Homeschooling

We often get asked if we homeschool, and if we do, how long do we plan on doing it and how do we do it with so many children . . .


We do homeschool and plan on homeschooling all the way through highschool.


As to how we do it . . . it takes creativity, structure and a lot of patience. With so many children, I have come to the realization that I am not going to be able to do some of the extra things that other homeschooling families do. I'm okay with that. I've had to pass up a lot of really cool curriculums. I have to find what works for our family. What I have found, I like. Cameron and I feel that our primary goal in homeschooling, besides teaching our children to follow Christ, is to teach them to love learning. Once we instill in them a love for learning, they can learn so much on their own. And they do! We have already seen this at work in our children. You would be amazed at what my kids want to learn about. They teach me all the time!




How did we come to our decision to homeschool? Now that is a long story. Before I start my story, please realize that this was our experience, our opinions, our journey. God may have you on a different journey with your family that includes a different schooling option. That's okay. I don't think that our way is better. It is just better for us. Here is how it happened:




Before I had children, it was never my intention to homeschool (It was also never my intention to have 7 children). I thought homeschooled children, and their families, were strange. Just being honest here. I definitely wanted "normal" children, thus I wanted to send them to school: public school, not private. I have my Master's in Social Work and my certification in school social work. The public school system is where I did my internships before Anna was born (one of them while pregnant with her). I went this route partly to have school hours and school vacations so that I would be home for my children when they were home. As I worked in the public schools, what I saw was a system entrenched in institutionalized racism. This was in Michigan, which is one of the two most segregated states in the country, the other being Illinois.





My first internship was in the Detroit public schools. I was one of the maybe 5 white staff and I think I saw 2, maybe 3 white students. It was a combined elementary and middle school in the heart of the inner city. Over 30 % of the children were in foster care. I never met 1 intact family. During the first 26 days of school, the school was broken into, and robbed, 26 times. There was NO playground equipment. The children played in a gravel parking lot. The school lunches were horribly unhealthy (Did you know ketchup counts as a veggie?). There were few library books (I have more in my home) and the art teacher received her supplies in March, which were meager to say the least. There was no gym or music classes, and no after-school programs. The year I worked there, over 75% of the 5th graders failed and had to attend summer school. When parent-teacher conferences were scheduled, not a soul showed up. Our cars were locked into the parking lot during school hours. The building was falling apart and during the 12 months I was there, the floor was NEVER mopped. Ever.

My heart ached for the children with whom I worked. I ran several groups for boys with ADHD--none of whom I think really had it. They were just boys . . . active little boys from the inner-city who had tough home lives, and needed some love and attention. We talked and played and I tried to offer them some academic support. How much could I really do to improve their situation? These children needed someone to give them hope, to inspire them. I don't know if I did that. I don't know if I made a difference. It was so difficult to not be able to talk about Christ and what He had done for them. It was difficult to realize that I was only offering a bandaid to their problems, when I had the "cure" and I couldn't share it with them. I don't mean to say that Jesus would magically fix all of their problems, taking them out of poverty and a crime and drug-infested neighborhood and transfer them to wealth, health and prosperity. The prosperity gospel is no gospel. But, Jesus could transfer them from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. He could give them eternal life, hope, a future and a citizenship in heaven. I was never able to tell them and that was the most difficult part of my job.


I contrasted my experience working in this inner city school with my own public school years: Nearly 100 % white, beautiful school building, clean, playground equipment, library books, computers, supplies . . . etc. etc.


Was the difference in schools due to money? Partly. In Michigan, schools are rewarded for their scores on a certain standadized test. Schools that do well are rewarded monetarily. Schools that do poorly aren't rewarded. Does that make sense to you? So, the rich (usually white) schools get richer and the poorer, usually black schools, remained poor. School funding is also based in part on property taxes, so the schools in Bloomfield Hills have more money than those in Detroit. More money=more supplies, better paid teachers, more extra-curricular activities, field trips, etc. You get the picture. Does that sound fair? Guess who writes the tests? Yep. I was told that it is a bunch of educated white people. They try to make the test fair so that those without the same experiences can still succeed, but c'mon--most of the kids in Detroit had never been outside Detroit. Can they even begin to compete?


But, that isn't the only reason the children faired poorly in this Detroit school. In my opinion, I think that the public school system is the product of racism. Segregation. The Have's vs. the Have- not's. Initially a victory, the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education initiated a period of desegregation in inner city schools. This landmark court case decided that the so-called "separate but equal" schools were in fact unequal because they were segregated. It also initiated the policy of busing black children to white schools. HOWEVER, in another court decision, called Milliken v. Bradley, the Supreme Court decided, based on 53 school districts in Detroit, Michigan, that children could only be bused across district lines if it could be proved that multiple school districts had intentionally engaged in policies of segregation. It also emphasized local control of schools and further stated that there was no required standard of racial balance that had to be achieved in a classroom or a school in order to be qualified as "desegregated". Thus, because of this ruling, suburban schools were exempted from policies aimed at integration and busing was limited to intra-city. This led to a huge movement of "white flight" in the 70's, which essentially means that white people left Detroit and moved to the suburbs, leaving no white schools for the blacks to be bused to in the inner city! How's that for integration? Oh. And they took their jobs with them. Motor City? Yep. All of the car factory jobs relocated to the suburbs, too. GM, Ford. Chrysler. Still today, in Michigan, Detroit is basically almost all black and the outlying suburbs are almost all white. Segregation all over again. It continues today.



I found this great quote by legal historian Lawrence Friedman. Here he explains the ramifications of the Milliken decision:


"The world was made safe for white flight. White suburbs were secure in their grassy enclaves .... Official, legal segregation indeed was dead; but what replaced it was a deeper, more profound segregation ... Tens of thousands of black children attend schools that are all black, schools where they never see a white face; and they live massed in ghettos which are also entirely black." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliken_v._Bradley


Here is another telling quote by Justice Douglas:

"Today's decision ... means that there is no violation of the Equal Protection Clause though the schools are segregated by race and though the black schools are not only separate but inferior."
"Michigan by one device or another has over the years created black school districts and white school districts, the task of equity is to provide a unitary system for the affected area where, as here, the State washes its hands of its own creations."



So, you have an almost all-black, jobless city. Next, you base school funding on property taxes and test scores. What do you have? Institutionalized racism. You have a system set up for the failure of blacks and the success of whites. Pull themselves up by their bootstraps? They don't have bootstraps to pull. Without education, what boots do they have? This kind of stuff makes my blood boil.





Most of the children I worked with in Detroit weren't motivated to learn, let alone succeed. Can you blame them? Most had never met anyone who went to college. Grad school? What was that!?, they would ask when I told them that was where I was enrolled. Most of their home situations were tough--the stories I heard could make you cry. These children had the weight of the world on their shoulders. Then they were expected to come to school and learn? What role models did they have? What success stories had they heard? What hope did they have? Could they compete on the same level as a white child from the suburbs for a spot in the top colleges in the state? They didn't even have a safe place to play during recess, for crying out loud!



So, when I was pregnant with Anna, Cameron and I discussed what we wanted for her--educationally. We really felt strongly that it was unfair for our daughter to have advantages just because of the color of her skin. I had read all the books by Jonathon Kozol--Savage Inequalities had opened my eyes to the whys behind the disparities in the public school system. We even attended a talk by Jonathon Kozol. We learned about per pupil spending and how white children in the suburbs literally have thousands more spent on them each year as compared to black students in the inner city. In addition, we were against charter schools. We felt that they would not improve the situation in the inner city, but would only make the schools worse and the worst off of the children in an even more desperate situation than they were already in. Their already failing school would only become worse, and their future bleaker without opportunites to compete for colleges and jobs and life. Charter schools gave some children an option when their local public school was awful. But, that only worked when there was a parent who could get time off work, find a ride, buy the uniform, etc.

After Anna was born, we continued to struggle with this decision. I began to ask myself if I could, with a clear conscience, participate in a system that I knew was based on racism? Could we allow our daughter to benefit from a system that was based on the color of skin? Should we send her to an inner city school just to make a point? Woudn't that be sacrificing her education? We started to consider homeschooling for the first time. I began to read every homeschooling book I could get my hands on. I was so worried about socialization. It makes me laugh to look back now and remember that I actually feared that my children would not be socialized! This could not be farther from the truth. The more I read, the more convinced we became that this was the best option for our family. It was a decision based not only on our negative view of the public schools, but also on what we thought was best for our children. I realized that I enjoyed staying home, enjoyed teaching my children, and I enjoyed being with them all day. I didn't want to not be with my children, to let someone else teach them when I could do just as good a job, if not better.



This was not an easy decision, but came at the price of some guilt for me. I realize the privilege involved in this decision: I have the luxury to stay home with my children (although I think I would stay home even if we were dirt poor--I would make it work just to be able to stay with my kids) that many women in the inner city do not. I have come to accept that we needed to make a decision based on our life experiences, what God was calling us to do, the desires God has placed in our hearts. My heart still aches for the children in the city who do not have educational options. I don't know how to resolve the two issues in my mind without having guilt. Even as I write this, I am aware that this isn't the "typical" manner in which families decide to homeschool. I realize that most people feel a religious conviction first, a desire to protect their children, to be in control of their children's education. Honestly, I feel these things now, but that wasn't how we came to our decision to homeschool. I can't imagine now not homeschooling. I absolutely love it!



Hopefully, in my next post, I can go into more specific details about what curriculum we use and such. This explanation (about why we homeschool) is so much longer than I thought it was going to be!



In Christ, Laura