Lifelong Learning Together

Dana Henley at Principled Discovery quotes a Florida newspaper story, Home schooling grows by 80 percent in state in past decade which, following a decent enough overview of the experiences of its example family, and a debunking of the socialization myth”You know you are a homeschooler,” goes the old joke, “when your six-year-old can explain the term socialization.”, caps off its coverage with some data: historical trends in homeschooling, legal requirements in Florida, contact information–and a “balanced” list of Pros and Cons of Homeschooling, apparently pulled from the author’s head. The first “Con” is this:

Parents have a much greater role in their children’s academic life.

to which Dana responds:

Parental involvement as the first con of homeschooling? Who is this a con for? The parent? The child? The system? I want to know because every study I know of researching the topic concludes that parental involvement is the number one indicator for academic success, regardless of socioeconomic status.

And she’s right. Here is New York University’s Anne T. Henderson, author of Beyond the Bake Sale describing the findings of her research:

When families are able to be involved, both at home and at school, because it’s important to be involved in both, not only do their kids do better in school, but there’s a collective effect: the schools get better. When we study the extent to which the schools are open to working with families and are used as community facilities….the schools that are more open tend to be higher performing, and they tend to have better reputations in the community, too, because they’ve earned them. …students tend to take more challenging higher level courses and do better at them. They feel more comfortable at school, that people who work at the school know and respect their families, they enjoy school more and behave better when they are there. There are a lot of very specific important good effects on students that we can trace back directly to parent and family involvement in schools.

What have we learned from all this? First, though parents and families, especially in lower-income areas, are often the subject of complaints from teachers and administrators for failing to care about the education and character of their own children, the truth is that families of all backgrounds are doing a lot more at home than we may realize or give them credit for. …Some parents may be uninformed about what is going on in school, and how to support it–but they want to know and to support their children’s learning. The more they are able to do this, and the more they have the resources to advocate effectively for their children’s education, the better the schools and their children do.

But however beneficial we understand parent involvement in education to be, the system we have is not integrated, but segregated. Read More »