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Common Core: A Threat to Homeschoolers? |
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Joy Pullmann |
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Much of the time, public school initiatives and regulations do not affect homeschoolers. The “next big thing” in public education, called Common Core education standards, already is, however, and that influence will grow. There are three major ways this nationwide initiative affects homeschool families: curriculum, testing, and student data tracking. There are some positive things about Common Core for public school students. For homeschool families, it largely represents an intrusion into their education freedoms.
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How Home Schooling Will Change Public Education |
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Paul T. Hill |
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More than 1.2 million students are now being taught at home, more students than are enrolled in the entire New York City public school system. Paul T. Hill reports on the pros and cons of learning at home—and the effects home schooling will have on public schools.
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Lessons from Homeschooling |
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Donald Boudreaux |
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Americans are increasingly aware that government education specialists in charge of K-12 government schools are lousy educators. This awareness is prompting parents to act rationally in a way that provides the best evidence yet that education bureaucrats cannot educate namely, more and more parents are homeschooling their children. |
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Parents, Are You Ready To Teach Your Kids Arithmetic? |
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Phyllis Schlafly |
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Parents are starting to realize that "fuzzy" math courses (variously called "whole math," "new math" or "new new math") are producing kids who can't do arithmetic, much less algebra. The U.S. Department of Education responded last October by officially endorsing ten new math courses for grades K-12, calling them "exemplary" or "promising" and urging local school districts to "seriously consider" adopting one of them.
The recommended programs were approved by an "expert" panel commissioned by the Department of Education. But many parents believe that the "experts" are subtracting rather than adding to the skills of schoolchildren.
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State Education Fails The Test |
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William Trench |
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Children naturally love to learn. They want to know everything. "Daddy, why is the sky blue?" "Why can't I see my back?" "Why are those dogs doing that?" "Are we there yet?" And so on and so on. Then we send them to school. And all desire to learn is methodically destroyed. Many of today's citizens are products of the schools of the last twenty years, during which time the trend has been to adopt a more and more socialistic posture. Most teachers have never spent their lives anywhere except in classrooms, and their vision of the world is so much at odds with the real world of business and industry as to be virtually a different society.
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Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech |
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John Taylor Gatto |
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This is the text of a speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990. From the speech: "Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents...we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life. We've gotten away from that curriculum--time to return to it...Time for a return to Democracy, Individuality, and Family." |
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The Great American Textbook Scandal |
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David McClintick |
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The nasty scrap inside California's process for picking its public school textbooks shows why publishers and educrats must share some of the blame for poor test results.
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The Inmates Are Running the Asylum |
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Tina Blue |
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A veteran teacher talks about her experience as a substitute teacher. Full of anecdotes, this article illustrates the state of classrooms today. She concludes that if she had school aged children, she would not place them in public schools, but would choose to homeschool them. |
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The Myth of Teacher Qualifications |
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Chris Klicka |
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Most education officials publicly claim that teachers need special “qualifications” in order to be effective. As a result, public education organizations often promote legislation or an interpretation of the law which would require home school parents to have one of three qualifications: 1) a teacher certificate, 2) a college degree, or 3) pass a “teacher’s exam.” Although this seems reasonable on the surface, such requirements not only violate the right of parents to teach their children as guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but virtually all academic research documents that there is no positive correlation between teacher qualifications (especially teacher certification requirements) and student performance. |
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