Home Schooling Works!

Our son, Connor, took his first set of standardized tests this year as per Colorado law, which says that students starting in third grade and every other year after should be tested. As a home schooling Mom, this was a bit stressful. We knew that Connor was bright and we thought we had taught him what he needed to know but the question of how well he would do still nagged at the back of my mind. Connor, being a bit of a perfectionist, always stressed at tests and lost his self-control, so at the beginning of this school year, I began testing him daily on everything so that he would get more used to testing and lose his fear. On the days of the testing, he handled it beautifully, even though he was in a strange enviornment and surronded by 20 other kids who were also testing for the first time and very nervous. I was proud of how self-controlled he remained through out the two days. ( Yes, self-control hands even worked in this situation to help him focus on something concrete.)

We received the results back yesterday and they were even better that I had anticipated in my best case scenarios ( yes, I thought about best and worst case scenarios - after all I felt like I was being tested as well.). Connor scored higher than even the national homeschool average.

Here's a quote from one study:

In 1997, a study of 5,402 homeschool students from 1,657 families was released. It was entitled, "Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America." The study demonstrated that homeschoolers, on the average, out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects. A significant finding when analyzing the data for 8th graders was the evidence that homeschoolers who are homeschooled two or more years score substantially higher than students who have been homeschooled one year or less. The new homeschoolers were scoring on the average in the 59th percentile compared to students homeschooled the last two or more years who scored between 86th and 92nd percentile.

All this to say that if you have not given home schooling a consideration in your educational choices for your children than perhaps you should. I know that there are other options other than home schooling but make sure you consider all the pros and cons carefully. For more information check out www.hslda.org or in Colorado www.chec.org.

Categories: parenting