You may have seen the news
item on the Covenant’s website last year: Elizabeth
Dorman, part of Grace Evangelical Covenant Church in Chicago,
had scored a perfect 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test
(SAT). That was after she had won the Windy City’s spelling
bee for three straight years. It was around the time she was,
as a high-schooler, earning A’s in chemistry and calculus
at the University of Illinois, and before she had been accepted
to the California Institute of Technology. While describing
these academic accolades, the article also noted another point
about Elizabeth: she was homeschooled by her parents, Sue
and Don.
If you’ve seen homeschooling in
the headlines in recent years, it’s likely been for
one of two reasons: congratulations – as with a delightfully
remarkable student like Elizabeth – or controversy.
Education in general has become a battleground in the culture
wars, and homeschooling in particular is the site of skirmishes
between various parties. Many educators, for instance, question
whether it is even a legitimate alternative to the known conventions
of public or established private schools. Then again, earlier
this year James Dobson (whose “Focus on the Family”
radio broadcast is heard by millions in over 100 countries)
publicly advocated that in certain circumstances parents remove
children from public schools and place them in Christian schools
or homeschools.
As those skirmishes flare, they can prompt
us to ask, Well, what about homeschooling? What do those who
try it say about it? Specifically, what do homeschoolers in
the Covenant say about it? Why have they made that educational
choice? And what considerations do they offer to those surveying
educational options?
FIELD TRIP!
To better understand the motivation to
homeschool, we asked a number of Covenanters from across the
country – from west coast to east, in urban, suburban,
and rural settings, both veterans and newcomers to the task
– to share from their experiences.
For a prodigy like Beth Dorman, who taught
herself to read at age 4½ and had finished Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings trilogy before she was 6, maybe an
education at home could provide more stimulation than a conventional
classroom. But taking on the workload of an institution like
education is a daunting task. Why do it? In Beth’s case,
her parents had pondered homeschooling their children even
as early as Beth’s birth. Whichever educational option
they selected, they viewed character training and imparting
their religious values as priorities. Homeschooling, as they
saw it, provided great opportunity for that. Most Covenant
homeschoolers with whom we spoke strongly echo this point.
In the target of education, as one parent put it, “character,
including especially the formation of Christian faith and
morals, is the bulls-eye.”
Homeschoolers share that while at first
they may have been prompted by some undesirable trait of their
local-school scene to consider options to it, their search
led them to sort out what they most desired in their children’s
education. For many, they came to set spiritual as well as
academic priorities. A number refer to a sense of divine guidance;
as Don Dorman simply states, “We believe this is what
God has called us to do.”
With this spiritual dimension to the task,
homeschooling can become a fundamental form of discipleship.
“I can’t think of any better way to disciple your
kids, to send them in the spiritual direction you want to,
than homeschooling,” says Wendy Stevick. She and her
husband, Drew, attend Grace Community Covenant in Olympia,
Washington, and are 19-year homeschooling veterans. Their
start at home education unknowingly parallels that of Calvin
and Shelly Carlson, who attend Evangelical Covenant in Lindsborg,
Kansas, and have homeschooled for 11 years.
In both cases, the families’ mothers,
both former public schoolteachers themselves, noticed a firstborn
child’s unwelcome behavior that began in kindergarten.
This prompted them to reading books influential in the early
homeschool movement, and that, coupled with concern for their
relationships with their young daughters, led them to try
educating at home. While not originally intending to do so
for the long term, they have so far taught all their children
at home through the elementary and middle-school years before
sending them to public high school. The Stevicks have five
children, including two college grads, one collegian, and
two younger ones still at home. Of the three Carlson children,
Bethany is a freshman at Kansas State, Ben is in public high
school, and Laura continues her studies at home.
Homeschooling “makes me more disciplined
to be more purposeful in raising my children,” explains
Annette Walker, who with husband Doug and family attends Salem
Covenant in New Brighton, Minnesota. With the hours children
otherwise spend in a classroom now being spent at home, there’s
increased opportunity for building closer relationships between
children and parents. “I’m still their mother,”
Sue Dorman says, “but I think we have the chance we
wouldn’t otherwise have to be friends.”
The student-teacher ratio clearly suits
Debbie and Rick Clark of Trinity Covenant in Manchester, Connecticut.
When serious, faith-related questions come up during lesson
time with son Alex or daughter Abby, says Debbie, “I’m
the one to address them. I’m the one training them;
I’m the one building their character.” Adds Rick:
“I’m pleased we can instill a Christian ethic
and focus on Jesus and following Him.” At a father-son
retreat his parents had blended into his curriculum last spring,
Alex, 7, came to Christian faith.
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HOMESCHOOLING: SNAPSHOT OF A GROWTH
SPURT
The homeschool movement
has rapidly expanded over the last two decades and continues
to grow in significant numbers. While still a progressive,
novel, or even offbeat notion to many, it’s now more
and more seen as a considerable alternative.
If you gave birth to
a child in 1980, she could be finishing college around now.
For parents seeing such an adult child having gone through
such dramatic change in that relatively short time, the
view can be nothing short of stunning. A similarly stunning
growth has occurred with homeschooling. Twenty years ago,
fewer than 100,000 students were educated at home in the
US; the number now is likely 20 times that figure. It’s
one of many signs that homeschooling has grown up into a
full-fledged movement.
THE NUMBERS
Homeschoolers make up
perhaps 2 to 4 percent of the US school-aged population.
The upper end of that range means that for every 25 students
in private- or public-school classes, one student is being
taught at home. Patricia Lines, a former researcher at the
US Department of Education and now with the Discovery Institute,
says the number of homeschoolers grew from somewhere around
15,000 in the late 1970s to perhaps 300,000 in 1990. That
number likely more than doubled in the next half-decade;
in the late ‘90s the annual growth rate probably approached
20 percent. That rate now appears to be slowing, though
of course the total numbers continue to escalate. There
is reportedly no state where the number is declining.
Brian Ray of the National
Home Education Research Institute says there are now 1.5
to 1.9 million American students being homeschooled. That
compares to roughly 500,000 students in charter schools.
Homeschoolers now make up about 10 percent of the privately
schooled population (in some states over 20 percent). It
is also no longer a US phenomenon, as organizations form
in Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, and
Germany. Says one academic analyst, “In magazines
and publishing houses, on the Internet, and through small
businesses and ministries of every description, homeschoolers
have built a lively and talkative world of their own. Homeschooling
is, in short, a social movement, with a rich history and
an elaborate organizational apparatus.”
WHO HOMESCHOOLS?
Mitchell Stevens, in
his book, Kingdom of Children, cites a 1995 study
demographically identifying homeschooling families as 98
percent white and 97 percent married, most under age 40.
In comparison with the general population of the region
studied (a large tri-state area), respondents were better
educated and slightly more affluent than their non-homeschooling
counterparts. Presently, according to Ray, practicing Christians
make up 75 percent of US homeschoolers. “As in American
culture generally,” Stevens explains, “one can
find great diversity in the movement in terms of religion,
marital status, economics, race, and size of family. Generally
speaking, though, many homeschooling families espouse conservative
Protestant faiths, have full-time or nearly full-time moms,
and a higher number of children than average.”
HISTORY THEN AND NOW
In the broader course
of history as measured in recent centuries, Time notes that
“prior to 150 years ago it was the movement to establish
public schools that was nascent while homeschooling was
quite common. Public schools became the institution over
the last century, and it was not until the 1960s”
that homeschooling was resurrected in any appreciable numbers.
Leftist educational reformers then promoted the idea with
some notable success, but by that era homeschooling was
often viewed as a concept on the fringe or an excuse for
truancy, and the practice had become illegal in many states.
That has greatly changed
in the last 20 years, “when well-organized evangelical
Christians adopted homeschooling ….” Through
years of work and the development of a remarkable grass-roots
effort, homeschoolers have made school at home legal in
all 50 states (though there is wide variation between states
on regulations, ranging from virtually no requirements to
a good deal of mandatory testing and submitting of forms).
The homeschooling movement
continues to undergo further change. Previously associated
in certain respects with fundamentalist Christians, homeschooling
now draws more politically moderate believers into its swelling
ranks. The relationship between homeschoolers and public
schools is changing, too – though, again, there can
be wide-ranging variations, even from one school district
to the next. In certain locales those relations can be quite
tense, prompting homeschoolers all the more to do what they
do anyway: form networks and support groups with each other,
and organize their own field trips, sports programs, even
homeschool bands. In other places, public schools are quite
open to homeschoolers taking classes there, and will even
pay for portions of school supplies. One of the latest trends,
in fact, is the “virtual charter school,” whereby
the student enrolls in public school and through online
curricula takes courses at home that are monitored by the
host school (see the adjacent article for more on this).
MAKING THE GRADE
Last year in its article,
“Home Sweet School,” Time reported that the
average SAT score for homeschoolers in 2000 was 1100, compared
with 1019 for the general population. In one large study
using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, where the national
average was the 50th percentile, the average homeschooler
scored in the 75th percentile.
“Certainly,”
the article went on, “the old suspicion of the academic
credentials of homeschooled kids has waned; perhaps three-quarters
of universities now have policies for dealing with home-schooled
applicants … Today Harvard admissions officers attend
homeschooling conferences looking for applicants, and Rice
and Stanford admit homeschoolers at rates equal to or higher
than those for public schoolers.” For those so inclined,
there is even a more direct transition from secondary to
post-secondary education levels: This past May, Patrick
Henry College in Virginia, a new Christian institution with
homeschooled students making up the majority of its student
body, held commencement for its first graduating class.
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