Day: March 14, 2007

We just got notice that Oregon is going to try to further regulate the activities of homeschoolers.  There were a couple of events that created an interesting backdrop to the our receiving the email that describes the proposed legislation.  First, just a couple of weeks ago, an article came out in the local newspaper explaining that, after years of trying to make the questions easier on the state assessment tests in math, they had finally given up and want now to just lower the passing test scores so that more will pass.  Second, Lorena had a conversation with some people who are very, very involved in their local government school.  They have characterized the school as phenomenal.  The parents in the community arre said to be heavily involved in both academics and extracurricular activities.  The teachers are said to be engaged with and responsive to the needs of the students and the concerns of the parents.  The students are said to be receiving a stellar education–one of the best in the entire state.

So, I thought I would just take a look at their state report card.  For the school in question, the Federal Adequate Yearly Progress Rating was “NOT MET.”  In the last year reported, 45% of the students in the school could not read at grade level and 54% could not perform math at grade level.  This gave the school an Oregon Report Card Overall Rating of “Satisfactory.”  I was amazed.  Here is a school that the State of Oregon says is performing at a satisfactory level.  At least one set of parents in the school think there children are getting a phenomenal education there.  But by any object standard, the school is failing.  We started homeschooling because of the abysmal education our children were receiving at a school that was rated “exceptional” by the state.  The school had much higher reading and math scores.  I compared that to the test results for homeschoolers in that same area that are available on the Oregon Department of Education Home Schooling page.  Of course, for the entire population of students, 50% are at or below the 50 percentile.  For  the latest homeschool nationally normed, standardized test scores that I could find, the records showed that less than 20% of the tested students fell at or below the 50th percentile.  The homeschools, by every measure are doing better than the government schools.

All of the information is in the public domain so, if anyone wants to look at it, they can.  I got all of the information on websites run by either the school or the State of Oregon.  None of this even considers the wealth of studies that the quality of “socialization” in homeschool settings is better than in government school settings.  Here is a web page that describes and links to a small subset of that work.  In the meantime, while Rome burns and the legislature tries to further handcuff a group of citizen who provide a stellar education for their children, the big sports issue that really interests the education establishment in the state has risen to the Oregon Court of Appeals.