If you homeschool your children, you know that some days are tough. And sometimes, those days turn into a few at a time, or even a week or two. Homeschooling turns into a battle everyday because no one wants to continue. You begin to weigh the pros and cons of homeschooling and wonder if you are doing the best thing for your child. You might start to think the inevitable: maybe you should stop homeschooling and place your child in public school.
But let me reassure you. As a former public school teacher for 14 years, you are doing the right thing. Don’t stop homeschooling. If you knew what was really going on in public schools, you wouldn’t even spend another minute weighing the pros and cons of homeschooling. There is no comparison, simply put.
From a veteran teacher’s point of view, let me share with you what’s really happening in public schools and why you shouldn’t stop homeschooling:
1. Bullying is Outrageous
Used to, we could chalk bullying up to “kids being kids”, but not anymore. Bullying has become a crisis in this country. Most bullying takes place at school, school grounds, and on the school bus (read this and other facts about bullying). Schools are not equipped to handle the epidemic, however, despite their best efforts. They are inherently designed for delivering instruction. So why should be they be equipped to stop bullying?
Dealing with bullying takes a certain level of professional training and area of expertise. Teachers make up the largest part of the professional workforce of a school. But their “anti-bullying” training consists of an hour-long professional development session every now and then. When you get down to it, teachers are trained to, well, teach! The small percentage of staff who are trained to deal specifically with bullying (counselors) are grossly outnumbered compared to the number of students in the building. Administrators are too task-saturated to deal with the bullying before it is too late. Schools can’t stop it, kids keep doing it….it’s a vicious cycle.
Because of it’s severity and impact on the mental and physical well-being of our children, the bullying epidemic should be one of the first considerations to think about if you are comparing the pros and cons of homeschooling. I personally don’t see the issue improving in our public schools for a long time, if ever.
2. Schools Aren’t Safe Anymore
I don’t even know where to start with this one! Let’s just say my husband is active duty military and was safer on deployment overseas than I was at my job in the same city. On any given day, my school had drugs, weapons, gang-related tensions, and fights among 1400 students. We had 3 resource officers and 1 actual police officer. Teachers were not allowed to break up fights (for good reason, of course), and our safety measures were ridiculous.
Once, when we went into a lockdown for a gun on campus, my 42 students and I hid into a corner of the classroom as protocol dictates. However, my classroom had a 6′ x 4′ window that allowed anyone walking by to see in the entire classroom, and “protocol” didn’t allow me to cover the window. After the third gun incident in one month, I discussed my concerns with my principal. She assured me that “this happens everywhere you go, Dr. James.” She did, however, work on getting window coverings as part of the new safety procedures.
By my final year as a teacher, I felt completely unsafe in my school and in the teaching profession, to the point to where I ultimately left the workforce. If you are still considering the pros and cons of homeschooling, just know that schools will never be as safe as your own home, despite their best safety measures.
If you are interested, you can take a look at the National Center for Educational Statistics report on school crime here.
3. Teachers “Teach to the Test”
Ok, I’ll be the whistleblower here, as if you didn’t already know. Teachers teach to the test. Yes, the standardized test that determines the school’s and district’s accountability ratings. I’m not saying that teachers enjoy this, because the fact is that most teachers don’t. They are only doing what they’ve been told and what they must do to get a good evaluation. But from personal, honest experience, I can tell you that we “taught” Algebra until Spring Break and then used the last 9 weeks of school to teach test-taking and calculator strategies. I distinctively remember a collaborative teacher of mine telling a student it didn’t matter if he didn’t understand the material, just to know how to do it in the calculator. What good does that do??
So, what happened in the class for the 10 days or so after the test? Well, not a whole lot of anything except more review and testing for those students who almost passed the test. Certainly no teaching of new material because there were no more standardized tests that year! Therefore, if you are still weighing the pros and cons of homeschooling, just know that you can expect your child’s education to largely consist of rote memorization and test performance skills if you place them in public school.
4. Lack of Rigorous Instruction
Unless a student takes all AP, dual-credit, or IB classes, chances are he or she is receiving watered-down instruction. And it’s not the teacher’s fault. From personal experience, many of the general education classes contain a large percentage of special education students and no collaborative teacher. However, teachers face an exponential amount of work on their part if a special education student is failing. They must differentiate, document, remediate, modify, accommodate, etc. for each of the failing special education students…all at the expense of the rest of the students. It’s easier, therefore, just to teach to the lowest level of the class. I don’t want to admit it, but it happens all the time.
5. Students Have Little Choice
I worked with the counselors to prepare incoming students’ schedules at the beginning of the school year. Most of these times, the students ended up in elective classes in which they had no interest simply because everything else was full or nothing else would work with their current classes or IEP requirements.
Once, we put a senior female student who was very interested in fashion into a sports marketing and management class. She had no desire to go to class and skipped it every day. It caused so much work on everyone’s part (except hers, of course) to get her to pass that class, which could have been avoided if she simply had a choice in her classes. If you are still making that list of pros and cons of homeschooling, add this to it. You could hinder your child’s motivation in learning and exposure to new subjects, interests, and topics because his or her class choices will be limited.
6. Not Enough Time is Spent on Learning
In today’s schools, teachers are inundated with so many tasks other than teaching. In order to avoid taking mounds of work home each night and every weekend, teachers often times resort to minimal instruction and dreaded worksheets so that they can get their work done at work. As students “work” on their worksheets, they also post to social media, play video games, text, sleep, talk on phones, talk with each other, bully….whatever! The classroom becomes a free-for-all so the teacher can work on his or her non-instructional tasks.
Take also into consideration time spent on lunch; transitions between classes; administrative tasks at the beginning and end of each class (such as taking attendance, collecting homework, etc.); classroom time spent handling discipline issues, interruptions, and fighting the technology battle with students; pep rallies and assemblies; and lockdowns, drills, and evacuations, etc. As you can see, much time is spent on non-educational activities during a typical school year.
7. Few Opportunities for Authentic Learning
Cutbacks in funds and programs have severely hampered teachers’ abilities to provide authentic learning experiences to students. Teachers cannot afford to pay for these opportunities out of their own funds, and thus they resort to videos as the next best option. Students lose the chance to learn from hands-on activities, field trips, and experiments. With this comes a loss of motivation, intrigue, and wonder in learning itself. Additionally, districts pump hundreds of thousands of dollars into “scripted” curricula. Unfortunately, these curricula leave teachers no room for creativity or personal flair and are often devoid of authentic learning opportunities.
Homeschooling offers children a wide array of authentic learning experiences. To stop homeschooling would take these experiences away and inevitably decrease your child’s spark and passion for learning. Consider this carefully as you weigh the pros and cons of homeschooling.
8. Other “Sad But True” Situations
I don’t even have a category for these things, so let me just tell you a few things here:
- High schools graduate seniors with 3rd-grade reading levels at alarmingly shocking rates.
- Teachers and administrative staff at a school I once worked at once assigned a shortened version of a course and did the work for a student so that she could graduate on time (and increase the district’s graduate rate). No lie.
- Students smoking weed in the hallways is commonplace.
- Students doing unmentionable acts in dark classrooms is also, unfortunately, commonplace. So are the inevitable teenage parents from said acts.
- I’ve only written police reports for incidents related to working as a teacher. One was for stolen money and one was as a witness for a sexual assault on a student.
- l’ve been in so many lockdowns, shelter-in-place’s, and evacuations that I’ve lost count.
- The good children who fall between the cracks are the real victims in public schools.
- Bullies are hailed as heroes, as long as they are the school’s sports star.
- Many teachers are overworked, underpaid, burned out, and simply done. They have told me so.
- I’ve actually seen teachers leave their classroom and the building, in the middle of a class, because of the lack of respect from students and discipline issues in their class. I’ve known this to happen several times.
- Many times, when a school can’t find a certified teacher for whatever reason, they hire a non-certified person to “teach” the class until a certified teacher is found. Once, this took the entire year and 4 substitutes for an algebra class.
- Unless parents become a real threat, schools tend to ignore the class size and special education percentages requirements.
Your decision to Homeschool
I get it. Homeschooling isn’t easy, and sometimes we feel like the decision to stop homeschooling may be in the best interest of everyone. Perhaps we feel our children aren’t getting enough socialization opportunities, or we feel unable to teach subjects that we don’t understand well enough ourselves.
Homeschooling has its own associated cons, as well. Curriculum and materials can become rather expensive, especially in large families. One parent must stay home to homeschool, usually at the cost of lost income. Children may miss out on elective opportunities due to lack of tools (i.e., woodworking, agriculture, robotics, etc.). And honestly, knowing when to wear the teacher and parent hat can be difficult. Each role must look objectively at the other’s role, which is difficult to do from the same set of eyes.
Despite the inconveniences of homeschooling, however, I still want to encourage you to continue homeschooling! With everything that I’ve seen and reported to you on the current state of public schools, homeschooling is by far the superior choice. By homeschooling your child, you are providing your child rich, continuous, authentic learning opportunities in a safe, supportive learning environment. You are encouraging creativity, optimizing your child’s talents and interests, and challenging your child to think critically about life (not just a multiple choice test)!
I hope this post gives you enough motivation to continue homeschooling. Perhaps you need to take a break, do things differently, consider “unschooling”, try something new….just don’t give up!
What have you done when you lose motivation? Share your comments below! We can all benefit from them!