equal players
Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 08:43AM [H]ome-schoolers … outperform traditional students across the spectrum. The National Home Education Research Institute found that, on a standardized reading test, home school students perform at the 87th percentile while formal school students perform at the 50th percentile. What’s more, the gap remains roughly the same despite parents’ education level, the amount of money spent on education or minority status — three factors that greatly influence the performance of traditional students. For example, both white and minority home school students performed at the 87th percentile on reading tests, while white public school students performed at the 61st percentile and minority public school students performed at the 49th percentile.
There haven’t been studies conducted about informal learning at the college level yet. But I imagine we would observe similar results showing that those with an informal education would perform better than those with a formal education. Unfortunately, there’s no definitive answer as to why informal learners do better, but I believe it’s because students outside the classroom are able to think more freely and encouraged to follow their passion instead of memorizing facts. The upshot is this: Don’t make a decision to stay or leave school based upon your background because research shows that we’re all equal players outside the classroom. — The Case Against College
Reader Comments (9)
This leads me to two conclusions: 1. All of those moms who have told me, "I'm not smart enough to homeschool," were wrong. 2. Gatto was dead on when he said that one of the purposes of public school is to perpetuate class distinction.
Oh, and "No Child Left Behind" is a huge scam. But we already knew that.
http://hopewellmomschoolreborn.blogspot.com/2011/07/readicide-personal-review.html
heather, arwen, and lisa, i hope you got my e-mails!
to arwen i had said something along the lines of — it makes sense to me just because homeschooling at all means that you are focused on your child's education and they're getting one-on-one attention.
i hope everyone clicks over and reads lisa's post.
ian, yes, i could have healed you with the magical powers of homeschooling. :)
florence, i think it says something about what we need to be competent learners. and we do *not* need someone who already knows everything we want or need to learn. we just need someone to help us figure out how to learn what we want or need to learn.
re: the importance of some of us figuring out how to help schools do better .. the problem is, we already KNOW what would help schools do better. educators have been saying the same things for decades. but things don't change. someone has to figure out how you actually get the system to change according to what we *already know* we need to do.
of course, teachers know what is on the test and so they cover exactly that material -- "teaching to the test". if you had tested gabe specifically on the material he covered, i imagine you would have gotten a different result. the question then becomes -- does the standardized test cover the material a child at a particular age must know? or just the information that he was taught?
interesting stuff...