Homeschooling takes off in Arizona
The city of Marana, Arizona, has seen a 500% population growth in the last decade (and they'll see more after this latest round of snowstorms in the East, I bet) - but the number of homeschooling families in Pima County has grown by an astonishing 545%. The lack of regulations makes Arizona one of the best states in which to homeschool. The homeschooling critics, though, say the parent-teachers should be held to the same standards as the public schools:
Proponents of the expanding effort to keep the classroom at home praise Arizona's shedding of regulations in the mid-1990s that resulted in giving parents more choice in deciding how, and what, their children learn. They say Arizona is one of the best states in which to home-school children.
However, critics say parent-teachers should be held to the same standards that apply to public schools, especially when it comes to student achievement testing. Until the mid-1990s, Arizona required standardized testing of its home-schooled students. Legislators did away with that under pressure from organized home-school parents.
It's the very lack of legislation that is helping Pima County's parents to succeed. What's more, even without the requirement to pass standardized tests, homeschooled children in the U.S. are doing so in huge numbers:
Teachers are focusing classroom efforts on what's necessary for students to pass standardized tests. Yet across the country, home-schoolers continue to score in the 85th percentile on standardized tests...Last year, Pima County fifth-grade students had an average math score in the 56th percentile and an average reading score in the 36th percentile on the Stanford 9 - a national standardized test taken by Arizona students.
Although Pima County parents don't have to have their kids tested, I would be surprised if their homeschooled kids were performing much different from the average for homeschooled kids - meaning, better than the kids in Pima County's public schools. So if it ain't broke, why fix it? The critics who are trying to regulate the homeschoolers are merely trying to block up the exits from the failing school systems and save their funding:
As public schools continue to fall short of national standards, alternative means of education such as charter schools and home schooling appear to be more viable solutions... The effects of the growing home-school movement are also hitting the wallets of Arizona schools, which receive state money based on the average daily student attendance. Schools are losing roughly $5,000 to $7,000 for each student not sitting in a public classroom. For Pima County, that amounts to between $14.5 million and $20.3 million each year.