Standardized Testing Versus Home Schooling

The following comment was posted: “Yes, and what REALLY gets me is when they demand home-schooled children take their standardized tests when it has been proven over and over that they are testing at the 80th to 90th percentile on average and the SAT scores of home-schooled children say it ALL! All the district has to do is gear their precious curriculum to the subject matter of the test and the kids can sometimes pass! Why can’t we just get back to the basics. Teach the child to read, write and do arithmetic. Teach them what they need to know to excel in the job market in our technologically advanced society.” I think I need to clarify a few things.

The first issue here is home-schooling, the second is standardized testing, and the third is general curriculum, and I’ll address them one at a time. I never intend to endorse home-schooling, nor to imply that standardized testing is useless. In fact, if there’s anyplace where standardized testing is needed, it’s in home-schooling situations. Additionally, curriculum is an entirely separate issue, and whatever that curriculum is, there does need to be some form of standardized testing geared toward it.

I’ll state that as far as I’m concerned, home-schooling should be a last resort, and only in cases where several conditions are met. The first condition has to be that there is no other reasonable alternative. The public schools available must be bad, I mean really bad, as in unsafe (gang activity, etc.) and poorly staffed with utterly incompetent teachers, because I’ve seen plenty of incompetents home-schooling their children. There should be no good private schools available; while I’m not a fan of private schools, especially religion-based ones, they are still generally better than home-schooling.

The second condition is that the parent or parents conducting the schooling need to be just as qualified, or preferably better qualified, as the teachers a school district would hire for each subject. The comment above is a perfect example, for instance, of someone who does not understand statistics in the least, nor logic. First, the average scores on tests are relatively meaningless, since the extremes may vary considerably more than those of regularly schooled children. In addition, the individual strengths, and weaknesses, of the person(s) conducting the home-schooling are likely to be reflected in the children, rather than exposure to a variety of teaching talents, thus the child with a strong math/weak verbal parent may become strong in math but even weaker in verbal skills.