(Photo by Frank Rumpenhorst/picture alliance via Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES – California’s elementary and middle schools will have to find an alternative to suspension when it comes to dealing with unruly students due to a new law that took effect Wednesday.
Beginning July 1, 2020, it will be illegal for public and charter school officials to suspend students for “willful defiance,” a broad category that includes disrupting class or willfully defying teachers.
California banned these types of suspensions for students up to third grade beginning in 2015. The law Newsom signed permanently bans these suspensions for grades four and five and temporarily restricts them for grades six through eight until 2025.
Teachers can still remove students from the classroom for willful defiance, but they could not be suspended.
“We want the teacher to be able to teach their class and not have disruptive students, but we also want to minimize these suspensions,” said the author of Senate Bill 419, Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Democrat from Berkeley. “The more a child is suspended, the more likely they are to do bad in school and just do bad overall.”
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Grades nine through 12 are not covered in the law.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Alpha-Phonics Blog Editor Note: Our Previous Blog Post: (NYU prof: ‘Hundreds, if not thousands’ of universities will soon be ‘walking dead’) will be a major result of the Corona Pandemic,. Prof. Scott Galloway explains that the pandemic has revealed to many families that the much sought after college education is not a very good $$ value. In this followup post he goes into more detail and suggests this offers a huge opportunity for higher education to produce much greater educational opportunities for everybody than ever before. We highly recommend this second article.
It May be a lot more Accessible and a LOT less EXPENSIVE!!
Scott Galloway
Our nation’s superpower is optimism. We invest in crazy ideas and believe anybody can be anything. We fund more start-ups, buy more lottery tickets, and reinvent ourselves more often than any nation. The belief that our best days are ahead of us results in an appetite for risk. We inherited this from people willing to leave everything behind, get on a ship, and build a new life in a strange land. Things would be better — they were optimists.
A sense of resolve, confidence, and optimism has led us out of every crisis in the 20th century. Wars end, and countries rally around a sense of rebuilding and a unified vision. Economic crises can be beaten back by consumer confidence: “Honey, let’s book a cruise and finance a Hyundai.”
America is an upward cycle, pulling the future forward. Optimism is our DNA, our superpower, our national identity.
With Covid-19, optimism is also our Achilles heel, and it may have disastrous results. People feel it’s time to get back to our regular lives. However, and I can prove this, Covid-19 doesn’t care about our emotions. We’ve entered into a consensual hallucination with the markets and our leaders that getting back to regular life is something we can make happen on our terms.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the bold, declarative statements from university presidents and chancellors that their campuses will be reopening in the fall. Brown University president Christina Paxson says reopening campuses in the fall should be “a national priority.” “Colleges and universities must be able to safely handle the possibility of infection on campus while maintaining the continuity of their core academic functions.”
At my home campus, NYU, Provost Katherine Fleming wrote last week: “We’re planning to reconvene in person, with great care, in the fall (subject to government health directives).”
Bold, optimistic statements, American even. They are also performative and reflect a consensual hallucination between university leadership and their finance departments. The hallucination is a function of a disturbing reality: A $50,000 “experience” tuition is a comorbidity during Covid-19. Universities with cost structures dependent on foreign students and luxury brand margins face sudden fiscal crises if a chunk of their students don’t show up in the fall.
The math here is simple, and similar to any product where the consumer is constantly weighing her options and deciding where to spend her money. The value proposition of college is:
C = Certification (the lane you are put in post graduation based on the brand/school you attended, i.e., a caste system)
E = Education (learning and stuff)
Ex = Experience (fall leaves, football games, getting your heart broken, throwing up)
Schools charging $50,000/year or more (Brown, NYU) have value propositions that have been rendered untenable overnight. The elimination of the university experience is similar to SeaWorld without killer whales. Yeah, we get it … free Willy, but I’m not paying $450 to see otters and penguins. Also, we’re not paying $54,000 for Zoom classes.
It’s no accident the universities that have declared they are “open for business” in the fall have much higher average tuition than those that haven’t said anything or announced they will be online only. The numbers and threat are staggering. NYU has 26,000 students. That means we are expecting approximately $400 million in tuition payments to roll in over the next several weeks. So, what would you say? “We’re not sure what fall looks like … it’s a good year to think about doing something else”? Leadership at high-tuition universities are sounding eerily familiar to a CEO during a disastrous earnings call who, in the face of a stark reality, attempts to paint an optimistic vision of the firm’s future to keep the stock from crashing.
The killer whales (cash cows) of high-tuition prestige universities are international students. We claim we let them in for diversity. This is bullshit. International students are the least diverse cohort on earth. They are all rich kids who pay full tuition, get jobs at multinational corporations, and often return to the family business. At NYU, they constitute 27% of our student body and likely half our cash flow, as they are ineligible for financial aid. We have a pandemic coupled with an administration committed to the demonization of foreigners, including severely limiting the prospects of highly skilled grad students. This means the whales may just not show up this fall, leaving us with otters and penguins — an enormous fiscal hole.
As in any sector, Covid-19 has yielded some unlikely winners. For example, the Cal State 
system, who many would argue is the real jewel of California, has announced they will be online only. This allows them to focus on the tech and training to deliver a better online experience. Cal State, which will graduate 40,000 more students than the entire Ivy League this year, is not rendered flaccid by Covid-19, as the experience was never a big part of the equation. Most students commute to school, and the denominator is much lower ($6,000 in-state tuition). So, their value ratio, in a time of corona, suddenly leapfrogs expensive liberal arts, campus-based universities.
On September 1, I’m scheduled to teach 170 students in a windowless room. After 12 sessions of 3 hours in the sealed room with 170 people, 50 of them will then disperse back to their 20+ native countries for the holidays. If the producers of Contagion decide on a sequel, I have an idea for their opening scene.
So, thoughtful, talented people — university administrators — are hard at work figuring out campus configurations and protocols to make campus safe. Ok, and what about off-campus? Unless the NYU provost can convince Mayor de Blasio to reinstate prohibition, there will be a lack of distancing in SoHo this fall.
An x-factor to all of this is a vaccine. Yet the probability we discover and distribute a vaccine in the next 13 weeks is low to none. In sum, the notion of universities opening pre-vaccine is a reflection of our optimism. The problem? Covid-19 is indifferent to our emotions.
Regardless of enrollments in the fall, with endowments of $4 billion or more, Brown and NYU will be fine. Likely better than fine, as a culling of the university herd would increase their number of applicants and return them to the salad days, only better. However, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of universities with a sodium pentathol cocktail of big tuition and small endowments that will begin their death march this fall.
Universities should be doing what every other organization whose business model has 
been threatened by Covid-19 is doing: cutting costs. This week, I spoke to the chair of the advisory board of an all-girls high school. Next week I’m scheduled to speak with the chancellor of the university that receives more applications than likely any school in the world. In both conversations we’ll discuss innovation, tech, and how we are all “in this together.” Usually, when I broach the subject of cost cutting, it’s as if I belched. The conversation continues as if they didn’t hear anything.
This is where the opportunity lies. Through severely overdue cost reductions and deploying small and big tech, we can dramatically lower the cost per student of a college education. The corporatization of campuses, bloated administrations, tenure, a lack of accountability, and a god complex that we, academics, are noble when in fact we’ve been preying on the hopes and dreams of middle class families and indebting them … all need to be attacked, aggressively.
The prize is enormous — a dramatic increase in the number of seats at good schools. Fifty percent online courses is tantamount to a doubling of the physical campus and returning admission rates back to what they were in the eighties, a time when the unremarkable sons of single immigrant mothers from lower middle class households were given remarkable opportunities.
In sum, elite universities will be fine. Yale has an endowment of $2 million per student. Tier 2 and 3 schools with high tuitions are the next department stores — not long for this world. And tier 1 public universities have a generational opportunity to achieve greatness in the agency of the unremarkable, again.
Regarding Mss. Paxson and Fleming’s bold statements on a return to campus in the fall? I hope you’re right — I miss campus a great deal. However, I miss college as a public good more.
Life is so rich,
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As colleges attempt to recover from the pandemic and prepare for future semesters, a New York University professor estimates that the next 5-10 years will see one to two thousand schools going out of business.
Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business told Hari Sreenivasan on PBS’ “Amanpour and Co.” that many colleges are likely to suffer to the point of eventual extinction as a result of the coronavirus.
He sets up a selection of tier-two universities as those most likely not to walk away from the shutdown unscathed. During the pandemic, wealthy companies have not struggled to survive. Similarly, he says, “there is no luxury brand like higher education,” and the top names will emerge from coronavirus without difficulty.
[RELATED: UNM lost nearly $50 million from COVID-19, still gave $100k to illegal immigrants]
“Regardless of enrollments in the fall, with endowments of $4 billion or more, Brown and NYU will be fine,” Galloway wrote in a blog post. “However, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of universities with a sodium pentathol cocktail of big tuition and small endowments that will begin their death march this fall.”
“You’re gonna see an incredible destruction among companies that have the following factors: a tier-two brand; expensive tuition, and low endowments,” he said on “Amanpour and Co.,” because “there’s going to be demand destruction because more people are gonna take gap years, and you’re going to see increased pressure to lower costs.”
Approximating that a thousand to two thousand of the country’s 4,500 universities could go out of business in the next 5-10 years, Galloway concludes, “what department stores were to retail, tier-two higher tuition universities are about to become to education and that is they are soon going to become the walking dead.”
[RELATED: Nebraska lowers tuition costs despite other schools raising theirs]
The radical left will stop at nothing to intimidate conservative students on college campuses. You can help expose them. Find out more »
Another critical issue underlying the financial difficulties families and universities both face is the possibility that the quality of higher education has decreased.
Galloway argues that an education in the U.S. is observably unsatisfactory for the amount that it costs, given that if you “walk into a class, it doesn’t look, smell or feel much different than it did 40 years ago, except tuition’s up 1,400 percent,” he said during an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta. And the pandemic, according to Galloway, has served to expose the quality of higher education.
“Students I think across America along with their families listening in on these Zoom classes are all beginning to wonder what kind of value, or lack thereof, they’re getting for their tuition dollars,” he said.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @mariatcopeland
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OTHER REVIEWS AWARDS HOW TO ORDER
Home schoolers have won a big victory in Virginia thanks to a couple of parents who took on a school district that wanted more information than it deserved.
Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) attorney Peter Kamakawiwoole tells OneNewsNow the Virginia Supreme Court unanimously ruled that home schoolers Kirk and Kristen Sosebee had the right to refuse to give the Franklin County School District their children’s birth certificates and proof of residency.
“They could have submitted what the district wanted them to do, but they were very concerned by the fact that the district was A.) taking it upon itself to add to the requirements that are in the law, and then B.) threatening to prosecute them if they didn’t meet the district’s policy,” Kamakawiwoole reports.
KamakawiwooleThe court also clarified that local school boards can only adopt policies in order to regulate public schools, not home schools.
“There’s no authority in any of the statutes — home school statutes or general public school statutes — that allows school boards to supervise home schools other than the specific things that are listed in the [state] statute,” the HSLDA staff attorney explains.
He says the decision also means that more than 500 other home school parents will no longer have to comply with this demand.
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OTHER REVIEWS AWARDS HOW TO ORDER
ORLANDO, Fla. — Scholars have long hypothesized about how laws came to be part of human civilizations. Some have credited ancient legal experts and judges, while others believe God is the source of order in the world. A study by researchers at the University of Central Florida and the University of Montreal found that several ancient societies had remarkably similar legal codes, despite being thousands of miles and years apart, indicating that law and order may be an instinct of sorts for humans.
The researchers have posited that people in these ancient societies had some intuition about whether particular punishments fit particular crimes.
“We sometimes think of the law as this completely rational enterprise that is the result of wise experts sitting around a table and working from logical principles,” says co-author Carlton Patrick, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, in a media release. “And instead, what this study suggests is that these intuitions that people tend to share about justice may be the things that are becoming institutionalized.”
Led by University of Montreal assistant professor of psychology Daniel Sznycer, the study compared modern and ancient conceptions of crime and punishment. Sznycer and his team believe the research is the first to examine the intuitions of societies across thousands of years.
The researchers asked participants in the United States and India to rate offenses written in two ancient legal codes and one modern code. The participants rated offenses from the Laws of Eshnunna–Sumerian laws over 3,800 years old, 1,400-year-old Chinese laws, and the Criminal Code of Pennsylvania.
The participants rated only the offenses and didn’t see the punishments for those offenses, ranging from not properly controlling one’s ox that gored another person to modern assault offenses. A portion of the participants were asked to come up with their own appropriate fines for each offense, while another portion was asked to dole out prison sentences.
All modern participants assigned harsher punishments to crimes they felt were the most serious, despite different ancient offenses and the participants coming from different countries.
“The match between participants’ intuitions and ancient laws was notable,” says Sznycer. “Criminal laws, like the writing that supports those laws, are cultural inventions: present in some societies, absent in others. However, this new research adds empirical weight to the possibility that the capacity to make laws–the brain mechanisms that appraise offenses and generate justice intuitions–are universal, and a part of human nature.”
Please click below on “study” to see an abstrqct of the study. (The full paper is behind a paywall)
The study is published in the journal Human Nature Behavior.
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WEBSITE TESTIMONIALS CATHY DUFFY REVIEW
OTHER REVIEWS AWARDS HOW TO ORDER
As Americans get a mandatory crash course in teaching their children at home, one Harvard Law professor is running the other way, arguing homeschooling should be banned. Elizabeth Bartholet, the faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, was recently interviewed for an incendiary Harvard Magazine article titled “The Risks of Homeschooling,” but she fleshes out her case in the Arizona Law Review.
In an 80-page screed against conservative Christian homeschoolers, Bartholet proposes a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling, alleging that some parents choose homeschooling to (1) abuse their children, and (2) provide religious instruction. The article also appears to conflate religious instruction with child abuse: Bartholet maintains that the fact that conservative Christians were among the first to embrace homeschooling is itself reason enough to discredit this educational model. She has planned a Harvard Law symposium this summer, solely for homeschooling opponents to support her misguided proposal.
Yet the law provides that it is parents who have not only the responsibility to care for and protect their children, but the right to guide and educate them. Parental rights are not “absolute,” but contingent on being capable and safe.
We know this well because over the past decade we have served as attorneys of record in more than 1,000 child abuse cases. At times, we have represented the government in abuse charges against parents. At other times, we have defended parents accused of abuse. Sometimes our law firm is appointed to relay what is in the “best interests of the child” as a guardian ad litem for children.
One of us has fostered children, and both of us have enrolled our children in homeschool, public, and private schools at various times. Regardless of the roles we have played over the years, we can tell you without a doubt that the government does not raise children well.
Bartholet’s article highlights anecdotes of isolated and sensationalized abuse cases as justification for banning homeschooling, yet does not take into account research demonstrating links between pediatric suicide and the school calendar. The article also presupposes that teachers are the best resource for abuse reports. The author completely ignores the fact that reporters come in all shapes and sizes, such as police officers, health care workers, neighbors, and other community providers.
Unable to find evidence that homeschoolers are anything but well-educated, well-rounded, and happy from a body of 35 years of research in peer-reviewed journals, the professor cites a dated study with a pool of 90 adult Canadians and tries to extrapolate some of those limited findings to the lives of 2.5 million American children.
Toward the end of the article, Bartholet admits she considers homeschoolers’ academic excellence irrelevant. She simply wants a homeschool ban to indoctrinate all children into what she calls the “majority culture.” The professor unfairly, inaccurately, and irrelevantly attacks faith-based homeschoolers when she presumes that religious parents will not sufficiently expose their children to a “range of viewpoints and values.” Of course, she does not propose that children in public schools diversify their viewpoints and values by learning about religion or minority cultures.
How does such intolerance pass for legitimate academic study? As one outraged homeschool and Harvard graduate has asked, even if most homeschoolers were conservative Christians, “Why does that matter?” It is not the role of government to override the family cultures and traditions of competent and safe parents and force “majority culture” on religious people. Indeed, the Constitution protects against such abuses.
The article attempts to pit the rights of parents against those of their children. But the rights of members in safe families are interrelated. The child’s well-being vests in his or her loving parent, and vice versa. Even if a child’s rights existed in a vacuum, completely independent of any parental rights, wouldn’t it make the most sense for a child to have a right to an education, not just a public school education?
A child-centered approach requires an independent analysis of each child’s needs. Only a safe parent or other legal guardian is capable of adequately evaluating the needs of the child in his or her care. The government can’t decide on a case-by-case basis which school is best for each child. The government does not have the resources to adequately care even for vulnerable children in foster care. Instead, it outsources this role in child welfare cases and asks education surrogates to stand in the shoes of the parents with educational decisions for the children.
Because the government is ill-equipped to make educational decisions on an individual basis for each child across the country, Bartholet decides a child’s individual needs must succumb to the greater good of cultural and educational uniformity. Her philosophy comes full circle, and as it does, reveals it is not about the best interests of children at all.
Oftentimes what one believes is in the “best interests of a child” is actually not in that child’s best interest. The “best interests of the child” is subjective and intertwined with a safe parent’s fundamental right to parent their children. We’ve experienced many a judge’s frustration following the removal of a child from her parents’ home as the judge seeks to determine what is in a child’s best interest. It’s often a mess, but it’s necessary when a parent is shown to be unfit.
Homeschooling today is a far cry from the draconian world Bartholet describes. The article is based on the homeschooling community of some 30-40 years ago — and even then, it’s a caricature.
Bartholet alleges that children who are homeschooled suffer social isolation, but our experience has been that homeschoolers are at least as active in extracurricular activities as their school peers. The article doesn’t recognize how widespread homeschooling co-ops, homeschooler field trips, and community classes are, nor does it take into account the wonders of modern technology.
Homeschoolers are privy to many life skills at an early age in comparison to their mainstream schooled peers. Unencumbered by the traditional school schedule, many teenage homeschoolers balance college courses, extracurricular activities, and jobs with more maturity and grace than many adults.
Homeschoolers, savvy to online education, have transitioned to quarantine with a wide support network already in place and with the discipline and creativity necessary for independent learning. Indeed, it is by and large modern homeschool families who have created the fantastic and diverse online resources that all children are now benefiting from during this national quarantine.
Homeschool has become popular for many reasons, and the demographics of homeschoolers have shifted rapidly. American families are gravitating to homeschool because of public schools’ ineffective and inefficient curriculum and educational methods, stressful testing with questionable metrics, lack of creative and independent learning, understaffing, mistreatment of special needs children, exposure to drugs and crime, inequality, bullying, and lack of physical activity and playtime.
Homeschooling frees families to make lifestyle and economic choices that are better for them. Many families have discovered that instead of working long hours at an office to pay for housing in a good school district, homeschooling enables parents to choose more affordable housing, where they can work fewer hours or work from home and spend more time with their children.
Homeschooling has been successful because parents believe their children have a right to education and protection. Bartholet professes a belief in these same values. If that is the case, the authors invite her to research and learn from modern homeschooling families, who provide these things to their children at the highest level.
Harvard’s Kennedy School has just announced it will hold a public Zoom meeting on May 1, titled “The Disinformation Campaign Against Homeschooling.”
Photo Amanda Sandefur
Since Homeschooling is the norm for the time being, we hope Parents whose children are in the midst of learning to read, will investigate how Alpha-Phonics can easily be used to teach their children to read at any stage of their reading instruction. Your Kids can make a lot of headway in only a couple of weeks with this proven program. Follow the links below to know all about the time-tested (37 + years) Alpha-Phonics program:
WEBSITE TESTIMONIALS CATHY DUFFY REVIEW
OTHER REVIEWS AWARDS HOW TO ORDER
Alpha-Phonics Blog Editor Note: Harvard Professor Elizabeth Bartholet has created quite stir due to her call to OUTLAW Homeschooling. We find this article, so crammed with important information that we risk possibly turning off some of our readers because of its length. But we decided to reproduce it in full anyway so our readers will have an abundance of facts.
Homeschooling families have the highest level of community involvement of all school sectors.
Prof. Bartholet overlooks the striking diversity within homeschooling, focusing instead on incendiary anecdotes.
In a recent University of Arizona Law Review article, Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor, claims that the “homeschooling regime poses real dangers to children and to society.” Bartholet’s legal argument is that homeschooling is an infringement on child rights, placing children in inferior, socially isolating, and dangerous educational environments. This threatens democracy, she says, since homeschooling is not likely to provide the kind of civic education available in public schools, especially regarding democratic values. Besides the risk of child abuse and indoctrination, the strength of far right-wing religious conservatives in the homeschooling movement ensures that children will be forced into submitting to patriarchy, leading, Bartholet fears, to “female subservience.” If that wasn’t enough, she goes on to charge the homeschooling movement with links to white supremacy and racial segregation. According to Bartholet, the future of our democracy depends on “freeing” these children from unhappiness and ignorance.
Beyond the antecdotal “evidence” Bartholet provides, is there social scientific evidence that demands the “death penalty” for homeschooling? After considering the impact of the homeschooling movement on community involvement, diversity, and the dignity of the child, it is clear that Bartholet’s prosecution fails to overcome reasonable doubt.
For this analysis, I analyzed data from the 2016 National Household Education Survey (NHES), which included a random sample of 552 homeschoolers in America. I also drew on the Cardus Education Study (CES) findings, which surveyed large random samples of private schoolers, including homeshoolers, in the United States, who had graduated from Prof. Ati-Homeschhooling arguments refutedhigh school and were between 24 and 39 years old in 2018.
Community Involvement
Bartholet claims that homeschooling “…parents…are ideologically committed to raising children in isolation from the larger society….” This analysis finds, however, that homeschooling children are part of families strongly linked to civic institutions and events. The NHES study included a battery of questions about community activities done by someone in the family in the last month, including attending a sporting event, attending a concert, going to the zoo or aquarium, going to a museum, going to a library, visiting a bookstore, or attending an event sponsored by a community, religious, or ethnic group. Added together, we find that homeschooling families have the highest level of community involvement of all school sectors.
This civic involvement not only strengthens social capital and trust within communities, but also provides a “hidden” or implicit curriculum important for civic socialization, which may carry into young adulthood. In the 2018 CES, about 22% of homeschooled young adults said they know a leader in their community, which compares favorably to the public school average (19). The total number of volunteer and community service hours for homeschooling graduates is very similar to or slightly higher than public school graduates.
As an embattled political minority, we would not expect to find high levels of political participation among homeschoolers, except, perhaps, lobbying to defend homeschooling. Yet, according to the CES review of U.S. data, young adult graduates of homeschooling are nearly identical to public schoolers in their likelihood of voting in the 2016 presidential election.
Homeschooling graduates likelihood of voting in local elections is also identical to public schoolers. They are slightly less likely to be registered to vote, but the two sectors have very similar levels of interest in politics.
Bartholet seems to take the “home” in homeschooling too seriously, as if their windows have prison bars. In actual practice, homeschoolers are organized in complex networks with educational organizations, civic, religious, and cultural organizations, informal personal and virtual support groups, friendship circles, extended family, and so on.
Diversity
A second major problem is that Bartholet overlooks the striking diversity within homeschooling, focusing instead on incendiary anecdotes. “Some [homeschoolers],” according to Bartholet, “engage in homeschooling to promote racist ideologies and avoid racial intermingling.”
The reality is that about 41% of homeschooled children are racial and ethnic minorities. When asked about four closest friends, about 37% of young adult homeschoolers in the CES mention someone of a different race or ethnicity—exactly the same as public schoolers (see last figure near the end of this brief). The increasing segregation in public schools has perhaps removed any advantage for cross-race friendship ties in that sector.
Data increasingly show that homeschooling is not a monolith, including considerable religious diversity. In the NHES, only about 16% say they are homeschooling primarily for religious reasons, and 5% for reasons of moral instruction. In the NHES national sample asking about reasons for homeschooling, only 51% cite religion at all, while 80% mention the school environment in other schools and 61% are dissatisfied with the academic instruction at traditional schools. Perhaps surprising to Harvard Law, but not to religion and education researchers, parents mentioning religion as a reason to homeschool are more educated than those who do not.
Homeschool graduates are not uniformly opposed to diversity in the public square, either. Bartholet claims that “a large percentage of homeschooling parents are committed to teaching their children that…democratic views and values are wrong.” The evidence is mixed at best. Homeschool graduates in the CES have higher levels of support for free speech norms than do graduates of public schools. Religious homeschool graduates are more likely than public school graduates to agree that a person should be free to express anti-religious ideas in the public square. Perhaps the experience of being an educational minority generates empathy for those who challenge convention, increasing support for key democratic values.
This diversity extends to schooling practices. Increasingly, homeschooling adopts surprising new forms, including “hybrids” that combine the benefits of home and institutional schooling. In fact, an estimated 57% of homeschoolers do not receive all of their education exclusively at home. Many of these are part-time public schoolers. In NHES, 32% of homeschoolers are receiving instruction at a public or private school or university. About 25% of homeschoolers receive instruction in public schools.
Homeschooling materials are not entirely from the dark ages either. About 32% obtain their homeschool curriculum or books from the public school or school district. Altogether, 46% of homeschoolers have some pedagogical relationship with public schools. If we include siblings who attend a public or private school, 58% of homeschooling families have a tie to public educational systems. These hybrid schooling experiences are likely to expand in a COVID-19 world. For this reason, Bartholet’s argument seems better suited for the late 20th Century, when homeschool-public school cooperation was in its infancy.
Child Dignity
Lastly, what about Bartholet’s view of homeschooling and child dignity? The homeschooled child is not locked up in a nuclear family prison, where girls are forced into “female subservience.” Their dignity is certainly not threatened by power dynamics more imposing than they would face in the social life and organization of public schools.
The homeschooling movement emphasizes the fit between schooling and the unique needs of a child at a particular stage of emotional and intellectual development, who may not thrive in a single environment for their entire schooling career. Consistent with this view, homeschooling is not the school of choice for the child’s entire elementary and secondary education. The NHES data reveal that only about 6 to 8% of homeschooled children spend all their school years at home. About 50% of homeschoolers spend less than half of their elementary and secondary school years in homeschooling. While Bartholet presents an image of authoritarian parents insisting on homeschool despite their child’s needs or wants, the reality is that most homeschooling families use various schooling options for each child.
Moreover, findings from the 2018 CES do not find homeschoolers bitter and lost. After family background and demographic controls are accounted for, about 64% of homeschoolers completely agree that they have so much in life to be thankful for (compared to 53% of public schoolers). Nor do we find that homeschoolers are different from public schools on feelings of helplessness, or lack or goals or direction in life.
Regarding dignity for girls, Bartholet claims that,
Some homeschooling parents are extreme religious ideologues who live in near-total isolation…some believe that women should be totally subservient to men and educated in ways that promote such subservience.
However, there is not support for the claim that religiously-conservative homeschoolers are patriarchal in their views of education. Using the NHES, I predicted the level of education homeschooling parents expected their child to achieve. The analysis tested whether, after demographic and family background controls, religious parents who homeschool favor the education of their boys over their girls. When using the civic/religious attendance as the measure of a religious home, the gender difference was small, favoring boys, but was not statistically significant. When using religious curriculum as a measure of religious homeschooling, the estimate of a gender difference in educational expectations disappeared. I do not find evidence that religiously conservative homeschoolers are opposed to higher education for their girls. Again, this is not surprising news, since sociology of religion scholars have long known that religious conservatives—along with everyone else—ignore their own scripts. Like evangelical Protestant home schoolers, religiously conservative homeschoolers are not walled off from dominant cultural trends.
Bartholet seems to take the “home” in homeschooling too seriously, as if their windows have prison bars. In actual practice, homeschoolers are “organized for instruction” in complex networks with educational organizations, civic, religious, and cultural organizations, informal personal and virtual support groups, friendship circles, extended family, and so on. The weight of bonding and bridging social capital matters for children, and the actual practice of homeschooling has many strengths on this score.
Traditional public schools continue to face imposing obstacles to achieving public purposes, especially as conceived by Bartholet. The question of schooling oversight remains, of course, but it would be short-sighted not to keep homeschooling and other creative schooling options in the mix, including the hybrid models that cross sector boundaries. In a COVID world, homeschooling may have something to teach us.
David Sikkink, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, has studied school sector effects on civic, political, and educational outcomes of teens and young adults, especially through design and analysis of the Cardus Education Survey.
References:
Berner, Ashley Rogers. 2017. Pluralism and American Public Education : No One Way to School. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Beyerlein, Kraig. 2004. “Specifying the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Educational Attainment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43(4):505-18.
Gallagher, Sally K. and Christian Smith. 1999. “Symbolic Traditionalism and Pragmatic Egalitarianism: Contemporary Evangelicals, Families, and Gender.” Gender & Society 13(2):211-33.
Horwitz, Ilana M., Benjamin W. Domingue and Kathleen Mullan Harris. 2020. “Not a Family Matter: The Effects of Religiosity on Academic Outcomes Based on Evidence from Siblings.” Social Science Research:102426.
Kunzman, Robert. 2009. Write These Laws on Your Children : Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.
MacMullen, Ian. 2018. “Religious Schools, Civic Education, and Public Policy: A Framework for Evaluation and Decision.” Theory and Research in Education 16(2):141-61.
NCES. 2019. “Homeschooling in the United States: Results from the 2012 and 2016 Parent and Family Involvement Survey.” Vol. Washington D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics.
Sikkink, David and Jonathan Hill. 2016. “Religion and Education.” in Handbook on Religion and Social Institutions, edited by D. Yamane. New York City: Springer.
Smith, Christian. 2000. Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wagner, Melinda Bollar. 1990. God’s Schools : Choice and Compromise in American Society. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Wilcox, William Bradford. 2004. Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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If you plan to teach your own child to read, we hope you will investigate the long-time favorite of families, especially of Homeschool families, Alpha-Phonics. Proven for over 37 years by tens of thousands. If you have any doubts about being able to teach your OWN Child to read please read why Alpha-Phonics works so very well. YOU CAN DO IT !! It is all explained below:
WED JUNE 10, 2020 – SOUTHEAST EDITION #13
Thanks to aPre-Apprenticeship Program in Heavy Highway Construction, lives are changing.
It’s no secret that constructing highways and bridges (aka heavy highway construction) is an exciting field with higher than average job growth. The demand for a wide variety of road construction craft professions means companies are constantly looking for workers. Unfortunately, not everyone makes the grade.
Enter theAlabama Department of Transportation(ALDOT). The DOT funds the apprenticeship program to train underrepresented and disadvantaged individuals (women, veterans and minorities) in heavy highway construction. Its goal is to expand the pool of qualified workers for enrollment into the ALDOT On-The-Job Training Program (contingent upon completion of this Pre-Apprenticeship Program).
Ronica Ondocsin, instructor,NCCER (National Center for Construction Education Research), Heavy Highway for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, helps ALDOT find people to hire into highway construction. “They asked us if we would put together an on-the-job pilot training program for ALDOT that’s funded by the federal highway administration,” Ondocsin explained to CEG. “As a result, we’re developing a curriculum and a pathway that allows us to train those new to the highway construction industry and get them into that career path. The goal would be to make it an ongoing program so there’s a group of trainees every year who are ready to be hired by prime contractors or subcontractors.”
The 2019-2020 program is being facilitated by The University of Alabama in Huntsville, in partnership with Calhoun Community College. The curriculum teaches fundamentals of the industry, along with specific skills and knowledge of heavy highway construction. Instructors from both institutions deliver the curriculum.
Program goals include:
The Heavy Highway Construction Pre-Apprenticeship Program is made up of two components. Component I is the Ready to Work module plus pre-employment training (80 hours). It includes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s 10-hour construction training and American Traffic Safety Services Association-certified flagger training. Component II is the NCCER Core and Heavy Highway Construction, Level 1 (240 hours).
There is no cost to participants. This one-year program is completely financed by the Federal Highway Administration.
Alabama’s Ready to Work program provides trainees with the entry-level skills necessary to be employed by most of the businesses and industries in the state. The training curriculum is set to standards cited by business and industry leaders throughout Alabama, and the skills cited in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) reports.
Participants must be adult education eligible and able to read at a 9th grade level. Essential requirements for successful completion include:
According to Houston Blackwood, Calhoun’s program director, “Ready to Work is for people who’ve held a minimum wage or part-time job their whole life. Their whole life may be 22 years or 50. Many are re-entering society from incarceration. They’ve never gone through an interview process, been in an office setting or had any type of workplace skills. Ready to Work gives them everything they need to go for a formal interview — how to dress, talk, write a resume, apply for jobs. They’ll also accrue workplace math and computer skills. Thanks to the Pre-Apprenticeship Program, they’ll have a starting point where they can successfully navigate entry into the workforce.”
The OSHA 10-Hour Construction Training Course provides workers with a basic knowledge of the most common safety and health hazards found on construction sites. The course also provides students with an overview of how the Occupational Safety and Health Administration operates. There are no prerequisites required.
The ATSSA’s Flagger Training Course teaches students how to be a safe and effective flagger. They learn why proper flagger operations are important; the standard skill set of a good flagger; how to apply and identify standard flagger control references; and learn standard flagger practices for various situations.
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If you plan to teach your own child to read, we hope you will investigate the long-time favorite of families, especially of Homeschool families, Alpha-Phonics. Proven for over 37 years by tens of thousands. If you have any doubts about being able to teach your OWN Child to read please read why Alpha-Phonics works so very well. YOU CAN DO IT !! It is all explained below:
Post-Common Core Scores Declining At Same Rate Pre-Common Core Scores Were Increasing
Alpha-Phonics Blog Editor Note: We have presented several posts on the results of Common Core in previous Posts: Massachusetts. Illinois and Georgia. This article on Florida shows very similar results of implementing Common Core. We present it as extra proof of how damaging this experiment has been.
The adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has led to a “historic” drop in student achievement scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” a new study reports. The poor performance results have been particularly stark in Florida, which was a national leader in student educational achievement in no small part due to its pre-CCSS statewide curriculum frameworks.
In the decade before the adoption of CCSS throughout most of the United States in 2013, mathematics and reading NAEP scores for both fourth and eighth grade were gradually increasing at a fairly steady rate, states The Common Core Debacle: Results from 2019 NAEP and Other Sources, published by the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research. This rate of growth had been occurring at roughly the same pace as it had been since before states began launching their own individual curriculum standards in the 1990s, writes author Theodor Rebarber, CEO of the nonprofit education organization Accountability Works.
Many involved in the education industry said they were dissatisfied with this pace of improvement, and they sought to remedy it by pushing states to drop their curriculum standards and adopt a single, national standard, which became Common Core. Promoted heavily by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Obama administration, CCSS was touted as being necessary to improve U.S. academic competitiveness with other nations on international testing, raise NAEP scores, lower the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers, and reduce the same gap among children from low- and high-income families.
Now, a decade after their adoption by most states and six years after their implementation, the Pioneer Institute report makes clear Common Core has had the opposite effect from what was promised. NAEP scores from 2013 to 2019, after the implementation of CCSS, have decreased by a “statistically significant” amount, the study found. Scores for both fourth and eighth grade in reading and math are down, with eighth grade scores decreasing at a rate nearly equal to their rate of growth before the implementation of Common Core.
More frighteningly, the study observes, scores are falling sharpest for low-income black and Hispanic students.
“U.S. students at the top, the 90th percentile, have continued to make gradual improvements that generally maintain the pre-Common Core trend line, ultimately neither helped nor harmed,” Rebarber writes. “But the farther behind students were before Common Core, especially those at the 25th and 10th percentiles, the more significant the achievement decreases have been. These declines appear to have wiped out the gains that lower-performing students made in the decade prior to Common Core.”
Florida adopted Common Core in 2010 and began implementing them in the fall of 2014. The negative effects were felt almost immediately. In the decade preceding Common Core, when Florida was utilizing its own standards, fourth grade achievement gain in mathematics on NAEP averaged roughly just over .75 points annually. Eighth grade scores grew by nearly a point annually over the same period. Post-Common Core, however, scores for fourth graders have increased, but at a smaller rate than they were pre-CCSS. More frighteningly, eighth grade scores have actually declined by roughly .4 points annually.
The same effect occurred in reading scores. The Sunshine State’s fourth grade reading scores grew by nearly one point annually pre-Common Core, but declined by almost one half of a point annually post-Common Core. For eighth graders, reading scores were growing by .8 percent annually before CCSS. However, they have been declining by roughly .4 percent after CCSS implementation.
Rebarber recommends states fully repeal Common Core, but says he realizes this will be a tall order, no matter how far scores decline. As Rebarber succinctly stated, the standards embody the “common curricular assumptions and conventional wisdom of the educational establishment.”
“It is human nature for those who supported a failed strategy to find it difficult to admit a monumental error,” Rebarber writes. “But our most vulnerable students are paying the steepest price for this particular error. After six years of digging this hole, the most fervent Common Core advocates seem to believe that we should continue to dig deeper. Instead, we must ensure that reason prevails and a different approach is considered.”
Adopting Common Core was one of the few poor education decisions Florida policymakers have made in the last decade. They should dispel Rebarber’s pessimism by admitting their mistake and repeal CCSS at the first opportunity and revert the Sunshine State back to its pre-Common Core, high-quality, state academic standards and tests.
The following documents provide more information about Common Core.
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For Parents who are beginning to Homeschool, whose interest is in making sure their kids are adequately being taught to READ, we suggest they consider using Alpha-Phonics. It has been used successfully for over 37 years by tens of thousands of PARENTS to easily teach their children to become excellent readers. It is simple to teach, is always effective and inexpensive.
YOU CAN DO IT !! Learn all about it below:
Alpha-Phonics
The Alphabet Song!
Water on the Floor
Alpha-Phonics the Book on CD Rom
Blumenfeld Oral Reading Assessment Test
How To Tutor
How To Tutor Cursive Handwriting Workbook
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