Josh Powell wanted to go to school so badly that he pleaded with local officials to let him enroll. He didn\u2019t know exactly what students were learning at Buckingham County High School, in rural central Virginia, but he had the sense that he was missing something fundamental.<\/p>\n
By the time he was 16, he had never written an essay. He didn\u2019t know South Africa was a country. He couldn\u2019t solve basic algebra problems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So starts a recent Washington Post article<\/a>\u00a0about Virginia\u2019s religious exemption.<\/p>\n
Powell was taught at home, his parents using a religious exemption that allows families to entirely opt out of public education, a Virginia law that is unlike any other in the country. That means that not only are their children excused from attending school \u2014 as those educated under the state\u2019s home-school statute are \u2014 but they also are exempt from all government oversight.<\/p>\n
School officials don\u2019t ever ask them for transcripts, test scores or proof of education of any kind: Parents have total control.<\/p>\n
. . .<\/p>\n
Josh Powell eventually found a way to get several years of remedial classes and other courses at a community college.<\/p>\n
Now he\u2019s studying at Georgetown University.<\/p>\n
. . .<\/p>\n
Josh Powell, now 21, wonders how much more he could have accomplished if he hadn\u2019t spent so much time and effort catching up.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people should definitely have the freedom to home-school as long as it\u2019s being done well and observed,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t see any reason for there not to be accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of all, he worries about his siblings: There are 11. One, old enough to be well into middle school, can\u2019t read, Josh Powell said.<\/p>\n
Now he\u2019s trying to get his brothers and sisters into school, to ensure that they don\u2019t have to work as hard as he did to catch up \u2014 or get left behind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Go read the whole thing<\/a>\u2014the article is excellent. The long and short of it is that Josh\u2019s parents used Virginia\u2019s religious exemption clause to get out of any requirement to teach him anything, and then proceeded to give him what he knew was a substandard education, despite his desire to learn more than they were teaching him. In the end, Josh overcame all of that and managed to obtain remedial classes at a community college (without his parents\u2019 help, I should add) and then gain admission to Georgetown. And now, he wants to see the law changed so that other children will not find themselves in his situation.<\/p>\n
What I want to turn to now is HSLDA\u2019s response. Before I do that, I should mention that the article includes\u00a0a quote from Michael Farris. It\u2019s not long:<\/p>\n
The law is completely clear, said Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, who has claimed the exemption for his family. It doesn\u2019t make sense to have the public school system regulate home schools, he said, because he thinks home schools are far more successful.<\/p>\n
As to whether there could be children getting an inadequate education, he said: \u201cWell sure, it\u2019s possible. But there are whole public school districts that are slipping through the cracks.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Dear Mr. Farris: What you said is called \u201ctu quoque<\/a>.\u201d It is a logical fallacy. You are a lawyer, you should know that. Now with that out of the way,\u00a0what I really want to look at is the official response HSLDA issued<\/a> the day after the Washington Post article came out.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, my God, I have a chance to learn!\u201d\u00a0The Washington Post\u2019s\u00a0recent article about Virginia\u2019s religious exemption statute includes this fascinating quote from Josh Powell, the young man who never attended public school because his parents obtained an exemption on religious grounds.<\/p>\n
The article criticizes the law that allows the exemption and lobbies for its change. But let\u2019s slow down and think this through.<\/p>\n
How many public school teachers ever hear their students say, \u201cOh, my God, I have a chance to learn\u201d? Very few. Because sadly, public schools crush many kids\u2019 desire to ever learn again. And this has been documented.<\/p>\n
The largest study comparing homeschool students to others (by Dr. Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland) amazingly revealed that homeschool 8th grade students score the same as 12th grade public school students!<\/p>\n
Why do homeschool students score an almost unbelievable four grade levels ahead of others by 8th grade? It\u2019s very simple. It\u2019s not that homeschool kids or their parents have higher IQs\u2014I suspect they don\u2019t. It\u2019s simply that homeschools don\u2019t crush a kid\u2019s inborn desire to learn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What is HSLDA\u2019s evidence that public schools crush children\u2019s \u201cinborn desire to learn\u201d while homeschooling doesn\u2019t? The Rudner study. Let\u2019s review, shall we? Somehow I feel like we\u2019ve been over this before<\/a>. (Also, if you haven\u2019t, you should read this excellent article as well<\/a>.)\u00a0What did Rudner\u2019s study say and how does he feel about the way HSLDA uses it<\/a>?<\/p>\n
Rudner\u2019s study was funded and sponsored by the Home School Legal Defense Assocation.\u00a0 It analyzed the test results of more than 20,000 home schooled students using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and it was interpreted by many to find that the average home schooled student outperformed his or her public school peer.\u00a0 But Rudner\u2019s study reaches no such conclusion, and Rudner himself issued multiple cautionary notes in the report, including the following: \u201cBecause this was not a controlled experiment, the study does not demonstrate that home schooling is superior to public or private schools and the results must be interpreted with caution.\u201d<\/strong> Rudner used a select and unrepresentative sample, culling all of his participants from families who had purchased curricular and assessment materials from Bob Jones University.\u00a0 Because Bob Jones University is an evangelical Christian university (a university which gained a national reputation in the 1980s for its policy of forbidding interracial dating), the sample of participating families in Rudner\u2019s study is highly skewed toward Christian home schoolers.\u00a0 Extrapolations from this data to the entire population of home schoolers are consequently highly unreliable.\u00a0 Moreover, all the participants in Rudner\u2019s study had volunteered their participation.\u00a0 According to Rudner, more than 39,000 contracted to take the Iowa Basic Skills Test through Bob Jones, but only 20,760 agreed to participate in his study.\u00a0 This further biases Rudner\u2019s sample, for parents who doubt the capacity of their child to do well on the test are precisely the parents we might expect not to volunteer their participation.\u00a0 A careful social scientific comparison of test score data would also try to take account of the problem that public school students take the Iowa Basic Skills Test in a controlled environment; many in Rudner\u2019s study tested their own children.<\/p>\n
Rudner himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentation of his work.\u00a0<\/strong> In an interview with the Akron Beacon Journal, which published a pioneering week-long investigative series of articles on home schooling in 2004, Rudner claimed that his only conclusion was that if a home schooling parent \u201cis willing to put the time and energy and effort into it \u2013 and you have to be a rare person who is willing to do this \u2013 then in all likelihood you\u2019re going to have enormous success.\u201d\u00a0 Rudner also said, \u201cI made the case in the paper that if you took the same kids and the same parents and put them in the public schools, these kids would probably do exceptionally well.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In other words, the Rudner study doesn\u2019t say what HSLDA says it says, and Rudner himself is frustrated about how HSLDA is misusing and misinterpreting his study. In other words, HSLDA\u2019s supposed \u201cproof\u201d that public school stifles a child\u2019s \u201cinborn desire to learn\u201d while homeschooling does not is proof of no such thing.<\/p>\n
Back to HSLDA\u2019s response to the Washington Post article:<\/p>\n
When he hit community college, Josh attended remedial classes designed to serve public high school graduates, then zoomed ahead. Now he attends one of the nation\u2019s top 25 universities, earning good grades while working part time and carrying a heavy academic load. Not too bad for a kid who thought he had a bad secondary education!<\/p>\n
If Josh had attended public schools, he would have statistically had a 1-in-5 chance of growing into an illiterate adult. The National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that 21.7% of adults in Josh\u2019s native Buckingham County are illiterate. This is the wreckage of thousands of young people whose desire to learn has been crushed in the public schools.<\/p>\n
I wonder if any of the other kids in Josh\u2019s remedial classes went on to attend one of the nation\u2019s top 25 universities. I doubt it.<\/p>\n
Maybe Josh didn\u2019t learn that South Africa was a country while he was being homeschooled. But he arrived at the gates of young adulthood with his inborn desire to learn fully intact, and that has served him very well indeed. The Virginia religious exemption statute deserves its place of respect.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The HSLDA response is, in essence, \u201cyour bad homeschool experience is nothing to complain about, because you could have a fate worse than receiving an incompetent homeschool education while begging to learn\u2014you could go to public school!\u201d Is HSLDA completely incapable of saying \u201cwe\u2019re sorry your situation was so bad, we feel that it is a terrible thing for any child to slip through the cracks\u201d? Are they incapable of hearing \u201cthat hurt me\u201d and responding with \u201cwe\u2019re sorry\u201d?<\/p>\n
All I have to say is this:\u00a0Where is your sense of compassion, HSLDA?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Josh’s parents used Virginia’s religious exemption clause to get out of any requirement to teach him anything, and then proceeded to give him what he knew was a substandard education, despite his desire to learn more than they were teaching him. HSLDA’s response is, in essence, “your bad homeschool experience is nothing to complain about, because you could have had a fate worse than receiving an incompetent homeschool education while begging to learn—you could have gone to public school!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[198],"class_list":["post-16368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homeschool","tag-hslda"],"yoast_head":"\n
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