What can I learn from the homeschooling movement?
My conversation with innovation leader Michael Horn forces me to reckon with my bias against homeschooling.
One part of my conversation with Michael Horn has lingered with me since our conversation a few weeks ago. When I asked Horn, who is an expert in innovation in education, what he thinks about the increasingly factionalized fight over public funding outside of public schools (voucher programs; charter schools; homeschooling), he pointed out the following:
“The ability to make progress toward mastery based learning or student success or the chance to collaborate can’t happen right now because the oxygen is getting sucked up by battling factions. A core lesson from innovation is that when no one agrees on the outcomes or how you get there, the only tools available for a leader are power tools (hiring and firing, fiat, other brutal tools). You don’t want to use these in public school settings, even if they’re available. The only tool you have to make progress is the tool of separation. I don’t think that’s an end state. I think that if you can separate and prove success, families and students want to join. To me, it’s a short-term move to build a base. Starting small with a group of people and building success can be incredibly healthy, actually.”
Horn’s is an underrepresented viewpoint in most of the circles that I occupy. Those circles tend to view the movement for diversification of schools, especially through charter networks, as a corporate-seeming movement that often serves to validate paranoia and affirm teaching methods and organizational structures that can deeply harm children in the long haul. Many valiant leaders have placed protecting public education, rightly, at the center of their lives as leaders and activists, and capitulating to the decentering forces of recent history feels like giving up hope. Horn presented a third way: understanding that fragmentation as part of a process that would ultimately strengthen a resurgent, centralized, innovative public school system in the future.
I’m not interested in speaking about public and charter schools in depth, because, though I have my own opinions, as neither a public school teacher nor a charter school teacher, I don’t bring much that’s valuable to this conversation, at least from a teaching perspective. One of my greatest hopes for this project is that it will ultimately bring me into more regular contact with public and charter school teachers to pursue a deeper understanding of this particular issue, which I’ve thought about often.
I’ve also been thinking about a third group beyond public and charter schools, one that I haven’t thought about as much: homeschools.
There’s so much stigma against homeschooling in this country, but that stigma is transforming rapidly. As record numbers of families are choosing to homeschool their children, I find myself the paranoid one: the rise in homeschooling seems to represent not just the fragmentation of a school system but a total splintering of that system into little, sharp, untraceable pieces. In my paranoia, the homeschool movement feels like the quickest route to a dystopian society like The Handmaid’s Tale. Another reason for my instinctive suspicion toward homeschooling comes from the feeling that teaching is viewed as a characteristically easy profession – for anecdotal reference, I’d challenge you to open a dating app in New York City and count how many people think it’s really cute to say that they’d become a high school teacher when they retire, “just for fun” – it’s a little bit offensive that so many parents seem to think they’re really qualified to suddenly become educators.
Like it or not, though, homeschooling is the hot new innovation in education.
The flashy, VC-funded startups at South By Southwest’s Education conference (no hate on that conference; I desperately want to go one day) really have nothing on homeschooling: no radical change can be implemented quite as rapidly or and lead to such immediate change in an individual student’s life as the shift to homeschooling can. And while to me, homeschooling will always make me think of the weird kid who joined the rec league baseball team but didn’t know how to make any friends, I’ve had to grudgingly admit, since Michael Horn set me off researching, that homeschooling can actually be really effective and produce functional, happy, well-educated adults.
I think, here, about many of the gaps in the school experience that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light for teachers, students, and their parents. In my own and many of my colleagues’s lives, there’s been a renewed awareness of the need to really make the gathering time of class meaningful: what students can do on their own, they should be able to do on their own, in the order and at the time that makes the most sense. Many of us have noticed that we need to use technology practically, but not heavily. Our classrooms need to adapt to students’ well being and needs, especially their mental health needs. Students could disengage easily when they were expected to connect to class online, and now that they’re back in the classroom, they’re still skeptical about engaging with the usual tried-and-true methods. Moreover, as they feel the weight of just how much they missed across the last two years, more and more students feel like they’re lost at sea in a school that’s kept up its forward pace from grade level to grade level, year to year.
Homeschooling, for a lot of kids, looks like a solution to all of these problems. For a lot of those kids, it really is a great option. Michael Horn’s words, though, have inspired me to believe that the renaissance in homeschooling could lead not to radicalized, free-for-all education, but, if we (teachers) play our cards right, better funded, better liked, and more appreciated schools. In that way, I don’t need to fear homeschooling: I need to learn from it.
Even though I couldn’t get the weird homeschooled kids out of my mind, this week I embarked on a little peer-reviewed research journey to try and get some more reliable statistics on the efficacy of homeschooling. I knew that I needed to escape the monolithic vision I had that homeschooling looks like an anti-vax, hippy-earthy-Amish mother types leading their kids through an education that’s half Waldorf School, half indoctrination. I found that homeschooling is often, on average, effective. It can give kids who feel they don’t have safe learning environments a safer place to be. It can introduce them to opportunities that their underfunded public schools don’t. It can play to their strengths. It can produce healthy adults. I really don’t want to admit to any of this.
Michael Horn, who’s studied innovation in education for virtually his entire career, pointed out to me that “[nothing] is innovative unless it’s actually benefiting and helping students make progress. If it’s not helping, it’s not innovation.” Teachers and schools often struggle to innovate, and because factions in the United States seem to fundamentally disagree about what benefits students and how to measure that benefit, a fracture might be – I’m not convinced, fully, but Horn is – necessary. “A more deliberate crafting of innovation” in schools, Horn told me, “may require separation initially.”
For some students and families, homeschooling is an appealing innovative technology. The fact that it is, on average, constructive for students should make educators think deeply about what they can learn from that growing separation. For a lot of families, homeschooling really is a better option for kids, at least for a while. What can we learn from that separation?
Kids, especially teenagers, learn well when their environment can respond to their mental, biological, and physical needs. Adolescent psychology illustrates that many common classroom management practices – physical separation, the need to sit still, a teacher-led approach – aren’t ideal for most kids. Truthfully, most teachers I’ve ever met work as hard as they can to respond to students’ needs, but the moment that resources are limited (crowded classrooms; teachers out with Covid), that responsiveness can become impossible.
Kids yearn for choice in the classes that they can take and the interests that they can pursue. For some, that means flexible scheduling around sports or special interests; for others, it means the opportunity to take state-funded courses that are more interesting than what’s offered in schools, and to engage with those classes in the way that allows them to pursue independent inquiry.
Independence feels great. The sky is the limit, and a kid learning at home doesn’t have to think about her, his, their relationship to a larger group in every moment.
The first and second reasons are where we all – teachers and everyone else – can learn the most. Where in the previous century, “lab schools” (which eventually and often morphed into charter networks) studied the ways to apply what we know about learning and the brain to classrooms, the homeschool appears to be the twenty-first century’s lab for schooling. Though wealthy and well-funded schools, like private and some charter schools, can and do already offer many of these responsive, choice-driven curricula. Homeschooling can look to some like the quickest, most democratic way to achieve those ends – though, as many choose to ignore, it’s hardly a democratic option, because in order to homeschool a child, at least one adult in a household must both have the requisite education to supervise and also work either seldom or not at all in order to be present for that learning.
The last reason, though, is the reason why I wouldn’t ever want to homeschool my own children, and why I hope that the trend is, as Horn suggests, just a moment of separation that will ultimately strength a reunited, strengthened school system on the other end of the pandemic. One of the most difficult parts of teaching, for me, is introducing students to impossibly challenging material and assignments in a community of kids who will respond differently to all of them. Schools are where kids can learn what it means to live the difficult parts of life with people whose lives are not their own. If anything, we need to put more into our community ethos than we ever have before if we are to raise generations of community-oriented, interreliant, relationally healthy political leaders, caretakers, and family members.
Independence appeals to everyone, especially Americans. Teaching kids that independence comes first, though, belies the undergirding American truth that achieving independence, or “freedom,” or “liberty,” or whatever other buzzword we seek, requires collaboration, coexistence, listening, and community care. We can’t have one without the other. While splintering might drive innovation, providing us an experiment in enhanced liberty, what we have to hope is that we don’t forget that we’re seeking to innovate not individual learning but a community resource and guaranteed right: equal education for all.