School Leader

Homeschooling surges in Kentucky

Homeschooling is exploding in popularity across the United States and here in Kentucky.

COVID-related school closures, mask mandates, and concerns about what students are learning may all be contributing to the exodus of families from traditional public schools. It is too soon to know whether these students may eventually return, but there are indications that many of these families are happy with their decision. The education establishment needs to pay attention, and policymakers need to find ways to give every family the opportunity to choose the school setting that works best for their children.

Data from the Kentucky Department of Education show that at the end of the 2020-2021 school year, approximately 90,000, or 14% of the state's school-aged students, were being schooled outside of the P-12 public education system. Of that 90,000, about 35,000 were homeschooling, an increase of about 16,000 students - or a whopping 84% increase compared with similar data from 2018, just three years earlier, when approximately 19,0000 children were identified homeschoolers.

Download 2021 Declaration of Participation Report Summary 062921

Private school enrollment increased during the same period, but only by about 1,000 students. Overall nonpublic school enrollment grew from about 11% to about 14% of the total student population, but almost all of that was driven by homeschooling.

There are some key things to consider when looking at these data. First, I'm comparing last year's enrollment with 2018, the most recent year for which I had a similar KDE report. It's possible that these numbers have been steadily growing the last three years and didn't necessarily skyrocket in 2020-2021. A look at the 2019-2020 data could confirm or disprove that. But given nationwide homeschooling trends, it's likely that most of the homeschooling explosion took place last year during widespread school shutdowns since across the United States about 3% of all students left the public education system and homeschooling among Black and Latino families is at an all time high.

Download 2018 Declaration of Participation PNP Homeschool Totals

It's also possible that some of these students returned to public schools this academic year. Those data aren't available yet to confirm. But my sense is that something has fundamentally changed in parents' attitudes toward the public education system.

To put it bluntly, parents are sick of the inefficiencies, adult-centered decisions, one-size-fits-all lack of innovation, and creeping leftist ideologies in far too many public schools. These were all underlying problems with the education system prior to COVID, but the pandemic also turned schools into a means for power-hungry politicians to exert illegitimate control over the system and to pander to their ideological base. 

In Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear ordered a statewide shutdown of schools early in the pandemic, and then tried to bully districts into remaining closed when school was scheduled to start in the fall. The union-controlled boards of education in large districts like the Jefferson County Public Schools chose to keep schools closed almost the entire year until pressure from the legislature resulted in a partial reopening.

This school year, Beshear continued his overreach by trying to force all schools to require children to wear masks, and then when he was reined in by the state legislature local boards of education voluntarily pandered to discredited public health entities and left the mask requirements in place, despite no meaningful scientific evidence that such mandates protect children from the spread of COVID.

Meanwhile, parents expressing legitimate concerns about how critical race theory may be influencing what is taught in schools have been labeled by the National School Boards Association and the federal government as "domestic terrorists."

To add insult to all of these injuries, the education establishment in Kentucky has fought ferociously to stop parents from having other options in where their children can attend school. Numerous districts used taxpayer money to launch a lawsuit to stop Kentucky's new education opportunities account (EOA) law, which provides privately-funded scholarships to help eligible families access education supports, including private school tuition, and other services that could potentially apply to homeschooling families.

Last week, Andy Beshear's favorite liberal judge struck down the law in a ridiculous ruling that will ultimately be overturned on appeal. It was a temporary victory for the education establishment and its schooling monopoly, and a temporary defeat for Kentucky parents and children, but in the long run families will prevail.

The exodus of families from the public schools should be a wakeup call to educators. Schools must become more responsive to parent concerns, be transparent about what students are learning, and recognize that education dollars are for students, not systems, or families will continue voting with their feet.

And policymakers should empower parents with more options. Kentucky's EOA law should be expanded, charter schools should be funded, and ultimately education funding should follow students to the school of their parents' choice, including to purchase textbooks, curricular materials, and other costs associated with homeschooling.

A sleeping giant has been awakened. It's time for Kentucky's education system to become accountable to the families it serves.

Image above is the "school room" in the former home of a homeschooling family here in Bowling Green - and the lovely house happens to be for sale! Learn more here.

Related posts:

• Unleashing parent power in education
• Kentucky finally crashes through the education establishment barricades, becomes a school choice state
• No, CRT is not just having a conversation about racism
• Equity and diversity are good, CRT is not

 

A classical education reading list

In recent years my thinking about school-level education improvement has focused almost exclusively on pedagogy and how we can create more student-centered and instructionally responsive learning environments. But over the last year, my interests have shifted back toward curriculum as the centerpiece of education.  I've argued that we can't really teach kids how to think, if we don't give them something meaningful to think about, and the content of that something matters very much.  I've argued that wedding a rigorous curriculum with student-centered learning may represent the best of both worlds, especially in terms of revitalizing Catholic schools.  And I've become enamored with classical curriculum as the best hope for offering just such an education.

Classical education is a language-rich approach to curriculum that emphasizes history, science, art, and great literature as the foundation of learning and expects students to develop a well-trained mind adept at logic and rhetoric and capable of participating in the Great Conversation of ideas that has shaped and driven the development of Western civilization.  It represents the best of what is sometimes conceived as a "liberal arts" education, though that term has become so watered down as to be nearly meaningless, and classical education does not shy away from mathematics and hard sciences but rather provides a strong foundation for advanced studies in all disciplines.  Above all classical education understands that education should primarily be about the acquisition of virtue, and only secondarily about vocational preparation.

I want to share some of the key books and essays that have informed my understanding of classical education.  This list is by no means exhaustive, but represents where I have started my own journey.  I did not read these books in the order that follows; I discovered them more haphazardly, but have sequenced them in the order I think makes most sense for someone exploring these topics for the first time.

Start with Dorothy Sayers' 1948 essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning," which is foundational to the modern movement for classical education.  Sayers describes the Trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric that framed medieval education. According to Sayers, the early grades should focus on intensive absorption of a rich and varied, language-based curriculum.  In direct contrast to our modern trend of reserving social studies and science for the upper grades, classical education incorporates science and history from the earliest grades onward, along with the study of classical languages like Greek and Latin.  By the middle grades, students should be introduced to dialectic (logic) and start to synthesize all the content they've learned previously.  And finally the upper grades should have a focus on rhetoric, or argumentation, in which students learn to articulate their own ideas and opinions with evidence from the treasure trove of world civilization and participate fully in a virtuous life as adult and citizen.

Next, to get a clearer idea of what this looks like in practice, I recommend Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home.  While Bauer's intended audience is homeschooling families, anyone seeking a grade-by-grade breakdown of the kinds of subjects and activities students in classical education might encounter (along with recommendations on specific book titles, text series, and other materials) will benefit.

Likewise, I recommend the St. Jerome Classical School's curriculum plan for another carefully-crafted sequence of classical materials.  St. Jerome's curriculum, like the one presented by Bauer, is explicitly Christian.  But I've been excited to learn about Great Hearts Academies, a chain of charter schools in Arizona and Texas, that offers a classical curriculum in a non-sectarian environment, suggesting that classical education isn't just for faith-based schools.

After understanding the basics of classical education, I recommend readers explore its philosophical foundations with David Hicks's 1981 book, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, and Christopher Dawson's fantastic work, The Crisis of Western Education, published in 1961.  Dawson describes how education has been historically undermined and taken over by various secularist ideologies, and argues that without a strong system of learning founded on the concept of universal truth, the very fabric of free society is vulnerable.

Finally, if you are interested in Christian, and especially Catholic education, I recommend the late Stratford Caldecott's lovely book, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education.  Caldecott's was actually the first book I read about classical education, and the gateway to my interest in the topic.  More recent, and slightly more accessible, is Ryan N. S. Topping's The Case for Catholic Education: Why Parents, Teachers, and Politicians Should Reclaim the Principles of Catholic Pedagogy, which I reviewed here.

Lest you think all of this has limited relevance the world of Common Core-beholden P-12 public schools, I urge you to consider the work of Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  Among many other education topics, Pondiscio writes about the need for a stronger, content-based curriculum in the early grades.  In this recent blog post, he argues that in the NCLB/ESSA era schools have started emphasizing reading as a skill so heavily that vital subject material that actually builds students' academic vocabulary (and thus reading comprehension) is routinely undermined.  And the effects of this imbalance are most negative for students of poverty who don't necessarily get exposed to a rich vocabulary and cultural experiences away from school.

Pondiscio argues for a much richer and more rigorous curriculum in the early grades, especially for public schools that serve large numbers of low-income children.  The Common Core friendly Core Knowledge Foundation (where Pondiscio used to work) offers just such a curriculum, and while it isn't exactly the same thing as classical education, the parallels are clear.

And so is the case that the content of what our children learn matters a lot, perhaps now more than ever.

Related posts:

• Yes, kids need to know about the American Revolution
• Classical education, Montessori, and the tension between the "what" and "how" of learning
• Saving Catholic schools: Policy and pedagogy

Don't homeschooling families deserve some access to public schools?

For a second year Kentucky state representative Stan Lee (R-Lexington) is introducing a bill that would permit homeschooled children to participate in public school athletics. Nicknamed the "Tim Tebow" bill after the famous quarterback who was homeschooled but allowed to play high school football in Florida, Lee's proposed legislation would let any child educated in a "nonpublic" school setting participate in public school athletics if their own school does not provide a particular extra curricular activity.

The Kentucky High School Athletic Association opposes the measure, and House Education Committee chair Derrick Graham (D-Frankfort), a persistent defender of the government's monopoly on education, says he will oppose it as well.  Opponents cite the difficulties of establishing academic eligibility for homeschooled students and the risk that students who do attend the school might be cut from teams or lose playing time to homeschooled students who just participate in athletics.

I've written elsewhere about how outdated policies regarding athletic eligibility can hamper good educational practice and doing what's right for kids, and this is probably another example, though it's the most legitimate argument opponents of Rep. Lee's bill can muster.  I don't have a strong opinion about the "Tim Tebow" bill per se, but I do think it's high time we rethink our attitude toward homeschooling in the larger educational landscape and the all-or-nothing choice we force families to make.

The bottom line is that homeschooling families pay taxes to support the local public schools just like everyone else.  As a fundamental point of fairness, why shouldn't these families be able to get some direct educational benefit from their tax contributions? 

The current educational system, which I have served for 20 years, empowers professional educators and institutions with the vast majority of control over who gets taught, what they get taught, and how.  Parents, by and large, must take what is offered - or if they have the financial means, leave it for homeschooling or non-public school options.

We need to begin shifting that emphasis, empowering families to take a larger role in the learning process, creating a richer educational marketplace, and giving all families the ability to customize their child's education based on their individual needs and preferences.

We need to see education as a public good (see "why school choice" in my recent post), and support it accordingly, but that doesn't mean all learning is best delivered by a government-run school.  Families should have more control over the tax money allocated for their children's education, and should be able to create a personalized learning plan for their children through a kind of "a la carte" menu of schooling choices.  See my recent post on education savings accounts (ESA) for an example of how this might work from a policy standpoint.

Every family should be able utilize their local government-run school district on a service-by-service basis, but also use their ESA to access tutoring services, online courses, vocational training, etc.  As one education writer put it, a student "might study algebra online with a private tutor, business in a local entrepreneur's living room, literature at a community college and test prep with the national firm Princeton Review," and perhaps take band class or study Spanish at their local public high school.  And maybe even play football.

And why not?  We all pay taxes to the local, state, and federal government to support education.  If we have children, why should we not have some say in how those tax dollars get spent?  And why should government-run schools be the only option?  Think parents are too stupid to make these decisions?  Then you might be guilty of educational paternalism, and should reconsider.

I suspect the opposition to Rep. Lee's bill is more about the general prejudice against homeschooling on the part of professional educators, who also have enormous political and cultural influence.  And yet, research makes it clear that millions of families are now successfully homeschooling their children outside of the educational system.  This fact should make us reconsider our assumption that the large, government-run model of factory schooling is necessary, or even serves the public good of fostering a well-educated populace. 

Government-delivery of education may remain a critically important part this revitalized educational marketplace, but it will be a choice and option among many others, not the best or only option for every family, and not a take-it-all-or-leave it service for anyone.

Related posts:

• Countering educators' bias against homeschooling
• Homeschooling in America: Lessons for educators
• Homeschooling challenges schools to change
• Is differentiation really possible
• Poll: Kentuckians strongly favor school choice

Updated disclaimer, 10/19/16: Opinions expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not reflect the views of Western Kentucky University (my employer) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

Classical education, Montessori, and the tension between the "what" and "how" of learning

In recent years my philosophical thinking about education has focused far more on the how of learning than the what.  That is, I've become much less concerned about curriculum and far more concerned about pedagogy as I've been convinced that the industrial, one-size-fits-all model of American education needs to be replaced with something that is much more student-centered.

After all, my reasoning has gone, the digital natives who occupy America's classrooms now have the entire body of human knowledge at their fingertips.  What they need are thinking skills that help them process this wide world of information and use it to solve problems.   This emphasis on "21st century skills" has been accompanied by a concern for the widely varying developmental needs of children who are often ill-served in schools that have arbitrarily decided that all children sharing the same birth year should be grouped together and taught the same, fragmented curriculum at the same pace.

In response to these concerns, my interests have turned toward Montessori, Sudbury, homeschooling, personalized learning, and other methods that place a much heavier emphasis on the agency of the individual child in the learning process.

But saying a child should have a lot more control of what, when, and how she learns does not necessarily mean there is no place for curriculum.  Adults still have a critical role to play in these decisions.  As a Catholic Christian, and especially now as a parent, I believe that education serves a greater purpose than to simply prepare children for adult life.  Indeed, the well-guided journey of the human soul is the ultimate purpose of education.  And not just any learning facilitates such an essential and important process.

This is why I've become interested in the use of student-centered pedagogies in Christian education, where the possibilities of blending such methods with a rigorous, soul-supporting curriculum are quite rich.  As I wrote on this blog a few months ago, rediscovering Montessori (as one example) might be a key strategy in the revitalization of Catholic education, which has suffered setbacks in recent decades in terms of enrollments, vibrancy, and religious identity.

That blog post was spotted by a friend who connected me with Corpus Christi Classical Academy, a tiny but thriving independent Catholic school in Simpsonville, Kentucky (Shelby County).  My friend, whose wife is a teacher there, wanted me to know about Corpus Christi's aspirations to integrate classical education and Montessori in the same school.  So on a hot spring day during the busiest time of the school year for both me and my hosts, I carved out some time and drove to Simpsonville to meet with Corpus Christi principal Leslie Genuis and visit her school.

Corpus Christi has had a long-standing presence in the Shelby County community, but nearly closed last year due to declining enrollments and the retirement of its long-time principal.  Genuis took over with a mostly new school board and a vision for revitalizing the school.  During my visit, it was a pleasure to see middle school students reading and thoughtfully discussing Homer, with other classics like Wuthering Heights and As You Like It tucked in their desks. 

Genuis, whose has experience both in homeschooling and Catholic education, showed me school's curriculum, which draws heavily from materials developed by Memoria Press, an offshoot of Louisville's Highlands Latin School.  But the staff at Corpus Christi has thoughtfully modified and adjusted the selection of materials to best meet the needs of their students. 

"Classical education" is now a very hot topic in the world of non-public education.  Memoria Press defines classical education as "the cultivation of wisdom and virtue through meditation on the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This is accomplished in two ways: first, through training in the liberal arts; and secondly, through a familiarity with the great books and the great thinkers of the Western tradition."  Classical education, done well, is a traditional liberal arts education with a strong emphasis on the development of Christian virtues.  In this sense, it is a curriculum that is rigorous, thoughtful, and structured in such a way that a natural coherence of all subjects is maintained and emphasized.

But Genuis and the parents and staff at Corpus Christi recognize that a rigorous curriculum does not preclude alternative pedagogies.  This is why they are launching a Montessori pre-school program for the 2015-2016 school year.  Genuis is participating in online Montessori training and has already started incorporating Montessori elements at the school.  I visited the classroom and saw the familiar pink tower, tracing letters, and other distinctive hallmarks of a Montessori pre-K environment.  And while the school only plans to institute Montessori in the preschool for now, visiting the lower primary class it was evident that the Montessori philosophy is making inroads there as well.

Is there a natural tension between a structured curriculum and a student-centered learning approach?  Probably, but Genuis and her staff seem eager to explore this tension and discover what is possible.  The Montessori Method includes its own, well-developed curriculum, after all.  And there appears to be nothing in classical education that precludes the possibility of students exploring that curriculum with a high degree of choice and self-pacing.

Corpus Christi Classical Academy is not alone in its faith that Montessori and classical education go together.  This fall I look forward to visiting Bob Nardo and the Libertas School of Memphis, a new charter school that will blend Montessori and Core Knowledge, a secular curriculum that nevertheless shares many of the same features as classical education.

It will be in schools like Corpus Christi and Libertas that educators will pioneer new modes of learning that embrace the student-centered, personalized focus emerging in conventional schooling but with the wisdom and accumulated human knowledge of classical approaches to education.  I am most eager to learn from their journey.

 

Become a teacher? It's complicated...

The Twitterverse and blogosphere are abuzz this week over comments from teacher Nancie Atwell, who just after receiving the $1 million Global Teacher Prize, repeatedly told media outlets that young people really shouldn't consider teaching as a career option.

Atwell, a 42-year veteran who teaches at a demonstration school in Maine, expressed reservations about Common Core Standards and the "hyper-testing, hyper-accountability" culture of schools in explaining why she was unenthusiastic to encourage young teachers unless they could work in a private school.

I'll not try to catalog the range of reactions that greeted Atwell's comments.  Rather, I had to pause and consider the question for myself.  After 20 years in the education business, would I encourage a young person to become a teacher?

It's not merely an intellectual exercise for me, as a beloved nephew of mine, soon to graduate from high school, is strongly interested in elementary education.  He would be following me, his mother (my sister), and his grandmother - all of us career educators - if he becomes a teacher.  And I have to say that my advice to him is..."It's complicated."  But not really for the reasons Nancie Atwell cites.

The overemphasis on testing in our schools is a problem, for sure, as is our obsession with curriculum standards.  But these things don't have to dominate teachers' work lives.  School leaders simply choose to make these things their focus, because doing so is easier than articulating a compelling vision of instructional improvement that would meaningfully alter what happens in classrooms.

And besides, things teachers sometimes associate with testing culture - like the emphasis on common formative classroom assessment, or data analysis for the purpose of meeting students at their current level of learning - are the product of real growth in our profession. 

There was a time when teachers had full autonomy to teach as they saw fit.  It was call the 1970's (and all the decades before that).  These were not exactly halcyon days for student learning, as student achievement gaps were huge back then too and there was no general sense of concern or urgency about that fact.

Moreover, policy makers are obsessed with rigid, top-down accountability efforts because, as Mike McShane argues, we have a system in which the government operates a monopoly on educational delivery.  When most families have no other options for education than their local school district, draconian measures are often needed to ensure quality.

There are better alternatives (which McShane describes), ones that would give teachers far greater flexibility and autonomy, but these involve confronting powerful institutional forces that fight like hell to keep school structures exactly as they currently are.

And schools as they are is what prevents me from enthusiastically endorsing the teaching profession in general right now.  We've discovered so much about how children learn best, and it is almost certainly not in the rigid, teacher-directed, one-size-fits-all industrial mode that characterizes the vast majority of American schools, both public and non-public. 

Great teachers who want to transform learning into an experience that is far more student-directed and personalized face enormous obstacles from the very structure of schooling itself and all of the cultural traditions associated with it.

In this sense, Nancie Atwell is right: some of the most exciting things happening in education right now - and there are many reasons to be excited about education - are taking place in charter schools (see Libertas School of Memphis as one example) and private schools (like Sudbury Valley or the Cristo Rey network of Catholic schools) outside of the traditional public structures of education.  These are schools where parents and educators that have the freedom to customize the learning experiences for the needs of individual children.

Further exciting developments in personalized learning are taking place outside of the formal structure of schools altogether, including record numbers of families successfully choosing to homeschool, and various entrepreneurial start-ups in digital learning and even a la carte options that blend all three.  All of these represent terrific career opportunities for aspiring educators.

So by all means, yes: become a teacher.  It's one of those rare jobs that is true ministry, where despite all the limitations you can see your daily efforts transform the lives of others.  But understand what you are getting into.  And answer the call to teach for the students, not the institutions of schooling that don't always actually serve students well.  Consider how you might contribute to a revolution in schooling that gives students far more agency in the learning process. 

And understand that university schools of education, while doing an adequate job preparing aspiring teachers for working in schools as they are now, aren't always good at preparing you for schools as they should be, or as they will be in the future.

For this reason, consider first doing a degree in liberal arts, sciences, technology, or some other field that will allow you to learn about yourself and the world, and then pursue teacher training, either through an excellent program like the Montessori training offered by AMI or AMS and other organizations, or in a traditional teacher education program. 

But if you are going the traditional route, be willing to do the independent work to build your understanding of the history of industrial schooling and its alternatives.  The way schools are is not an accident and it's not fate either.  We can do things differently.

And for the record: I haven't given up on public schools either.  To the contrary, I endorse the "three sector" approach articulated by the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO).  America needs a healthy blend of great private schools, charter schools, and traditional public schools. 

In lone classrooms and in many whole schools, brave public educators are trying to make a shift toward more meaningful personalized learning.  You see evidence in the move toward standards-based grading and assessment, project-based learning, and competency-based instruction.  These are small but significant steps in the transformation American education requires, and many more innovative teachers are needed to help carry out this work.

All of which also depends on courageous, innovative, effective school leaders.  So don't just consider becoming a teacher.  If you are a teacher, or an aspiring one, also recognize the vital role you might play as a principal or in some other administrative role.  Because to make the teaching profession appealing, we also need great school leaders who can articulate this vision of student-centered learning, rise above the pettiness of testing and accountability, and lead teachers, parents, and students toward a whole new way of thinking about education.

And if that's your calling, here's how you can get started.

 

Saving Catholic Education: Policy and Pedagogy

There's an interesting discussion this week on the excellent website Ethika Politika about the rising cost of Catholic education.  In an essay "The Tuition Is Too Damn High," Mattias Caro covers a lot of ground, noting the decline of Catholic school enrollments, the skyrocketing rate of tuition in many Catholic schools, and the failure of Church leaders to both promote Catholic education for those who can afford it and to respond to the impossibility for families of modest means to choose Catholic education themselves.

Caro notes how Pope Francis' call for justice for the poor contrasts with this situation, and wonders if it's not time for the church to consider new pedagogical philosophies as a means of reviving Catholic education, but what he has in mind are some tried-and-true methods such as "classical" education and Montessori.

As is typical for Ethika Politika, reader comments to the essay have extended the discussion in thoughtful ways.  Several readers pointed out that the cost 0f Catholic education is directly tied to the massive decline in vocations to religious life.  It was easier to provide low-cost Catholic schools when they were mostly staffed by members of religious orders who took vows of poverty.  Now that the sisters and brothers are gone, personnel costs for maintaining a teaching staff of lay people with families are substantially higher.

Other readers pointed out that homeschooling is a viable and perhaps preferred mechanism of Catholic education, and Caro heartily concurs, noting that he and his wife are actively involved in the homeschooling movement.

For my part as a Catholic Christian, a former Catholic school educator, and a soon-t0-be Catholic school parent, I think potential strategies for addressing the problem Mattias Caro so ably lays out include "all of the above."

The Catholic Church has been an early and vocal advocate for the expansion of various public policies of school choice, including vouchers and tuition tax credits.  This position acknowledges that while schooling is a public good, there is no Gospel suggesting that government-run schools are the best or only way to effectively provide for that common good.  As Ashley Rogers Berner described in First Things a couple of years ago, many other countries have workable models of "educational pluralism" that both recognize the value of non-public education to a vibrant democracy and empower low-income families to exercise that option.

Unfortunately I think much of the Church's emphasis on school choice has remained at the level of the bishop's conferences and has not been intentionally pursued at the parish level, so many Catholic parents remain relatively uninformed about school choice and how such policies could benefit their own families and other families who long for a Catholic education but cannot afford it.

I'm hoping that will change dramatically in Kentucky next year as the Catholic Conference of Kentucky tries once again to promote a tuition assistance tax credit policy that would encourage the growth of tuition assistance programs for low-income families.  This strategy bypasses some of the more difficult political and legal hurdles of a voucher policy while expanding access to non-public schools.  But the success of such a bill will depend on educating and mobilizing parents (both Catholic and non-Catholic) at the local level.

Besides policy prescriptions, though, I agree with Caro that the Church needs to broaden its thinking about Catholic education, especially in terms of pedagogical method.  He writes:

In the longer term, the Church should ask not only how to fund her schools but whether the need for such an education might be provided by other forms...If the intellect and moral imagination is being formed by the virtuous past of human tradition, there is no tension between faith and education. Can we consider pedagogies and approaches that are not strictly “Catholic” as still being formed by the Catholic heart, mind, and imagination? The recent recovery of Montessori education as a Catholic education seems to point to the answer being yes.

I would heartily echo that "yes," as my experience of sending my own children to a Montessori pre-school has had a profound impact on my thinking about teaching and learning.

In my experience, many Catholic schools still offer an extremely traditional approach to education.  Classes are teacher-driven, involve tons of rote memorization and regurgitation of facts, and duplicate some of the worst aspects of the "industrial model" of education we see in public schools, including grading practices that don't convey much meaningful information about what students have learned and foster an unnecessary and sometimes destructive emphasis on comparison and competition among children.

There are better ways, and the Montessori Method represents one of them.  Maria Montessori was a Catholic after all, and understood her approach in light of Catholic teaching.  Her student Sofia Cavalletti went on to develop a beautiful method of religious education based on the Montessori method called The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.

My point is that there is nothing inherently Catholic about the Prussian style of industrial education that has dominated American (and many European) schools for the last century, and Catholic schools should investigate and embrace new pedagogical approaches that reflect what we've discovered in that time about how children learn.  This is actually happening - to a very modest and halting extent - in traditional public schools.  Catholic children deserve the same kind of learning opportunities.

Additionally, I've come to see homeschooling as a completely viable educational option for many families, one that in some cases is preferable to traditional schools, both public and Catholic.  Read my recent, two-part review of Suzie Andres' The Little Way of Homeschooling here and here.  Every family's educational needs are unique, and Catholics (and educators in general) should embrace and support a wide range of meaningful educational options.

Of course, as Mattias Caro implies, Church leaders must themselves come to courageously confront the current crisis in Catholic education.  This means bringing policy battles for school choice in front of parish congregations.  It means confronting the rigid, teacher-driven learning models of Catholic schools by introducing parents and educators to new pedagogical approaches.  And it means supporting and encouraging homeschooling Catholic families.

But above all it means placing a greater emphasis on the natural and necessary link between faith and learning and what it means to raise Catholic children in an increasingly hostile culture. 

So there's lots of work to do, from the bishop's office to the principal's office to the family kitchen table.  Let's get busy.

Related posts:

• Can Educational Pluralism End the Schooling Wars?
• Tuition Assistance Tax Credit Expands Educational Options for Kentucky Families
• A Journey into Personalized Learning
• Richard Elmore: "I Do Not Believe in the Institutional Structures of Public School Anymore"
• Trusting Our Children, Part I
• Trusting Our Children, Part II

 

Trusting Our Children, Part II

In the first part of my two-part reaction to Suzie Andres' The Little Way of Homeschooling: Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling, I noted the surprising way I found the book - through Stratford Caldecott's manifesto on rethinking Catholic education, Beauty in the Word.  And I observed a key theme from the book: that consistent with the unschooling philosophy, these Catholic unschoolers practiced a remarkable level of trust in their children to direct their own learning process.

Which is not to say that it's easy to cede so much control to children, especially when adults have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the teacher-driven approach.  One of the things that impressed me about the essays in The Little Way of Homeschooling was the frank and vulnerable way that the moms described their struggles with the method.  Many battled a constant fear that their children were not learning what they should, but tried to hold steady in trusting their kids to lead the way.  This often involved a constant dance of moving toward and away from structuring their children's learning.

And this was the second thing that impressed me about The Little Way of Homeschooling - the great flexibility the parents practiced in supporting their kids and the permission they gave themselves to try different approaches at different seasons of their lives, and especially to allow the needs of the individual child dictate their path.  Across the thirteen families profiled in the book, some practiced a very "free" style of unschooling, while others regularly directed some portion of the learning in their home, but none were dogmatic in their approach as all seemed to recognize that their children needed different things at different times and flexibly responding to those needs is the real essence of unschooling.

Many of the moms mentioned the notion of "strewing," a term coined (it appears) by unschooling advocate Sandra Dodd, author of The Big Book of Unschooling. The idea is to create an environment filled with good books, art, musical instruments, and other items that will naturally spark a child's interest and prompt them to learn something new (akin to Montessori's idea of the "prepared environment"). 

The idea is a wonderful example of how unschooling does not mean taking no interest in your child's learning.  To the contrary, it requires intimately knowing your child, his or her needs and interests, and knowing a lot about a lot of different things so you can prompt the child toward the material that will ultimately nourish his or her soul and intellect.  In this way, unschooling represents the ultimate form of differentiation - something educators know is essential, but is so hard to accomplish when children and their learning are treated as a standardized process.

In the closing chapter of The Little Way, Andres' husband, philosopher Tony Andres, emphasizes that, because the unschooling philosophy is geared so much toward the needs of the individual child, it isn't merely about homeschooling but can have implications for schooling of all sorts:

...[P]arents who unschool might very well have their children take advantage of courses offered at a school.  As long as the parents disregard grades and allow their children to focus on learning for the sake of knowing, they are bringing unschooling into the school.  The essence of unschooling is not the staying away from school buildings, but making education hinge on the desire for knowledge, rather than on rewards and punishments.

And that's a lesson not just for parents, but for educators who work in actual schools.

Could such a philosophy be adapted to brick-and-mortar schools?  Not easily, to be sure.  And it would require a total rethinking of how we fund education and ensure accountability in outcomes (for more on this see my two part discussion of Michael Q. McShane's Education and Opportunity here and here).

But there are huge opportunities for schools to begin shifting their pedagogy from standardized, one-size-fits-all, teacher-directed instruction to something far more personalized and built around individual student interest and need.  Educators have much to learn from unschooling, and Suzie Andres' book (and especially its recommended resources) has greatly extended my own reading list on the topic.

Related Posts:

• Richard Elmore: "I Do Not Believe in the Institutional Structure of Public Schooling Anymore"
• A Journey Into Personalized Learning
• Homeschooling Challenges Schools to Change
• Is Differentiation Really Possible?
• "Education and Opportunity" Makes a Clear, Succinct Case for Rethinking Educational Delivery

Trusting Our Children, Part I

Two of my professional (and personal) interests, Catholic education and unschooling, recently came together through an unexpected path of reading.  First I read Stratford Caldecott's Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, which attempts to articulate a new philosophy of Catholic education based on the ancient Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  But to my surprise, Beauty in the Word ends with a lovely acknowledgement of homeschooling as a viable - even desirable - method for implementing Caldecott's vision, and he suggests Suzie Andres' book, The Little Way of Homeschooling: Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling as an exemplary m0del of what's possible.  I'll discuss this book and my reactions to it in two parts.

As a practicing Catholic Christian who spent some of my formative years as a teacher and administrator in Catholic schools, I believe that Catholic schools are one of many viable avenues through which a much-needed revitalization of American education could take place, especially given the excellent record of Catholic schools addressing the needs of low-income minority students (see the Cristo Rey network of schools for an exciting contemporary example). 

This is what brought me to Cadelcott's Beauty in the Word.  But what really struck me was a small chapter at the end of the book in which he reflects on linkages between his theory of Catholic education and the work of John Holt (1923-1985), a former school teacher who created a homeschooling revolution through his radically student-centered philosophy explicated in his books How Children Fail and How Children Learn.  As an example of where his own philosophy merges with Holt's, Caldecott pointed to Suze Andres' profile of 13 Catholic families in The Little Way of Homeschooling.

Andres, whose first book was Homeschooling with Gentleness: A Catholic Discovers Unschooling, takes her inspiration from the "Little Way" spirituality of St. Therese of Lisieux.  Her particular style of homeschooling - unschooling - is closely linked to John Holt's and emphasizes giving children an extraordinarily wide latitude in allowing them to choose what they learn, how, and at what pace.

I realize that many of my colleagues and friends who work in K12 education (especially if they are not regular readers of this blog) may find these concepts completely bizarre.  I don't have time or space here to make a case for this kind of radical rethinking of education, but I do refer you to the related posts listed below for more background on how my own understanding of these concepts continues to evolve.  Here I just want to note some general reactions to Andres' book, most of which is taken up with the first-person essays written by the Catholic homeschooling moms in her personal network.

First, I'm most struck by the overwhelming theme of trust in these families' approaches to educating their children.  Unschooling is predicated on the idea that children are natural learners, that they desire to learn and do not require coercion or external rewards to encourage them to do so - as long as you let them direct the process.  This is confirmed by my own experience parenting small children and by my eye-opening encounters with Montessori education. 

But this kind of trust runs directly counter to the typical structures of traditional American schooling, which assume that there is a body of knowledge that all children must learn, and that they must learn it at fairly precise ages and rates under the careful direction of a professional teacher.  Most of this is not intentionally predicated on a distrust of children (though I recently had a teacher insist to me that her second graders never do anything without an extrinsic reward), but rather on an industrial model of education that we have inherited and simply take for granted - and that operates on an unstated assumption that kids won't learn without lots of structure.

The experience of unschooling families (and schools based on the philosophy like the Sudbury Valley Schools) suggests that this distrust of children is damaging and thoroughly unwarranted given the impressive outcomes of kids educated in a more trusting way.

Which is not to say this kind of trust is easy for adults indoctrinated in the traditional way of schooling.  I'll say more on this, my reflections on the Little Way of Homeschooling, and its implications, in my next post.

Related posts:

• Richard Elmore: "I Do Not Believe in the Institutional Structure of Public Schooling Anymore"
• A Journey Into Personalized Learning
• Homeschooling Challenges Schools to Change
• Is Differentiation Really Possible?

Homeschooling challenges schools to change

An article at MindShift this week (an excellent website, by the way, which every educator should closely monitor) describes research carried out by Boston College professor Peter Gray on the long-term effects of "unschooling," an approach to homeschooling that allows children a maximum level of self-direction.  There are as many flavors of unschooling as there are unschooling families, but in general the method is marked by a lack of any structured curriculum other that what the child expresses an interest in studying.

A learning philosophy like this stupefies most professional educators who have spent their entire careers wrestling over massive state- and locally-mandated curricula, trying to figure out how to "cover" it all.  How could kids possibly learn all the things they NEED to know by their (arbitarily determined) 18th year?

As the MindShift article explains, Peter Gray's research of former unschooling parents and of the unschooled "graduates" themselve reveals that, by and large, they turn out just fine.  On a variety of measures, former unschoolers felt overwhelmingly positive about their learning experiences.  Eighty-three percent of them attended a wide range of colleges, and about half graduated (similar to the college graduation rates of traditionally-school students).  Getting into college was relatively easy, even though most had never taken the ACT or SAT, and few found college to be particularly difficult, though many found the rules and structures of university life somewhat stifling.  Unschoolers had high levels of successful employment, and a large percentage worked in the creative arts.

The percentage of homeschooling families that practice unschooling is probably small, but Gray's findings are consistent with other research on homeschooling in general affirming that homeschool children do about as well as, if not better, than their traditionally-schooled peers on a wide variety of measures.

As I told CQ Researcher magazine when they interviewed me earlier this year on the topic, I believe that the success (and skyrocketing numbers) of homeschoolers poses a major challenge to those of us who work in the traditional education system.  What does it mean that so many families - including those with relative low levels of income and education themselves - can successfully educate their children without the structures and supports of traditional schooling?  And in the case of unschoolers, the evidence suggests that children don't even need a lot of direction from adults to learn and achieve at high levels.

The world has changed and the factory model of schooling, which was designed to create a compliant industrialized workforce, is no longer appropriate for the digital, hyper-connected world we now occupy.  Learning must become increasingly fluid, personalized, and student-driven.

Correction: Learning is becoming increasingly fluid, personalized, and student-driven, thanks to technology and the abundance of educational options families now demand and utilize.  Schooling (as opposed to learning) is becoming increasingly obsolete as more families opt out or demand a more differentiated learning evironment for their children. 

Professional educators can embrace the lessons of unschooling and homeschooling and accept that children can learn far more when they direct their own learning experiences, and transform the experience of schooling into something far more personalized, or they can watch their industry gradual crumble into a relic of the past.

Recent CQ Researcher issue focuses on homeschooling

I was recently interviewed for a special issue of CQ Researcher, a bimonthly public policy publication that attempts to offer a comprehensive look at hot-button issues.  The March 7, 2014 edition examines the topic of homeschooling.  The complete issue, written by Marcia Clemmitt, features several articles and is available here.

In an effort to provide a "balanced" view of the topic, the issue is sometimes longer on opinion than fact, but nevertheless offers a multi-perspective analysis of what I consider one of the most interesting developments in American educational history.

My comments appear in a section called, "Can home schooling help public schools?"  Relevant passage:

In the long run, says Gary Houchens, an associate professor of educational administration, leadership and research at Western Kentucky University, the public schools badly need fresh ideas about how to tackle today's tough education demands, and the experiences of home-schoolers might provide some insights.

“The current structures of education have outlived their usefulness,” Houchens says. That's largely because, for the first time in history, “we have to figure out how to do something that schools were never designed to do — educate all students to proficiency,” he says. It's clear by now that this unprecedented task cannot be achieved using many standard school practices, such as “age-level groupings, a fragmented curriculum, days broken up into 60-minute periods by traditional subject matter such as reading or math, and letter grades,” he says.

But what new practices and structures might effectively replace those models remains a mystery, Houchens says. He argues that the embrace of home schooling by more and more parents might provide some answers, if educators study them. “What does it mean that kids can be educated in their own homes at least to a comparable level that they are in schools” and that some people find homeschooling “a personalized model that schools don't provide and that seems to work better for their child?” he asks.

Actually, while I do believe that no one knows what the future holds, the features of America's emerging schooling structures are becoming more clear to me.  Whatever education looks like later this century, I believe families will demand more personalization, flexibility, and choice than the traditional structure of state-run schooling can provide.  And it is in these features that high-quality homeschooling excels.

Read my review of Joseph Murphy's excellent book, Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement, here, along with my thoughts on what all of this means for people who work in traditional schools.  A version of this post also appeared on Penelope Trunk's homeschooling website.

 Read my post, "Countering educators' bias against homeschooling," here.