Sunday, November 7, 2010
Want a tax cut? Consider home schooling!
Home schooling is becoming more and more popular though..." In the United States similar trends were noted with numbers jumping from 50,000 homeschooled students in 1985 to an estimated 850,000 in 1999, according to the US Department of Education."
(http://www.suite101.com/content/trends-and-growth-in-homeschooling-a48813)
...and here
"Home schooling is much cheaper than public school education. If government is looking for ways to reduce costs, active encouragement of home schooling as a serious option ought to be promoted and encouraged. If most children were home-schooled, then many schools could become public parks or libraries, and all the fossil fuels used to drive children to school, to heat, light, and air condition schools, and other activities that are anathema to environmentalists could be avoided. Public schools could always be the option for parents who, for whatever reason, cannot home-school their children or send their children to private schools, but the public policy of promoting private instruction of students could solve many problems that government currently and clumsily tries to solve through the expenditure of vast government resources and the hyper-regulation of education in many states." (http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/education/4722-homeschooling-in-america-grows)
...may be an answer to help some budgeting problems our country is now experiencing! Perhaps taxing the rich more is not the answer, or signing away stimulus bills.
The average funding per-student in Missouri is $7,000 in the public school system, while my mom spends $800-$1,000 a year on school curriculum for eight children, but never any more then $2,000 for eight children with sports, theater, dance, or debate included. That's $100-$250 per student a year! However, there are more expensive options for home schooling, CD's that can be bought with learning materials, or buying certain curriculum can get up to $4,000 a year, but not many homeschooling families spend that much. You can almost even home school for free from public libraries, and from libraries established by home school groups that are rooms of amassed curriculum. In the school district that I live in alone gets $38.3 million a year at the rate of $7,625 a student. Where if these students were to be educated in my family, $1,509,600 would be spent a year on them. That leaves a difference of $36.8 million in my school district alone that could be use for something else.
We all either are paying taxes already, or will be soon. All this money is being dumped into school systems that are failing more and more as we speak...we see this as we look at the violence in our schools, the drugs, the poor grades...is this something you want to pay taxes for? or at least, this much money towards?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
aah, I forgot to post the link for the financial statistics, but I used the Missouri DESE sight.
ReplyDeleteI was actually home schooled by mom up until the second grade because of CONFLICTS that my family had with a school district in Colorado. Although I did learn the basics, when it became an option for me to enroll in public school I was academically behind all of my fellow students.
ReplyDeleteI think that homeschooling children could be much more beneficial than public school (especially when some public schools have over a thousand students, like mine). However, most parents don't know how to teach. Not only are they at a loss when it comes to the subject matter but they also don't implement structure and discipline like schools do. A good example of this is a boy that I went to school with used becoming home schooled by his mom as an excuse to just quit school.
(Of course, then there are the awesome moms like yours who were actually successful at home schooling their children!)
...
Also, I completely agree with you that even though they say, "a public education is a free education," it absolutely isn't. Every year on Enrollment Day at my school it cost at least $200. Then when you add in lunch money, club fees, activity fees, and the taxes it takes to run the schools, our families pay thousands of dollars. And at the end you sometimes get students like me who hated grade school and spent all of that money for close to nothing...
(Wow, I had a lot to say about this...)
Everyone is good at something! No parent can use the excuse of not being a good teacher for not homeschooling their kid. Okay, here I go...
ReplyDeleteMy mom is a math and science FREAK! Because of this, our education at home had a VERY strong emphasis on these two subjects, and if you did poorly in them, my mom would work extra hard to help us study, or have siblings work together studying with each other, to get grades up. As a results, even though I do not naturally get along easily with math, I can work it out eventually.
My mom also enjoys a good book, so our literature courses were always well rounded...we read the classics; William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain...American and English poetry.
However, she was not strong in the area of writing, and I did VERY few papers throughout high school. But! there is a solution to this dilemma!
We (home schoolers) call it "Co-op"
Simply, it is home school parents banding together, normally once a week, to teach classes that they enjoy or are strong in, to the kids of homeschooling families. My family had just gotten into this when I first entered highschool, but all the writing classes offered at the time, were for kids ages 8-12 or so, so my mom would sign me up for other more advanced classes.
Now the Co-op has grown, and there is a large range of all kinds of classes available. You can almost always find at least one someone who can teach a class you need taught. :)
That's awesome. So it's kind of like a Home School District.
ReplyDeleteLike I said, you had an awesome mom-- one that actually took educating her children seriously. People like her are the reason home schooling works and it's a shame there aren't more like her.