state college, I can only assume that they were made that mind-numbing in order to weed out any thinking people from actually becoming educators. Because of that experience, the idea of a mandatory home educator course honestly makes me cringe. Also, my limited experiences with the world of homeschool conferences makes me doubly cringe.

In theory, such a course sounds good, but I struggle to imagine a way that it would work well in practice. Who would teach it? If it's the state education system, how would you balance the interest of the state to get more kids into their system with the idea that they're preparing home educators? All I can imagine is that they would usher in the class and start trying to sell them on K-12. If it was the state homeschool organization, in states with only a Christian statewide organization, what would secular homeschoolers do? Would the state set the curriculum? Is the sort of preparation you need to be a "good" unschooler the same sort of preparation you need to be a good classic homeschooler or Waldorf homeschooler?

I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. I'm not saying that there can't be any preparation for homeschooling, but I think that unlike in mainstream education, where everything tries to put the student into one of a few possible paths, in homeschooling there are an infinite number of paths, both for the student and for the parents who guide them. I don't know that there's one class that would do it.

One other thing that's been bothering me throughout the day: for most of the homeschoolers I hang with, home educating our children is seamless and undifferentiated from parenting. It is just a continuation of our responsibility for preparing our children for the world and our enjoyment of our relationships with our kids. To credentialize this part of life sounds to my ears no different than issuing licenses to people to insure (as if we could) they can adequately parent their two- or three-year-olds or feed their thirteen-year-olds -- with the GOVERNMENT as arbitrator of that? Oh my. Please understand -- to US, it is no different, no less outrageous.

Win, you wrote: "...home educating our children is seamless and undifferentiated from parenting."

Exactly. There are many skillful parents (it sounds like you are one of them)who keep up with the learning needs of their children and explore new learning opportunities for their children. Unfortunately there are also many parents who lack good parenting skills and resources. I agree that higher education requirements are not a fix-my father had a Bachelors and was not a skilled homeschooling parent. I do think some regulation and oversight is needed to ensure that basic education needs are met and that parents have access to expensive resources, such as disability testing, if needed.

We don't measure the need for laws and regulations regarding child welfare by the best examples and we shouldn't do that with homeschooling. When it becomes obvious that that the child welfare system is a mess we also don't use that as a battle cry against enacting regulations and laws to protect children. Having a basic education is a requirement for having choice and participating in society. Anyone who has tried to hold a job without knowing how to read or attempted to handle their personal finances without math skills knows this.

Some parents are equip to provide a learning rich environment for their children that more then covers the basics-others are not. We have a social responsibility to ensure that the children of the latter parents have access to learning that will prepare them for an adulthood with choices.

Having a "basic education" according to whom? The guy who built my house had an eighth grade education and has worked his way into a successful life as an established builder and businessperson. He is also a great dad. He is a better parent (and he homeschools) than many of the PhDs I work with, who shuffle their kids to low quality day care and keep talking about how they hope that it's true that children are "resilient." I fail to see how preventing my builder from homeschooling will do anything to help the children you are worried about. I think you've got the default wrong: "We don't measure child welfare by the best examples" ??? Don't you know the phrase, "Hard cases make bad law"? It is generally accepted that the legal system should NOT make laws to govern the "hard" cases of things, because too many regular and good folks end up caught in the morass.

And, if your bachelors degree dad was a poor homeschooling parent, then even your anecdotes are failing you? I'm not sure I get this at all. You want to create hoops for homeschoolers to jump through so no one falls through the cracks, even though you openly concede that the hoops won't do that - even higher level hoops that generally proposed? This is so illogical that a homeschooled high schooler would poke holes in the fallacious reasoning.

Look. Homeschooling takes time and resources. I've homeschooled all over the place for a long, long time, and have found it's a pretty self-selecting kinda thing. People who don't want to fool with their kids or don't want to provide for any resources or any kind of special needs mostly send their kids to school, because it's free babysitting and the government takes care of breakfast and lunch. Will there be a few bad apples? Sure. But all I have to do is google "teacher arrested" to find out that certification certainly has not taken care of such problems in our stellar government system of education.

We've got a big problem with education in this country. But it's not with homeschoolers.

There are several false arguments typically used by homeschool detractors. As the political pendulum swings away from freedom and more towards government intervention, I think it is important to identify these false arguments:

Firstly, freedom is suspicious to those who don't like it. Since we don't know what goes on behind the closed doors of a homeschool, we must assume the worst. Although they would never admit it, that's the line of thinking of those who, deep down inside, really don't like freedom in general.

Another is that since the government schools are heavily regulated, it is only fair that homeschools should be too. Furthermore, if homeschools aren't regulated as heavily as the government schools, it seems as if homeschoolers are "getting away with something". Nevermind that government schools must have regulations to provide accountability to the taxpayer. Since I'm paying for my children's homeschooling, the accountability should stay within my household.

Another is what I call it the "calendar argument" whenever someone says that we have to accept some new government "reform" or onerous regulation just because it's ________________, and you fill in the blank with the current year, decade or millennium. The same goes for a any derisive remark about the 1950's being over or the nineteenth century being so old fashioned. Being truly open-minded means that we don't exclude good ideas for our homeschools just because they are from the past.

Another is that adults procreate for the purpose of meeting the needs of the state. That argument was worded differently in this article, but it is there. Personally, it is a ridiculous argument considering that my wife and I were so close to not having any children at all. Now that we have them, I don't see why the state thinks that it has an ownership stake in their future. It is freedom, not intervention, that will ensure the brightest future for our children. Perhaps the real agenda is that the state wants to eventually tax them to pay off its accumulated debt.

Finally, another is that qualifications can only be determined by the state. This false argument claims that the government is the default qualifier for determining who should do what and how. Nevermind that the government schools, with all their "qualified" teachers and principals with master degrees, do far worse than homeschool families.

Although not all the above false arguments were made in this article, we should be aware that these crop up from time to time.

Multiple studies show that homeschoolers perform head and shoulders above their public and private schooled counterparts (regardless of the parents' education level). The argument that someone you know had/has a bad homeschooling experience/family does NOT mean that ALL homeschoolers are bad. We should not punish the majority of thriving homeschoolers for a few possible bad seeds, just like we do not have the government visiting all homes on a regular basis in case a "bad parent" is present (God forbid!). I am not going to say that all teachers are bad because I've had bad teachers - like the one who decided not to teach Spelling and just give the whole class B's! Yes, there are good teachers out there. But every parent is a child's first teacher. Most teachers would kill to have that one-on-one teaching ratio, and know that the connection, the rapport between a child and his teacher is what makes a good teacher, something that parents have.

Laura wrote:

"Also, although Virginia requires that students score above the lowest 25% to move on to the next grade, I don't know that the state forces children to return to public school if they aren't making that grade. That number was what I needed to ensure that my daughter didn't repeat the fifth grade, but if she hadn't reached it, I bet the state would have wanted to visit my home, and study our homeschooling practices and my child's aptitudes, before taking any action."

Actually the law is clear in Virgina...if a parent does not provide adequate evidence of progress (either through a standardized test or evaluation) then the superintendent may put the homeschool parent on probation and ask that a remediation plan be submitted. And no, they would not send anyone out to your house to evaluate what you are doing or that you are doing it correctly. You can read the full text of the law here:

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+22.1-254.1

The evidence of progress requirement really has nothing to do with advancing grades...parents may teach their child at any grade level they feel is appropriate. Given that many, if not most children, are at different grade levels for different subjects, this gives us the flexibility to meet our children's needs. There is actually no requirement for a child to even be "at grade level". The only requirement is that we provide "adequate level of educational growth and progress". Some of my friends homeschool kids with learning disabilities and they use an independent evaluator to make an assessment of progress given the child's unique abilities which is then submitted to the superintendent. Again, flexibility is key, as not all kids are "on grade level" in school.

Another clarification...Laura wrote:

"However, many states don’t require any monitoring of student progress, and even in the states that do, like my home state of Virginia, scoring above the lowest 25th percentile on a standardized test is all that’s asked. It’s sort of like those public schools that push failing students along to the next grade every year."

I just wanted to point out that the 4th stanine (23rd percentile) is not "failing". Please note that we are not talking percentages here...percentiles do not provide information about the student's actual score but only on how that score relates to the scores of other students. Percentiles are broken into stanines as follows: 9, 8, and 7 is considered above average. 6, 5, and 4 is considered average and 3, 2 and 1 is considered below average. So children scoring in or above the 4th stanine (which is the level set by Virginia) are average when compared to their peers. This makes sense as not all homeschooled children are geniuses and they should not be expected to score "above average" in everything.

With those clarifications made, I will post my other thoughts in a separate comment.

Are there homeschool children who fall through the cracks? Yes, just as there are public school and private school kids who fall through the cracks.

In a perfect world, we would be able to ensure that no child ever falls through the cracks. But our world unfortunately is not perfect and no amount of certification of homeschool parents is going to fix that. It only gives us the illusion that we can, just as testing our kids in school gives us the illusion that kids are learning when many are not. I would argue that testing just tells us that some kids are better at taking the test than others. I know that the standardized test that my kids take to satisfy Virginia's requirements is NOT an accurate reflection of what they know and have learned. But it makes the powers that be feel more comfortable and allows us to continue to homeschool.

The problem with a certification process is who gets to decide what needs to be covered? You mentioned that statewide homeschool organizations could provide additional "courses"...in effect some of them (including the two statewide groups in Virginia) already do by offering homeschool conferences and seminars that cover much of what you listed. There are also very active homeschool groups (online and in real life - both at a national and local level) where parents can come together and discuss these types of things (one in Virginia has over 1300 members). There are so many resources available to people as well as many homeschoolers (such as myself) who volunteer to help new homeschoolers get connected. Obviously these are not mandatory, nor do I think that most statewide organizations would want to start giving "certification." And I would assume that the state would want to get involved if they did.

Which brings me back to what exactly do we test for? Actual knowledge? That means that if my kids are 8th grade and 4th grade I would have to prove competency at those grade levels? But what if my 4th grader is actually working at a 3rd grade in math but the 5th grade in language arts? If we have to come up with standards, would it then make sense that they be based on the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs)? Who will develop these standards, who will administer them, who will pay for this testing? It sounds very easy and reasonable, but the devil is in the details.

One of the reasons that I homeschool is because I want to be able to customize a learning program around my children's interests and abilities, not around a specific curriculum or state requirements. One of the worries that I have is that the more certification required, the less flexibility I will have. I think that this worry is why you see such strong opinions on this issue.

After homeschooling for 8 years I have found that it is not what I know, but that I am good at finding what I need, whether that be a specific approach or resource or an activity or an outside mentor. So how do we test for that?

Homeschooling is a lifestyle for us...we do not simply do what the school does at home. What I do is so different from what a teacher does, yet I am sure that any kind of certification would be viewed through a more traditional teaching lens. It takes a paradigm shift to get what we as homeschoolers do and many people who do not homeschool just do not understand it.

I do understand the concern. I just don't see how an additional layer of "certification" will make homeschooler outcomes any better and it could take away some of the flexibility I cherish. We have to balance the freedom of the family with the responsibility of the state - and where to draw the line is the tricky part.

It is incorrect to make the statement that homeschooling is unregulated. Although regulation varies from state to state, every state in our country has laws in place requiring children to be provided with an education.
The existence of those variables provides a perfect way to study which regulations might be most valuable and which will actually ensure that children are educated.
A survey of the data shows that there is no significant difference in the performance of homeschooled students between states with minimal requirements and those with strict requirements. It's easy to verify objecively that adding extra layers of burdens on the homeschooling parent does not improve the quality of education for the children. The extra requirements are simply the government making itself feel better about "doing its job." Politicians may benefit by being able to brag about how much they care about education, but children do not benefit.

Dr. Brodie,

The home-school families usually come out in force when they are not fairly represented. Your article fans those flames - anecdotal data in which you added the typical speculative cliché comments -- is this the best a researcher with your "credentials" can come up with when analyzing home-schoolers?

The home-school data is incomplete for good reasons and I think we all can conclude that without any effort - no one in the conventional schooling systems really wants to know the answer. The critics of home-schooling will not take any data without adding an asterisk or putting in the cliché anecdotal comments regarding the compiled data. You want data - take some data yourself. The comment regarding "little data out there" is that an excuse to make speculative comments? The cliché that "most home-schoolers are secretive," do you have any data supporting that comment?

So you can perpetuate and paint this mysterious picture about home-schooling or you can study it and collect real data without speculative nonsense. Keep in mind that anybody who produces any real data about home-schools still gets the cliché swipe by their peers because all the findings so far (and I speculate that yours will also) will show that home-schooling produces stark contrasting positive results when compared to conventional schools. Yes there are home-schooling failures and flunkies (teachers and/or students). BUT let’s compare your statistically valid results on those to the percentages in conventional schools – apples to apples.

Some of my anecdotal data: I have thoroughly studied the education industry (along with many other home-schooling families) from pre-school to post-doctorate and for anyone who has done the same (not hard for even the casual observer) just look at conventional schools and say categorically that "this is best way to do education."

Public schools have only two answers to problems in education - need more money and need more teachers. Well, how come parents with less than high school educations can teach their children just fine for far less money (20 times less) than conventional schools and produce far greater academic results? That is the apple to apple accountability we should be scrutinizing conventional schools not vice versa.

Conventional education gets a pass on critical scrutiny, again with cliché comments "considering the circumstances ...” How many Edisons or Einsteins (both home-schooled) has the public school systems crushed, lost or conformed to a miserable standard? Start with the obvious question when it comes to education: what really is the best way to educate children? Does locking them in a room for eight hours a day with children the same age come up as the best way to do this?

Home-schooling and conventional schooling which is the better way? For right now, I will stick with the one that produces the best results. Regulations, government oversight, certified credentials – that way does not seem to fair so well when we just look at results.
Clearly home-schooling works – why not investigate why it works instead of poking fun at it? Why not try to improve conventional schools with the obvious things that make home-schooling a HUGE success? Perhaps further topics for your research? Show me the data!

Dr. Brodie:

I submit that if you'd like to see more regulation of homeschooling, then you also need to advocate for more regulation of parenting. And how feasible is the second?

I am a certified teacher, with a Master's degree in Educational Psychology, and I homeschool my child. I do not, however, feel that those credentials make me a better or more qualified homeschooling parent than anyone else. Nor does it make me a better or more qualified parent. Some of the kindest, most attentive mothers and parents I've ever met are people who went straight into the parenting track and did not diddle around in the halls of higher learning during their most energetic, flexible, and creative years.

There is a basic error in thinking here that has its roots in the conceptualization of the nature of learning. How is it that people learn? What are the best ways to attempt to figure out what people have learned?

No one can force another person to learn and often, especially in the case of children, what is being learned has nothing to do with what we are hoping to teach. In addition, the richness of learning cannot be properly assessed through standardized tests, which let us down so often, as recently demonstrated by the debacle in the NYC school system. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only person whose business it is to know what and how much a child has learned is that child. The rest of us? Really, it's none of our business.

Regulating homeschooling on the scale suggested in your article and in some of the comments would be costly, time-consuming, and completely unnecessary. In addition, it may contravene a parent's constitutional right to decide the manner in which their child is educated.

As an adult, I have learned and retained far more than I learned and retained as a child in compulsory schooling. There are no "critical" periods for the regurgitative learning children are expected to engage in during their "school" years. There is nothing in the school curriculum that a child cannot learn at a later age, and, consequently, at a faster rate. People can always learn what they need when they need it or want it.

You have broached a topic which has far-reaching philosophical implications (about parenting, about the politics and practice of schooling, about fundamental freedoms, about children's rights, about the validity of a formal college education), none of which can be properly examined or discussed in this forum to anyone's satisfaction.

And I have a big question.

You wrote: " We all have a stake in our country’s children being challenged to the limit of their intellects, in a wide variety of subjects."

Why? What is this "stake"? Why should it affect my child or anyone else's child? And who says that challenging children to the "limit of their intellects" is actually a good thing, especially when not all children have the same areas of strength or the same way of approaching learning?

Just wondering...