Say Anything Blog

I think this is a good trend for two reasons:

First, you generally can’t go wrong with parents taking more responsibility in their child’s education.

Second, more people opting out of the public education system puts more pressure on the public educators to do a better job.

The ranks of America’s home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years, and new research suggests broader reasons for the appeal.
The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007. “There’s no reason to believe it would not keep going up,” says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center.

Traditionally, the biggest motivations for parents to teach their children at home have been moral or religious reasons, and that remains a top pick when parents are asked to explain their choice. . . .

The category of “other reasons” rose to 32% in 2007 from 20% in 2003 and included family time and finances. That suggests the demographics are expanding beyond conservative Christian groups, says Robert Kunzman, an associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Education. Anecdotal evidence indicates many parents want their kids to learn at their own pace, he says.

Public schools are failing us, and nothing is more indicative of that than parents seeking to take their kids out of the public systems altogether.  It’s an act of self-empowerment we should be happy about, even if we’re unhappy about the failures in the public system that are driving it.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that we can solve America’s education woes by further empowering these parents by allowing them to take their share of our education tax dollars with them when they opt out and spend them either on a different public/private school or on home schooling.  Public educators don’t have a problem with spending more and more of our tax dollars on education even as they educate fewer kids (here in North Dakota we routinely see 30 - 40% increases in education funding even as enrollment numbers drop), but if you take away their funding you’ll get their education.

There is simply no reason why we can’t do a better job on education in this country while spending fewer tax dollars.

A friend of mine who is also a local political leader told me that he home schools his kids.  He says his wife, who does most of the schooling, is an unqualified educator (meaning she doesn’t hold the proper degrees for teaching in North Dakota) and the mobile home he lives in is a substandard education facility (again it doesn’t meet the standards set out by the state and federal government for classrooms) and yet one of his kids is a Presidential scholar and the other is in the top 1% of the nation in ACT scores.

We can do this.  We just need to realize that the solution lays in more freedom (meaning school choice), not more government and more spending.