Homeschool FAQ Standardized Testing

Standardized tests, standardizing students.

One of the questions I’m often asked about homeschooling and unschooling is how I know if and what my kids are learning without testing. The most amusing part of this question is that I always scored at the top of the class in our IOWA testing from as early as second grade yet I’m not sure I learned much of real value in school. The high test scores and the many A’s, V plusses and O’s for Outstanding Effort simply documented how well I learned very little of real value.

But since most of the people who ask – and most who would read this - are truly interested and simply do not know, I will provide a serious answer. Here goes:

From a very young age, my son created stories while playing with army men, Thomas trains, Bionicles, Star Wars figures and other toys. He also read a lot of books, both with me and/or my wife and on his own. So when a creative writing class was offered in our homeschool group, and a number of his friends were taking the class, I figured he’d be very interested. But, no. Baffled, and like many parents, I wondered, “How will he learn how to sit down and write a story?” as if there were no other ways but sitting at a desk in a classroom.

The following winter, while driving home from skiing, he decided to read me a story from the back seat of the car. He’d just finished writing it – on his phone. It was in the Star Wars universe, had a clear introduction, plot and conclusion, and demonstrated language and vocabulary skills far beyond his years. The oral presentation rivaled the abilities of some of the students in my Speech Communications 210 class - in college. Though I still suggest taking creative writing and other classes in areas that he’s shown some interest, I began relaxing that day about whether or how he’d learn to write, or learn any other skill.

Then, last year, a post came in my Facebook feed from a Minecraft server. It offered discounts for playing on and donating to the server and the copy was so enticing and well written I had to tell the copywriter in person. Thankfully, I only had to go as far as my son’s room down the hall. Clicking through to his blog post, I was struck by how his posts had become stronger and stronger in the years since he’d launched the blog. The post had a purpose and a logical flow, proper sentence structure, grammar and capitalization, mostly, and appeared as professional as almost anything an adult who had taken a business communications class would post.

Without standardized testing or testing of any kind, I know exactly where he excels and where he hasn’t yet excelled. I know if he knows whether or not to capitalize seasons, places and proper names by reading his posts without forced memorization or silly rules like I before E that rarely apply enough to be of much value. I know the extent of his vocabulary and can help him touch up or clarify where to put a comma in a more meaningful way than drudging through repetitive worksheets night after night from an English textbook. This purposeful approach also helps ensure the knowledge is retained into adulthood.

These examples should have put my mind at ease that he was learning just fine. But we parents seem to feel an educational clock ticking, as if we only get until age 16 or so to instill proper habits and feel sure of their ability to survive in the real world. So when a couple of days went by where it was eerily quiet in his room, I went in, fully expecting him to be hard at work on his Playstation. “What’re you working on?” I asked. “I’m writing a book,” he said.

“Oh. Ok…”

He and a friend were collaborating online on a sci-fi thriller. They were 1,800 words in. As I write this, they’ve finished a prologue and four chapters. Occasionally, he checks with us to verify proper usage of quotation marks. Otherwise, I don’t think having him take a standardized test will reveal much about whether or what he’s learning compared to what I already know.

“Well, Paul, that’s great, he can read, write, speak and work well with others. But what about calculus?” you ask, as if reading, writing and speaking doesn’t already document that he’s better educated than most college graduates in America today. Well, I suppose that if he’s ever interested in calculus, or needs to take calculus to pursue a particular degree or profession then he would take calculus, most likely online.

Over the years, I’ve found the surest way to know whether and what kids are learning is to talk with them and listen to what they say, and, especially, to what questions they ask. This approach requires letting go of the demand that kids must learn given skills or memorize bits of knowledge on an arbitrary, societal schedule, from potty training by pre-school to calculus by high school. With this approach, you not only uncover more information than any test could but you also may find you like being with your kids.
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Stop NJ A4372, S3105

Updated Jan. 11, 2012: Bill reintroduced in NJ Senate - call or write your senator today.

Your message can be as simple as:

“A bill was filed and referred to the Education committee, S3105, that would turn New Jersey’s sensible legal framework for homeschooling into a complicated morass of regulations and red tape. Don’t add new burdens to school staff, tax payers, and parents. The current homeschool law is working. Please oppose S3105.”

Find your senator: http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/districts/municipalities.asp

Original post:

Your calls are needed to stop a new threat that has arisen to your rights in New Jersey: A4372, filed by Assemblywoman Valerie Huttle. It is identical to Sen. Loretta Weinberg’s S3105.

Please make five phone calls by Thursday using the contact information below. Remember to be courteous.

- Call Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver at (973) 395-1166. She is the Speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly and controls its business.
- Call Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan at (908) 757-1677. He is the chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, where A4372 has been referred.
- Call Assemblywoman Joan Voss at (201) 346-6400. She is the vice chair of the education committee.
- Call Assemblyman Erik Pederson (R) at (908) 237-4694 and Assemblyman John DiMaio (R) at (908) 684-9550

Feel free to email too: AsmDiMaio@njleg.org, AsmPeterson@njleg.org, AswOliver@njleg.org, asmdiegnan@njleg.org, Aswvoss@njleg.org

Huttle’s bill gives the State Board of Education dramatic new power over homeschool families. The board’s regulations could mandate exactly how all the bill’s requirements would be enforced, including what medical information must be submitted. The board could define homeschooling itself. The bill treats every homeschool parent like a suspected child abuser requiring them to file documentation of annual medical exams by September 1, to submit each child’s name, birth date, and homeschool instructor’s name every year by August 1 and a mandatory portfolio would be due June 30. Bureaucrats would have virtually unlimited power over what families must include in the "portfolio" and what is to be taught.

This bill would turn New Jersey’s current sensible legal framework for homeschooling into a morass of regulations and burdensome red tape. With identical bills now filed in both houses of the legislature, the situation is more serious. If both bills should pass in their own respective chambers, no vote in the other chamber would be needed for the bills to become law.

Your message can be as simple as:

“A bill was filed and referred to the Education committee, A4372, that would turn New Jersey’s sensible legal framework for homeschooling into a complicated morass of regulations and red tape. Don’t add new burdens to school staff, tax payers, and parents. The current homeschool law is working. Please oppose A4372.”

Thanks for helping to fight for our freedom to homeschool.
Paul
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I Am Organized, Dammit!

I’m a very organized person. I once built a database to organize and catalog my cassette tapes years before iTunes figured out how to do that for us online. I painstakingly organized my baseball card collection into scores of cardboard boxes, each labeled on both ends and all stored according to the year issued. I aligned books on my bookshelf by size to prevent them from sliding over and to ensure all of the spines were visible. A colleague once called me fastidiously attentive to details in my advertising contracts. My wife once marveled at how well organized, clean and uncluttered my desk and office were (though she perceived me to be completely unorganized at home, erroneously, I might add). I realized tonight that I am by nature, quite an organized person. But somehow my family perceives me as quite the opposite. And worse, I believed the opposite, too. How could this happen?

Hypothesis

Every year my Mom would take me to Jamesway for back to school supplies. I enjoyed flipping through Mead’s latest selection of binders and always went home with a Data Center, a Trapper Keeper and/or a variety of spiral notebooks. I took great care in counting the number of tabs and pockets to be sure there was one for each class. I chose spiral notebooks to coordinate with my schedule. One, five-subject spiral notebook would do fine for the Tuesday/Thursday schedule for the entire year without having to make extra trips to my locker. A single subject notebook would do for classes like typing and computer science. Clearly, this is an example of an organized person, one who is excited to start school. Yet within weeks, the new binder would be overstuffed with handouts that didn’t quite fit into the pockets along with myriad papers with frayed edges ripped from the spiral notebooks. The metal spirals would be deformed and the notebooks covered in some very creative doodling while each page showed a single frame of a full-length animated cartoon at the lower right hand corner. Very few class notes were written in these notebooks.

Yet only weeks earlier I’d placed great importance on these books. What happened?

Forgetful or Unorganized?

My teachers knew well that, occasionally, I’d forget to do my homework. Occasionally, I’d even forget to bring home the very little notebook we were required to have and in which we were required to write down what homework was assigned so it wouldn’t be forgotten. Occasionally, I’d arrive in class only to remember that a quiz or test was to be taken. It’s understandable that any parents witnessing these lapses year after year might label their son as unorganized. “If only he were more organized then he’d remember these things,” I suppose my parents thought to themselves. I don’t recall what they actually said about it, if anything, since it’s hard to argue when even this visibly unorganized process unfailingly brings home A’s and B’s and annual evenings at the honors dinner. But as this process played on for 12 years, it is clear now that even I came to believe I was naturally unorganized.

How can the person who leaves the homework assignment notebook in his locker at school at the end of the day be the same person who meticulously organizes his baseball card collection as a child and today runs a company that meets deadlines on a daily basis without fail?

Conclusion

It doesn’t take a professional scientist to conclude that the child organizing the baseball cards and carefully selecting the ideal three-ring binder is the same person who meets tight deadlines and works from a clean, uncluttered (mostly) desk as an adult. The oddity, or anomaly if you prefer, where a profound lack of organization is evident appears only at school or around assignments related to school. When involved in self-directed or otherwise inspiring and important pursuits, I’ve demonstrated serious organizational skills. Only when forced to do schoolwork that I’d found uninspiring and deemed unimportant does any hint of disorganization appear.

So what is it about schooling that causes naturally organized people to act in a disorganized manner and over time, come to believe that they are in fact naturally disorganized? What else are children learning to believe about themselves from schooling that isn’t true, or wasn’t true when they first began schooling? What damage might it cause and how might it affect their ability to succeed as adults?

I suspect many people tire of organizing their clothing, kids' toys and even the day's mail. But the truly important jobs always seem to get organized just fine.

If there are any published studies addressing this issue, please post a link.
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