Just a sampling of what I have encountered at various times:
- Children who could not read or write at age 10+.
Children who had learned only one subject area - learned it very well, perhaps...but were sorely lacking in others.
Children who had no idea how to interact with other children. They were like little adults...unable to fit into a group of children (unless the group were from the same, small sample of home-schooled children.)
Children who were malnourished or abused...and no public school to catch it and report it.
Children with very odd ideas about how the world functions.
Children with treatable) learning disabilities which would have been caught in a more public setting.
MOST of the children I have encountered who were home-schooled had parents with a
very specific agenda. There is supposed to be some regulation of home-schooling, but in reality, the Dept. of Ed doesn't monitor it very well and so these kids are at the mercy of whatever their parents choose to teach them...or to not teach them.
Lali, I am not saying that this describes your kids. However, this IS my overwhelming experience with children who have been home-schooled.
That doesn't surprise me at all, jewel. Would I be correct to assume that these are homeschooled kids who are now attending a public school? The social issues are one thing and cannot always be attributed to homeschooling. (Sometimes it can, for sure, but sometimes kids are just different. That is true whether kids are homeschooled or sent to public or private school.)
What happens quite often is that you have a child who is put into a public or private school. That child begins to struggle for some reason. Maybe he is autistic, maybe he is dyslexic, maybe he has some other learning issue. If the parent had gotten lucky, a teacher might have directed that student into special services. Unfortunately, what happens all too often (and I know from personal accounts) is that the child is ignored or doesn't get the services he needs. It seems like, for whatever reason, that parents have to
fight for special education services in many cases.
(And, for the record, although we pay taxes like everyone else, our school system was not required to provide special services to our daughter as she was being homeschooled. To be clear, I would have been willing to take her to the school whenever they wanted for speech therapy; I would never have expected anything beyond that, beyond what they were providing to the public and private school kids.
Don't even get me started on (practically non-existent) special services for dyslexia....)
Anyway, so some of those parents pull their kid out of school and try to homeschool him. Sometimes that works out great; sometimes it doesn't and the kid will end up back in the school system, still not knowing how to read or whatever.
And, yes, sometimes parents say they are homeschooling and they are not; they neglect their kids, abuse them, don't teach them anything at all, or whatever. It's sad but true, just as it is sad the number of kids who are sent to public school and suffer the same things at home. Just because they are sent to a school doesn't mean that the abuse or neglect will be spotted. It may make it more likely but not always.
Do I know "bad" homeschooling parents? Sure, I know a few, not any abusive or neglectful parents, though. I would report that.
In short, there is no perfect system, and I maintain what I've always said. I don't care how parents educate their children. Do you send your kids to a public school? Great! I hope that works for you and your kids. Do you send them to a private school? Also great, and I also hope that works for you. (We can't afford that.) We want to homeschool; it works for us. I follow the law and the checks and balances that are in place in Ohio; they are neither too lenient nor too stringent.
One thing I like about public charter schools (which these virtual schools are) is that they provide some very healthy competition to public schools, and the hope is that maybe they will force the public schools that are lagging behind to get their acts together.
One thing several homeschool families I know do is have their high school kids take a few classes at the public school. Then their kid can participate in sports or extracurriculars. The school gets some money from the state for that. The kid gets some experiences that can't be replicated in a homeschool setting and gets some classes that are harder to replicate (or impossible) in the home setting. Win-win, imo.
This is the kind of thinking I like to see--outside of the box.
Lali