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| The perfect learning environment. (Source) |
The ever-present homeschool debate recently landed on my
radar thanks to an emerging argument that liberals owe it to society to place their children in public school rather than homeschooling them. These children,
Dana Goldstein argued in Slate, will lift everyone up toward the light through the
beneficence of their “peer effects” on the less fortunate among them. The idea
made me laugh because even though I’m pretty liberal and I homeschool, I know
without a doubt that my children aren’t quite what people have in mind when
they ask me to return my children to public school. My children, you see, are
special needs children, and I’ve never encountered an expectation that their
presence would lift up anything in a public school except costs.
I also find the idea of these positive peer effects ironic
because we pulled our oldest, autistic son from public school precisely because
of his peers--and because of an administration that looked the other way with every
instance of bullying and every failure of staff to adhere to the content of our
son’s individual education plan, or IEP. We stuck it out from kindergarten to
halfway through third grade before a set of bloody fingernail gouges in our
son’s face from a long-time playground nemesis led to a final rupture.
We homeschool because we have children with special needs,
and many public schools simply don’t have what it takes to teach them and keep
them safe. The special needs population among homeschoolers is not
negligible--in a 2009 U.S. government
survey [PDF], 21% of respondents cited “special needs” as one of their
reasons for homeschooling, and 6% cited health problems or special needs as
their main reason.
Goldstein writes about having benefited from attending “one
of the most diverse and progressive school districts in the United States.”
That’s lovely, but the fact is that as of 2009, public schools nationwide were more
segregated than they were in the 1950s. And very few schools seem to
consider “diversity” to include the special needs community of children.
The core of Goldstein’s argument is that you can’t be truly
progressive if you homeschool because that “go-it-alone ideology” doesn’t serve
society as a whole. Low-income kids have better test scores when schooling with
middle-class children, she writes, a phenomenon known as “peer effects.” But
“peer effects” can go both ways. My children attended public school for a few
years. It was not a success for them, in part because they have special needs,
and in our former district, anything except perceived “perfection” was socially
unacceptable. Homeschooling immediately relieved the family-wide daily stressors
we experienced because of public school, which ranged from “peer effects” like bullying
that included
physical attacks to special education services promised but not delivered.
I don’t feel liberal guilt because we have the wherewithal to give our special needs
children the stress-free, individualized education they need with a
standardized curriculum that many states use for online schools. It would be
great for school districts to recognize the gifts of diversity that come when special
needs students are included in every facet of school life. But we’re not going
to offer up our children as guinea pigs for achieving that lofty goal, watching them be bullied and fall through large economic and academic cracks as their childhoods slip by. Without
deep social change beyond the classroom, all aspects of diversity--socioeconomic,
ethnic, ability--will remain out of reach for many schools.
And why homeschooling liberals, specifically? Why not appeal
for the wealthy to pull their children from the rarefied atmosphere of our
nation’s private schools and plunge them into public school for the common
good? I don’t understand why only “liberal” homeschooling parents should
express their progressivism by catapulting their children into public
school--particularly the more common schools on offer where standardized
testing takes precedence over a progressive or diverse curriculum. Further, I’d
argue that it’s conservative to assume that everyone will benefit from the same
experience, i.e., public school, and progressive to understand that choice is
important.
Would society be a better place if all children had the
option of a public education in one of the most “diverse and progressive school
districts” in the country? Sure it would, especially if “diversity” also
included--wholly and completely--the special needs population. But that’s not a
reality, and current reality is all we have to work with in educating our
children right now. There are no do-overs on childhood. Once the time has
passed, it is gone. What matters is what you do with it when you have it, and
for my children, we are making the most of that time. At home.
