Alternative Education Puts Classes in Living Rooms--Even Kitchens : For Parents Challenging Role of Schools, There’s No Place Like Home

Eleven-year-old Benji Wei doesn’t go to school. He wakes up there.

Benji, who lives in North Hollywood, is one of a growing number of children being educated at home for reasons that range from their parents’ dissatisfaction with public education to a conviction that the Bible mandates home schooling.

No bells ring in Benji’s school. No principal’s voice booms over the public-address system. There are no exams, no grades, no competition for the teacher’s attention, no schoolyard pals--or bullies. Benji’s teacher is his mother, Ann Wei, who said she decided to teach Benji at home because he was bored with public school.

Moreover, she said, the school had not been understanding about Benji’s missing classes when he worked as an actor on such television series as “Webster” and “Scarecrow and Mrs. King,” despite the presence of a credentialed teacher on the set.

Benji’s one complaint, Wei said, is that home schooling is “too easy.” But when she pressed him about the complaint, he told her he really meant that going to school at home is fun, she said.

Nobody knows exactly how many children are being taught at home. A United States Department of Education spokesman recently estimated that 250,000 children attend home schools nationwide, double the number three years ago. Proponents of home schooling put the current figure as high as 1 million.

Fred Fernandez, a consultant on private schools to the California Department of Education, estimates the number of California home schools at 1,800. In the Los Angeles area, hundreds of children study long division at kitchen tables, pledge allegiance to dining-room American flags and call the teacher “mom.”

Home schooling is permitted in all 50 states. California law does not speak directly to the issue, but it does allow parents who wish to teach their children at home to do so if they file an affidavit with the state declaring their homes to be private schools.

Oversight of California’s vague education statute is left to local school districts. The law requires, for example, that private-school students must be taught the subjects taught in public school. The law also requires that private-school teachers, including home schoolers, be capable of teaching, although it doesn’t specify who should make that judgment.

Not surprisingly, officials in the 1,100 school districts in California vary in their views of the desirability and legality of home schooling and, thus, in their tolerance of home schools. The educational establishment voices many concerns about home learning, ranging from questions about the quality of education most parents can provide to fears that children educated apart from their peers may suffer socially or psychologically. Home schoolers insist those fears are largely groundless.

John Boston, who has taught everything from kindergarten to Juvenile-Court school classes, said formal training in education is rarely necessary for successful home schooling. Boston, of Escondido, decided almost a decade ago to teach his son, Sean, at home.

“When you are teaching one-to-one, teaching credentials don’t matter,” said Boston, who has a credential. “If you know the subject, you can teach it yourself. If you don’t know it, you can go out and find someone who does.”

When Boston started teaching Sean at home, the local school district advised him to fill out a private-school affidavit.

“I call that cooperation,” Boston said. A former teacher who dropped out to raise avocados, Boston assumed most of the responsibility for overseeing Sean’s education, in part because his wife worked outside their home.

Eighteen-year-old Sean is now a student at Palomar Community College, his father reported proudly. Boston never had Sean tested for academic achievement once he left school, although Sean had himself tested at 14. As Boston explained, “He was considering high school because that’s where all the girls were.”

Opened Home

Because Boston “wanted to give other parents the same kind of freedom I had,” he opened his home school to other parents who want to educate their children themselves. For $65 for the first year, $45 for subsequent years, parents can become official volunteer teachers in Boston’s School of Home Learning. In the four years the non-traditional educational enterprise has existed, about 155 families in California and seven other states have signed up.

Boston, who started his home school for philosophical and practical reasons, not reasons of religious faith, does not inquire into the motives of his prospective teachers.

Parents who sign up for Boston’s program can legally teach at home without filing affidavits of their own with the state. Boston also helps them with such chores as transferring school records. And Boston added: “I also send the kids a little ID card so if they are ever stopped on the street, they can say, ‘I’m enrolled in the School of Home Learning, and I’m supposed to be going to the library.’ ”

Benji Wei is one of the School of Home Learning’s 250 students. Benji was a gifted student at a San Fernando Valley magnet school before he began studying at home with his mother.

Now in sixth grade, Benji is following a curriculum from a Hawaii-based organization called Learning at Home. Theirs is not a Christian school. “I’m Buddhist,” his mother said.

Lessons Freely Modified

Wei said she freely modifies Benji’s lessons and encourages him to pursue his own passions. Benji is expected to do schoolwork at least three hours a day, usually in the morning. What he doesn’t do during the day becomes homework at night, Wei said.

Together they are studying Spanish, of special interest to Benji because he has friends who were born in Bolivia. He reads, writes and does math every day. He loves science activities and beating his mother at Scrabble. Benji, who sometimes joins his mother in her children’s store, Reruns for Wee Ones, is thriving, Wei said.

Like many other people involved in home schooling--as many as 80% by some estimates--Linda and Steve Evans of Eagle Rock are devout fundamentalist Christians. Linda is a former school librarian who devotes several hours a day to teaching Lorien, 8, Sarah, 5, and Andy, 3. Home schooling allows them greater control over the values their children absorb with their phonics and other academic lessons.

Steve said their reasons for opting for home schooling are as much secular as religious. Indeed, the burgeoning home education movement has created strange bedfellows--a large number who want to turn their homes into God’s classrooms and a secular minority who read the reformist work of educators John Holt and others and decided that the best school is no school at all.

The Evanses are a little of each.

Advocates of “deschooling,” the Evanses try to make learning part of the natural flow of their family day, a day imbued with their belief in God. Their school, which has never been visited by an education official, is called the Questing House.

Baking in Lesson Plan

In the Evanses’ view, making a batch of blueberry muffins is a better lesson in reading and measuring than any classroom exercise. As Steve said: “The more homelike we make our schooling, the more successful it is. As soon as we make it classlike, it becomes less successful.”

The Evanses believe that they can do a better job than the public and most private schools. “We’re very impressed with the quality of some of the teachers we’ve seen, but they’re up against an impossible situation,” Steve said.

From her school librarian days Linda recalls how frequently even good teachers were overwhelmed by the demands of teaching 30 children at once. “The odds were against the individual child because the teacher was always tied up with the bright kids or the slow kids,” Linda said.

Although Linda carries most of the family’s pedagogical burden, husband Steve, an insurance agent, also teaches. Steve, whose office is nearby, reads to the children when he comes home for lunch each day and again at night. He leads them through math games and has taught them a smattering of Spanish and Swedish. And Steve was the one who helped Lorien bind last year’s schoolwork into a handsome volume entitled “Lorien’s Frist Grade Workbook,” lovingly preserving her almost correct spelling of first.

Unlike Lorien, the younger children are not yet legally required to be in school. But as Linda Evans said, “We don’t send the younger ones into the other room, so they all pick up on it.” As a result, Sarah already outshines her older sister in math, a situation that might be harder for Lorien to bear if she was not such a gifted artist.

While children in conventional schools are wriggling in their seats, Lorien curls up in the living-room rocking chair to read the library books that are her textbooks.

The Evanses spend about $50 a year for an elementary school curriculum devised by the Oak Meadow School, a private school in Ojai whose home-study curriculum is used by about 3,000 children nationwide. The Evanses don’t hesitate to modify the curriculum as they see fit. Paper is their biggest school expense.

The Evanses say they would consider sending the children to a conventional school if that was what they wanted. But so far, the Questing House is just fine with Lorien. “I have more time to play,” she explained as she dashed into her bedroom for her latest arts-and-crafts project, a house for her teddy bear.

Katherine Duffus of Pasadena decided to teach daughter Jacklyn, now 12, at home when she realized that the youngster had a serious reading problem. Jacklyn attended second and third grade at the Waldorf School, now in Altadena, a private school in which Duffus knew Jacklyn would be able to learn at her own pace. Even there, Duffus said, “my daughter was very aware that other children were reading well. That made her feel real dumb, even though she’s plenty gifted.”

Duffus kept Jacklyn home for fourth and most of fifth grade. Duffus, a practicing Christian, explained, “I wanted to pass on my belief system and just wanted to spend that time with her.”

She also wanted to help Jacklyn learn to read. They spent hours poring together over the “Little House on the Prairie” books that Jacklyn loved, Jacklyn painstakingly sounding out the words using what she had learned about phonics, her mother there to help her when she faltered.

Earning Straight A’s

Jacklyn is now a sixth-grader at San Gabriel Christian School. “She’s reading fine,” her mother and former teacher said proudly. “She’s earning straight A’s. I think she’ll go on and do whatever she wants to do.”

Gayle Guzman, who lives in Long Beach, became a home schooler out of dissatisfaction with the public school experience of her now-grown son, an underachiever who couldn’t find his educational niche. “I could never communicate with the teachers,” she said. “There always seemed to be an us-and-them feeling. If you wanted any changes made, you were more or less told to go to a private school.”

Impressed by the philosophy of the late home-schooling guru John Holt, Guzman decided to teach her younger child, Lily, now 11, at home. Guzman said that home schooling appealed to her counterculture side. “I’d say I’m a question-authority type of person,” she said.

Lily stayed home for fourth and fifth grade. “She was happy to be out of school, but she wanted to be sure she was up with everybody else,” said Guzman, who administered standardized achievement tests to her daughter largely to reassure her that she was not falling behind.

This fall, Lily, who is an accomplished violinist, started sixth grade at a public magnet school in Long Beach. Ironically, one reason Guzman, a single parent, abandoned home schooling is because she became a full-time public school teacher.

Role Given Insight

“I originally wanted to get credentialed so I could teach her,” Guzman said. Being in the classroom has given her enormous insight into the problems that public school teachers face, Guzman said. But it hasn’t changed her mind about the legitimacy of home schooling and other forms of alternative education. “I feel that people who want to do it should be able to,” she said.

Some home schoolers encounter no problems with education officials.

Elizabeth Hamill, who runs Gardensong School for her two young sons, lives in Berkeley.

Gardensong’s curriculum is a far cry from most schools’. On a recent morning, the children worked alongside their mother at a soup kitchen for the homeless.

Seven-year-old Harrison’s math lesson that morning consisted of counting the number of people who wanted to take showers and dividing that number into the amount of time available for showers. He was responsible for telling those in the showers when their time was up.

Berkeley Unified School District sent a representative to the Hamills’ house shortly after they filed their private-school affidavit. He verified that Elizabeth, who majored in neurobiology in college, was keeping attendance records--she routinely marks the children present seven days a week--teaching in English and meeting the other requirements of the law. The district hasn’t contacted the family since.

Not every parent teaching at home finds the authorities so amenable.

In Lancaster recently, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office pressed charges of violating the state Education Code against a Palmdale couple, Gary and Mary Clevenger, who took their children, Kay, now 7, and Tony, 8, out of their local public school, filed a private-school affidavit with Sacramento and began teaching them at home. Mary Clevenger said the family, which is Christian, did not do so for religious reasons but because she and her husband were unhappy with the local school.

The complaint was filed by the superintendent of the Eastside Union School District, Jack E. Killian, who believes that the Clevengers failed to establish a legal home school. He advised them to modify their home program or to hire a state-credentialed tutor.

The Clevengers have since enrolled their children in a Palmdale public elementary school. According to deputy Dist. Atty. Hans F. Berg, they are expected to plead no contest when the case comes to court Tuesday. Berg said sentencing will probably be deferred until next year so the court can be sure the children remain in school. At the time of sentencing, the $200 fine that the Clevengers could be assessed will probably be suspended, he said.

To help avoid or successfully negotiate such legal battles, about 7,000 home school families nationwide have joined the 5-year-old Home School Legal Defense Assn., based in Great Falls, Va.

For a $100 annual fee, member families are advised on the legal ramifications of home schooling in their states. More important, should members encounter legal difficulties, the association will, as co-founder J. Michael Smith said, “become their attorney for home school problems.” The Clevengers are members, for example, and the association has provided them with an attorney at no charge.

Most, but not all of the association’s members are fundamentalist Christians. When defending secular members, Smith said, the group’s lawyers usually opt for a 14th Amendment or privacy defense, rather than their usual First Amendment, religious freedom defense.

Smith, who recently moved to the Washington area from Santa Monica, is among those who believe that home schooling is a scriptural obligation for Christians like himself.

Smith cited a verse from the book of Deuteronomy: “And thou shalt teach them (God’s laws) diligently unto thy children and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” To fulfill what he regards as God’s mandate, Smith and his wife began teaching their three younger children at home five years ago while still in Santa Monica.

Smith said his group has become involved in about 370 “hostile contacts” between home schoolers and education officials in the past year. In recent years, he noted, a growing number of states has passed legislation explicitly allowing home schooling under specific circumstances.

“Every state is going to have to resolve this one way or the other, so there is an objective standard and people know where they stand,” Smith said.

Opponents See Flaws

Opponents of the movement worry that home-educated youngsters may be shortchanged academically. They also express concern that home schools have enormous potential to isolate children and prevent them from interacting normally with their peers.

Home schoolers respond by pointing out that the method has worked successfully for decades in Alaska. They also point to such home-schooled success stories as Grant and Drew Colfax, who were taught at home on a Boonville, Calif., ranch and later succeeded at Harvard.

Most home schoolers say they go out of their way to ensure that their children have contact with other children in church, in the neighborhood or in dance or other classes outside the home. And many home schoolers add that they are just as glad that their children are not acquiring most of their social values through contact with children their own age.

“I think it’s a negative thing to have kids herded together in a big group just because they are the same age,” said Elizabeth Hamill, who believes that the typical schoolyard is more often hellish than paradisal.

Renee Brooks, a former actress, now a minister’s wife who teaches her children at home in Watts, denounced the typical public school as “just a giant baby-sitting cage.” She scoffed at the notion that her son Jason, 6, is missing something because he spends more time at home than with other youngsters.

“The kids in my neighborhood smoke dope,” she said. “They break-dance, and they play all day. I wanted more than that for my son.”

Many home-educated children grow up without television sets. But Jason, a student in Boston’s School of Home Learning, is being taught with the help of a TV and a videocassette recorder. Jason spends three hours a day watching an educational tape from a Christian firm in Florida.

Many observers, including the state’s consultant, Fernandez, express concern over the lack of quality control over home schools. Others, including UCLA education professor Donald L. Erickson, say that learning at home can be as good or better than regular school.

Erickson, who has appeared as an expert witness for home schoolers who have run afoul of education statutes, acknowledges that some home schools are inferior, perhaps worse. “There are crazy people in home schooling just as there are in other areas of society,” said Erickson, who lives in Westchester. “A person would be an idiot to say all home schools are good, just as a person would be an idiot to say all public schools are good.”

Even critics of home schooling agree that it requires enormous commitment and energy. Most of the teachers are mothers, and spending every minute of every weekday with their children can take its toll, they admit.

As Renee Brooks said, “Once in a while I wish my name wasn’t Mommy, but it only lasts about an hour.”