March/April 2001

The New Face of Homeschooling

As their ranks increase, homeschoolers are tapping public schools for curriculum, part-time classes, extracurricular services, and online learning

By Peggy J. Farber

Adam Schieber's school day straddles two worlds. After eating breakfast with his family, the 15-year-old pads over to an iMac in his bedroom at 8 a.m. and logs on to the Virtual Charter School, an online compendium of Internet links, teacher webpages, lessons, and assignments created for homeschooled children by the teachers of Basehor-Linwood (KS) public school district, where Adam lives. At 10:30 he showers and goes to the local public high school, where his older brother is a full-time senior. Adam takes two classes, chemistry and French. Between classes he joins his brother and pals at lunch in the school cafeteria, and at 1:30 he returns home to finish off any schoolwork left over from the morning.

This is the new face of homeschooling. Where once, not so long ago, homeschooling families were entirely on their own to find curricula, provide opportunities for socializing, and monitor academic growth, today an increasing number of school districts are offering homeschooling parents a rich array of benefits. In Kansas, California, Colorado, Washington, and other states, school districts that once grudgingly granted permission for homeschooled children to participate in after-school activities now openly court them with virtual curriculum packages, school-based enrichment centers, in-service training sessions, and even, in at least one case, a full-time school designed to satisfy the demands of homeschool families. "It's an incredible safety net," says Adam's mother, Melanie Dearing, of the curriculum, textbooks, and professional support she gets from the school district to homeschool Adam and two younger children, Nicole, 7, and Brandon, 5.

Survival Mechanism

Conversations with education officials at the state and local levels around the country turn up a broad spectrum of collaborative practices. These new configurations challenge traditional definitions of public schooling-and in some places they introduce new sources of school revenue. "In the last four or five years, school districts across [Colorado] have been finding ways to attract homeschoolers to school programs," says Art Ellis, Colorado's assistant commissioner of education. "It's a survival mechanism. In some districts they've lost so many kids to homeschooling they're losing revenue."

Some schools pick up a bit of state funding by offering once-a-week enrichment classes to homeschoolers. Others operate as charter schools, helping parents supervise their children's learning at home in exchange for full per-pupil payments from their states. When the California Board of Education polled 317 charter schools last March, nearly one in five identified themselves as homeschool charter schools. An additional 20 percent identified themselves as non-site-based charter schools.

Distance-learning models like Basehor-Linwood's are catching on elsewhere. A second Kansas-based online charter, the Wichita e-School, opened last September with the slogan: "Educating your child at home just got easier." Ninety elementary students were enrolled. At the same time, a privately managed, publicly funded electronic charter school for homeschool and at-risk students called e-Cot opened in Ohio. Initial enrollment: 2,600 elementary and secondary school students from around the state. Meanwhile, former education secretary William J. Bennett recently announced that he will serve as chairman of a new cyberschool, named K12, targeted especially at homeschoolers. The for-profit venture will launch in the fall with a complete curriculum for K-2 and plans to eventually expand its services to include students in K-12.

Although Basehor-Linwood, near Kansas City, started its virtual school in 1998 without a clear idea of who would use it, the project quickly attracted hundreds of homeschool families from around the state. The charter school draws $5,000 in per-pupil state reimbursements for each enrolled child, money that goes into the district's general fund. From that, the district provides each family with an iMac computer, Internet connection, and the services of its teachers.

Public Obligation?

Some administrators say their collaboration with homeschoolers is motivated by a simple sense of obligation to all students, whether enrolled in regular classrooms or not. "We did research four years ago and found that kids were homeschooled for an average of two years," says Linda Kondris, an administrator in Colorado Springs who established a program of enrichment classes for homeschool families. In her district of 32,000 children, 950 children are educated at home each year. "Typically, kids go in and out of the system," Kondris said. "We wanted to try and maintain a good connection with their families so they could come back into the system easily."

The most common accommodation schools make is dual enrollment, a policy that allows home-educated children, especially secondary school students, to take particular classes at local public schools. Ruth Dunnavan's two children are dual enrolled at the local elementary school in the small coastal village of Moultonborough, NH. Beatrice, 9, and Lee, 8, take art, music, and gym classes once a week, and Lee goes every day for lunch and recess. "My son's life revolves around recess," says Dunnavan. The children also go on field trips, have desks reserved for them in classrooms in their respective grades, and bring cookies to school when there's a birthday party. "They get to see what's going in school and I do, too, and I can compare their progress [to their classmates'], something that's hard to do in homeschooling," she says.

It took considerable negotiation and patience for Dunnavan and principal Michele Miller to come up with this plan, largely because the elementary school schedule is relatively freeform. Last year, when art, music, and gym were scattered through the school week, Dunnavan and the children wasted several hours every day, either waiting at school for long stretches between classes or driving back and forth. Miller says only a few families homeschool in Moulton borough so it hasn't been too hard to arrange the schedule to accommodate the Dunnavans this year. Miller even arranged for the children of one 4th-grade class to have art, music, and gym before lunch and chorus on Mondays so that Beatrice could attend enrichment classes without interruption. "But what if there were 10 families like theirs?" Miller wonders.

Classroom Exodus

San Lorenzo Valley district in California is one that was beginning to feel the loss of revenue from children leaving the classroom. "We had a homeschool population that was leaving the district," says Eric Schoffstall, a principal at an alternative school in the 4,100-student district that sits in a redwood forest near Santa Cruz. Sixty-five families had pulled out by 1991, when Schoffstall and his school obtained one of California's first charters. The resulting conversion school, the San Lorenzo Valley Unified School District Charter School, draws in 250 homeschool children-and full per-pupil reimbursement from the state, roughly $4,500 per student. "We wanted to give people who were inspired to create programs for their kids, for whatever reason, a vehicle to do it," says Schoffstall. "We call it homeschooling, but really they are non-classroom-based programs."

The school has three basic components: multi-age classrooms that children attend two days a week; contracts with local artisans and experts-such as a neighborhood theater company, a ceramist, a naturalist-for community-based workshops; and a lending library with curricula, manipulatives, computers, audio and video tapes. The school also purchases curricula on behalf of families. "We care what curriculum they use, but they can choose whatever they want as long as they don't cross church and state boundaries," says Schoffstall. "And it varies. Some parents say all of life is a lesson, and others go right to one of the teachers and say, 'Can you give us what the regular first-grade class is doing?'"

This kind of collaboration is becoming a significant feature of California's public education system. As many as 30,000 children enrolled in California charter schools are homeschoolers, says Sue Bregato, executive director of a statewide association of charter schools, the California Network of Educational Charters.

Online Outreach

Teachers who work in both regular classrooms and in partnership programs with homeschool families say they find themselves making major changes in their classrooms after they start collaborating with homeschoolers. Josh Anderson teaches 11th-grade English both at Basehor-Linwood High School and for the district's Virtual Charter School, which accommodates 372 homeschooled students. In fact, all of the online school's teachers also teach in regular district classrooms. Comparing his classroom practice to his online teaching, Anderson says: "I'm pretty passionate about what I teach. So I'm going to approach the content the same regardless of which environment I'm using. But teaching online has turned everything I used to do around. I've organized my classroom completely differently."

Teachers for the virtual school put their lesson plans, assignments, ideas for activities, and tests from their regular classrooms on websites and then guide parents via email to help children master the curriculum. Teachers post the curriculum in its entirety early in the year, so that homeschoolers can move at their own pace. For instance, Adam Schieber, the part-time homeschooler, finished his coursework for the first semester of 10th-grade English in mid-October.

Anderson says he's been able to introduce a new level of flexibility to his regular classroom and to his interaction with parents. Just like homeschoolers, students in traditional schools can log on to the virtual school, see what lies ahead, and modulate their pace of learning, zooming ahead through some units and going back to others. Their parents can also log on to see exactly what their kids are doing. "The website is really worth it for my classroom students, but I would never have put as much time and energy into it if it were just for the students in my classroom," says Anderson.

One example of comprehensive collaboration between a public school district and homeschooling parents is the Kent Learning Center in Kent, WA, which serves 200 children in grades 3-12. Academic subjects are taught at the center on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and electives on Tuesday and Thursday. Parents can elect to enroll children in the academic courses, the electives, or both. Ninety-five percent of the parents eventually enroll their children full time; almost all are reentering the school system, having earlier opted out.

Tense Negotiations

The delineation between home and school is permeable. Parents asked for-and got-co-status with classroom teachers when the school was established four years ago. On any given day there are five to seven parents in the classroom assisting the teacher. Almost all elective courses are taught by parents. Course content is subject to long and sometimes tense negotiations between parents and the headmistress, Dian Colasurdo. For example, when the matter of teaching evolution came up, some parents resisted. Colasurdo took pains to assure them that she and the school would respect their religious beliefs even while teaching evolution. "They just want a voice. They want to be part of the process and not feel we are [attacking] them and their beliefs," she says.

Patricia M. Lines, a former researcher at the National Center for Education Statistics, says homeschooling parents have been creating institutions like these outside school systems since the 1980s: "Homeschool families often work cooperatively, sharing teaching responsibilities and classes. If you think about what a school is, once they start doing that, they've already got a school. Years ago I said I thought homeschoolers were going to be reinventing schools on their own terms. I had expected it to happen on a small scale. I hadn't expected public schools to step in and help them reinvent it."

Ironically, the stiffest objection to these new public school-homeschool partnerships comes not from defenders of public education but from its harshest critics, members of conservative homeschool groups. The largest national organization, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), has consistently opposed all regulation of homeschools, including state requirements of any teacher qualifications and student participation in school testing programs. Currently, only nine states require homeschool parents to have even a high school diploma, and only 10 states require students to participate in standardized testing programs. Skirmishes between state legislatures and HSLDA over these issues have largely been settled since the mid-1990s-in the defense association's favor. Now the association is taking up the battle against programs for homeschoolers offered by school districts. HSLDA president Michael Smith explains: "It concerns us that if a lot of homeschoolers start accepting benefits from schools, ultimately we'll all end up being challenged by legislators to do the same thing. We think that would be a step backward, and it concerns us a lot. That's the reason we oppose it."

Jim Farthing, who edits a newsletter for the Christian Home Educators Confederation of Kansas, says many homeschool parents like the idea of being able to get free curricula and computers from their local schools, but he says others are very wary: "I've heard, 'Hey, I pay my taxes, and I don't get anything in return. Here's a way for me to get my tax money back.' But the great bulk of homeschoolers think the more we get entangled, the more likely it is that we are going to be regulated. This is proving to be very divisive within the homeschool community. All of a sudden we're at odds with each other."

Because this phenomenon is relatively new, research on partnerships between public schools and homeschool families is skimpy. Patricia Lines published a preliminary examination of several Washington State programs in September 2000 and found that over time partnership programs tended to lead to full-time enrollment. She said the motive for school districts appeared to be fiscal-not philosophical. "This was not, in my opinion, a case of a public school Trojan horse," Lines wrote, referring to homeschool advocates' concern that school authorities would try to gain control of homeschool practices. If anything, she wrote, reviewing accommodations schools are making to homeschoolers' needs, "it looks as if the Trojan horse is sneaking into public school turf."

Lines's study is the first scholarly treatment of public school-homeschool collaborations. But it's a subject that's bound to get more attention as schools and homeschoolers continue to work together.

Peggy J. Farber is an education reporter based in New York City. She wrote about efforts to help violent girls in the January/February 2000 issue of the Harvard Education Letter.
 

For Further Information

Basehor-Linwood Virtual Charter School, 3102 N. 155th St., P.O. Box 251, Basehor, KS 66007; 913-724-1727. http://vcs.usd458.k12.ks.us/public

H. Cordes. "Battling for the Heart and Soul of Homeschoolers." Salon.com (October 2, 2000). Online at www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/10/02/
homeschooling_battle/

Home School Legal Defense Association, P.O. Box 3000, Purcellville, VA 20134; 540-338-5600; fax: 540-338-2733. www.hslda.org

P.M. Lines. Homeschoolers: Estimating Numbers and Growth. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1999. Online at www.ed.gov/offices/OERI/SAI/homeschool

P.M. Lines. "When Homeschoolers Go to School: A Partnership Between Families and Schools." Peabody Journal of Education 75, nos. 1, 2 (2000): 159-186.

San Lorenzo Valley Unified School District Charter School, 6264B Highway 9, Felton, CA 95018; 831-335-8344. www.slv.k12.ca.us/CHARTER/

Z.P. Tyler and J.C. Carper. "From Confrontation to Accommodation: Homeschooling in South Carolina." Peabody Journal of Education 75, nos. 1, 2 (2000): 32-48.

K.M. Welner and K. Welner. "Contextualizing Homeschooling Data: A Response to Rudner." Educational Policy Analysis Archives 7, no. 13 (1999): 1-11

Wichita eSchool, 412 S. Main St., Wichita, KS 67202; 316-973-5181; fax: 316-973-7916. www.usd259.com/eschool/