Classroom in the kitchen

Home education an increasingly popular alternative

Sunday, April 23, 2006

By CHRIS ETHERIDGE

The Register-Mail

GALESBURG - Amanda Brucker is not a people person.

And the thin 12-year-old with bushy black hair said the pressure of going to school every day for seven hours was too much.

With the stress of her dad's cancer weighing on her mind all day, she would come home from school angry and was not happy.

"She was not living like a kid," her mother Amy said.

So her parents pulled her out of school in 2001 and began teaching her at home.

Now 4 1/2 years later, with her father healthy and back at work, the oldest of the three Brucker children takes classes at the kitchen table, on the living room stairs or in front of a computer for about 5 1/2 hours a day and says she has no intention of going back to public school.

Amy says homeschooling her children helps her retain the strength of her family relationship and ensures that her children are in a secure environment.

A survey of American families estimated that about 1.1 million students were homeschooled in 2003, the year for which the most recent statistics are available.

This is a 29 percent increase from the last survey performed in 1999 and is an increase from 1.7 percent of the total population in 1999 to 2.2 percent, according to the federal Department of Education.

The report also reflects a dramatic increase in homeschooled students and support for homeschooling in the last 40 years.

In the 1960s, an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 students were homeschooled, according to "Homeschooling. Trends and Issues," a 2002 publication. And a survey in 1997 showed a increase of 20 percent - from 16 to 36 percent - approval rating for homeschooling children since 1985.

Eloise Spurgeon, an East Galesburg mother of four who has been homeschooling her children for 15 years, says the trends nationally match those in the Galesburg area.

"When I started, there were three families that I knew of in this area," she said. "But within 10 years there were 20 families."

Now, estimates of the number of homeschooled children around Galesburg range from 100 to more than 200 children, which is consistent with national averages.

Keeping track

For the Knox County Regional Office of Education, keeping track of the number of families in the area with children at home can be a headache.

John Delawder, the assistant regional superintendent for Knox County, has the task of coordinating programming for homeschool students, and he also attempts to keep a database of families who homeschool. But registration with the state or county is not required, he said, so tracking statistics and families is difficult. He said there are 63 families who have registered with the county superintendent's office this year, but another 50, he believes, have not.

Amy Brucker, who runs an e-mail resource group for homeschooling parents in the Galesburg area, has seen the list grow to more than 30 members, which she believes equates to more than 100 students.

But Illinois is one of 12 states that does not require any annual accountability for homeschoolers. In the state, homeschool students are treated as a private school and are expected to operate 176 days a year for any children between 7 and 17 years old, but the onus of accountability lies in the school district in which the students live.

"In Illinois, there's a lot of freedom, and most homeschoolers like that," Brucker said.

Spurgeon says it allows her to focus on topics to which she thinks her children will learn best. For example, her son, Robert, checked out books about praying mantis from the library, because he found praying mantis eggs near their house.

"I want parents to have the freedom to teach their children," Spurgeon said. "I don't want someone regulating it."

She says it seems as though every year there is a proposal to change the rules, like lowering the age requirements for public education to 5 years old or raising them to 18 in one of the country's most lenient states.

Assessing students

In Iowa, parents must file a "Competent Private Instruction Report Form" annually, which asks which subject and books the students will use. If the parent is not a certified teacher, the students must take an assessment test each year or be placed in the local school.

When she lived in Iowa, Brucker said she liked the accountability of knowing her children were going to be tested at the end of the year. She found vindication in her program when Amanda passed the exams.

But for the most part, homeschooled students perform equivalent to their school-educated counterparts in college, said John Klockentager, Monmouth College vice president for enrollment.

"They're on par with the other students," he said. "They are not the most outstanding students (as a demographic), but they're not weak either."

He said assessing a homeschool student's ability to perform in college without a transcript is difficult but possible. The school will consider test scores from the students, but typically asks each student to interview with a professor in a subject they think they might major in. They also submit a writing sample and the regular application with essays.

"Each school deals with homeschool differently," he said. "I think we have a pretty good system."

By the numbers

- 1,096,000: Estimated number of homeschool students in the U.S. in 2003.

- 98,000: Number of kindergarten students homeschooled in 2003, the largest of any grade level.

- 77: Percent of homeschooled students in 2003 who were white, up 2 percent from 1999. (61 percent of public school students were white.)

- 54: Percent of homeschool families that made less than $50,000 in 2003.

- 445,000: Number of homeschooled students in southern states in 2003, the most of any region of the country.

- 48: Percent of homeschool students in the equivalent of elementary school (K-5), the same percentage as public schools.