Testing, Best Practices and Other HS Evaluation Efforts

Yep, it’s the silly season again — not just for presidential campaigning but for independent family education as a state legislative target.

“Maybe with oversight we’ll find out there are no problems out there and it’s fine and dandy. I hope that’s the way it is, but it’s our responsibility.

Those kids should get an education in this state” . . . Schimek said she just wants quality control checks, she doesn’t care how they’re done.

As Kay and Dana and other hardworking home education advocates face renewed legislative meddling attempts in their own states, I thought I would offer this perspective, FWIW.

It was 2005 and a legislatively awakened mom was asking me — as an old education policy pro now happily homeschooling — about data collection and evaluation attempts aimed at home education. Her state department of education had created a professional position for same, and she was wondering about its potential to help or harm:

“The position requires that
the individual for this job be able to:

1) comprehend and remain current in research and best practices in
home schooling

I would like to know what you think of the term ‘best practices’
being used with homeschooling?”

Here’s how I responded for her, and for our “parent-directed education” list:

Interesting!

First a riff about “best practices” as a concept and then homeschool-specific thoughts.

Nance is right, “best practices” is education jargon. It’s meant to be fuzzy yet generally understood and accepted, like social norms or manners or grammar.

In the past 25 years, public schooling has made a new specialty out of collecting and promulgating “best practices” because imo, it’s a way of seeming helpful and expert without any generalizable research or enforcing regulations; it’s more like writing an advice column or suggesting recipes.

In benign form, “best practices” are anecdotal and non-binding, so there’s just nothing to argue about — best practices are ideas that have helped some folks somewhere move toward the “good” end of some widely accepted continuum. Best practices are proffered routes to take you where you say you want to go.

Neither law nor formal teacher preparation defines homeschooling best practices, that I know of — they barely acknowledge homeschooling’s existence and learn nothing about us, just assume schooling is superior!

. . .Which has always been a bone of contention with me. School laws that charge ps personnel with evaluating homeschools armed with nothing but schoolish best practices as their measure.