Enter HIPPY, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters.  Developed forty years ago in Israel, it is slowly making its way around the world as a successful model of helping prepare at-risk youngsters.  It does so not by separating children from their parents so that licensed profesionals have more hours with them, but by teaching parents to teach their own children.

It works this way: “home visitors,” usually young mothers, visit parents weekly with a simple curriculum the parents deliver to their own three, four and five-year-olds.

The free curriculum, which teaches the basic pre-kindergarten skills, takes about 15 minutes a day to deliver. Parents are equipped with everything they need, from advice on area services to books, crayons and scissors. Ottawa Citizen

Fifteen minutes a day of home education apparently goes a long way in preparing a child for school.

Who would have guessed?

HIPPY homeschool homeschooling

‘The notion of “good enough” parenting may seem ideal in today’s hectic world, yet the reality is that “good enough” parents will most likely produce “good enough” children at best.  MailOnline

There really are no startling revelations in this study, at least as it was reported.  Except maybe that you can get government money for this kind of thing, but that is hardly a surprise, either.  One little part caught my attention, however.

The Good Childhood Inquiry recently claimed a culture of ‘excessive individualism’ among adults was to blame for many of children’s problems.

It said 30 per cent of adults in the UK disagreed with the statement that ‘parents’ duty is to do their best for their children even at the expense of their own well-being’.  (Ibid. emphasis mine)

Thirty percent?  Forgive me, but if you are not ready for making some sacrifices for the well-being of your children, you are not ready for the responsibility associated with caring for another human being who will be wholly dependent on you.  I’m sorry, but if you want to get a dog, you need to be ready to make some sacrifices or you should get a stuffed one.

Here, I’ve only heard the discussion framed in terms of how much is too much.  Like, at what point have you sacrificed so much for the well-being of your children that you are actually doing them harm?  An instructor I had in college, for example, argued that while staying at home with children is a good and noble thing, a mother doing so who was unhappy in this role would do her and her children a favor to put them in daycare and get a job.

Are we really that distant from our own children that almost one third don’t seem to agree that we should put the best interests of our children before our own?  And if true, what does that say for our future?

Hat Tip: Are We There Yet?

parenting culture

______________________________

Howard Ahmanson is switching parties?

Also, check out the Carnival of Homeschooling!

“Maybe we should home-school him,” I tell Posh after the first week.

“Spl-WHATTTTT?!!!” Posh says, doing a spit-take with her first mimosa of the day.

And that was hilarious.  For those of you who are new here, or have perhaps forgotten, I’ll share my favorite homeschool criticism of all time.

You people don’t know like you know how to have fun. How sad? No mamoosas with the other moms while the kids are out at school.  Structure and Learning in the Homeschool Environment (comment #27)

‘Cause moms just wanna have fun.  And you can’t do that without a Mimosa or two, I guess.  Maybe that is why Crimson Wife went ahead and made us one.

And for those of you who seriously are looking for a “better way,” I’ll be interviewing Kelly Curtis about her book Empowering Youth today on Home School Talk.  Tune in a 1PM CST, or listen to the archive which will be available shortly after the broadcast from the same link.

kids teenager parenting education homeschool youth empowerment

“We just told the Department of Education that if they were really trying to [serve] all kids and close the proficiency gap that high-stakes testing isn’t the way to do it,” says Doug Christensen, state commissioner of education. “We told them we would show them that we had a better way.”  How Nebraska Leaves No Child Behind

Maybe I never knew his stance on home education because he was too busy fighting the powers that be in order to effectively serve Nebraska’s public school children to worry much about us home educators.

Brian Gong, executive director of the National Center for Improvement of Educational Assessment, said Christensen has been influential in the national testing debate for years.

“Doug Christensen and his staff have been leaders in the nation in saying the form of the assessment and the form of the accountability should be as local as possible,” Gong said. “That obviously has been a minority voice, but one I think that people have really appreciated and have been thinking a lot about.”  Omaha World Herald

And that is really the crux of why I was sad to see him go.  Ted Kennedy, of all people, praised our unique system which successfully incorporated the accountability measures of No Child Left Behind and Nebraska’s historic commitment to local control.  Certainly the system was not perfect, but it was far better than the direction Raikes is leading us.

In the end, Raikes won and Christensen resigned.  We have four finalists, and I’m not sure I’m happy with any of the choices.

• Roger Breed, superintendent of Elkhorn Public Schools
• Virginia Moon, superintendent of Ralston Public Schools
• Dan Hoesing, shared superintendent of Laurel-Concord, Coleridge, Newcastle and Wynot public school districts
• Larry Ramaekers, superintendent of Aurora Public Schools

On a purely gut level, I’m leaning toward Virginal Moon.  But I’m not sure that her resistance to Omaha public schools taking over smaller school districts as Omaha expands necessarily speaks to her broader educational or governing philosophy.

I doubt any of the candidates will be quite what I would like them to be.  Maybe I’m unfairly biased, but the finalists were chosen by the State Board of Education.

Actually, I think Ramaekers will probably get the position.  He sounds like a Commissioner of Education.

And like Meyer [the President of the State Board of Education], he also said the new education commissioner must work to rebuild relationships with members of the Legislature and the governor’s office.

“I think that in the past, the Department of Education has not been as active of a player in that as maybe it should be,” Ramaekers said of assessment and state aid. “I want to make sure the Department of Education is at the table.”  Grand Island Independent

Someone to “heal” the “damage” done by Christensen.  At least that is how I read it.  Someone who isn’t quite so much a leader, but is ready to let that whole “standardized-tests-are-not-legitimate-measures” thing go.

Once that is out of the way, they’ll have a little more time to turn their attention to those homeschoolers.  After all, how do we really know what they are learning if they don’t take The Test?

homeschool education Nebraska Board of Education Doug Christensen

But it just wouldn’t happen.  The difficulty is that Mr. Koivisto has the benefit of not knowing what he is talking about as he criticizes homeschooling through fictional examples of his own fictional homeschooled childhood.  I really did attend public school, and I really did learn each of these lessons.  And had to unlearn each of them, as well.

My earliest memory of school was making gingerbread men in Kindergarten.  I remember somewhat sullenly pressing candies into icing, knowing my cookie I was so enthusiastically encouraged to embellish was about to be kidnapped.  See, we had just heard the story of The Gingerbread Man, and I had a foreboding sense of impending doom about the future of my particular gingerbread man.  When we were done, we walked together in single file down the hall to the kitchen where we watched a cook place our cookies in the oven.  Surprise, surprise.  When we returned, the cookies were missing.

I couldn’t figure out why the teacher was putting on such a show of surprise, and I think I might have burst into tears.  I learned an important lesson that year, I think.  Something about not trusting adults and literature being responsible for the theft of cookies.

At the beginning of first grade, Mrs. A. passed out plain sheets of paper and instructed us to color a house.  I made mine with a high peaked roof, two upstairs windows and a door.  It occurred to me that my house looked rather sad.  I know I was a strange kid, but I have always seen faces in houses…still do in fact…and some look like they’ve been bopped in the eye, most look rather bored but a few appear to be grinning from chimney to garage.  The house I lived in smiled, although most of its smile was hidden behind a tree.  I wanted a happy house, so I added a few extra windows in the shape of a bright smile and colored happily until Mrs. A. came and looked over my shoulder.

My house was much happier than she looked.  She scolded,

Houses do not smile.

If I remember correctly, I responded something to the effect of “Mine does.”  Which she took as the height of insolence, though that was the furthest thing from my mind.  So she took my paper and gave me another, demanding I “do it right.”  I somewhat reluctantly restarted my assignment, turned in a miserable, haggard-looking and every-day sort of house which she smiled at and praised.  The praise stung, and I think I burst into tears.  I never did see my happy house again.  I learned another important lesson that day.  Something about creativity and expression being acceptable only under tightly prescribed rules.

By the end of first grade, I had read all of the books in the lower elementary students’ section of the library.  I asked the librarian if I could check one out from the other section, the great big inviting section which looked so much like a small version of the public library rather than a reading corner for little kids.  She smiled kindly and said,

When you are in third grade.

I looked disconsolately at the books while years of re-reading the same baby stories stretched out before me.  And I learned another important lesson about grade level expectations trumping individual abilities and interests.

For second grade, I had Mrs. J. and Anthony, an annoying boy who kicked me under my desk and would immediately raise his hand and tell the teacher I kicked him.  At first, I protested.  I had done no such thing.  He, in fact, had just kicked me.  But she always believed him, always defended him, always said, “But my Anthony would never do a thing like that!”  And I always thought the mere evidence of the case stood overwhelmingly in my favor.  His legs were so long they were literally wrapped under his desk and though I was not exactly short, I couldn’t have reached his desk with my foot if I had tried.  After some time of this, the trouble-maker–that would be me–was moved.  I learned a lot then about justice, fairness and partiality.  And began to develop stomach aches and head aches on a regular basis.  I had a vague suspicion that it was because they were both black, but that would be nothing compared to my first real lesson on the playground.

One winter day, I was playing on the snow drifts with the other children when this little black boy ran up, punched me in the lip and ran off without saying a word.  I told the recess monitor who rounded up every black child on the playground and stood them in a circle around me, demanding I identify the one who hit me.  I looked at them and, surrounded as I was, I’m still no sure whether my tears were from the pain in my lip or from my growing sense of fear.  They stared me down, the group of them, and I had a distinct sense I was going to be jumped by the whole lot at some unsuspecting moment.  I finally pointed out the boy who had hit me, and Ms. V. exclaimed,

Dinky!  I should have known!

And grabbed him by the collar and marched him off to the principal’s office, dismissing me to see the nurse about my lip.  My great lesson in socialization and learning about people different from myself was that blacks were THEM, a group, a haunting group, a dangerous group.  A group to be feared.

Fourth grade, I had Mr. T, by far my favorite elementary school teacher.  He taught with enthusiasm, always had anecdotes and tangents to share about the subjects he obviously knew more about than all our textbooks combined, and he never answered our questions immediately, turning most of them back on us to consider a little more.  He made me think.  I loved being in his class and had more respect for him than I had ever had for any other teacher.  He also noticed that I had a difficult time making friends and took me out in the hallway one afternoon to talk to me about it.

Why don’t you try to be more like the other kids?

I fought back tears…feel them stinging my eyes even now at thirty four as I remember how devastated I was.  As if I wouldn’t have chosen to be “more like the other kids” if I had even known how.

Fifth grade taught me perhaps my second most important lesson.  My best friend (and my only friend at school) stopped playing with me that year with no real explanation.  One day in gym–we were on the same baseball team for class–she sat down next to me on the bench and started to talk to me.  For a few moments, it was like things always were.  The previous few weeks had hung over me like a dark storm cloud as I battled boredom and loneliness, having no one to talk to on the playground.  But for a few moments, the sun shone.  Until Leslie came over and sneered,

I thought I told you I would only play with you if you didn’t talk to Dana, anymore.

The storm broke, and I sought shelter.  Shelter somewhere deep within myself.  My fifth grade year, I learned how to become invisible.  To remain under the radar.  To attract no one’s attention and no one’s scorn.

It was a lesson that would haunt me for years.  I had set an interesting trap for myself.  Everything about how I handled myself told people to stay away, not to notice me, not to engage with me.  And for the most part, they didn’t.  In a crowded classroom, I was alone.  In a busy hallway, I was alone.  Sitting in a noisy cafeteria, I was alone.  And because everyone treated me as if I weren’t there, I felt as if I weren’t.

That all might surprise some of my more regular readers.  I have always said I had a positive school experience.  And I did.

Fifth grade may have taught me my second most important lesson in life, but my most important lesson I did not learn at school or as a result of school.  The summer between eighth and ninth grade, I really began noticing for the first time how differently I was received in my neighborhood than at school…even by the very same people.  Take that back.  I had always known that, but I had always viewed “them” at school as a sort of singular entity, separate from any of the individuals in that group.  In a group, people were very different than they were individually.  But over that summer, I began to really realize that they were not different.  I was.  I was the one who changed according to the social environment.  I was the one who walked confidently around my neighborhood, striking up conversations and rounding up kids for a softball game.  At school, I never made eye contact, rarely spoke and walked quietly along the edge of the hallway, trying to stay out of everyone’s way.

That summer, I had a conversion of sorts.  Not to Christ…that wouldn’t be for another five years…but from a victim to a survivor.  I made a choice not to play the part of the victim, and ninth grade was a very different year for me.  My high school years were some of the best years of my life.  And I never did become quite like other kids.  I accidentally rooted for the wrong team at the only Homecoming game I ever went to, never went to a school dance…not even prom…and found the whole social scene somewhat baffling.  But I had finally found myself and navigated through it all somewhat amused rather than offended.  I loved high school.  I relished not having to fit in. I was no longer being educated by the public education system, but in it.  And I felt free.

______________________________

If you want to know how our first day of school went, I wrote about it on my other blog.  If you enjoyed my pencil story, you will be able to relate.

I think I forgot to mention that the August issue of Heart of the Matter is posted.  Including my article about a public school administrator who called for an exposé on homeschooling.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up.

homeschool, homeschooling, education, public school

A ten year old started a fight with another youth which involved hitting and kicking on his first day at a new school…a move which was made because of problems at his previous school which had resulted in five suspensions and 23 missed days of school. It was hoped that a “new environment” would give him a new chance.

Sadly, I think this is rarely the case. Troubled children generally bring their troubles with them because the kinds of problems which lead to ten year olds threatening staff members and the safety of other students run much deeper than which peers they are hanging out with at the school they are enrolled in.

When I used to work with foster families here in Nebraska, one of the more common requests made by families was to have new foster children changed to new schools. Foster parents often saw negative peer influences as central to the child’s school behavior issues, and even to many of the difficulties they were having with the children in their home. Some caseworkers also saw placements as opportunities to rescue children from bad educational environments, and the children would be moved. Almost without exception, however, the youth merely found a similarly problematic peer group in the new school. As nice as a “fresh start” sounds, it is also true that no matter where in the world you go, you bring yourself…and your troubles…with you.

This ten year old started out his first day at his new school by swearing and flipping his middle finger at the teacher. At recess, he attacked another student, resulting ultimately in expulsion.

Expulsion isn’t always the best option for the expelled child. As Mark Fancher, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan says:

A kid with that much more free time is more vulnerable to influences leading them into trouble.

Jagers of U-M agreed.

“They find other kids who have been put out of school and they become delinquent together. They feed off each other.

“It’s a school-to-prison pipeline.” Ann Arbor News

At the same time, however, school districts cannot tolerate this kind of violent behavior in their schools. In fact, one of the most frequently cited reasons for homeschooling is to protect children from bullying in schools which is often not sufficiently addressed by school administrators. Without a basic sense of physical safety, children cannot learn in any environment. In the mean time, one more family has found a somewhat unique reason to homeschool. Felicia Hancock, the expelled ten year old’s mother, stated:

We’re trying to home-school him, but we ain’t no teachers.  Ibid

This child obviously needs help which the school district is not capable of handling, but somehow leaving the family to homeschool does not seem like the best option, either. And what of the mother’s pleas for help?  Her requests to the district to have her son evaluated for special services?

He has an anger problem. I know that. I wanted him to be tested (for special-education help), but they told me I didn’t want him to have that label, that it would follow him for 50 years.  Ibid

I am no fan of lables, but I am also no fan of turning a blind eye to children in need of help in order to avoid naming the very problems they and their families are experiences.  But what other options are there?  A child this violent cannot be maintained in the regular classroom, but do we simply discard ten year olds for fear of labeling?

And just why was this case used to question zero tolerance policies?  It’s not like the young man featured was expelled for cutting his lunch meat or making guns out of origami.

homeschool zero tolerance education

Unfortunately, Nebraska is looking at leaving this unique system of accountability behind. Legislative Bill 1157 recently was voted out of the Education Committee and has been prioritized by senator Greg Adams of York. This will do away with our current innovative model (discussed more below) and replace it with a single, state-wide assessment. Instead of Nebraska leading the nation in assessment and accountability, we are considering falling in step with the rest of the nation and its fixation on standardized testing as a single method of judging a student’s educational success.

Doug Christensen, Nebraska’s state commissioner of education, explained to Time Magazine for the article, “How Nebraska Leaves No Child Behind “

“Our public schools are embedded in those communities and those families. So why wouldn’t we first trust those folks? We believe you create the capacity at the local level to do the right thing in the first place, and then you don’t need the state or federal government looking over your shoulder.” TIME

This concept of using the state to empower local governments, schools and communities to provide an excellent education for all Nebraska children is perfectly addressed through our innovative testing model, the School-Based Teacher-led Assessment Reporting System, otherwise known as STARS. This has yielded impressive results, with Nebraska tying Mississippi for the highest percentage of elementary students meeting federal accountability scores in reading (87%) with similarly high numbers in math and in middle schools.

The current model also has a growing list of praise and endorsements:

• The US Department of Education which describes our system as “the nation’s most innovative assessment system (pdf).”
• FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing cites STARS as a model for assessment.
• The National Council on Measurement in Education,

“…the following lessons can be learned from Nebraska’s experience. Teacher-led assessment systems appear to be both possible and effective in developing benefits such as increased assessment literacy and positive impacts on classroom instruction.” NDE

• An independent study by Susan Brookhart, Coordinator of Assessment and Evaluation, School of Evaluation, Dubuesne University, which determined the STARS system to be both valid and reliable (pdf).
• Senator Edward Kennedy, who met with state officials while the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee deliberated on revisions to NCLB and was impressed with our results.

The current system avoids many of the problems with No Child Left Behind and the resulting high stakes testing by creating assessment tools intended not to punish students, teachers and districts but to inform teachers and guide instruction. As Pat Roschewski, Director of Statewide Assessment for Nebraska, describes it,

It’s not so much an accountability tool as part of the curriculum, instruction, assessment loop. The Rural School and Community Trust

Which is exactly what good assessment is supposed to do. This is possible because STARS does not rely solely on information obtained by a single, statewide standardized test, but may include observations, rubrics, portfolio assessments, teacher input, writing samples, test scores and other student work. This encourages classroom instructions focused on higher order thinking tasks, including writing, problem solving and critical thinking rather than lower order tasks, such as memorization typical of standardized tests.

With the short legislative session, this legislation may conceivably be passed by the legislature before the public really gets a chance to find out what is going on. For those who wish to preserve Nebraska’s unique system of local control in education, please take a moment to write your senator, voicing your concern. Parents, teachers and local school officials know more about the individual needs of our state’s students than the Nebraska legislature or officials in Washington. Let us preserve their autonomy for the benefit of all of Nebraska’s public school students.

*LB987 is a very similar bill which seems to have died in committee.  Senator Raikes was its only proponent with several opponents.  LB 1157, however, has adopted many of the same features.

This is part of a project I am working on to fight legislation which recently passed out of the education committee and has received priority status thus will likely be debated and passed by the legislature this session. It had one lonely opponent in the hearing presented by NSEA (our state chapter of the NEA) representative Jay Sears. Nebraska is the last state in the union with true local control of education, from funding to accountability. LB 1157 will change that, by doing away with our current testing and replacing it with a single statewide test and the creation of a commission independent of voter control to advise the legislature and the elected State Board of Education on education matters.

[tags]homeschool, home school, LB 1157, Raikes, STARS[/tags]

Marin County, CA, for example, has the highest per capita income of any zip code and the highest density of BMWs in America. You would think that the public schools, with all the advantages of wealth, would be able to consistently educate the children of these professionals. But statistics at San Marin High School are a little troubling, considering the obvious advantages these children should have:

• Less than half of 10th and 11th graders scored at or above proficiency level on the California Standards Test (CST) English exam.

• Only 38% of students taking the CST algebra 1 exam scored at or above proficiency.

• Less than half of students taking the CST algebra 2 exam scored at or above proficiency.

• 82% of parents went to college but only 23% of kids passed the EAP college-ready exam.

If you are paying $758,000 for a house, you might expect scores to be a little higher. (More interesting tid bits in the Pacific Research Institute’s Buyer’s Guide).

Most people seem to question our education system as a whole, yet maintain that their local school is good. Most people also seem to think that the solution to education problems is increased funding and teacher certification. Neither seem to be helping schools in the middle class and affluent neighborhoods included in the study.

What is going on?

I am tempted to say that busy executives in two income households have completely abdicated their role as parents, leaving it over to the school district. After all, previous studies have already found that the single greatest indicator of school success is not wealth.

Parental involvement in their child’s literacy practices is a more powerful force than other family background variables, such as social class, family size and level of parental education (Flouri & Buchanan, 2004). The Importance of Parental Involvement (pdf)

That alone explains the success of homeschooling. And gives rise to concern over just how much of parenthood can be outsourced. Or turned over to the television set.

Hat Tip: SignOnSanDiego.com

education

So in all of the debate that has supposedly been surrounding NCLB this year as it comes up for reauthorization, all that we were really able to accomplish was a name change. Here are the suggestions, from the Washington Post:

• Quality Education for All Children Act, submitted by Marian Wright Edelman, president of the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund.

• Children First! submitted by Donna Shalala, president of the University of Miami.

• New Partnerships for Student Achievement or Educating Americans for Today’s World, submitted by Dorothy Rich, founder and director of the nonprofit Home and School Institute. (I thought we were supposed to be educating for the future?)

The first one actually sounds like something. Believe it or not, I sort of like it. With a name like that, the legislation has to be good, even if it is the same old legislation with a brand new name attached.

But wait! There’s more. I do not know who Andrew Friedson is other than the president of the Student Government Association over at the University of Maryland at College Park, but his titles at least reflect what he thinks of the actual legislation rather than just a pretty bow to put on the package:

• No Child Left a Brain Act, or All the Money Left Behind Act.

I am sure some of you have titles to add to the list.

NCLB, education

“Once they leave the house, we lose all contact with them and the family has no way of tracking them after that.”

In a free society, who should be monitoring whom? I am not completely against CPS, but should our society be set up with primary concern over how easily families can be surveilled or how readily our government can be surveilled?

A sampling of large New York City high schools showed that the schools failed to notify the state of a significant number of violent or disruptive episodes in the 2004-5 school year, the city comptroller announced yesterday. NYT

Significant being 1 in 5. Twenty percent. I am still trying to figure out why we need a federal law to force local school districts to report these kinds of episodes so that parents can know what is going on in the schools they send their children to. This I find very troubling:

But the audit also found that in 41 additional cases the state was never informed, including one rape and an instance outside the school in which two students were “about to be jumped” by gang members. Ibid.

A rape? If your child was raped and you failed to report it, what kind of legal ramifications would that have? But if the school district fails to report it, it is an understandable oversight.

Still, Mr. Klein, speaking to reporters yesterday, acknowledged that in the vast school system, it was impossible to guarantee that every disruption was appropriately documented. Ibid.

For note passing, talking out of turn and an occasional curse word, I would understand and even agree. But we are talking about some pretty violent activities which should have involved local law enforcement.

The state cannot even effectively protect and track the students it is responsible for during the school day. And we are supposed to trust it to monitor private families?

homeschooling, home school, education, school violence