Staying Home to Go to School

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

Despite her background in the public schools, Delaine Chaffee was so dismayed by the seemingly constant testing in his 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 traditional of colleges: West Point, the Army’s military academy.

The latest believers in home schooling aren’t the fundamentalist Christians or left-wing hippies of earlier days. Instead, the ranks of home schoolers are being swelled by a new wave of conventional parents who suspect that their children are being let down in some way by the 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 can be seen across Southern California, particularly in Orange County, one of the nation’s home-schooling strongholds. The county’s Department of Educations runs a program for home schoolers; its enrollment is at 1,350 students, up from about 700 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 with the county 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 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, driven by a more personal sentiment about the best education for their children.

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

“Before, it was some fringe thing,” said Laura Denne, coordinator of the Ojai Home Independent Program, run by the local public school system, which despite its small enrollment of 27 has almost doubled in the past year. “But with home schoolers winning the spelling bee and the geography bee, it’s obviously working for some kids.”

A for-profit charter school in La Canada Flintridge that caters to home-taught students has grown from a handful of pupils in 1997 to nearly 1,000 today.

Politicians’ calls for reform of the public schools have fueled a popular belief that schools are doing a bad job, according to education experts. And, they say, 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.

And now home schoolers increasingly can turn to their public school systems for help.

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

In Orange County, both the Irvine and 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 teacher-parents. 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 in the future, if enrollment continues to climb.

The growth of home schooling drives many a public school educator to despair. Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers’ Assn., says 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 age-old question of socialization.

“What is the implication for our society for the long term?” said Houston of the school administrators association. “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 offers their children more options for socializing than ever before--and that their children often have more play time because of their shorter school days and lack of homework.