Home Schooling

I've thought a lot about home schooling during my career as an educator, and as my wife and I talk about having kids at some point. One of the first times I considered it from a professional lens was when I was traveling in Kenya in 2007 and I stayed with a missionary family in Kisumu, a small city on Lake Victoria. They had two sons aged eight and ten, and while they had enrolled them in an international school, it struck me how richly educational the experience of just living in another country can be for young kids, provided they have adults in their lives who would support their inquiry of authentic questions that emerge from the experience of travel.

For anyone who knows the history of education, and who follows many of the trends that are popular today in education, the narrative of the "industrial model" of schooling should be very familiar. As we talk about the information age, flipped classrooms, mobile learning, personalized learning, and project based learning, parent choice and accountability, it surprises me that there is not more of a discussion of the right place for home schooling in the education of every child. I imagine that we could provide great value to every student if, as a system, we encouraged a certain kind of home schooling.

Take Logan Laplante, the 13-year old who gave the popular TED talk last year about "hack-schooling." Setting aside any analysis of the content of his talk and what his story suggests about privilege, his performance and skill is evidence of the incredible value that can be built in a nurturing environment where individualized attention supports interest-driven learning.

What kind of changes could we make to traditional schools to foster this level of passion, drive, and exceptional development for all kids? What do these kinds of results suggest should be the role of parents in supporting education when their kids are enrolled in a traditional school? When does it makes sense for a kid like Logan to go back to school? What's the right balance? 

As I wrote a year ago, I think we'll make a lot of progress in providing for all students when we figure out a new model of financing and school choice that prioritizes strong community schools and a competitive ecosystem of private providers of specialized services. Let's add to that recipe a clear and purposeful place for home schooling. Perhaps we budget for training parents to be the kind of coaches and teachers that the best home school parents are; perhaps our public school system should be equipped with social workers who are tasked with visiting homes and helping to set up libraries, work spaces and virtual learning environments. I like the idea of encouraging small collaborative learning groups among families, so that home schooling responsibilities could be shared by several working parents and kids could benefit from group learning. Finally, we might make some real progress in considering the questions of time in school alongside the notion of homeschooling. 

For those of us who are serious about learning and like to talk about what future school should look like, let's seriously open up the exploration to how learning time at home is utilized, whether it's a radical re-imagination, or it's just evenings, weekends, vacation breaks, and… snow days.

Vouchers and the Community School

Free market thinking suggests that the solution to poor school quality is school choice and competition. Align incentives, and schools will be forced to develop and promote their competitive advantage to earn  students, and therefore, their right to exist and perhaps, grow.

Democratic, humanitarian thinking suggests the solution to poor school quality requires investing in our public schools--not "throwing money" at them, but really investing the time, energy, thought and resources to identify their needs, address them, and by extension, address the needs of the community.

I posit today that we don't need to chose. In fact, both camps are right.

What if we did provide vouchers to not a few, but to all students? These vouchers could range from $500 to $15,000, depending on how far we want to go, but essentially they would be designed to give students and parents choice for where they wanted to pursue a vast array of academic and extracurricular learning. These vouchers could permit enrollment in a full-time college prep program, an after school music program, an outdoors adventure summer camp, or a specialized engineering course. With these vouchers, private providers, regulated by an accreditation board, compliance agencies or private ratings agencies, but most importantly, by the market, would compete for the business of students seeking the very best along an array of interests. Wouldn't that help produce a crop of new, excellent programs? Wouldn't that give new opportunities to kids?

Well sure. You really can't argue that it wouldn't produce some great new programs, and give some amount of choice. What you can argue, and the evidence bears it out, is that if vouchers replace public schools, they end up gutting schools as the center of a community, and leaving behind many students and families who are not "educated consumers." That's the cost of vouchers, and why, in this thought experience, I propose vouchers as one half of the solution. Now for the other half:

Imagine that the vouchers previously discussed were used to merely supplement investments in strong, community based schools. These schools would provide critical functions--counselors and academic advisors would support all local students in their academic and career planning, as well as their social and personal health and wellness concerns. In the lower grades, mandatory and excellent literary and math classes would give young children the foundational skills to advance to higher grades, regardless of what specialization they might choose down the line. Classes in civics and government would be taught for middle and high school (and adult) age students, because spreading this knowledge is a public good, and we should guarantee it for the well being of all members of the community.

The community school would house a medical clinic, apprenticeship classes, a library, a media center, tutoring and babysitting. It might have computer labs where students could do distance learning provided by institutions from around the world, and it might have an auditorium where visitors and presenters could educate large audiences.

The community school would provide the home for local sports teams and clubs, to help build local pride and relationships between neighbors. The community school might grant diplomas, or it might simply facilitate students earning diplomas elsewhere. Either way, the community school would serve primarily to support the children and families of its local community, preparing them to contribute to the social good and to achieve their dreams.

Imagine a school system where learning doesn't need to occur in the local school, but it where it absolutely can. That seems like a system that leverages the best of American freedom and democracy, and provides the best model to ensure these national treasures persist for generations into the future.