Home Sweet School

By NANCY GIBBS

When Bonnie Vautrot realized her daughter was dead bored in school, she decided to take on the system. She became the PTA president at the Williamsburg, Virginia, elementary school and challenged the teachers to challenge the kids. "I would go in and beg the teachers: 'What can I do?' If you have a curriculum that says you're in third grade now, but your child is ready for fourth-grade material, you hit a brick wall." The response, she recalls, was, "Well, obviously you've got nothing better to do. Why don't you teach your kids at home?" So she did. Thus was born another home school. Beverly and Brad Williams had similar reasons but different circumstances. They were not only unimpressed with their local schools, they were scared of them as well. The idea of sending their four children through the cross fire of South Central Los Angeles was too harrowing. With ruthless budgeting, they managed to pay for private schools for six years, but tuition was just too high, and they were not satisfied with what it bought. So the couple converted their basement into a classroom with three desks, bulletin boards and two computers. Now their children get dressed every morning as if headed to school and are required to report to the basement by 9 a.m. Brad, who doesn't start work as a Federal Express delivery man until 3 p.m., handles most of the teaching. They work until 1:30, then break for the day.

If the Williamses and Vautrots do not seem like traditional home schoolers, that may be because there's no such thing anymore. A movement once reserved largely for misanthropes, missionaries and religious fundamentalists now embraces such a range of families that it has become a mainstream alternative to regular public or private education. In inner cities and rural farm towns all across the country, periodic tables hang on the dining-room walls, and multiplication tables are taped to the back of car seats for practice during field trips. Home schoolers hold conventions at which hundreds of companies offer curriculum guides, textbooks and support groups. There are home-school chat sessions on the Internet, even home-school proms and graduation ceremonies.

Since the late 1970s, when roughly 12,500 children were taught at home, the number has grown as high as half a million. It remains true that most parents who choose to withdraw their children from the school system, or never send them in the first place, do so for religious reasons, seeking to shape their children's learning in accordance with their spiritual values. In addition, there are still the hermits and occasional hatemongers, observes Joe Nathan, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for School Change, "people who have made it clear that the reason they educate at home is that they don't want their children exposed to people of different races, or that they don't want their children exposed to ideas with which they disagree."

More and more parents, however, are embracing home schooling for secular reasons. "I've also seen people who are very progressive or liberal," Nathan adds, "and think children are not well served by schools that are too stifling." Others, like the Williamses, are concerned mainly about the safety and the quality of public schools. Parents stress the chance to design a curriculum that is challenging, flexible and tailored to their particular child; to escape the "hidden agenda" -- ranging from capitalist conformity to secular humanism -- that they believe is promoted in public schools; and to have a teacher utterly devoted to their children's welfare.

For years the courts treated children who were kept home as truants; but home schooling is now legal in every state. Thirty-four states have passed specific statutes and regulations, and 29 require standardized testing for home-schooled students to ensure that they are passing muster. Last June the Texas Supreme Court upheld a ruling that exempted home-schooled children from the state's compulsory-attendance laws. As long as parents use a curriculum that includes written materials and meets "basic education goals," the court ruled, the state has no authority over the matter.

If there was a turning point in the public image of home schooling, it came in 1987, when Grant Colfax got into Harvard after having been taught by his parents his entire life. Grant graduated magna cum laude, became a Fulbright scholar and graduated from Harvard Medical School. One by one, his home- schooled brothers followed suit. "Our kids were more or less the guinea pigs," says Micki Colfax, who along with husband David home schooled all four Colfax children from their home in Boonville, California (pop. 750). "Their going to Harvard validated what home schooling was all about."

The Colfaxes make compelling spokespeople for the movement they did so much to legitimize. "We feel every parent is qualified to teach," Micki says. "If it doesn't work, fine, go on to something else. Even within one family, the learning skills might be different, so one ((child)) might work at home, the other might work at school. But I think the more the government gets involved, the less freedom parents have."

Some critics of the movement argue that parents may have too much freedom under current laws. Only 10 states require parents to have a high school diploma or General Equivalency Diploma to be able to teach. "It's a giant step backward," argues Thomas Shannon, executive director of the National School Boards Association, which represents more than 15,000 public-school boards across the country. "People tend to think, as one old basketball coach said, that everybody can boil water and coach basketball, and they kind of feel the same way about teaching. They just don't know what they're talking about." If these parents spent their time supplementing their children's educations rather than substituting for it, he adds,"their children would be remarkably well off."

< But home-school advocates counter that a teacher's certificate is no guarantee of success. They cite study after study showing that home-schooled children excel on standardized tests. While the national average is in the 50th percentile, the average home-schooled students register between the 65th and 80th percentiles. Nor is this unconventional background necessarily a disadvantage when students apply for college. With no grade-point averages or class ranks, no chance to edit the yearbook or captain the soccer team, home- schooled students must have top test scores to win admission to the most selective schools. But many colleges are eager to welcome freshmen who bring different experiences of learning. "What it really boils down to is getting a sense of a student's intellectual drive," says Jon Reider, associate director of admissions at Stanford.

But critics are also concerned about lessons that can't be measured on exams. A home-schooled child, they note, is not exposed to the diversity of beliefs and backgrounds that a child would encounter in many public schools and is deprived of an opportunity for "socialization." The after-school baseball leagues and Boy Scouts and dance classes don't make up the difference. "When you send them out to soccer and scouting, you're usually sending them out to a very select group of people who share, to a considerable extent, your own values," says Shannon. "That's a controlled group. The problem is, when they finally do get to working, they won't be in that controlled group."

Home-school parents retort that the socialization children experience in schools is not necessarily healthy: it may be competitive, even intimidating and violent. "I do not think that gang membership is proper social development," says Donna Nichols-White, who has home schooled her three children after having to teach herself how to write. "Whenever people mention the problem of gang membership, I mention that the common factor amongst all gang members is that they attended school at some time in their lives."

Do the children miss out on something essential? They don't seem to think so. "Sometimes I like playing school," confides Lydia Kiefer, 6. "I'll get up in the morning, get my backpack, put some books in it, come downstairs, and sit down at my little brown table and pretend I have a teacher and other kids next to me." She pauses to think. "But I'm not so sure it would be so fun in real life."

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Scott Norvell/Atlanta and Bonnie I. Rochman/Williamsburg