Why I Homeschool: Response to Dr. Phil

December 3, 2006


I reviewed the show on "unschooling" that was on Dr. Phil. I do not generally watch these shows because I am busy at those times and/or I am interested in doing something else. I was advised that this particular show might be of interest from several homeschooling lists I subscribe to. I wrote this response to the Dr. Phil website. I had to subscribe to do so but I really, really wanted to respond!

Response to Dr. Phil

About the show: I was disappointed with the show on homeschooling because it looked as if the most extreme and problematic issues were chosen as if they were typical of homeschooling in general. I suppose that is to expected since IMHO television increasingly displays the most extreme side of anything in its bid for the attention of the public. However, this is not informative for people and it seems to be designed to cause arguments rather than conversations.
Some of the posts on the show's message board illustrate that the above is true.

I live in New Mexico and my second career was as a public school teacher--a deliberate choice after spending 15 enjoyable years as a scientist. In my personal experience as a teacher I have met more excellent teachers than poor teachers, but it is wrong of the public schools as a whole to claim that poor teachers do not exist. They do.

I took my son out of public school this year and I am teaching him at home. I did this for several reasons. The first is that I was unable to get my son the type of educational services he needed in the public schools. My son is extremely bright and he also has Asperger's Syndrome. Many general education teachers have difficulty attending to the needs of the bright children in their classrooms and it becomes even more difficult when the child also has a disability. I found myself spending more time educating my son's teachers than I did educating him--sometimes with good results and sometimes with poor results. So the first reason is that I felt I could better meet my son's educational needs than the schools if I put my energy into that instead of continually trying to make the schools into something they are not.

My second reason for removing my son (and myself as a teacher) was the inordinate amount of time spent on testing, teaching to the test and poor quality of the tests that came with NCLB. During the 10 years I was teaching, I taught at all levels--elementary, middle school and high school. The last two years I was at the elementary level. We spent 15 solid days testing students. Many of the tests did not reflect the actual curriculum and the test designs were so poor that the qualitity of the information they gave us was extremely suspect. In my professional opinion as a teacher, much of this testing was an enormous waste of time for our students and did little to improve their learning. The last straw for me came when students whose testing indicated that they were not meeting literacy standards were told they must go to summer school. However, each school was given only 1-4 slots per grade level in the summer literacy programs due to lack of funding from the Feds--who mandated this in the first place. What were parents to think? They tend to blame the teachers because the teachers are the people they actually talk to face-to-face. Yet as teachers, we were powerless to get the students what they needed. Accountability is all well and good if the people being held accountable have the means to make change happen. Otherwise, it is another way in which the federal government can pretend they are doing something about a problem without actually taking any risk or action.

A personal story: In April of 2005, I recieved a letter from my son's IEP team stating that he had not made adequate progress in reading and that his scores on the A2L indicated that he needed remediation. As I was reading the letter, my son was reading James Michner's novel "Hawaii" and telling me about how shield-volcanic islands are formed and why they support such a diversity of life. He was just finishing fourth grade. It was a pretty funny moment. How could he test so far from reality? The A2L is a computerized test that has at most two items for each skill tested. Because it is a standards based test not a norm-referenced test, one or two items is not enough to make a valid assessment of student progress for a specific skill. Also, kids don't read computer screens all day in school. They read books. Therefore the testing method does not match the teaching method. This makes the test doubly invalid.

So my son is being homeschooled by me with help from his step-father and his 21 year old sister who is a student at UNM. Am I qualified to teach him? Hmmm. I certainly know more about him and his special needs than the average general education teacher. You could say that I am a specialist in his learning styles because I have spent far more time with him than any of his teachers could have. Does he get adequate and appropriate socialization? Well, he participates in Boy Scouts, goes to Hebrew school, belongs to youth group, and has neighborhood friends. I have been told by many a store clerk that my son has exemplary manners and talks to adults and other children appropriately. This is quite a compliment given that Asperger's Syndrome is primarily a social-communication disorder. Is my son making adequate progress? He is getting 90's in 7th grade math (he is "technically" a 6th grader), he has trouble writing due to poor fine-motor skills--this is also part of his disability--but he is learning key-boarding skills (the school would not teach him these until 8th grade!), and he is reading at the 12th grade (adult) level. He has learned biblical Hebrew and next semester we are going to be working on modern Hebrew language. So, like most kids, he is at different levels in different areas. This is true of kids who go to school and kids who don't.

Homeschooling, like anything else, is what people make of it. I am not an "unschooler" and I personally have no data to discuss how these children turn out--but the testimony of one child does not a valid research study make. I recommend that Dr. Phil read a sociological study called "Kingdom of Children" in order to better understand the varied approaches and philosophical ideas that comprise the homeschool movement as a whole. (Like any other social phenomenon, the homeschool movement is not monolithic).

Our school day is relaxed but includes quite a bit of content. We are following a classical curriculum Monday-Thursday and on Friday we do field trips and activities. My son is able to concentrate far better in his quiet dining room than he was in a classroom with 24 other children. (He has a lot of difficulty with what he calls "signal to noise ratio" due to his Central Auditory Processing Disorder --which is a frequent companion to Asperger's Syndrome). His social skills have improved because he is not constantly forced to relate in an environment that overstimulates his sensory system (Sensory Integration differences are another co-morbidity commonly seen in kids with AS). We start at around 9 AM and finish at around 2:00 PM with breaks as needed--but he gets much more content in that time than he would in school because he gets individual attention when he needs and does not spend a lot of time on the necessary but time-consuming "housekeeping" chores that go on at school (you know--attendance, explaining assignments, keeping order, disruptive students, etc). And he can go to the bathroom when he needs to--which is a luxury that is frequently denied to both teachers and students in school. (The most common chronic ailment for teachers is bladder infections due to inability to use the bathroom when needed).

Do I think everyone should homeschool? I would not presume to tell someone to homeschool because I have not walked in his/her shoes. Do I think all public schools are terrible places that do not educate. No. I was educated in public school and received a fine education. My daughter was educated almost entirely in public schools and she skipped several introductory courses at university because she had excellent, hardworking teachers for her AP courses.

In a free society, people make choices based on their values and the circumstances they find themselves in at the time. Because values and circumstances are necessarily diverse, so are the choices that people make. This is a good thing. I am grateful that my grandparents survived oppression in Nazi occupied Europe and came to these shores because I am free to make choices for myself and my children. I can do this because I was fortunate enough to be born in country where the freedom to choose one's own life-course is protected by law.