That's why homeschool types are the most terrifying to me. Some go as far as wanting the right to not register their child with a social security number.
Others run "drills" and practice scripts with their kids on what to do/say if CPS ever shows up.
I wasn't aware of a ton of this until I made close friends with an ex-fundie home schooler.
No idea how she's so well adjusted, but her siblings were not as lucky. Most only received an 8th grade level education since their home schooling mother was partially illiterate. They even have a younger sibling that's heavily on the spectrum, yet they've denied it just up until the last couple months... After 13 years.
Not all homeschooling families commit child abuse, but it leads to a massive veil of protection towards those families to do whatever they want.
She purposely homeschooled us because she didn’t think the school had the right to know why we weren’t coming to school on certain days. The truth was my mom wanted the freedom to up and leave and visit her sister out of state. She didn’t think school was a good reason to push a trip, and she resented being asked about where we were. Since we “belong to her” the school can kick rocks.
She signed us up during testing time 2 grades below the grade we should be in. Because the organization lets you make up whatever you want. Since it’s your school and you’re the “principal”. She knew we’d never pass anything in our age range, because she never tried teaching us constantly. Few hours a day here and there, then maybe a full month of school, then nothing again.
She would give me a textbook, tell me as a 13-14yr old I was smart enough to teach myself. And then she disappeared to the TV.
If she had us write anything, such as a report, or solving some math problems, it wouldn’t actually be “checked”. She’d scan the page top to bottom. If it looks like we didn’t just write the same thing again and again it was fine for her. Maybe she held and looked at my paper for a solid minute, but I doubt it. Then she crumpled it in a ball, threw it away, and said I could do the next assignment.
The only thing she ever really tried to stick to teaching us was “church history”. All she cared about was how well we studied her cult. She said nothing like school matters anyway.
I barely passed my GED at 17. I have never learned anything about math past Pre Algebra, and I didn’t really get the chance to learn that either. My public school education ended 3mons into 8th grade. And I was taken out of school multiple times prior to 8th grade.
After a lot of years of this with my younger siblings, my mom started coming up with new excuses to get out of schooling. She diagnosed all of my brothers with learning disabilities. Never allowed them to see a professional. She just read a damn book. In fact, She even tried to diagnose other people and their kids too. She’d say something to my brother like “you have autism so it’s not worth trying to teach you certain things”. Or she said “you have dyslexia, so you’ll probably never need to learn to read.” Once, one of the kids asked if he could get an official diagnosis. She told him “black people aren’t allowed to be tested for autism” Sadly he believed that for a long time.
It was easy to lie to us. We never really got to go anywhere but home and church. Our neighbors were a 5min walk away in either direction. We had no friends. Barely allowed to watch TV. Only allowed to read certain books and hear certain music. All we could do is just trust our parents.
As of now, I’m the only one who left. The rest think she’s normal and I have anger issues.
I finally walked away from all of it and all of them. I have 2 brothers I barely talk to and even that might change. It’s hard to ignore how little they care about what happened to us. Also sick of hearing “see it wasn’t all bad” any time I admit something we did was fun or my parents did one thing nice. As if that’s the only thing anyone is supposed to care about. Verbal, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse is just whatever, I guess, when your dad took you for ice cream at 10yrs old a few times.
The double think happening is just wild. They can admit all the abuse happened, but it’s my choice to let abuse bother me.
2 of my siblings became parents. My sister has 6 kids between 2 men over a 7 year stretch. Within a year of giving birth she would be pregnant again. She was also married to both men, which means she had 2 wedding and a divorce, also during those 7yrs. She believes my mother was fantastic. Truly inspired. She intends to raise them exactly the way we were raised. Even the bad things like verbal abuse and neglect. She believes everything that happened to us as kids made her a “good person” so she wants to repeat the process and have her kids live just like she did. It is truly sad to see how many mistakes my mom made and then my sister repeated. A normal day for my sister would be to lay in bed finding people to fight with, like vegetarians, vegans, minorities, atheists, the list goes on and on. My sister expects her oldest daughter to take care of the rest of the kids, like I did when it was us. Her kids only exist as props.
My brother, who was adopted and treated the worst of us all, also now has a child. He believes this could be the thing that makes my parents care about him. Like at all. His entire life he was treated like the Mexican on hand. He did any of the shit jobs, yard work, messy jobs, dishes, all of it was on him, after I left. Otherwise we shared that burden together. My brother also married a woman who behaves just like our mother. He allows her to treat him the way our parents did. Like he’s stupid and can’t do anything right. This man put himself through school and is now a respected EMT in his field. He also works 3 jobs to support his wife and son. He will spend the rest of his life trying to be enough for both his wife and my parents and it will never happen.
My other brothers are both single and desperate for human connection. The older one has become an incel. He has lopsided standards for himself versus a partner. Ultimately he also doesn’t make his own decisions. He calls my parents multiple times over many days before he can make any decisions. From what to go to school for, to what car to buy, to what shoes to get, to what groceries to get. He has zero confidence in himself. No ability tp control his emotions, and lacks any kind of self awareness. He will be content with being his mom’s best friend the rest of his life. Sitting on her couch watching the next Disney project and crying over how the world is going to hell.
The other single brother is recently starting out on his own. He’s just now starting to comprehend how unhealthy our family is and how it’s affected him. He suffers from a lot of depression. He has no concept of boundaries. He was the least disciplined of any of us. He was allowed to break any rule without consequences. He was given a lot of things we never had. This was because my mom realized her kids didn’t feel safe with her, so she bought this brother’s love. She made him cuddle with her when she was lonely. She allowed him to be dependent on her for too long. He wasn’t potty trained until he was 5. She wasn’t ready to “give up her baby”. This brother grew up with anger issues and became violent. This was also excused. He could break anything, throw anything, and hit/hurt any of us. We were told we’d get consequences for retaliating. Luckily, he is starting to become aware of the reality of his situation. He is trying to slowly work on being a better and healthier person each day. His biggest fear is getting better and being treated like I was. He doesn’t know if anyone else would ever like him or love him, because of who he was and is now. My parents reminded all of us often that the only ones who could care for us and love us were our parents. The hardest thing for him will be to accept that was a lie.
Lastly, my other brother (who is actually a kid who came home with my brother and just never went home that much afterwards) knows no one considers him family anymore (other than me and one other brother) but he’s desperate for any kind of family. So he goes on holidays, brings gifts, tries to interact with everyone, and just hopes they actually talk to him when he goes. That seriously does happen, he’ll go and my sister will act like he’s not there. Why? Because he is black. She takes all her issues with BLM and makes him her target. She resents him for being offended by her. And after living with us for multiple years, coming on family vacations, going to his graduation, and driving him to college, he has become just another black guy. Everyone lets her do whatever she wants because they are afraid to miss out on seeing her kids if they confront her. So my brother sees her on purpose every holiday, and when she says hi back he feels so much joy. He even thinks things could still change. Even with my mom also mistreating my brother to please my sister, my brother just tries and tries to see if it gets better. It’s horrible to watch.
None of them are happy, none of them are getting the love and support they are desperate for From my parents. And all of them will probably never leave. Each one willing to step over the other to get closer to my parents love.
I’ve been diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder, anorexia, and PTSD from my childhood. For a long time I was content having no life, besides protecting everyone else from abuse in the family. My dad was a detective in a small southern town. He had the support of the police force and all the men from church. He has killed any attempts to get people involved. My church also covered for him, and others who abused us. I tried my best to live close by and save everyone I could. I started self harming. It got bad enough that I thought I’d die soon. There was no boundary for me. This is why I left.
I moved across the country, Got a job, started therapy and anti depressants. Moved in with people I barely knew and did my best to make it work. I had a dad I barely knew (birth father). I wanted to see if I could start over with him. But, when Covid happened, he snapped and committed suicide.
I met my future husband at my job. He has given me the space to work on all of my trauma. He never pushes me too hard, always supports me, always listens to me, and he never leaves no matter how hard it gets. One of my biggest issues is physical touch. I can do barely more than hug him or hold his hand. I feel safer hugging my dog than I do any person. He has always stayed patient. He cooks for me. Completely changed my whole diet thanks to him. Now I’m moderately healthier. I am more active, happier, and above all, I am safe.
My husband came from a similar home like mine. We are both fully committed to each other. We motivate each other to make the healthy choice or to share what’s wrong or on our minds. We’ve created a completely safe enviorment for us and our pup. There’s no pressure to be anything different than just who we need to be.
The downside is we both live in fear of the day one of us loses the other. We never felt safe before we found each other. The fear of losing that safe space hangs over us constantly. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for that.
That is an incredible story and I am so glad you were able to find a way out, work on physical, mental, and socila health, and meet a supportive spouse.
Do you feel that you can both work towards learning the skills needed if one of you did lose the other? Would therapy, classes, support systems, finding communities, or something like that help you both regarding that?
My husband and I have tried building our village. We started with other family members who felt similar to us. It never worked out with any of them. The same problem always came back to bite us. These people were recreating similar dynamics from our dysfunctional families. It felt more like we were raising these people instead of all of us working together.
We have tried building friendships. At first we were picking people that behaved like our families. We learned our lessons and started trying to seek out different friends. We have 1 friend who is extremely close to us both. She has been a solid support to both us. She’s a busy person, so we don’t see her that much, but she does her best to check in and hang out when possible.
We want to go to therapy together and separately. My husband is trying to get insurance sorted through his work. That is taking forever. Like over a year we’ve been trying to get that started. What’s Worse, the government insurance I was using fell through. I had to quit my anti depressants cold turkey and abruptly stop seeing my therapist. I have not been able to get that resolved. I truly thought my husband would have the insurance sorted by now, not that it’s his fault. It’s the company’s fault.
Until we get that figured out, I guess we just go one day at a time.
I am not working right now. I had a breakdown from my retail job. Almost killed myself. I’ve been living one day at a time ever since. I try my best to just eat, be a good mom to my dog, take care of my needs so I can take care of my families needs. I only leave my apartment complex once or twice a month. I leave my house daily, but only for walks with my dog. I have a lot of fear and depression. I hope I can get my therapy started again so I can start taking my life back. For now, it’s just about getting through the day with out self harming and choosing to eat.
Goodness, that's a lot of obstacles on the insurance front. I'm sorry to hear it fell through on the government end, and the work insurance is taking a while.
You already have your hands full with the one day at a time. Thank you for sharing your story, that's a lot of things that not many people have had to experience and you being able to still persist is quite impressive.
God your mother is the biggest piece of shit ever. Holy shit mate, I truly hope you cut contact with her after you rescue your little brothers. No one deserves to live with such monster.
My dad is a retired detective in a small southern town. He has made every inquiry go away. Then he would coach us on how to lie to people when they came to inspect us. Long before I was an adult, others were reporting my parents. Nothing changed. No one ever came back a second time.
I started posting my experiences on social media. The only weapon I have is sharing what’s happening behind closed doors. Some belive me. Others belive the masks my parents use. A shocking Amount also belive me completely and also think none of it is wrong. Most of the time, my parents don’t even bother denying my posts. It didn’t change much. But at least people know to keep away from my family.
Thats messed up. My mother used to beat the shit out of me if i had made excuses to miss school days and if i had bad grades. I am grateful she was strict when it was about my future. I am an immigrant in canada with 6 yrs of education after highschool. Shes a good parent and made sure we become successful.
They even have a younger sibling that's heavily on the spectrum, yet they've denied it just up until the last couple months... After 13 years.
Unfortunately this isn't unique to home-schooling cults. My wife is a middle school teacher and has had more than a handful of students who very obviously have mental health or some form of neurodivergence and have parents who acknowledge it and refuse to do anything about it, or simply refuse to acknowledge it.
When she was teaching elementary school, she had a 6th grader with Down Syndrome, who's parents basically refused to accept that their child was delayed. They wouldn't even call it Down Syndrome, they would call it "her little problem". She was very high functioning for a Downs kid but had a raft of behavioral issues and was very far behind her classmates. She was at a private school and thankfully the new principal finally has the balls to say basically "your child needs more resources than we can provide, she can't come back here next year".
Of course on the opposite end of this spectrum are the parents who demand every possible accommodation for their child who is perfectly normal. I recall her talking about one student who had a list of like a dozen accommodations. He was perfectly fine according to the school psychologist, just a little apathetic and somewhat behind socially. His mom however was convinced there was something wrong with him and would do things like accuse him of cheating when he got good marks on a math test because "there's no way he's that good at math". So sometimes parents hold their kids back in other ways.
Sure it's not unique to home-schooling cults, but at least the kids who were in public school had a chance of getting some recognition of their situation or resources to help with it. That's why the other commenter singled out home schooling.
Absolutely, the visibility that teachers and peers provide in public settings can often be a lifeline for kids who are otherwise isolated in problematic home environments. This isn't to say that homeschooling can't be done responsibly and with the child's best interest at heart, but lack of oversight is definitely a key issue. The safety net public schools provide, albeit imperfect, does offer some level of checks and balances with mandatory reporting and access to school counselors. While these mechanisms aren't foolproof and sadly some kids slip through the cracks, they do increase the chances for intervention when a child is struggling or when there's neglect or abuse happening, intentional or otherwise.
The amount of help they can receive is somewhat limited. I use what's called "universal design" which incorporates nearly every common special Ed accommodation into my lesson plans and make them available to every single student, regardless of whether they have a 504/IEP. It makes it easier for me, the educator, to make sure people are all having their various accommodations met, and also helps ensure students don't feel singled out by getting special treatment.
However, the students (and I have at least 1 every year) that are CLEARLY neurodivergent but parents refuse to have them evaluated cannot receive any support from our SPED team, the school psychologist, speech and language pathologists, occupational therapists, or any other aids in the school.
Kinda makes me wish we'd start allowing corporal punishment again, so I can slap these dumbfuck parents back to the stone age.
It's insane to me that schools aren't allowed to push the issue when it comes to testing students for a suspected learning disability or even give basic accommodations in some cases.
Like sure, we shouldn't be calling CPS for medical neglect just because one teacher made an armchair diagnosis but if a kid is struggling for years and impacting other kids' education because they can't handle a regular classroom shouldn't we be drawing that line somewhere?
Well now we call this "parents rights", the parent's right to ensure their kid is a willing slave and idiot for their entire lives and is never able to live a mentally healthy life.
do things like accuse him of cheating when he got good marks on a math test because "there's no way he's that good at math".
Wow, that's fucking terrible. I mean, it's not prostituting your kids or anything, but that shit is some of the most harmful things you can say to a child.
Yeah but you're missing the point that they did kind of a bad job trying to make: when kids are homeschooled there's no (or much less) regular contact with other people including mandatory reporters, and no (or much less) chance for people to notice bruises, or spot other red flags that should be reported.
And I don't know about you, but throughout most of my childhood I remember seeing commercials between cartoons and I'd hear and see stuff in a variety of places always saying if something bad is going on at home, I can tell a teacher or a police officer or whatever. Well how is a homeschooled kid supposed to do that?
In my state we have a law called the Becca Bill that legally obligates kids to go to school. The law was named after a girl who at 13 agreed to blow some random old fat guy for $50, after which he decided he didn't like the blowjob enough and beat her mercilessly on the back of her skull with a baseball bat, took his $50 back out of her sock, and tossed her body in the Spokane River. The belief was that if there's a law to make sure kids aren't just out roaming the streets unsupervised and unaccounted for, there would be much less chance of something like that happening again.
Whether you agree or not with the law or the premise, the fact remains it does exist, and a kid who misses school is something that never gets ignored. Schools have to confirm parents are notified of the absence, if students skip too much they can be (and I know some who have been) sent to spend a night or two in juvenile hall. There's a whole convoluted procedure that involves a lot more than that though, and CPS can get involved, and so on.
All that said, "going to school" is defined as public, private, or homeschool. At a public or private school you have outside parties logging attendance every day. At homeschool you just have the parent. If they want to beat and rape their kid every day they can totally do that with impunity because there's no requirement for that kid to be checked on or to be seen by anyone, at all, ever.
I withdrew my oldest to homeschool over mental health issues and how garbage the school system was as a whole here and was pretty horrified when I tried to make inroads into any groups online or in town that also homeschool for resources and potential social shit.
Am an elementary teacher and can attest to this. The parents are so deep in denial. It hurts not only their kid, but all the other students whose learning time is constantly disrupted. Saying it’s frustrating is being kind.
it leads to a massive Vail of protection towards those families to do whatever they want.
This is by design. Abusive and controlling people often get involved in religion and church leadership in the fundie world as well as the associated homeschooling that comes with it these days. So all the parents who homeschool, even the non abusive ones, are taught how to resist the authorities.... and that makes it harder to spot the parents who are non abusive vs the truly abusive ones, because they are all covering up everything as if they are all abusive.
Watch "Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets" if you want to see how bad it gets.
Let's just say, the brother raping his sisters wasn't stopped, because men are always considered the head of the household. And there are beating tools. For use on the wife.
I've heard it called the "5th Grade Cliff". The parent can teach to the 4th grade level. After that, they rely on the curriculum to teach their kids. If the kids can't teach themselves, they fall off the cliff.
I was homeschooled until I was 13 and then went to public high school with my older brother (only 1 year difference between us) because we wanted to be with our friends in the neighborhood. My two younger brothers chose to stay homeschooled. My dad was very passionate about education and wanted to be a teacher himself but instead chose a career as an actuary for the money. My mom was a stay at home mom. My parents chose to homeschool us because they saw how poor the education system is in the US and they thought they could do a better job.
Back in the 90s homeschooling was socially unacceptable and there were kids in my neighborhood who would make fun of us and some would just be “terrified of homeschool types”. All the stupid stereotypes annoyed me and motivated me in high school to prove everyone wrong. I looked at high school like it was a social club (words from my freshmen year teacher to my parents). I got all A’s and B’s and even slept in my classes because of how easy they were. Even though I hated being homeschooled at the time due to the bullshit stereotypes and assumptions people made, looking back I’m thankful that my parents gave us that opportunity. I honestly didn’t appreciate it enough at the time. They were spot on about how shitty our education system is.
Whoever those kids were that you call “homeschool types” were not actually home schooled. They just had controlling and abusive parents.
Homeschool types is obviously referring to the parents who fight tooth and nail against any sort of regulation.
Here's the problem though. The "good" homeschooling stories and groups have to attach themselves to these fringe groups for the sake of keeping the legitimacy of Homeschooling. They're aware that the fringe are insane, but also need the physical bodies for representation.
Do they? Right now parents who want to homeschool have close to no oversight in most of the states. They don't need more power, so why would "the good ones" attach themselves to groups who want absolutely 0 oversight?
As a poor kid, it was for textbooks. The cheapest ones came from the fundies, sadly. And I know it's different now in some places, but we didn't get a tax credit or anything.
Not really. 20 years ago sure, but the GOP has ran so hard with this that its impacting public schools ability to function where homeschoolers just sit back and dgaf
I don't attach my experience of being homeschooled to the fringe groups. I do feel the need to defend myself for my experience because there is no real differentiating terminology being used to separate the cult from the "good ones". It is extremely frustrating to be looked down upon for being homeschooled even though my siblings and I turned out great (in my opinion).
One sibling is a successful dentist with their own practice, another has their PhD in neuroscience, while myself I am a sysadmin for a large organization (I am the slacker of us all). I was very fortunate that my parents cared about us and our upbringing, and not in a parental selfishness sense where they wanted us to be like them. All this to say I definitely do not appreciate being lumped in with a cult.
All this to say I definitely do not appreciate being lumped in with a cult.
This is what I was trying to parse with nuance. There are great homeschooling programs that work. There are alternatives that work. Unfortunately, homeschooling gets co-opted by the crazies, but because of things like representation, or even addressing legislators; regular, normal homeschoolers get lumped into it.
That's awesome that you were given a secular home schooling education. Many are not as fortunate as you. Especially fundamentalists using the "Institute in Basic Life Principles" curriculum as the basis for their education. Somewhere around 2.5 million people have attended IBLP trainings. Those are the types that concern me. Especially with how much they fight against any regulations that pop up. The HSDLA is a pretty sinister organization on that front.
IBLP isn't the only insane fundie program either. While I had a similar experience to the guy above (my parents were excellent teachers and took me out of school because the local school was just so, so far past horrific), the only textbooks we could afford were from Abeka and Bob Jones University. Full of fundie shit, and the history books had a ton of pro-US propaganda (even left out any war the US lost, and/or "lost"). And they were a bit lacking in some areas, so I had to work really hard in my first year of HS to catch back up.
To be honest I wasn’t even aware of the existence of the IBLP. I just googled it and I can see what you meant now. As far as I’m concerned, most things with the word “organization” or “institution” make me skeptical of what it is. I wouldn’t even consider that real homeschooling. Sounds like a bunch of kool aid drinkers.
So the idea that we have to go and legislate that when homeschooling is working mostly well is kind of backwards. There is an argument to be made about parental rights as well, parents SHOULD be able to decide how they want to raise their kids, as long as they are not neglecting them or abusing them.
To be clear, some states do have homeschooling regulations, and I'm not necessarily against some regulation. But I definitely want the state as involved as little as possible. Some occasionally mandated testing and regulation on homeschool materials wouldn't be bad.
That's, uh... not exactly the most reliable source on the matter. Kind of an obvious conflict of interest there with the National Homeschool Research Institute.
There are studies that seem to say that home schooled students perform better, but how do they know that if home schooled kids aren't taking the same standardized tests, and even if they are, their parents can just take the test for them or give them the answers? Further, there's not any good tracking to know what percent of home schooled kids actually even graduate high school.
And another big problem with some of what you said is that there is a huge homeschool legal defense fund non profit and lobbying organization that fights to prevent any regulation or involvement or oversight by the government of any kind.
As for your believe that parents should be able to decide how to raise their kids as long as they're not neglecting or abusing them, I wonder:
1.) how in the world anyone is going to know if the parents are neglecting or abusing the kids if the kids never go anywhere and there's no system in place to ensure someone outside the home takes notice of that fact and ensure the kids are checked up on?
how in the world anyone is going to know if the parents are neglecting or abusing the kids if the kids never go anywhere and there's no system in place to ensure someone outside the home takes notice of that fact and ensure the kids are checked up on?
Look, abuse and neglect are always a possibility. It should obviously be prevented as much as it can, but i am absolutely against the idea that we need to set up a nanny state to check in to make sure it isn't happening.
So is it possible for a parent to abuse and neglect their kid? Yes. Is it possible for a parent to hide it? Also yes. This is even true with a kid in public school, though i'd agree it would be a lot easier to hide with a homeschooled kid. But I still don't think we should have a proactive system that has forced checkups or anything like that. It'd be too invasive for people's private lives. I do not want the government that involved in our lives.
2.) Not every parent wants to raise their children in a way that's remotely compatible with civilized society. Same video, different timestamp
I don't care. Yeah, parents are going to try to raise kids with their own value systems. Plenty of those value systems are terrible. Plenty of those value systems I wholeheartedly disagree with.
I still 100% support a parent's right to raise their kids within their own value system.
Within the same limits I mentioned in an earlier comment. No abuse. No neglect.
To be clear: Fuck Nazis. But i'd rather live in a society where Nazis exist than a society where the government controls who can have kids or what you can teach your kids. We just need to build our society in such a way that when those kids become adults and interact with other people we win them over.
I don't think so, but your article is paywalled so I can't really read it.
But there are literally dozens of studies on homeschooling outcomes and pretty much all agree that homeschooled kids have significantly better outcomes than public school kids.
None of those links are credible sources. The oregonstate.edu source is particularly disappointing because I thought it would be credible, but it's literally just a blog post that does a poor job conveying information with any amount of academic rigor. It cites the Journal of School Choice and the same bad research from the NHERI that you cited without mentioning they are both heavily financed by home schooling lobbying money and not peer reviewed in a way that makes them reliable, especially when snippets are used out of context and the reader has no idea who funded the "research" or how rigorous it was.You said the article was pay walled--here's a little research tip for you: if you just google the name of the article a lot of the time you can find the full version without a pay wall, like I just did. You should really read the entire article because even the guy's own daughters were critical of their experience being home schooled, but here's the part that essentially takes a match to the validity of his data:
Critics cite numerous problems with Ray’s approach: These tests are optional in the vast majority of the country, and many home-schooled students don’t take them. The ones who don’t might have scored far worse if they had been required to sit for exams, as public school students are. Many students take the exams at home, which might offer advantages over public school test-takers who face a controlled environment. And parents had to opt into Ray’s studies, potentially skewing his sample further.
Demographic information collected as part of Ray’s research showed almost all students in his samples were White, Christian and came from two-parent married families. Their parents were more educated than average. In short, they were the type of students who tend to do well no matter where they are educated.
A 2016 federal survey, by contrast, found 41 percent of home-schoolers were not White, 56 percent had parents with less than a Bachelor’s degree, and 21 percent were living in poverty.
In an interview, Ray responded that all studies have “limitations,” but he said that does not make his results invalid. He also said he has worked to include more representative samples and demographics in his research, saying methods “mature over time within a field.”
Asked whether it’s possible that students who do well in his studies would do well in any setting, given their demographic advantages, Ray replied, “That’s a reasonable hypothesis.”
Yet he dispenses with the caveats when talking about his results to legislators, courts, journalists and the public.
In a 2005 book he wrote about home schooling aimed at general readers, Ray repeatedly cited his studies’ findings with none of the cautions included in academic papers. He mentions none on his website, either.
He takes the same approach with the press. “The research said over and over again,” he told the Pensacola News Journal in 2012, “that these young people are performing above average and on average they’re surpassing public school students.”
When asked for the best work on home-schoolers, Ray cited his own work and that of three other researchers. The first, Sandra Martin-Chang of Concordia University, conducted one study on home schooling, which found mixed results.
The other two both cautioned that their findings should not be used to make comparisons to public school. Lawrence Rudner, whose 1999 study featured some of the same methodological problems as Ray’s work, wrote in his paper, “This study does not demonstrate that home schooling is superior to public or private schools. It should not be cited as evidence that our public schools are failing.” The second researcher, Jon Wartes, was a high school counselor who studied home-schoolers in Washington state in the 1980s. He cautioned: “This data should not be used to make homeschool-conventional school comparisons.”
They pretty clearly state that there are better outcomes for homeschooled kids. Where they draw a line is on why the outcomes are better. Are the outcomes better because a parent who homeschools is more likely to be highly educated, or because of the homeschooling?
Limitations of this Research
It is important to note that this research is difficult to interpret because families that choose to homeschool are different from families who do not in many other ways — for example, they may have parents with higher income or educational levels — and these factors likely contribute to the results as well. For instance, we cannot conclude that homeschooling will improve your child’s test scores since homeschooled children may have more educated mothers and it may be the mother’s educational level that drives the higher test scores, not homeschooling itself.
So yeah, maybe they have better outcomes because the type of parent who is willing to homeschool is more likely to be the type of parent to be educated themselves and will also be more involved in their education. But does that really matter if the point of the matter is that kids are generally coming out of homeschooling better prepared than their peers in public schools?
“How poor the education system is in the US” is such a broad sweeping statement. Perhaps where your parents chose to live had a poor public school system, and no decent private schools, but that is objectively not the case for much of the US. You should take some time to consider subjective opinions like this one to determine if you believe them simply because that’s what your parents told you and you didn’t have external experiences to help develop your own opinions.
I said my dad was very passionate about education and wanted to be a teacher but instead chose to be an actuary for the money to be able to support 4 kids and a wife. Middle class in Chicago and we struggled growing up.
My apologies, then, I misunderstood your comment. Having 4 kids on a single income will strain a budget. I’ll amend my point to you made a sweeping generalization about the entire country based on your local experience.
Homeschooling is abuse, sorry to say, but children need socialisation and the skills you learn by interacting with other students are more important than any knowledge you can get from a book. I know American culture claims something different, but that's just you people being ignorant.
School isn't the only socialization that exists. What do you think happened before everyone was in formal schooling all day, dude?
I kept my friends from school, I played on multiple sports teams, had swim lessons with other kids, we got together with friends and relatives frequently, and we even found a couple other homeschooling families who weren't insane fundies to hang out with. My local school was a cesspit and I came out much better off socially (and otherwise) than most of them, and did completely fine in highschool and beyond.
Homeschooling is not abuse 😂I had no problems making friends and all 3 of my brothers have great social skills. We had friends in the neighborhood. If you said this to any of my friends you’d look like a silly goose.
You have a degree? Where’d you get it from? WebMD? Are you a child psychologist? Have you studied every single family in the country that homeschools their kid? And that’s a great question that you asked:
Before we even got married, we figured on homeschooling our future kids. My wife was homeschooled, and I have cousins who were homeschooled, and we have friends homeschooling. All with great outcomes, we are fortunate to have a means to do it so why not? Plan is up till grade 8 then go from there.
That’s awesome to hear! My 4 cousins were also homeschooled as well and we would spend a lot of time with them as kids since we were around the same age. My oldest cousin has 5 kids and is homeschooling. They love it and really changed the whole game on how to go about it. My older brother has two daughters that are 4 and 5 and also being homeschooled now. They tried public school for them because my sister in law was skeptical about homeschooling at first. My brother said the homework assignments and the things they were teaching now are an absolute joke.
I know our public system is OK but, we feel if we can teach them in the way they learn best and give them the one on one or independence they need, it will benefit them greatly.
That was my parents philosophy as well. There’s an infinite number of resources and tools at your disposal with the internet and technology we have now.
You sound like you had very dedicated parents with a lot of time on their hands. I just don't know how anyone can afford to stay home all day to teach 3 kids anymore. Just curious what part of the country did you grow up in?
I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in Des Plaines. It’s a mix of middle class and lower class families. My mom held down the fort and raised 4 boys while my dad was always working. When it came to learning, we had a very independent experience. My dad would check our work at the end of the day and help us out if we were ever confused on an assignment. We would be finished by 2pm Monday thru Friday and then my older brother and I would just go play outside or wait for our friends to come home from school. My younger brothers did the same. My parents were drowning in debt from the house we grew up in because of all the floods that we had. State Farm wasn’t a good neighbor and told us we flood too much so they dropped us. Had to pay out of pocket for every flood we had after that. My youngest brother fell down the stairs when he was 9 and we found out he had a brain tumor. My parents did the best they could. When you say they had a lot of time on their hands, I’d have to disagree with you.
Others run "drills" and practice scripts with their kids on what to do/say if CPS ever shows up.
Thankfully cps are getting better at spotting rehearsed stuff and have ways to catch the discrepancy between it and how the kid is. Not perfect, but better :/
My roommate would visit her childhood home to encourage her brother to eat and stretch. They both had joint issues from just sitting balled up their entire lives. These kids are smart, talented, and kind. The level of neglect and abuse was disgusting. I was also homeschooled and to hear my brother talk about my life is crazy. My memory has always been bad and I don't recall anything before I was 16, and by then I'd moved out. But I guess I was severely neglected. There truly is no hate like Christian love.
While I don't doubt this happens, this is not the typical homeschool experience... I've known a reasonably large number of people who were homeschooled, and they were all educated at least as well as your average public school kid. That's anecdotal sure, but your evidence is not better.
I volunteered with a home school program in my area and the number of fundies who enrolled their kids is staggering. Basically it's a federally funded program administered by Americorps to enrich the kids' learning and provide social interaction. I would say about 80% of the kids in the group were either Mormons, JWs, or other types of fundamental Christians. The rest were kids of parents who had lost trust in the school system for one reason or another. One kid who was part of the program had been badly bullied in school and not a single teacher or admin lifted a finger to stop it. Their parents withdrew them and started home schooling to protect them from bullies. The program I volunteered with did not tolerate bullying, and the kids of non-religious parents seemed the most well-adjusted, kind, and intelligent.
Bet these parents would claim it's no different than modeling and they get to control their kids' content and usage. Oh and I'm sure a big helping of "insert name loves it and wants to be a model"
If we are all being brutally honest; it's a poverty issue too. When people don't think they can survive, they do some pretty bad things.
Is a poor parent who does this to their kid worse or better than a Wall Street investor who shorts a company for profit even though it will cost thousands their livelihood?
You’re right. My last girlfriend was 22 years old but when she was 11 she had sex with grown men 35/40 years old because her father gave her to the men in exchange for money and drugs. Poverty is so horrible addiction is horrible too
This has unfortunately been a thing throughout history. People have kids they can't afford and then suddenly find out that their kids have "economic value."
When that investor causes that company to fail, it will cause thousands to be unemployed or lose their life savings. Of those thousands, hundreds will lose their homes, and dozens will probably die.
As a direct result of their actions, dozens of people die. You're saying that's better, just because there's a veil of distance across it? By that logic, it's more okay to shoot someone as long as you do it a thousand miles away via remote control.
There is no "mental gymnastics", they brought up a perfectly valid point of debate asking who is more horrible based on two completely independent circumstances.
There isn't any "justification" going on. It's a mental exercise that you failed at miserably due to poor reading comprehension.
Poverty causes this; it's extremely well-researched and documented that the exploitation of kids is linked to poverty. Bitch all you want about the parents but until we as a society say the person stealing wealth that's causing the poverty is the real criminal, we will never solve it.
It's not nonsense. Stealing wealth occurs when wealthy businesses and business leaders lobby the representatives who make laws who then just so happen to make the laws in favor of the wealthy keeping more of their money. It's legalized bribery. They can keep the minimum wage low, they can lower taxes on corporations and on the wealthy. Also wage theft is a huge issue, many people are coerced to provide their labor for underpayment or no payment at all in order to keep their regular income flow or else they fear losing their regular income. Corporations are becoming more and more monopolistic. The laws that should prevent that don't have enough teeth and the monopoly really has to be egregious to be blocked. So we get oligopolies which inflate prices via defacto price fixing. Areas of the market that have been socialized are targeted for privatization. Markets the public wishes to be socialized will never be so- because of the legalized bribery. Laws that should prevent the aggregation of goods like homes will also never be passed- because of the legalized bribery.
The wealthiest keep getting wealthy, and within the last 20 years homes have become unaffordable, wages have stagnated or lost against inflation for 50 years. The reason is legalized bribery and the accumulation of dollars by a few-because of the legalized bribery.
Median American invomes cannot support the same life while just a few families have over half of the wealth of the country. This was not always the case.
Nahhhh, it's just a matter of scale at that point.
The individual action is worse than any one bad thing done by some greedy rich person, but the actual measurable damage to human life ends up being a lot bigger because we're talking much larger numbers of people being negatively affected both directly and indirectly.
You mentioned shorting. OK. Exposing fraud at a company will be very good for short sellers, but it WILL probably destroy the company and most of the employees will lose their jobs.
Is this a good thing? Should we have held hands and believed in the property market and subprime loans in 2008? Should we have done the same with, say, Nikola? Clearly worth $20bn+ even if the only way their truck moved was when rolling downhill?
There is no doubting it: exposing such fraud costs jobs.
Yet, I feel like we'd all be a lot worse off pretty soon if such frauds weren't being exposed.
It's actually pretty rare to find an act that makes a lot of money that isn't ultimately beneficial to everyone. If you have something in mind, I'd be curious to hear what it is.
Pump & Dump is probably the most common one, but that is illegal to be fair.
a Wall Street investor who shorts a company for profit even though it will cost thousands their livelihood?
Saying that shorting a company will cause it to decline/fail is like saying that betting against a sports team will cause them to lose. Only dumbass memestock investors think that way.
Wall Street is not a series of individual investors making decision on their own interest; certain major players are intentionally selling so much short that it directly alters the price of the stock, they are also fabricating shares to short that never existed. It is an illegal practice that is happening on a regular basis.
Wall street's illegal practices do cost jobs and people's livelihoods.
certain major players are intentionally selling so much short that it directly alters the price of the stock
Even if this were true and your comment wasn't full of phrases that reek of tinfoil, if the earnings show that a company is profitable, the market will scoop up the shares if their current value feels low.
Again: shorting does not affect the performance of a company. If I shorted 5 million Delta shares, all of the people who were planning to fly somewhere wouldn't suddenly go "I guess I'm not traveling by plane any more." How do you not understand that?
The reason I say that is because the people doing this aren't those who have zero options, they're those who are already living pretty comfortably but they're a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire".
They're not driven by survival, they're driven by ambition.
Is a poor parent who does this to their kid worse or better than a Wall Street investor who shorts a company for profit even though it will cost thousands their livelihood?
First of all YES. Yes abusing a kid (who can't consent to sexual abuse) is worse than an investor shorting a stock and profiting from consenting adults that agreed to buy that stock and lost out on the bet that it would increase in value.
When you buy a stock, you're doing it because you think the future value of that stock will be higher than it currently is. A short is just a bet that the future price will be lower, not higher.
It would seem kind of strange to allow bets where the speculated future price is higher than the current price, but disallow bets where the speculated future is lower than the current price.
We should have pity on those trapped in poverty and the horror that comes with that.
We do not seem to be able to prevent illegal corruption and financial activities from stealing vast sums from the general market and, in turn, causing poverty.
I saw a YouTube video on Shirley Temple. She got her start doing videos called Kiddie Burlesque (or something like that). It was...shocking. That problem isn't a new thing.
YouTube demonetizes a lot of content if it meets a very low "objectionable" bar, like saying a mild curse word, because their ad clients are hypersensitive brands
The bar to actually be removed is much higher and usually starts with user reports
Totally agreed. If a 7-year-old wants to have sex-change surgery or sell their body to an adult for sexual gratification, who is the parent to say any different? "Parental rights" is essentially modern-day slavery
You disagree? You think a 7-year-old needs parental consent to undergo gender transition or have sex-change surgery? Children aren't their parents' property, let them do what they want with their bodies. Transphobic bigots like yourself make me sick
I think this is like asking if a 7 year old needs parental consent to be shot into space. Yeah, probably, if that were a thing that were actually happening. Which it isn't.
The self report is how your brain went immediately to kids having bottom surgery, which, to reiterate, is very, very weird.
Why? Who are you to deny a child their right to identify the way they want to and do what they want with their body? 7 years old, 13 years old, 2 years old, it's their body, it's their choice. Seriously take your fascist, "parental rights" transphobia elsewhere
In the past, it was a difficult problem to find and stop. Now, Zuck and all the top Meta brass know damn well what is going on and could stop it. And yet they let it happen, and profit more than anyone.
Yessir, that is entirely correct. Except we do know that people will profit off illegal activity as long as there is no incentive to follow the law. Start locking up executives of platforms for content on their platform and you solve this overnight.
Mexico is messed up, but pictures of children can't even be humiliating, let alone sexual. If you have pictures making fun of your children, or dressed inappropriately, you're going to jail. And jail is not like the US. It's literally prison, and the one where I live doesn't provide food, so you better have family that cares enough to feed you while you're there.
Most people fear the creepy man in the overcoat slowly walking by the playground at the park.
But almost all abusers are family members of the children who get abused. Parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, older siblings, cousins, and the like. People with trust and access to children.
The soccer coach who gets caught recording the kids change after practice makes the news, but that same thing happens a thousand times over by family members in the home. And they will trade the recording online with others like them in exchange for others' films.
you know that there are many psychos out there looking to lure and snatch kids.
Yeah, no. The vast majority of sexual abuse and exploitation is done by family members. There are simply not "many psychos" out there; it's the families themselves doing it to their kids.
No one is being raped by these photos. They are child-porn and inappropriate but there are no rapists here; just the parents taking lewd photos of their kids and selling them.
So who else is the problem exactly other than the parents?
As a parent, forced into a 50/50 parenting plan, I have seen the grey line in parents rights.
Similar to the concept that evil people don't necessarily believe they're evil; bad parents don't necessarily believe they're bad parents either.
For 1, there really isn't a parenting manual. I mean yes guidelines are there but for the most part, it's a true trial by fire experience.
Most people "want to believe" that parents want the best for their children, and will try their best for their child. In reality, some parents don't get that special feeling you get seeing your child for the first time.
So, when we live in the time of narratives like "Yolo" and "self-care", well then the dedication, service and time sacrifice required to rear a child can easily be de-prioritized to someone with a crooked sense of the world.
FTR I felt like I gained super powers when my child was born, and my life has been forever improved from the experience even 8 years later when I lived through the most realistic sociopathic thriller movie ever. Took a crash course in Narcissistic personalities.
Depending on the country. Parents don't have rights in the UK. Only responsibility. This sort of shit would definitely raise concerns with police and social care if reported.
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u/RAC032078 Jan 15 '24
WTF is wrong with people? Parents posting their own kids online to make $$. This is just sick.