Home vs. Classroom : For Some, Schooling’s a Family Job

When Bonnie Nord took her 6-year-old daughter Stacy out of a private school and began teaching her at home 5 years ago, she tried to keep it a secret.

“I didn’t want to tell anyone I was doing it,” she said. “There was extreme persecution from close friends, family--everyone.”

Today Stacy is still in school at her home in Edmonds, Wash., learning math, reading, science, Bible history, sewing, cooking, even Greek. She recently scored at the 11th-grade level in reasoning and vocabulary skills on the California Aptitude Test.

No Longer a Secret

But Stacy’s home-based education is no longer a secret. “Now it’s reversed,” her mother said. “I’m very comfortable teaching at home now. Parents tell me they feel guilty because they aren’t home schooling.”

A growing number of parents--led by religious fundamentalists but also including parents who are disenchanted with public schools because of drug problems, inadequate discipline or low academic standards--have decided that their children will get better educations at home than in school.

Nobody keeps a precise count, but Pat Lines, a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Education Department, estimates that between 120,000 and 260,000 children are being taught at home nationally, about double the total she found three years ago.

Occasionally, the results of home schooling are spectacular. Grant Colfax, 22, who was taught at the family ranch near Boonville, Calif., since the first grade, is graduating from Harvard this year as a premedical student, and he is preparing for a year in New Zealand as a Fulbright scholar. His 19-year-old brother, Drew, whose only teachers through high school were his parents, is making A’s as a Harvard freshman.

Disliked Public Schools

David Colfax, father of the two brothers, decided that he did not like public schools while he was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. The family moved to California in 1973.

“Public schools,” he said, “were the worst possible place to send kids. When we came here, we were turned off education in general. Of course, at that time, nobody was home teaching.”

Not every family that turns its home into a school can expect to send its children to Harvard. In fact, critics of home schooling--particularly public school administrators and teacher organizations--say that most parents are not adequately trained to teach their children.

But advocates say that the results tell a different story. The Home School Legal Defense Assn. of Washington, D.C., recently surveyed 591 children being taught at home and found that 88% scored at or above their grade level on standardized tests.

Beyond academic considerations, however, opponents of home schooling warn of the isolation faced by children who are taught at home.

“The No. 1 function of education is not reading, writing and arithmetic, it’s learning to grow up, to communicate with other people and interact with people your age,” said Keith Geiger, vice president of the National Education Assn.

“We’ve found that the social skills (of children taught at home) are not very well developed. I find it hard to believe a person who goes all through school at home, then is thrust into a college or work setting will be able to get along.”

Georgetown University sociologist Margaret Hall worries that children taught at home could become too dependent on their parents. “I think there are probably more dangers than advantages for parents doing it,” she said.

Attentive to Needs

But many home-school advocates, aware of the risks, say that they make sure their children are involved in non-school activities with other children. Stacy Nord, for example, regularly goes ice skating and takes field trips to local museums and farms with other children from a local home-schooling group.

“My daughter is more socially adjusted than a lot of adults,” Bonnie Nord said.

David Colfax has found no evidence that his two sons had trouble adjusting to Harvard after years of studying on their California ranch. “Other kids have said they’re impressed with the way they do their studies without any external pressures,” Colfax said.

Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, a 10-year-old who briefly attended private school but now is taught in her home in Bryn Mawr, Pa., says that she has plenty of friends her age--and plenty of time to spend with them. She goes to a local gym twice a week with other children, serves as a volunteer at a local nature center and has a circle of home-schooling friends.

“We call each other up a lot and go to the park,” she said. “I don’t feel that because I’m not in school I don’t have friends. I feel I’ve got friends most school kids do not have--adult friends.

Combines Study, Play

“Something I really like about home schooling is that when I’m working on a work sheet, I can say, ‘I’ll do half now, then run outside and play.’ I like being able to decide when to do schoolwork.”

Nobody--least of all the parents who have tried it--says teaching at home is easy. The biggest problem for beginners is confidence, said Susannah Sheffer, who edits a monthly home-schooling magazine in Boston.

“They have to learn to trust their children and trust themselves,” she said. “Many parents feel they are not trustworthy enough to teach their children. They have to let go of the pressure and worry. Good teachers learn how to teach from their children.”

Wendy Baruch, who has been teaching her 12-year-old son at home in Boston for four years, says she tries to make her lessons practical. “You can teach math by baking an apple pie,” she said. “Not only do kids learn about math, they get to see the results--they eat it.”

Peter Bergson, a Pennsylvania home-school consultant who is teaching his four children, including Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, at home, said he does not try to be an expert on every subject.

They Research the Unknown

“My kids often ask a question I can’t answer,” he said. “Then we go and research it. We may end up answering just one question, or it may lead to more exploration and reading. We got interested in Colonial life and ended up joining a local program that runs a farm as it would have been run in Colonial times.”

Bergson enlisted his brother-in-law, a public schoolteacher, to help his daughter with astronomy and geology. He took her to a local museum to get help in science. Many home schoolers hire piano and art teachers.

“I try to ask where this (the subject matter) shows up in the real world and what adults are using it in a practical application,” Bergson said. “Then we try to find adults who love their subject matter and are willing to share it in non-traditional ways.”

Colfax, who has written a book on home schooling that will be published later this year, said his ranch, more than a mile from the nearest neighbor, offers an ideal opportunity to learn by doing.

“In effect, we were homesteading, so much of it was hands-on experience,” he said. “We’d read a book on how to build a septic tank, then build it. In effect, the boys were right there learning alongside us, carving out a living in the process.”

Flexibility Called Key

Parents--in most cases mothers--find that they must juggle their teaching responsibilities with household duties. Staying flexible, they say, is crucial.

“We’ve found the children help each other,” Sheffer said. “Older children serve as a model. We find a much closer sibling bond in home schoolers. A mother might have a baby in her arms, but the other children help out.”

Sheffer said that many parents learn home teaching by consulting others who have gone before them. Holt Associates, an education consulting group founded in Boston in 1970 by home-school advocate John Holt, offers a list of experienced home schoolers who are willing to advise others on the methods they found successful.

California’s annual home-school convention--this year’s will be in Pasadena on July 18--gives parents a chance to establish contacts with other home schoolers, hear lecturers and browse through exhibits of 45 publishers offering home-school manuals, workbooks and textbooks.

The most comprehensive how-to book is “The Big Book of Home Learning” by home schooler Mary Pride, published last July by Good News Publishers of Westchester, Ill. Sales of the 350-page paperback have topped 18,000, and it is still selling at a rate of about 1,000 copies a month, even though it is sold primarily in religious bookstores and carries a $17.95 price tag.

Schools Offer Materials

Some private colleges and correspondence schools have begun marketing special materials for home schoolers. Many of the publishers are church-based.

If the church is the source of much of the teaching materials, most of the parents who teach their children at home are motivated by religion. Bonnie Nord is typical. “Public schools,” she said, “are totally contrary to Christian principles.”

John Wartes, a public school counselor in Washington state, who teaches his three children at home, surveyed 219 home-school families in his state and found religion was the most common reason parents taught children at home.

But what he calls “emotional factors” seem to be catching up. Parents are particularly concerned by a decline in morals in the public schools, he said, and worry that their children will face temptations to use drugs.

“Values have changed since I was a kid,” said Glennda Gobble, 29, who teaches her three children at home in Kent, Wash. “Most schools don’t discipline kids. I’d be all for public schools if they could straighten up in discipline and get back to basics in moral values. I feel like I’m taking a risk by home schooling, but I think I’d be taking more of a risk if I put my kids in a public school.”

23 States Address Issue

Some states, apparently jealous of the prerogatives of their public schools, make it extremely difficult for parents to teach their children at home. Of the 23 states with laws specifically addressing schools at home, North Dakota, Michigan and Iowa allow children to be schooled at home only if a certified teacher--the parent or someone else--does the teaching.

A few states require that home schoolers meet minimum standards in key subjects, such as reading, math, science and history. Many require that the children be tested each year.

California has no law governing home schooling, but the California Education Department requires parents who teach their children themselves to file affidavits declaring their homes to be private schools. Fred Fernandez, a consultant with the California Education Department’s non-public schools unit, said that the number of affidavits has increased about 7% in the last year, to 1,808.

“Every time I go out to make a presentation to home schoolers, I expect to see about 25 people,” Fernandez said. “Invariably there are over 100. There’s a tendency for them to be a little more bold about it now.”

Local superintendents in some California school districts, Fernandez said, vigorously resist the home-schooling movement. One technique: to insist that parents who teach at home are in fact tutors rather than private school teachers--and that therefore they need California teaching credentials. Alameda County school officials sent letters to home schoolers warning them they were violating the law and threatening legal action, though none has been taken.

Probably a “significant number” of parents have succumbed to this form of pressure and sent their children to traditional schools, Fernandez said. He added that he knew of no case in which a California superintendent succeeded in court in forcing parents to obtain credentials to teach their children at home.

The Los Angeles Unified School District does not act against families that have filed home-schooling affidavits and initiates action only against those who are notified of proper procedures and still refuse to follow them. It lists only 18 affidavits for private schools of six or fewer students.

‘Very Few Run-Ins’

“We have very few run-ins,” said Don Bolton, the district’s administrator for student attendance services. “We try everything we can to get it resolved before going to court.”

Elsewhere, educators have gone further. Two Michigan parents, Mark and Christine DeJonge, were convicted last November of fostering truancy by teaching their children at home. The court ordered them to allow the local school district to test their children and arrange for a state-certified teacher to supervise their home-school program. The DeJonges ignored the order, saying it violated their religious beliefs; they now face a contempt charge.

In Philadelphia, Leonard and Sue Laurito--he is a city police officer--won the right to teach their children at home in 1984 only after city school officials brought criminal charges against them for failing to enroll their children in a public school. The Lauritos retained a lawyer, offered test scores as evidence that their children were receiving an adequate education and finally won a recommendation from the court that their home-schooling program be approved.

“A lot of people are intimidated by the law,” Bergson said. “It can be frightening when the system starts moving against them. It’s expensive to go to court, and many people don’t have the money to fight it.”

Group Helps in Fight

The Home School Legal Defense Assn. was established four years ago to help such parents fight back. The nonprofit association, which sprang from the fundamentalist Christian movement, has 5,000 member families that pay $100 a year in dues. Chris Klicka, its executive director, said the association has handled 75 cases and has not lost one yet.

Apart from Klicka’s association, most home-school support groups are local. One is Christian Family Educators of Orange County, which publishes a bimonthly newsletter and conducts regular meetings for parents who teach their children at home.

“It’s incredibly important to have these groups for encouragement,” said Bethany Bennett, the group’s head and a home teacher for six years. “It takes a tremendous amount of conviction, and if you don’t have the conviction, you drop out after a year. We’ve found it’s important to know someone else who is home teaching.”