Reforming K-12 education is a wicked problem. Even the best ideas are inevitably incomplete and contradictory. All fly in the face of entrenched interests and are beaten around by opposing ideologies. Not only are there no silver bullets, there isn’t even a common view of the target. Rather than hope for reform, parents should consider opting out of the mess and focus instead on their own kids’ learning.
Critiques of the US educational system’s failures include the lack of basic literacy, how our children are falling behind in math and science, how our educational system is creating a cultural divide, how the system is failing our best students, and how it kills creativity, just to cite a few perspectives. These varied issues do not stem from a few root causes but from a tangled mess of intertwined issues, many of which are outside the reach of educational reforms.
So, while I applaud the efforts of Bill Gates, Eli Broad and others mentioned in Luisa Kroll’s article, I’ve long wondered, as a parent, whether such efforts would make any difference to my children’s K-12 experience.
I’m afraid the answer is “no.”
Given that, my proposal in response to Forbes' call for the “single best idea for reforming K-12 education" is the one that I adopted for myself: outsource education to parents. In other words, encourage and help parents to home school their kids.
I did not come to this viewpoint lightly, as I suspect that most parents would not. But, as parents tending to our kids’ education, here’s what my wife and I faced:
Our city’s public school system reports that only 14.2 percent of its eighth grade students exceeded state standards. Our home sits almost equidistant between two public K-8 schools, one of the best and one of the worst. The poor option, our “neighborhood school,” lifted only 2.2 percent of its eighth grade students above state standards. The students at the better option, one of a number of “selective enrollment schools,” did much better, but the school has a 6.6 percent admission rate. (Harvard has a 6.9 percent admission rate.)
We have the good fortune of being able to afford private schools, and those options were better; but, their admissions processes were even more tortuous. We went to obligatory “parent teas,” interviews, and child assessments, only to learn that most had no openings. The Montessori school had only two openings—after preferential admissions for siblings, alumni and staff. The progressive “lab” school had no openings; all slots were allocated for children of faculty at its affiliated university.
We labored on and eventually secured a preschool slot for our son at a well-regarded private school. But, after so much effort to get him in, we soon had to face the question of whether it was worth it.
Our son struggled to adapt to the institutional regimentation, with its 20-minute activity rotations and emphasis on being in the right spot (in line, on the right section of carpet, and so on) at the right time. At home, he spent hours reading books, digging for worms or building with blocks, as the mood struck him. At school, there was no option but to move on when the curriculum said it was time for the next activity. His young teacher, on her first assignment, struggled to control and corral 18 toddlers, and didn’t have much energy or skill for nurturing them. At home, we were reading chapter books like “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH,” “Watership Down,” and “The Hobbit” to our son. At school, my son found it hard to pay attention as his teacher read picture books like “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” to the class.
After a few weeks, our son asked us, “I’m not having any fun, and I’m not learning anything. Why can’t I just stay home?” We eventually decided he was right.
For the last two years, we’ve home-schooled our son, now six. We have followed his passions and designed his “curriculum” around them. He wanted to watch “The Lord of the Rings” movies, and we agreed—if we read the book first. We read Tolkien’s “Silmarillion,” too, because he enjoyed Tolkien’s world so much. He got to watch the entire trilogy, but he likes the book better. We made the same deal with Harry Potter, though he stopped during volume four (the “death-eaters” were too scary). We’ve also read A.A. Milne, E.B. White, “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,” and hundreds of other books. (He has his own library card with a 30-book limit, which is always maxed out.)
My son loves butterflies, so we spent much of the summer in local parks catching and identifying (then releasing) butterflies. On one recent butterfly hunt, we met the curator of the natural history museum’s insect collection, who was impressed enough to invite our son for a behind-the-scenes tour of his collection. In the midst of an animated two-hour discussion, the curator turned to my wife and asked, “How does he know so much?” The answer: we read about it.
My son loves the beach, so we joined an adopt-a-beach program where he works with other volunteers to clean the beach and take water samples.
After he learned to play chess, we joined a local home-school co-op where home-school families gather for a range of weekly, mostly parent-taught, classes, including chess, nature, math and kitchen chemistry. You get the idea.
While ours is a work-in-process, three observations stand out.
First, my son has help lead the way. We do not assume that his interests will lead us to all the learnings that he will need. But it has worked out well thus far, and we can see the linkages for the next several years, at least.
Second, we have not done it alone. Between ourselves, the other committed families in our home-school cooperative, and the subject matter experts that we have encountered or found (like the museum insect curator, the wild-food forager, the bee-keeper who sells honey at the Thursday farmers market, and the former state-champion chess teacher), we feel comfortable that we have enough fluency in the relevant topics to help our son learn deeply. The challenge will be to maintain real thresholds for fluency—but isn’t it always the teacher’s challenge to stay ahead of the student?
Third, it has been a mutually enriching experience. Sharing in the learning experiences, through deep reading, hands-on projects and even getting into the cold lake to take water samples, allow for deep bonding and mutual learning. It is also more fun then just being the schedule master and chauffeur. (I remember very well the speech from the headmaster of one prospective school; he made it clear that parents were not welcome into his educational process—that was a job for professionals.)
Home schooling isn’t a silver bullet, either, but it is the only big idea that is mostly within a parent’s control. It doesn’t require deficit spending, union busting, social transformations, management revolutions, or paradigm shifts on the part of teachers, administrators, politicians and other entrenched stakeholders. Home schooling reduces the problem of education reform to the needs of an individual child and gives the job of addressing those needs to the one or two persons in the best position to do so. Relative to education reform alternatives, home schooling is a much more tractable problem.
Many have written eloquently about homeschooling. I recommend that parents (and skeptics) explore that body of work. Here are some springboards:
John Holt was an educational reformer who came to believe that homeschooling is the best option for the child. Holt believed that for small children, “learning is as natural as breathing,” and that the great opportunity (and challenge) for educators is to build on that, rather than squashing it. Holt’s book, “How Children Learn,” should be on every parent’s reading list.
David Guterson, the novelist, wrote an eloquent book, “Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense,” about his family’s home-schooling experience. Guterson wrote this book while he worked as a high school English teacher—before his literary successes, which include “Snow Falling on Cedars.” He gives a thoughtful account of why, even though he worked inside the educational system, he opted out of it for his children. Guterson also addresses many frequently asked questions about homeschooling, such as the socialization of the child, the economic and time demands it places on the parents, the implications for our democracy, and how homeschooling and the formal educational system might constructively interact.
Homeschooling is not right for everyone, but it has been the right answer for my family. Studies show that many families—across a wide socioeconomic spectrum—choose to home school, and that it is the right answer for many of them, too. No studies show that it is the best answer for everyone.
Erasmus said that learning should be adapted to the ability of the child and should be taught with sympathy and tenderness. Who better to do that than the parents? And what better student-to-teacher ratio could a child get?
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