Home-Schooling Takes a Tack Toward Mainstream Parents

Drew Chaffee, an 18-year-old from San Juan Capistrano, typifies the new face of home-schooling.

The Eagle Scout has conventional interests: He rows on a local crew and plays guitar.

He has conventional parents, too. David Chaffee, his dad, is an Orange County Superior Court judge. His mom, Delaine Chaffee, is a former teacher who quit to raise her kids.

Despite her background in the public schools, Delaine Chaffee was so dismayed by the seemingly constant testing in her son’s fourth-grade class that she pulled him out when he was 10 and began teaching him at home.

Next fall, Drew will enter the most tradition-bound of colleges: West Point, the U.S. Army’s military academy.

The latest believers in home-schooling aren’t fundamentalist Christians or left-wing hippies of earlier days. Instead, the ranks of home-schoolers are being swelled by conventional parents who suspect their children are being let down by public schools.

Precise figures are hard to come by, but experts estimate that 1.5 million to 1.9 million children in the United States--perhaps 4% of all school-age children--are educated at home. The number is growing by as much as 15% a year, according to Mike Smith, president of the national Homeschool Legal Defense Assn.

The growth has been particularly strong in Orange County, one of the nation’s home-schooling strongholds. The county Department of Education runs a program for home-schoolers with an enrollment of 1,350, up from about 700 just five years ago. The high school program has an additional 300, up from 35 in 1996. And more than 540 parents this year filed affidavits stating their intention to educate children at home, up about 20% from last year.

“Now we have a new breed of families who are choosing home-schooling for academic reasons,” said Sidra Gaines, principal of the Pacific Coast High School, the county’s home-schooling program for teenagers. Three years ago, most of its students were taught at home for religious, philosophical or medical reasons, Gaines said. About half of all families now cite academic reasons for coming to the school.

In Ventura County, home-school affidavits are up 13% over last year’s, and home-school programs run by local districts--many of which have opened in the last 10 years--report that business is booming.

The Ojai Home Independent Program run by the local school district has seen its small enrollment almost double to 27 during the past year. “Before it was some fringe thing,” said program coordinator Laura Denne, “but with home-schoolers winning the spelling bee and the geography bee, it’s obviously working for some kids.”

A La Canada Flintridge company that operates campuses for home-school students throughout California has grown from a handful of pupils in 1997 to nearly 1,000 today.

Politicians’ calls for reforms in public schools have fueled a popular belief that schools are doing a bad job, according to education experts. And the 1990s spurt of appreciation for individual entrepreneurs has extended into the education world, catching the imagination of well-educated parents with high expectations for their children.

“Most people doing it are better educated than the general population,” said Paul Houston, executive director of the American Assn. of School Administrators. “You have a lot more people doing it because they’ve decided they can control academics,” he said.

Smith, of the home-school legal defense group, said that over the past 10 years, home-schooling has become more legitimate in the eyes of mainstream parents. His organization fought many of the court battles to make home-schooling legal.

“People don’t think you’re so strange now,” he said. “And there are so many more resources available. If you go online and type in ‘home-schooling,’ you’re just blown away by how much is there.”

Predictably, vendors have sprung up to meet parents’ demands, offering everything from online courses to stores full of curriculum guides and workbooks. And home-schooling conferences, where parents can network and buy curriculum materials, have become a booming business for convention planners nationwide.

Now home-schoolers increasingly can turn to their public school systems for help as well.

Partly in response to concerns over whether home-schooled children get adequate preparation--and partly to capture state funding for attendance--many school districts nationwide have begun bending over backward to create programs for parent-taught children.

In Orange County, the Irvine and the Capistrano unified school districts have started charter schools that offer home-schooling programs. Parents can consult with certified teachers, use computers and participate in music and science classes with other parent teachers. The county education department’s high school has become so popular that administrators turn away scores of students each semester. Its elementary school may open a fifth campus if enrollment continues to climb.

Religion-based home-schooling still dominates the scene, but now these parents are also finding a place in publicly funded schools, to the dismay of some educators.

Jennifer Spehar of Huntington Beach began home-schooling her children because she was afraid for their safety in public school. For Spehar, the county’s charter school is the answer to her prayers.

Every week, Jamie, 8, comes into the county school’s Costa Mesa campus for computer classes. Her mother sits outside the computer room, looking at workbooks or reading the Bible, which she positions right in the middle of the desk.

One reason she likes the program so much, she said, is that it allows her to weave religious themes into her children’s studies. This is possible even though her children are enrolled in a public school, she said, because she can teach supplementary lessons in Bible study.

Her children’s public school advisor, Peggy Broyles, whose own children attend a Christian school, said that as a public schoolteacher she cannot proselytize or require students to do religious assignments. But she does allow parents to assign children to copy Bible verse as a supplementary handwriting lesson--although, Broyles said, she probably would not put it in their permanent file.

That’s now considered permissible under the law, but Brian Ray, head of the National Home Education Research Institute, predicted that government-run home-schooling programs may soon find themselves in hot water over the teaching of religion.

“It’s probably going to wind up in the courts somewhere,” said Ray, a proponent of religious-based instruction who believes home-schoolers should avoid entangling themselves with the public school system. “What’s happening is both the government school programs and the parents want to have their cake and eat it too.”

Colin Miller, a consultant to the state Department of Education’s charter school unit, said his office has fielded scattered allegations of state-funded charter schools pushing religion but has never substantiated any complaints.

If a school were found to be teaching religion, he said, that school would be ineligible for state funding.

The growth of home-schooling drives many a public school educator to despair. Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers’ Assn., said home-teaching is bad for most children and could end up weakening the public school system.

“My gut instinct is . . . the track record of most of these kids academically is not going to be very good,” Johnson said. “I have serious questions about how one or two people feel they can do a better job educating their children.”

Other opponents raise the question of socialization.

“What is the implication for our society for the long term?” said Houston of the American Assn. of School Administrators. “What happens in 10 to 15 years, when you have a lot of kids who have grown up withdrawn from the social context? . . . Democracy depends on people being able to get along with people who are different from them.”

But parents point out that the growth of team sports, private enrichment programs and recreation department classes offer their children more options for socializing than ever before. They say their children often have more playtime because of their shorter school days and a lack of homework.

Michael Leppert of Thousand Oaks said his son, Lennon, sings in a children’s choir and participates in local play groups.

Nathaline Shonk, who teaches her three children in her Davis home, often takes them to a local park, where other home-schooling families gather and where the town’s art center has painting, dance and photography classes during the school day. Her eldest daughter also takes classes at Sacramento City College, plays soccer in a local youth league and volunteers at a small animal clinic.

But for many parents, the socialization question is irrelevant.

Some fear violence in the public schools. After a year of home-schooling, Wendy Edwards was considering enrolling her son, Daniel, at Santana High School in Santee. She was driving there on March 5, the morning gunfire killed two students and injured 13 others. As she was caught in the traffic caused by ambulances rushing to the school, she decided to continue home-schooling until her son is ready for college, she said.

For the most part, the latest wave of home-schooling is motivated by desire for good academic preparation tailored to children’s needs.

“The main problem we see with kids in school is: They’re not taught to think,” said Leppert, “They’re just part of the herd, and they form opinions and call it thought.” He and his wife, secular home-schoolers, have taught their 13-year-old son since he reached school age; he has never attended public school.

They also publish a national newsletter intended to connect Christian home-schoolers with their secular counterparts to better support the movement. The couple are expecting more than 1,000 parents at a May 17 conference for secular home-schoolers that they are organizing in Woodland Hills.

Many parents who teach their own children say they also take advantage of community colleges, with their more advanced classes.

Drew Chaffee studied physics, chemistry and pre-calculus at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo while studying English in the county home-school program.

“Believe me, I had nothing to do with teaching him chemistry and precalculus,” his mother said. He had great teachers at both campuses, she said.

Overall, say parents and education experts, the growth of home-schooling is likely to continue, especially since many colleges are more receptive to such students.

“Five years ago, maybe 10% of colleges had a policy on home-schooled students,” said Cafi Cohen, a home-school parent in Arroyo Grande who has written three books on the subject. “I bet its 40% to 60% today, and I expect it to be 100% within two or three years.”