OFTP WebAdmin, Author at The Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents

A Reflection on my Internship Experience with OFTP

All students going through the Teacher Education Program at the University of Toronto must complete an internship in order to graduate. From the beginning of the year I knew that I wanted to do an internship that involved the topic of homeschooling. Even before we had children my husband and I seriously thought about the prospect of homeschooling our children. I thought that doing an internship on the subject would be a great way of getting more information. Before the school year started I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I was pregnant. Therefore, doing an internship on homeschooling seemed even more intriguing because then maybe I would have the flexibility of taking my child with me while visiting families in their homes as they homeschooled. However, as the year went on I began to have doubts that I would be able to complete an internship at all because realistically it would be too much stress to visit families everyday for a month with a newborn. And sure enough when my son Oliver was born, he was too much of a handful to take around to an internship. But all was not lost. I had been in contact with Herb Jones, a member of the Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents (OFTP), and it was approved by the university that I could complete a research project on OFTP at home for my internship. The following is a reflection on what I’ve done and what I’ve learned while doing my internship with the OFTP. Basically, my goals were to find out what the educational climate was like when OFTP started, the reasons why OFTP started, and what OFTP is doing today. I spent a lot of time reading the articles found on the OFTP website. The website is very comprehensive in providing information about the organization and homeschooling in general. OFTP provides services like support groups and legal help. They organize Diversity in Education conferences and are currently working on a Post-Secondary Admissions project. While researching the educational climate in the 1970’s around the time that the home schooling movement began, my site supervisor J. Gary Knowles provided an article that he co-wrote about the origins of homeschooling from 1970-1990. The article is American based, but I’m sure it represented what was going on in Canada at the time as well. The article outlined 5 phases of the homeschooling movement: contentions (criticisms of public schools), confrontation with educators (court cases), cooperation with schools, consolidation (networking), and compartmentalization (like-minded homeschoolers joining together). I would say that it was during the confrontation stage the OFTP started its work here in Canada. The confrontation stage is characterized by the court cases of home educators versus school boards/states regarding issues of the rights of parents, the roles of the school board/state and educational choice. Among its purposes, OFTP acts as a link between home educators and institutions such as the provincial government and school boards. With the amount of confrontation that was going on at the time, an organization like OFTP needed to be formed. As part of my internship I was in contact with Albert Lubberts, one of the original founders of OFTP. He provided me with some further insight into some of the reasons OFTP was formed. In an email, Albert said: “OFTP was formed in 1987 by a small group of individuals who were not actually home schooling individuals. The original founders, Dora Force of Woodstock, Barney McCafferry of Killaloe, myself and a couple others were at the time all involved in private schools with dispersed classrooms. Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Ministry of Education thought it a good idea to have homeschooling families join together to form private schools. This way, the Ministry believed, these families could be readily monitored and tracked. In many instances, regional school inspectors helped set up these schools. In the middle ’80s, the Ministry changed their way of thinking and attempted to close down a number of these schools. At one time there were at least 25 private schools with dispersed classrooms. Today about 15 remain. Because of this, OFTP was formed. The original purpose was to combat the adversarial activities of the Ministry and school boards who attempted to disrupt the activities of individual families that were members of these private schools. At that time, there were no support groups who had any experience in dealing with school boards and the Ministry. OFTP membership consisted of families who were members or owners of these private schools. Over time, OFTP took on true homeschooling families as well and today, the membership is virtually all home schooling families. For about 5 years, until OCHEC was formed in 1991 or 1992, OFTP was the only provincial support group and still is the only non-sectarian support group in the province.” Unfortunately, there still remains confrontations and that is why OFTP is still needed. Confrontations about what, you may ask? Many reasons, but many confrontations have been over two little words, “satisfactory instruction”. Ontario’s Education Act Section 21. (2) (a) states “a child is excused from attendance at school if, the child is receiving satisfactory instruction at home or elsewhere”. From what I understand some school boards/Ministry of Education have taken upon themselves the job of determining what is satisfactory instruction. Some have sent letters to homeschooling parents informing them that they have to provide detailed plans of instruction and that school boards must assess and evaluate their children. Some boards even portray that home visits and standardized tests are mandatory according to the law. (For more information on this issue see https://ontariohomeschool.org/legal/oftparchives/ ). OFTP and home educators would argue that nowhere in the Education Act does it say that parents have to provide this information and that these are intrusive practices. The question was even asked, “Are our school systems providing satisfactory instruction with so many students still not able to do the basics and not motivated to learn?” As I read these articles

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Home Education Memoirs: A Personal Biography of Our Journey – Part 2

About OFTP Members / OFTP WebAdmin

In the April 2002 issue of Home Rules, Jeanne wrote about her family’s ‘journey’ through the school system and ultimately discovering homeschooling. This is Part 2 of her story. How did we do it? In 1989, we started out very simply as far as school work; using Golden Work books and lots of field trips. Any degree of structure was based around the scheduling demands of the two year old. Our lives were far from simple. We gave up the regular salary my husband had and started our own business that fall. Theo had open heart surgery in the first month of our leap into home education. With Tom’s flexible schedule and with the kids out of school, we were all able to stay at Ronald Macdonald House together. We juggled our work and family times much more easily when we weren’t tied to the comings and goings of the school bus. It was a time of new direction and freedom for our family. We had no regrets about our decisions. As the kids and their interests grew, we started using the Unit Study approach and since the two older boys were very close in age, it was easy to have them working on the same subjects with just slightly different expectations and using simpler books and methods with the youngest one. When our fourth child was born we prepared a Unit Study for the older boys that focused on pregnancy and infant development. We relaxed about teaching and learning other things for the first few months after he arrived. It seemed important to teach not only about babies but to experience the reality of the impact babies have on routine. In 1994, when Leigh was home for Grades 7 and 8, we made plans for our biggest Unit Study yet. It was time for the long-awaited construction of an addition to our home and figured we would need all the help we could get. We couldn’t continue our home-education routine without including time for this project. We started with the planning and included looking at the history of housing and types of homes around the world. Eventually we got into a bit of architecture and design. Through the winter we fine-tuned our plans and we all worked on the costs and bill of materials. By spring we had everything ready. The kids were taken to the nearby building supplier and each was bought a carpenter’s apron and the hammer of their choice. Hammer they did. By the fall we had closed in our two storey, 800 square foot addition and on Valentine’s Day we put the last bit of paint on the walls. The motivation to keep them at it was high since the addition was providing individual bedrooms for them and a communal play and storage place for us all! We worked for nearly two years on that project and had an amazing structure to show for it. Gradually we got back to daily school work routines with the older three scheduled often around the youngest. We kept the kids involved in Cubs and Scouts and music lessons when we could swing it. The only text book I ever bought was a Transition Math book for Grades 7, 8, and 9. It was a wonderful investment (I got the answer book, too!) and both older boys got through it in two years giving them great preparation for Grade 9 Math in school. Theo is using it now. The Moores’ Influence: When the two older ones were in high school, we focused most of our energy on the learning needs of the next oldest one. Theo had a full recovery from his heart problems. But we discovered that he was not an avid reader and probably would have been “identified” as learning disabled had he been in school. Everything Raymond Moore has said about boys and reading was evident in this child! We focused on other areas – hands-on activities, field trips, museum days, Math and music and drama. When the announcement came that a new four-lane highway was to be built nearby we decided that following the process would be an exciting thing to do with Theo. He interviewed workers, got a tour of the engineer’s trailer and the gravel pit, and made phone calls to contractors to find out when the bridges were going up. At the end of it all we wrote and published a book as a family about the highway (thanks to Dad’s professional design and a hired illustrator). It was a great experience for a kid to write and publish a book when he still couldn’t read very well! Theo reads much better now. I suspect he is close to the average for his age. But he does not like to read. He plays violin and has a part-time job in a toy store where he often juggles and rides his unicycle to entertain customers. He is a computer whiz, can fix anything he tries and he has many other interests and talents. What Have I learned about Education? There is no question in my mind that individualized home-education is the ideal. At the same time, I have had many days when I feel inadequate and start to panic about what our kids might be missing academically (especially when we have been overwhelmed with real life situations like having a new baby and a dying Grandpa and we had no ‘book’ work to show for our time and efforts). We have also had wonderful opportunities to learn together as a family about things going on around us. We have often, by default, focused our ‘schooling’ on everyday things that show up in front of us, despite our plans to be more strict and better organized. We have used holiday times and family events as opportunities for learning: parties, new baby, weddings, funerals, holiday preparation, renovations, all these real life times. We involved our children in meaningful activities to help in those times

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Home Education Memoirs: A Personal Biography of Our Journey – Part I

About OFTP Members / OFTP WebAdmin

Our research about preschool: When our eldest, Leigh, was a toddler there was much talk about nursery schools, preschool programs and Four Year Old Kindergarten which was the school issue of the early 80’s. Though we had already chosen many alternatives as far as birthing and diet we were pretty steeped in the idea of traditional schooling. We had yet to encounter any home-educators or the reality of the public school system! One of our acquaintances with older children told us that if we had concerns about the school system that we should become informed and get involved now so that there might be some changes made by the time our kids were in school. Our first step was to look at the options available to us: there is a public school about ten minutes drive from our rural home or the Catholic school five miles further. We looked at Montessori and Waldorf schools but the reality was that as appealing as private school might be, it was not a realistic option financially. Our Firstborn starts school: We chose to keep Leigh home from Junior Kindergarten. When Leigh turned five, though, the demands of two active children and the impending third, coupled with the demands of Leigh himself, and my own ignorance and inexperience, we all seemed ready to send him to Senior Kindergarten. We chose the Catholic School as we had heard good things about it. Leigh adjusted well and enjoyed the friends and social side of it all. His teacher was a very patient, very experienced woman who seemed to be able to gear her subject areas to each of the many different children. She and Leigh got along well. After a few months, I noticed that when Leigh came home he was very grumpy and seemed to take out his frustrations on his younger brother, three year old Carey. It was as though everything that was said or done to Leigh during the day, on the playground, waiting in line for the washroom, or sitting in the classroom, he had to say and do to Carey. He was also very hungry when he got home and we learned very quickly to get some food into him ASAP when he arrived home to minimize the aftershocks. Learning to Read: When he was home sick for a week in November that year, Leigh learned to read. It was exciting to think that he just figured it out: with minimal coaching from me and while he was sick!! He would have crossed that step if he had been in school, if not that week, soon after, but I thought at the time it was quite ironic that he learned to read when he was NOT in school. Unfortunately, that big step in learning was not to be such a good thing for long. By the time he got into grade one, he was reading at a Grade 3 level and became quite bored with the time and attention given to basic reading skills in the classroom. Because he was a social child, he would talk and fool around with his willing peers. This of course, caused problems in the class. When we asked about providing some kind of enrichment, we were told that they don’t do anything extra for kids like Leigh, who excel in an area, until they are “identified” as gifted and that doesn’t happen until the end of Grade 3! I was even admonished by the principal for stimulating my child too much. It was easy to see through her narrow view. I had not spent hours and hours teaching Leigh. All I had done was love him and read to him. While in Kindergarten and Grade 1, Leigh had a substitute teacher for a large portion of each year. During Grade 2, Leigh had the benefit of the same teacher for the entire year so she got to know him well. But, again, because he was so quick to pick up on new concepts and ideas, he would master worksheets in a fraction of the time of the other children and then in his usual social manner, try to help them with theirs! His report card stated, “Leigh is a very social child” – a positive way of saying he talks and noses into other people’s business, too much! Again, when we tried to get some more challenging work for him the teacher gave him extra work or extra things to bring home but again we were told “wait until the end of Grade 3”. That being the case, all I could imagine was that by the time they ‘tested’ him, this kid would be totally bored, totally ‘put off’ by the school system, totally unwilling, unhappy, and consequently would do poorly on those tests, so causing an even more rapid downward spiral of achievement. He had many altercations on the playground including a swing in the side of his head that required stitches, a lunch box smashed, and numerous bullying experiences that were making it hard to be patient with the situation. He was trying to get along, respond without violence, trying to “use his words”, as he had been taught, but the majority of the kids he was dealing with did not have the same skills or goals. So the hope of getting along and making changes quickly became simply a “How can we give Leigh the skills to cope with this?”. Carey goes to kindergarten: In the meantime, Carey entered Kindergarten, while Leigh was coping through Grade 2. He had the same Kindergarten teacher as Leigh had. After the first half day Carey had, he announced that he wanted to stay all day long! I was encouraged and for a few weeks things went well. But by November, Carey was not so enthusiastic and became more sullen and even unhappy. While at home he had been drawing pictures of underground wells and what’s inside trees, his schoolwork challenges included colouring three balloons

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Dehumanizing Effects of Standardized Testing

Homeschool / OFTP WebAdmin

Few people consider standardized tests to be the powerful teaching instruments they are, nor do parents consider the possible impact of tests on their children. Most homeschoolers who have their children tested find the tests to be merely a source of academic feedback or a simple way to notify the state that the children are being educated according to their standards. Years ago I administered standardized tests to the students in my public school classrooms. As a homeschooling parent, I have agonized over whether to test my own children. Now I regularly administer achievement tests to homeschooled students. I continue to notice that standardized tests often teach significant lessons. Please consider the “dehumanizing effect lessons” listed below. Parents may want to consider how to best counter these potentially harmful lessons the next time their children are tested. Dehumanizing Effect Lessons Someone else knows what you should know better than you do. Learning is an absolute that can be measured. Your interests are not important. The subject areas being evaluated on the test are the only things that are important to know. Thinking is not valued; getting the ‘right’ answer is the only goal. The answer (to any question) is readily available, indisputable, and it’s one of these four or five answers here; there’s no need to look deeper or dwell on the question. Your worth can be summarized by a single mark on a paper. The purpose of learning is to get a high score. High test scores are the only purpose of testing. If you score very well, you are better than other people who do not score as well. Poor test scores mean that you are a failure. If you score poorly, there is nothing you can do to change it. Why try? I haven’t learned to read yet. I am not smart. Since we are tested once a year so we can homeschool, we have to spend the rest of the year preparing for the test. The test was too hard. I am not smart. The test was easy. I don’t have to learn any more. The test was easy [hard]. Public [home] school kids are dumber [smarter] than I am. The questions on the test are what is important. What I have been studying is not important. I have to get a higher score next year to show that I am learning. Other professional educators share my concerns about achievement testing. A few years ago, I spent an afternoon in the Multnomah County Library in Portland searching through education journals, reading articles on testing and evaluation. Here are the notes I gleaned that day. The single most common misuse of any test score is as a sole evaluation tool, contrary to test makers’ recommendations. Tests do not measure what they are said to measure. Standardized tests cannot measure creativity. Test scores reward children who have one style of learning, and penalize all other children for having a different style of learning. Standardized tests cannot measure the ability to think, and actually teach children bad thinking habits, such as trying to outguess the test makers, rather than thinking for themselves. Standardized tests result in a type of evaluation that is easy to manage (true/false, multiple choice). Thinking skills are very difficult and time consuming to evaluate. Standardized tests are designed, not to test individual progress, but to compare a child’s progress to the progress of other children. Thus, tests promote competition, not cooperation. Poor test scores decrease self esteem, possibly leading to social and discipline problems. Testing can damage the trust relationship between teacher and student. Test scores and grading are a divisive force in families, separating parents from their natural position as the child’s first and most committed teacher. (Wow! Some educators know this! Dare I hope for a positive future?) Reliance on standardized test scores reduces initiative, independence, creativity, and willingness to take risks in learning situations. Test scores become the goal of student work (extrinsic reward) rather than the sense of satisfaction and wonder that naturally follows discovery of something new (intrinsic reward). The drive for high test scores creates unnecessary, unproductive stress. Standardized tests promote under achievement. Test makers assume that all children have equal readiness for all subjects at the same age. Tests focus on a narrow band of learning, emphasizing memorization skills. Reliance on test scores and grades causes students to drop courses of study. It is worth noting that standardized tests, in addition to being narrowly focused and frequently misused comparative measurements of academic progress, are powerful teachers in their own right. Only when these instruments have been imposed on huge populations of students for many years can we begin to see that the tests take on a teaching life of their own, quite apart from the intentions of their creators. Reprinted in the Feb. 2002 issue of the OFTP newsletter (Home Rules), with permission. Ann Lahrson-Fisher is a homeschooling parent, longtime educator, the author of “Homeschooling in Oregon” and numerous homeschooling articles. Her contact address at the time was: Nettlepatch Press, P.O. Box 1279, Carson, WA 98610.

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Home-Schooled Students Face Hurdles to Higher Education

Homeschooling in the News, OFTP's Work / OFTP WebAdmin

University registrars in Ontario and a federation of parents who teach their children at home are beginning talks about how to admit home-schooled students to Ontario universities. There aren’t any formal guidelines for dealing with home-schooled students, and universities have trouble slotting them into the system because they are such a varied group. “It’s a challenge,” says Karel Swift, registrar at University of Toronto. “It’s hard to come up with a precise formula because they’re all so different.” Now, the Ontario University Registrars Association has asked the Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents to take part in a roundtable meeting about admissions at their annual meeting in February. Ontario universities may become somewhat more willing to welcome home-schooled students because last May the Ontario Ministry of Education advised universities that qualified home-educated students are now eligible to be counted for funding purposes. Nobody knows how many Canadian children are being educated at home and even the estimates, usually compiled by associations representing teaching parents, vary wildly. U of T has admitted about eight such students over the past four years, Ms. Swift says, and they have generally performed very well. But they were also subjected to rigorous scrutiny before being accepted. The university wanted to see a complete portfolio of their work and, in most cases, asked for Scholastic Aptitude Test scores or marks from some other independent academic test. Ms. Swift adds that the Ontario Council of University Admissions Officers have had discussions with organizations representing teaching parents but so far they have not been able to develop a standard list of prerequisites for accepting home-schooled students. In many provinces, including Ontario, there aren’t any province-wide high school exams that home-schooled students could take. Saskatchewan is one province that allows home-schooled students to take exams if they want to qualify for university admission. “We are a bit of a pain for the institutions,” admits Leo Gaumont, an Alberta high school teacher who, along with his wife, has home-schooled their three children in Tofield, a farming community east of Edmonton. “We don’t fit pre-conceived moulds. The Gaumonts’ two oldest children went on to earn diplomas from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton, but he says both encountered hurdles, including skepticism about the quality of their education, before being admitted to the community college. Teaching parents in several provinces have been actively querying universities and other post-secondary institutions to determine how they handle homeschooled students. Mr. Gaumont, a past secretary of the Alberta Home Education Association, was involved in a survey last year in which questionnaires were sent to 187 universities, university colleges and religious colleges across the country. Sixty-seven institutions responded, and 72 per cent of them had accepted home-schooled students while the balance either had not or would not. “We concluded that if home schoolers come knocking at their door, most will give them a chance,” says Mr. Gaumont. “But they’re not going to go looking for them.” The Christian Home Schoolers Association of Nova Scotia has surveyed universities and colleges in Atlantic Canada and found that none had a set admission policy, but most were open to admitting students educated at home. In most cases, the institutions wanted a portfolio of work and would insist on standardized test results only if the student had not followed a prescribed curriculum. The Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents undertook a small survey of four universities — Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier, McMaster and Brock — and found their approaches differed significantly. Brock, for instance, said it was prepared to assess students individually and would have faculty conduct an interview in the absence of supporting documents to assess achievement. McMaster, on the other hand, insisted upon an Ontario high school diploma or completion of a community college diploma, but would consider mature students. Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier have recently developed admission policies. Waterloo’s won’t be released until receiving senate approval. The WLU policy, adopted by senate in mid-November, stipulates that students educated at home can be admitted directly to the contemporary studies program at the university’s Brantford campus, and those who can provide independent evidence of academic achievement can be admitted to any WLU program. Otherwise, they can write a Scholastic Aptitude Test and other tests, or wait until they are 21 and be admitted as mature students. There are no firm estimates of the number of home-schooled students in Canada.

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How to Measure Home School Education

Homeschool / OFTP WebAdmin

Are you making the right choice? I have been a home educating parent for a number of years. We have only one child who is now a teenager. Except for a brief experience at public school in grades two and three, he has received the majority of his education here at home. I will admit that it has not always been easy and it has not always gone according to plan. I’m sure like every other home educating parent I have naturally asked whether we were doing the right thing. If the benefits did not outweigh the drawbacks I am certain my choice would have been different. Even with doubts at times, I have always had the feeling that this was the right course to take. One of most important factors in succeeding with home education is to get support from others with similar interests. This is possible by joining an association and keeping in contact with other home educating parents. Having support from friends and family is a tremendous benefit, and lessens the burden of having to feel you must prove to them that you are making the right choice. What does public education provide? Public education over the years has become a source of learning that has become accepted as the norm. It certainly has served its purpose for countless families. Many children have benefited and become successful adults. It has functioned for years with very few people questioning its authority. Since I have been out of the public education system for close to thirty years, it would not be fair for me to say I could give a true evaluation of public schools. It does seem in my opinion though, that unfortunately not many changes have taken place. Students must constantly compete against each other to be the top in their class. While this may be rewarding for a small percentage it obviously leaves the majority of students questioning their own ability. The smartest and brightest will benefit by being praised and increasing their chances of entering a better university. You might ask what is wrong with that, they certainly have worked hard to earn these rewards. I certainly would never want to discourage students from trying their best, but we can’t blindly ignore the children that were not as successful. What happens to those students, possibly even a majority who struggled with their education and did not find it rewarding? What would motivate them to continue on with school? Isn’t perpetuating a system in which the smartest get the greatest rewards and the average or below average face the consequence of failure, and all of the stigma that goes with it, counterproductive? Isn’t it more valuable to ensure that all students receive an education that allows them to make mistakes and rather than be punished, encourage them to learn from their errors? Keeping an interest in learning is a lot easier if you don’t have to fear failure. This is one way that home education surpasses public education. Is home educating working for me? How do you want to measure your child’s success? Is it necessary for your child to complete college or university for you to feel that home education has been successful? Must they also go on to have a high paying job and distinguished career before you feel that you have accomplished your goals, and if your child did not achieve your expectations, would you feel that you had failed? How will you know when you have succeeded? Maybe there is a different way of looking at success. In school we are taught to gain and remember knowledge in hopes that it will be eventually useful. Learning on the other hand is different, because it means the way in which we gather knowledge. If the art of learning can be taught, then measuring our success as a teacher has a different meaning. When you are learning, there is no need to ask the question–how much knowledge do I need? Learning and not knowledge then becomes the important factor in determining success. Is there a way to know that as a home educating parent you have made the right choice and are being successful? Well certainly there isn’t a test you can take to see if you passed, it isn’t that easy. Each family may have different reasons for choosing home education and I think it is important to ask yourself some questions. Besides the most obvious questions related to learning skills such as reading and writing and gaining knowledge, there may be some basic, yet significant subjects that I feel most schools overlook. When I was in school, we were never taught how to deal with life challenges even as simple as balancing a cheque book or as difficult as understanding prejudice. So as a parent, what do you want your child to know? Does your child have confidence and the skills to take on new challenges? Is your child comfortable talking to new people including friends of yours? Is your child learning how to look after things around the home, including cooking and cleaning? Does your child feel a responsibility for helping out around your home without expecting a payment in return? Do you feel that when your son or daughter is old enough, that they are included in some of the important decision making? A very important question is, does your child enjoy learning? One of the most important aspects of home education is that it allows you the freedom to teach values that are important to your own family. Not every family will agree on the same method and teachings or philosophy, but there is a common bond among home educators, that being, the right to teach our own children what is important to us and them. There are probably an endless number of questions you can ask yourself to determine how to measure your own success with home schooling. With the world changing, not always for the better,

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Fraser Institute Study on Home Schooling

Homeschooling in the News / OFTP WebAdmin

Home schooling is an effective alternative to the public school system The Fraser Institute issued a press release on October 9 [2001] summarizing their study entitled, “Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream”. Here are some quotes from Claudia Hepburn, director of education policy at the Institute: In the past decade, home schooling has proven itself to parents and researchers to be a highly effective alternative to public and private schooling. Although parents home school their children for a myriad of reasons, the principal stimulus is dissatisfaction with public education. Although home schooling is neither desirable nor possible for all families, it has proven itself to be a highly successful and relatively inexpensive alternative to public and more formal private education. As such, it merits both the respect of regulators and the further attention of researchers. Popular belief holds that home schooled children are socially backward and deprived, but research shows the opposite: that home schooled children are actually better socialized than their peers. Some studies have shown that home schooled children are happier, better adjusted, more thoughtful, mature and sociable than children who attend institutional schools. Research of homeschooled children in the U.S. and Canada indicates that they routinely outperform their peers in both public and private schools. International evidence appears to show the same trends. Although there is less research available in Canada than in the U.S. the academic performance of Canadian homeschoolers seems to be comparable to that of U.S. homeschoolers. The largest study that was done in Canada, to-date, found that homeschooling students, on average, scored at the 80th percentile in reading, at the 76th percentile in language and at the 79th percentile in mathematics. The Canadian average for all public and privately educated students is the 50th percentile. Parents choose to homeschool their children for many reasons: 1) opportunity to impart a particular set of values and beliefs, 2) higher academic performance, 3) lack of discipline in public schools, 4) the expense of private schools for large families, 5) a physically safer environment in which to learn. The Fraser Institute was established in 1974 and is an independent public policy organization based in Vancouver with offices in Calgary and Toronto. For further information, and/or for a copy of the study:[web editor’s note: link no longer valid — see current link to the most recently updated version of the study, below] Web Addendum: for another summary of the Fraser Institute study, see “Children schooled at home have better social skills — Challenges orthodoxy” by Julie Smyth in the National Post, October 15, 2001. “Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream, 2nd Edition” was released in 2007. “This second edition builds on the original with new research and data. The paper considers the educational phenomenon of home schooling in Canada and the United States, its regulation, history, growth, and the characteristics of practitioners before reviewing the findings on the academic and social effects of home schooling.“ The most updated version of the study as of June 2015 is Home Schooling in Canada: The Current Picture — 2015.

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How Do Homeschooling Parents Know Their Children Are Learning?

Learning / OFTP WebAdmin

The assumption that homeschooling parents somehow lack awareness of their children’s progress, and therefore require formal evaluation of that progress, is related to the fact that homeschoolers function beyond the arena of the schools, and our philosophies and methods are not always well-understood. How do homeschooling parents know their children are learning? The answer to this question is, to put it most simply, direct observation. I have only one child. If a teacher had only one child in her classroom, and was unable to describe the reading skills of that child, everyone would be dismayed — how could a teacher have such close daily contact with one child and miss something so obvious? Yet many people unfamiliar with homeschooling imagine that parents with just this sort of close daily contact with their child require outside evaluation to determine that child’s progress. This puzzles homeschooling parents, who cannot imagine missing anything so interesting as the nature of their child’s learning. No homeschooling parents have twenty-five children, and we are thus free to focus on the enhancement of learning without being continually distracted by the many time-consuming tasks unrelated to learning that are necessary in a classroom situation. This freedom from distraction is a major factor in the establishment of a lively, creative, and joyful learning environment. Any parent of a preschool child could almost certainly tell us how many numbers her child can count to, and how many colors he knows — not through testing, but simply through many hours of listening to his questions and statements and observing his behavior. In homeschooling, this type of observation simply continues on into higher ages and more complex learning. There are many times in the course of a day when a reasonably curious child will want to know the meaning of certain printed words — in books and newspapers, on the computer or television, on board game instruction cards, on package labels, on mail that has just arrived, and so on. If this child’s self-esteem is intact, he will not hesitate to ask his parents the meanings of these words. Through the decrease of questions of this type, and the actual reading aloud of certain words, (Look, Daddy, this package is for you!) it seems safe to assume that reading is progressing in the direction of literacy. This may seem to outsiders to be somewhat imprecise, but homeschooling parents learn through experience that more specific evaluation is intrusive, unnecessary, and self-defeating. If the government were to establish compulsory evaluation of babies to determine whether they were walking on schedule, everyone would think that was absurd. We all know that healthy babies walk eventually, and that it would be futile and frustrating to attempt to speed up that process; it would be as foolish as trying to speed up the blooming of a rose. Gardeners do not worry about late-blooming roses, or measure their daily progress — they trust in nature’s good intentions, meet the needs of the plants under their care, and know that any further intervention would interfere with the natural flow of their growth. Such trust is as essential in the education of a child as it is in gardening. All healthy rose bushes bloom when ready, all healthy babies walk when ready, and all healthy children in a family of readers read when ready — though this may be as late as ten or twelve. There is no need to speed up or measure this process. The child’s progress is not always smooth; there may be sudden shifts from one stage to the next. Thus, formal evaluation given just prior to such a shift may give unfair and misleading information. At a time when I knew (through a reduction in the number of requests for me to read certain signs, labels, etc.) that my son Jason’s reading was improving, but not, as far as I knew, yet able to read fluently, I told him one evening that I was unable to read to him because I wasn’t feeling well. He said, ”Well, you can rest and I’ll read a book to you.” He proceeded to read an entire book flawlessly, at a level of more difficulty than I would have guessed. Thus it sometimes happens in the natural course of living with a child that we receive more direct and specific information about his progress. But it should be stressed that this is part of the natural process of aiding and abetting a child’s learning, and that requiring such direct proof is almost always self-defeating. Had I required him to read the book, he might well have refused, because he would have felt the anxiety which anyone feels when being evaluated. But because he chose to read voluntarily, and his accuracy was not being examined, anxiety was not a factor. Homeschooling parents, then, cannot avoid having a good general idea of a child’s progress in reading, or in any other area. Without testing for specific learning, we may underestimate a child’s abilities to some extent, but all that means is that we make delightful discoveries along the way. If homeschooling parents do not measure, evaluate and control learning, how can the child himself know when to move on to the next level? If we were to ask a horticulturist how a rose knows when to bloom, he or she could not answer that question; it is taken on faith that such knowledge is built into the miraculous design of the seed. A child’s schedule of intellectual growth, like the rose’s blooming, may indeed be a mysterious process, but it nonetheless exists, built into each child at conception. There is no need to impose such a process from the outside, and no one but the child has direct access to this process. Thus any imposition of an artificial structure must necessarily be less successful than simply leaving these determinations to the child. That is, any attempt to make these determinations from the outside represent mere guesswork that is unlikely to

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Good News!! School Health Support Services Update

Laws & Policies, OFTP's Work, Special Needs / OFTP WebAdmin

There has been a positive change in the service delivery model for School Health Support Services. The service delivery model for SHSS is now the same as it is for the Personal Support initiative. This means that the Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) will still assess children for eligibility and determine the type and level of service required. However, the CCACs will no longer refer the student to a contracted service provider for service. Instead, the CCAC will flow funds directly to the school (or through a local agency for homeschooled children) and verify that the funding was used for approved services. Since implementation of SHSS in private schools has been slower in some areas than anticipated, this funding is retroactive to September 2000 for any eligible children who were receiving professional health services. This means that a school or parent will be reimbursed for professional health services that could have been provided through SHSS since September 2000 but were not. In other words, the budget has not been used up. If you are privately contracting approved services, contact the CCAC, have an assessment done and get your money back. Plus, you can continue using the agency you are using and have the CCAC pay the agency on your behalf.

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Ten Things I Wish I Had Known About Homeschooling

Homeschool / OFTP WebAdmin

The Top 10 Okay, here are the top 10 things that I wish I had known about homeschooling–it’s just that some of it is difficult to believe until you have lived it. 1) Homeschooling is addictive. Once you start, it’s difficult to stop. 2) Most learning goals will be reached even if you teach nothing. If the resources are available kids will learn whether you meant them to or not. 3) Buy resources “you” need. The kids are going to ask you things that aren’t in the “children’s” books. 4) Find a support group–On-line, In person, Anything. One other person who will remind you, on rough days, that people with children “in school” have rough days too. It’s not homeschooling… it’s parenting. 5) Don’t expect a typical homeschooling day to be anything like the next typical homeschooling day. 6) If you say “funding”, duck. Quick. (Well, you would have to be an old-timer around here to remember what #6 is about.) 7) Some homeschoolers use lots of packaged curriculum (otherwise vendors wouldn’t sell so much of it) but we are paranoid about admitting it to unschoolers. (This thing has nothing to do with me, of course, we “only” use a packaged math curriculum, a packaged spelling program, thinking skills, and once dabbled in a packaged unit study. But when we are not doing all that we are really unschoolers.) 8) Most teachers and principals will “not” be pleased when you tell them you homeschool. Naive? Well, the principal at the school in Rankin Inlet threw open the doors to the supply room for me and encouraged me to take whatever I wanted. The reception here has been, uh, somewhat cooler (weird, since we are further south). 9) Homeschooling is easier than it sounds. 10) Homeschooling is harder than it sounds. Those last two statements don’t contradict each other. They only seem to. Gina Rozon is a homeschooling mom to two daughters aged 7 and 5. They live in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. In addition to homeschooling, running a home daycare, and writing, Gina operates a home-based business doing income tax returns.

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