Karissa Tunis

Why We Chose Public School for Our Kids

Since I send my children to public schools, I decided to share our personal experiences with you! Our decision to send our children to public school was not one that we took lightly, and it is something that we continue to evaluate and consider on a regular basis. Hopefully my answers below will give you some insight into how we chose public school for our kids!

 

Are Public Schools Free?

Public schools are no-fee schools that are funded and operated by the government. Overall they have their pros and cons just like any other form of education, and they can differ greatly depending on your location and school district. Part of our decisions to send our children to public schools is that we chose to live in an area that has great public school districts. We were very intentional about this decision, and we know that it can be a huge factor for families. I feel lucky to have great options and resources for our children in the public school setting!

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EDUCATION OPTIONS

This collection is created to shed light and answer questions surrounding different types of schooling and education. We are not trying to compare, but rather give you insight into the differences. Each family will need to make their own decision regarding what works best for their child and family. There are no “right” answers. It is an individual decision that needs to be made based on your student’s individual needs, learning style, abilities, and resources. Read below for more information about Public Schools.

Our goal of this Education Options collection is to allow you to dive a little deeper into the possibilities and opportunities around you!

Public | Private | Homeschool/Cyber | Montessori | Waldorf | Classical | Unschooling

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Q:  What are some of the things that you considered when you chose public school?

There were so many small pieces that went into making this decision, but the main reasons were:

Great school.

I have been blown away by the administration and the teachers that are at my kid’s elementary school! They do an incredible job there and have education down to a science.

Family dynamics.

My kids and I have a great relationship, which means that they are very comfortable with me. Oftentimes, I think they rise to the occasion more-so when it is a teacher or coach asking them to try something. But if it’s mom… they don’t always feel the need to put in as much effort.

Career.

My husband and I both have careers that we really enjoy. And while I work from home, I still need quiet time and space to get my work done. It is great for everyone that we all get to go do our own “jobs”, and then regroup back at home for fun, family time.

Friends.

It is amazing for me to see the relationships that my kids have built in their years of school. They love spending time with their friends, and they get so excited to see each other when we are at community events, or even just at the park.

Resources.

The public school system does have great resources at their disposal. And while you may need to jump through some hoops to get there, they also want what’s best for your child. Simply having guidance counselors and education experts on your team is an incredible resource.

Finances.

Education is extremely important, and it is not something to pinch pennies over; but… free public school doesn’t always mean that it is a less valuable option. I feel that some of our local public schools deliver a far better and well-balanced education than some private schools.

 

A little background:

I grew up attending private Christian schools from Kindergarten through 9th grade before switching to a public school. Since both offered great experiences, it was a very difficult decision when choosing where to send our first child. All of the reasons that I just mentioned above were why we decided to send our first child to our local public elementary. The only additional reason that I would add is convenience, although you should never make a decision solely based on this!

When purchasing our home, we chose a highly rated public school district, and a neighborhood that is zoned for a very sought after elementary school, which is less than 3 miles down the road.

The other reason I would add is structure. Our children attended a Montessori school for preschool. And while they all enjoyed it and had a wonderful experience, I realized that our daughter needed more structure. Our son who loves to explore why/how things work did very well with the Montessori way of teaching, but our daughter benefits from having more guidance/structure throughout the day.

 

Q:  How does public school and this form of education benefit your children?

I remember being so surprised at how much each of my kids learned in their first year of Kindergarten. They went from my toddler to this incredible, young kid that could read and do math problems. At every grade, I love to see how they use well-thought-out curriculum to teach skills that continue to build upon each other. I don’t know how these teachers manage to fit in so much education into each and every school day, but my children are thriving in that environment. Sure, there are certain pieces of school that each one doesn’t always love, but as a whole… it’s been a great experience – both academically and socially.

But what I appreciate most about our public school district is their teachers and learning support staff – they are truly amazing!

Our daughter has dyslexia. While I am sure that most schools offer extra learning support, ours seems to be top-notch. I believe that there is value in a formal way of evaluating, communicating and implementing a learning plan; that I have very much appreciated. For our school, it’s very routine. They did a great job of figuring out our daughter’s exact needs, and focusing on her strengths.

Together we worked to create an IEP – an Individualized Education Plan for her. And periodically we have team meetings with all of her teachers to asses where she is at, what we need to work on,  and how we can give her extra support. Together we all share the same goals – to help her feel as confident as possible, to love school, and to enjoy learning.

But I also believe that we have had so much success because we choose to partner with our school for all of this. Because they are public, they have these extra resources. And because we are involved, we know that everyone is staying on top of her needs. There is consistency and routine in both her school day, and in the way we help with homework in the evening. So for our daughter’s learning style and needs, this really has seemed to work best for all of us.

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Q:  What does a day in the life of your children look like at public school?

This is one of the areas that I struggle with the most when it comes to public education. I hate that I have to wake up my child early in the morning to rush and get them ready for school. I don’t like that they might spend part of their school day bored or wasting time. But… these things don’t outweigh the positives at the moment. Our local elementary school goes from 7:20 am to 2:30pm. But it is nice to have them home by 3:00pm each afternoon!

During their school day, they have their main class; but they each have separate teachers for their specials. They get to do gym, art, music, dance, computer, and library on a rotating schedule, which helps to round out their education.

While I am not crazy about the common core standards, I do find value in my kids learning each subject in a traditional structured environment. Each day is pretty routine, which is good for my son who sometimes gets anxiety in new situations. It’s comforting to always know what’s coming next. And this is where the amazing teachers become the best part – their days on paper may seem similar, but somehow they have the ability to make each day truly special and fun!

 

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Remember:

Even though public schools are required to teach the same curriculum, their school environments can differ greatly from school to school. Before making a decision on what type of education would be best for your child, I strongly encourage you to do your research, explore your options, and visit as many schools as you can in person

 

Our goal of this Education Options collection is to allow you to dive a little deeper into the possibilities and opportunities around you!

Public | Private | Homeschool/Cyber | Montessori | Waldorf | Classical | Unschooling

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An in-depth look at the research behind common homeschooling myths help us to uncover the reality of this childhood education option

As homeschooling becomes more and more popular across the United States, two damaging myths continue to thrive. We wanted to find out how widespread those myths are, and how they compare to the reality of homeschooling today. So in January and February, we surveyed over 2000 people. Then we reviewed the existing research to discover the truth about homeschooling in 2020. Below are the study’s findings for homeschooling myths vs reality.

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This article was originally published on Study.com
For more on this topic, check out the full Education Options collection

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Traditional Classrooms and Learning in Groups

Classrooms hum with the chatter of excitable teens. Books and papers spill from overstuffed lockers. Days are routine, conducted by the regular, shrill blast of the school bell.

Sound familiar?

Most of us have experienced the ‘institutional’ school system in some form or another. Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century, when the need arose for societies to be able to produce a functioning workforce that could read and write. Since then, group schooling (such as public schools) has been the norm. But that wasn’t always the case.

 

How Homeschooling Was Started

For most of history, those who were privileged enough to get a formal education received it at home. Their teachers were personal tutors, parents and other caregivers. This custom gradually faded as the makeup of society changed and the practice of group schooling spread.

But in the latter half of the 20th Century, dissatisfaction with the modern school system increased in some quarters. The idea of home education grew in popularity once again, albeit in a different form. Parents would be the sole educators. Passing on their world-views and the knowledge that they deemed important. And in that moment, the modern homeschool movement was born.

Throughout the 1980’s and 90’s the number of homeschooled children swelled throughout the U.S. And since the late 1990s, this number has doubled.

Common Homeschooling Myths

However, even as the number of homeschoolers rose, the general public remained skeptical of homeschooling. Negative stereotypes began to take root. And without any apparent basis in fact, two of these stereotypes spread through society and developed a mythical quality.

1. Myth #1 – Homeschooled students suffer from a lack of social development.
2. Myth #2 – Homeschooled students perform worse academically, receiving fewer opportunities to succeed than traditional school students.

Over the years, various studies have been carried out to compare the social and academic outcomes of homeschooled students to those in institutional schools. While much of this research has confirmed that the myths around homeschooling are untrue, they have done little to address the widespread nature of these damaging ideas.

[ Read: A Look at Homeschooling and Cyber Schooling ]

 

Homeschooling Research – An Extensive Study

Study.com wanted to better understand the homeschool community and find out where people stand on the effectiveness of these two schooling methods today. So, in January and February of 2020, we conducted a survey of 2,398 parents and students (aged 13 and up), both with and without homeschool experience.

Combined with a review of the existing research, we aimed to discover how widely held these myths are, and shed some light on the reality of homeschooling today.

 

Homeschooling and Social Development

It’s clear from the results of our survey that this myth still holds. Well over half of homeschoolers felt that poor socialization was the most common misconception aimed at them.

In a different question, non-homeschoolers, and especially students, felt that institutional schools would be better for their social development. Below are survey responses to the question “Is it more beneficial for children to learn social skills and emotional maturity in a brick-and-mortar environment, or a homeschool environment?”

Of the non-homeschoolers we surveyed, over a third of parents and over half of students told us that they thought institutional schooling was better for their social development. 

But it was also striking how many homeschool parents felt the opposite. Only 2.6% of homeschool parents we asked said that institutional schooling would benefit children’s social development. 

Homeschool Study Results for Social Development

This result matches what we found in existing research. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported in 2016 that 80% of homeschool parents had concerns with the school environment. Saying that drugs, peer pressure, and the social environment were factors. 34% said this was their main concern.

One final thing that stood out from our survey results was the fairly consistent feeling that neither method of schooling is more beneficial than the other. Across all the groups we spoke to, more people believed that children would develop similar social skills regardless of the type of school they attend.

We did a lot of digging into homeschool studies. However, we couldn’t find any evidence to support the idea that homeschooling is bad for children’s social development.

So this appears to be a myth in the truest sense – a story told to make sense of something that is not well understood. As the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) states, ‘there is no empirical evidence that homeschool causes negative things compared to institutional schooling’.

Given the lack of evidence, presumably homeschoolers feel this is the most commonly held misconception among non-homeschoolers. Unfortunately, it‘s something they hear a lot in conversation and in the media that they consume.

 

Evidence of Social Development Advantages for Homeschooling

There is however, actually some evidence that homeschooling may be better for social development than traditional schooling. Also according to NHERI, homeschooled children are “typically above average on measures of social, emotional and psychological development. Research measures include peer interaction, self-concept, leadership skills, family cohesion, participation in community service, and self-esteem.”

They go on to say that “research designs to date do not conclusively ‘prove’ that homeschooling causes [improved social development],” and that further research is needed, but this is exactly the point. There just isn’t any evidence to support the idea that homeschooling hurts students’ social skills.

 

Where Does this Homeschooling Myth Come from?

So where does this idea come from?

In reality, it may be that non-homeschoolers do not fully appreciate the range of social activities and interactions that homeschooled children experience. If homeschooling simply involved sitting children down at home and getting them to work through exercises, then it could be argued that those children’s social development would suffer. But in practice, many homeschooled students are active in groups outside the family home.

For example, some parents see homeschooling as an opportunity to teach their children about the world through exploration and interaction with it. Others do primarily teach children academics at home. But they use the increased freedom to take educational trips, and travel to places that provide valuable learning experiences and interaction with other people. Some even hire other experts or services like spark tutoring to teach or offer additional support in a specific areas.

 

Reasons for Homeschooling

Many homeschool parents we surveyed commented on the freedom that it provided. One told us that homeschooling allowed them to “tailor [education] to what interests your child has. If it’s college, a trade school, or neither. You can do what is best for your child.”

Another said their main reason for homeschooling was to free up “more time to do things that interest us. Such as trips, excursions, 4-H [an organization devoted to youth development], etc.”

Others take advantage of local sports teams and other community programs. Some join homeschool co-ops, where their children interact with others in an environment that aligns with their parents’ views on education. According to one researcher, “the average homeschool student participates in five or more out-of-home social activities”.

So while there is a perception that homeschooling harms children’s social development, the truth may be the opposite. Certainly, given the range of homeschooling approaches practiced across the U.S., this generalization is not well founded and doesn’t reflect the reality of modern homeschooling.

[ Homeschooling Printables: 35 Free Printables for Teaching at Home ]

 

Homeschooling Academic Performance and Opportunities

Here again we found that the myth still holds. Large numbers of non-homeschoolers told us that they felt institutional schooling would lead to better academic outcomes for their children than homeschooling would.

Also as before, we found that homeschoolers, especially homeschool parents, were very skeptical of the benefits of institutional schools in setting their children up for success.

 

Measuring Academic Success in Homeschool Students

For this part of the study we were really interested in two measures of academic success:

1.  The best chance to pursue a college degree
2.  The best prospects to be a successful adult

On both measures, we saw that non-homeschoolers had more faith in institutional schooling than homeschooling to deliver academic success. On the other hand, only 2.1% of homeschool parents felt that institutional schools would be better for their children’s college chances. And just 0.5% said the same for the chances of being successful adults.

Why Homeschool Parents Choose to Homeschool

This tallies with the results of separate question, where we asked homeschool parents why they homeschool. The most popular reason given (from almost 60% of respondents), was dissatisfaction with education in schools. Among non-homeschoolers in our survey who said they would consider homeschooling, over a third (35%) said that they didn’t like education in schools.

As with the question of social development, we see that both homeschoolers and non-homeschoolers feel that – in general – the education their child is receiving is more likely to lead to success.

‘In general’, because the picture is not completely clear-cut. Many children switch between homeschooling and institutional schooling as needs and circumstances change. Some families have a child that they homeschool, and another that attends their local school. As one experienced homeschool parent told us, “I have counseled literally hundreds of families [on homeschooling]. Everyone has different reasons for what they do. And some families only homeschool some of their children. Every situation is different. And every family is different.” Ultimately, families choose when, and for how long, to homeschool.

 

SAT Scores for Homeschool Students

Existing research has looked into the question of academic success too. A 2014 study showed that homeschool students’ SAT scores were much higher than the average scores of college-bound high school seniors.

In 2015 NHERI found that homeschool students perform in the 86th percentile on standardized tests, as a measure of the national school-age population.

Percentiles refer to performance groups in a given population. So the 1st percentile contains the group that has the lowest set of scores on a test. The 100th percentile contains the group with the highest scores. By definition, the 50th percentile is the ‘average’ score of a given population.

Achievement Tests for Homeschoolers

In 2019 NHERI also reported that “The home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests”.

Of course, we should be wary of accepting these results without question.

Samples for such studies will have a strong bearing on the results. It’s possible that self-selection plays a part. More motivated parents are more likely to be involved in this kind of study. And those parents may be from more privileged backgrounds with more resources to put into their homeschooling efforts.

That being said, in an analysis of peer-reviewed research, 35 of the 45 studies (78%) found that the homeschooled students or graduates performed significantly better than their institutional school peers. Measures that were looked at in these studies were exactly those we’ve been discussing: academic achievement, social and emotional development, and success into adulthood (including at college/university).

 

Homeschool Students Going on to College

It’s also been reported that “colleges and universities boast that their place of learning is supportive of students who have largely been homeschooled ”and that“ universities actively recruit homeschoolers”. This includes prestigious schools like Brown, Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and many more.

The question of setting children up for success gets to the heart of why people homeschool. No parent chooses this option because they want worse outcomes for their child. The truth is that no single method of schooling will work for everybody.

Where families have the motivation and the resources to homeschool their children effectively, their outcomes may be measurably better than their institutionally-schooled peers. And where schools have the resources, the teaching quality and support of the community, there is every chance for the children who attend them to become successful adults.

 

So What Have We Learned About Homeschool Myths and the Reality of Homeschooling?

However these negative homeschooling myths seep into the collective consciousness, it is clear that they persist. But where research has been carried out, it suggests that homeschooling can actually have positive effects on students’ social development and academic achievement.

We should be wary of accepting such results without question and further research is required in this area. But undoubtedly it is true that if motivated, nurturing parents take homeschooling seriously, then it can be extremely beneficial for their children’s prospects.

It may be that these myths are based on an outdated vision of homeschooling. The modern homeschooling community is a rich demographic tapestry woven from political, religious and ethnic groups from all corners of society.

And in the digital age, homeschoolers have access to more information, support and affordable resources than ever before. This is likely to further boost academic success for homeschoolers, and give families more confidence if they feel they want to try homeschooling.

 

Which Education Method is Better?

The reality is that, as with so many aspects of life, there is no simple answer to the question of which method of schooling is more beneficial; there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Different children will flourish in different environments according to their personality, temperament, family situation and a whole range of other variables.

Homeschooling is a huge responsibility for parents to take on. But with a dedicated approach, and when students receive the appropriate levels of support and attention, they will ultimately benefit. And of course, the same can be said for children in institutional schools.

What is important moving forward is to redress the balance of people’s common misconceptions around homeschooling.

This appears to be happening slowly over time, but homeschoolers, non-homeschoolers and observers alike should take a responsible approach to the discussion and work to dispel unsubstantiated myths.

Only in this way can we counter existing stigmas so that people can make informed choices, based on sound judgements, about whether to homeschool their children.

For more on this topic, check out the full Education Options collection

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References:

1. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_206.10.asp 
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254350927_Revisiting_the_Common_Myths_about_Homeschooling 
3. https://www.nheri.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Ray-2010-Academic-Achievement-and-Demographic-Traits-of-Homeschool-Students.pdf
4. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017102.pdf
5. https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/
6. National Center for Education Statistics (2008) – https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf
7. https://www.nheri.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Ray-2010-Academic-Achievement-and-Demographic-Traits-of-Homeschool-Students.pdf
8. https://www.nheri.org/homeschool-sat-scores-for-2014-higher-than-national-average/
9. Ray (2005) (as seen in ref. 5) 
10. Ray, Brian D. (2017). A systematic review of the empirical research on selected aspects of homeschooling as a school choice. Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform,11(4), 604-621
11. Romanowski – Revisiting the Common Myths about Homeschooling (2006) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254350927_Revisiting_the_Common_Myths_about_Homeschooling

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EDUCATION OPTIONS

This collection is created to shed light and answer questions surrounding different types of schooling and education. We are not trying to compare, but rather give you insight into the differences. Each family will need to make their own decision regarding what works best for their child and family. There are no “right” answers. It is an individual decision that needs to be made based on your student’s individual needs, learning style, abilities, and resources.

Our goal of this Education Options collection is to allow you to dive a little deeper into the possibilities and opportunities around you!

Public | Private | Homeschool/Cyber | Montessori | Waldorf | Classical | Unschooling

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