Paul Harvey once had a review of Amish children who left their homes and went onto college. He said that the majority of them tested much higher than regular students who had had high school and many science courses. This may be a little different now with so much tech stuff, but if they are bright, it shouldn’t take long for them to catch up.

In my area we have Amish who have a thriving business in the building trade. They are bright and motivated to succeed. Hooray for them.

Some homeschool without realizing the amount of work that it takes. The parent should become the teacher to help the child be successful. I know of some who let their kid quit because of bullies but she only studies less than 5 hours a week. RIDICULOUS!

The experiences of my sons are very similar to yours. I will be generous and say that each had more than 3 good teachers. Maybe about 25% of them were good. Only a handful were excellent, and these teachers were all in the A/P or I/B classes.

I did mention that teenagers sometimes start to resist their parents efforts and that often high school is the time to let someone else become the bad guy, but I know of many teenagers who do not resist. In fact I am aware of a number of families that actually started homeschooling in high school. High school presents a whole different set of social pressure for teenagers, and this is often where the real bullying can kick in. Plus the class sizes are often larger and as a few other posters mentioned, many teachers have absoultely no control over their classrooms. This is a problem when you are dealing with 7 year olds…but it can be a life threatening situation when you have 16 and 17 year olds involved. It can actually be very scary for many children to be in this type of classroom situation.

I just want to make clear that I agree with everything you are saying. I just feel inclined to defend my personal choices, which were excruciatingly thought out, logical for our situation, and worked for us. There are many paths to success, security, and happiness.

I agree it is a game, and I am not in favor of the game at all. I think public education is somewhat fascist the way it is set up. But since we were stuck on LI, (for the kids to be near their day). we do the best we can for them. Since my divorce left me 52K underwater, and with nothing but the shirt on my back, with 2 toddlers, I had very little time to save for their college. We went the alternative route-rent in a great district for high school only, and let my (luck of birth) extremely bright kids thrive. While I know my daughter could have gotten into a good school from anywhere, she would not be able to afford to go anywhere at all.

For us, so far, it was our only play, and a gamble that is paying off big time- full tuition scholarship to MIT. She tried for Intel, but her mentor college’s laser broke, and it was needed for her experiment, so she was out of the running. But I do recommend, to any parent, the Kaplan courses, it brought her scores up a bit, if only because it gave her dedicated time to focus on the exams, and a concrete study plan. The most effective few hundred bucks we’ve ever spent!

I too went to a marginal public school, with 1 art teacher, but got a full scholarship to one of the 3 best art schools- a school my guidance counselor had never heard of- I found it in the big book of schools at the library at the advice of my teacher. It absolutely depends almost entirely on the determination of the student. My parents did not even understand why a girl would want to go to college!

And you know what? It didn’t interfere with my path toward a career in science at all. I still got into (and got a scholarship at) a top school for undergrad, and again for grad school. I think that anyone who has the talent to win the Intel competition, but lacks the opportunity to do a project, could easily do the same.

And once you’re in grad school, nobody gives a rat’s nether region what you did or didn’t do while you were in high school, or even while you were in college. (An exception may be if you want to go into a really competitive field where professors only take a small number of students each year – then your undergraduate research record may come into play. But for the vast majority of fields, this doesn’t apply.) In fact, in terms of its effect on your later career, I’d say that the only really good reason to get involved in research as a high school student or as an undergrad is to figure out whether you like doing research or not.

So no, I don’t think that doing your job as a parent absolutely requires that you “stretch it to the limit” to send your kids to a superimpressive high school. Whether the alternative is homeschooling or a more modest traditional school, truly talented students are going to thrive wherever they are.

You are right in that I am basing this on my own children’s high school, where the a voice coach from the Metropolitan Opera coaches our chorus, and our students place as finalist in Intel and Seamans (spelling?) every year. It is crazy with options (e.g. 12 languages taught), and competition. You have to pick a schooling forum that suits your kids. My school excels with extremely bright and driven kids, so my kids are doing well. If I had kid who had difficulty in class- I would choose another district, one that was more nurturing to every kind of student.

Homeschooling may be best for some, but others have made an excellent point that during the teen years, there will be resistance, and it might be easier for all to go to school outside the home at point.

But if a kid dreams of being a scientist, and could won the Intel competition, would they have that opportunity as a homeschooler? Do most home-schoolers have the resources to purchase that kind of equipment? My job as parent is just to open as many doors as possible for my kids, whatever door they choose to walk through is up to them. For us that means stretching it to the limit for this district for 6 years, for others it means homeschooling.

As an adult myself, I realize that you were cheated, but I still think this is kind of awesome. :)

I’m not so old that I’ve forgotten what High School was like. I went to a wealthy suburban school with a good reputation, and I got excellent grades while there. I say that only to let you know 2 things: First, I don’t have a grudge against the school because I was a failure there, and secondly, being at the top of my class, I was assigned to the best teachers in the school, both because I was taking college prep classes and because the school seemed to have a policy of putting the hardworking and/or academically talented students in some classes, while putting the not so talented and/or not so hardworking students in other classes.

My experience was that most of the teachers were not particularly good at their jobs. They couldn’t control their classes, couldn’t motivate their students to care about learning, and couldn’t really challenge those of us who did care about learning. The best of my teachers (I can count them on one hand) were good at two of those things, but none were good at all three. Of my favorite teachers:

One was an engineer who had left his career to teach math and was somehow working as a teacher without a teaching certification, but the school district put an end to that and he had to leave the job.

The second taught physical science and physics who was tired of all the administrative crap that the school put him through and was building a boat in a shed behind his house so he and his wife (a math teacher at a different school) could sail to Hong Kong where they were going to tutor some children of a friend of theirs. He left my junior year.

The third taught computer programming, algebra II, and calculus. He had a mastery of his subject matter that few of the other teachers could claim in their subjects. When the school got a new computer lab (a changeover from Apples to PCs) the summer after I took computer programming, he went to bat for me and two of my friends who wanted to take a second programming class (the school did not offer it) and we got a special class the next year, the first semester taught by him, and the second semester taught by a student teacher he arranged to have brought in so we could learn a second programming language. He went the distance and recently retired. He and my stepfather (who built his house) keep in touch and he tells my stepfather I was his favorite student.

Regarding the teachers who I would say were not particularly good at their jobs, I could go on and on. Teachers who allowed open bullying in their classroooms, teachers who allowed their students to openly mock them, teachers who didn’t know their material, professional high school coaches whose day job was teaching basic math, history, or social studies badly, teachers who didn’t know their material (after decades of teaching it!), teachers who would write tests with multiple choice questions featuring no right answer, or two answers that were perfectly correct (I had one teacher who stopped letting me ask questions during the tests for this very reason), teachers whose method of grading essay questions was (apparently) to look at the length of the answer (Sitting on a 98% in History class, I ‘tested’ a teacher who I suspected of doing this by writing a nonsensical story about a biscuit that travelled the world on the back of a whale instead of answering his question about ancient Rome or whatever and got no points taken off. For the rest of the class I would just write whatever I felt like in the spaces he left for essay questions. Perhaps he let me do that because I was amusing him and he was aware that I knew the real answers, but shouldn’t he have put a stop to it? Wasn’t I owed some feedback on my real answers? As a high school kid, I thought it was awesome that I could get away with that, as an adult, I realize I was cheated.) I typically spent the time in his class reading instead of listening to him. Despite his lazy grading policy, he was at least good enough to understand that his material (at the rate he was covering it, anyway) didn’t challenge me, and I had already read the text, anyway. As long as I was reading a history book of some sort he left me alone.

Remember, I was one of the top students at a comparitavely good school, generally getting placed into the classrooms of the best teachers. A dedicated parent (or group of parents, working together) who can read & write will likely do at least as good as a set of ‘average-to-good’ teachers, and if your student is an average student while your school district has an average school, she probably won’t generally get ‘average-to-good’ teachers, and she’ll get very little exposure to the best teachers. In the face of all of that, homeschooling makes a lot of sense, and ‘yuppies’ opinion of their own teaching abilities (remember, they’re not going to be teaching 5 sets of 25 kids, but 1 set of 1-4 kids whose abilities they know quite well) doesn’t seem so unreasonable.

The best teachers I’ve had in my life were college professors with little-to-no training as a teacher. They had a love for and mastery of their material that was seldom matched by the teachers I had before college. For that matter, I taught undergrads while I was in grad school and my training for that was a two-hour class dealing primarily with sexual harrassment.

Sorry for the long post. I get fired up about this because my school failed so many bright kids, and it happens every day all over the country. They’ll likely fail your kids, too. You’re better off teaching them yourself, if you can.

I bet that if you gave any professional teacher the same kind of beneficial conditions that homeschooling parents have, they’d achieve superior outcomes too. It’s not magic.