CONSIDER HOMESCHOOLING!

Recently, several articles based on statistics have pointed to the growing declines in scores in subject areas such as math, reading, and history.  As an alternative educational option, homeschooling can provide students with the freedom to pursue interests, find curriculum and courses that interest them, and bypass some of the challenges and pitfalls that might exist in other schooling options.  A former homeschool family at CHESS had this to say about their journey into homeschooling:

“We have tried just about everything, from homeschool, to private school, to regular public school, to online public school, trying to figure out what works best for our three boys. We finally gave up on finding any one thing that would work for any one of them and settled on officially homeschooling all three of them during the same school year for the first time this year, while trying hard to find classes in person or online that are appropriate for them. It’s rewarding for us to help them learn and to know that they are learning from curriculum that we choose, that addresses topics that we believe are important, at a challenging level, not something that a bureaucrat selected for a generic child of a certain age. It’s also rewarding to have time to spend with them when most other children are at school. I wish that we hadn’t waited so long to make this decision. I would encourage all parents to consider homeschooling!”

J. Hall, Homeschool Parent

Mr. John Jenkins, author and writing teacher at CHESS, shares news snippets below from some of the articles citing the statistics and information in “The Nation’s Report Card.” 

IN THE NEWS

If you haven’t kept up on the alarming statistics about public school middle school students, read below. For more details, follow the source links. 

DECLINING SCORES 

(https://www.axios.com/2023/06/21/schools-students-reading-math-test-scores-decline)

“According to the “The Nation’s Report Card” distributed by the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Education Department, math and reading scores for 13 year olds began declining in 2012, and average scores are now lower than they were before the pandemic. The decline in math scores last year was the biggest in the past 50 years, according to the newly released federal data.”

“Test results from earlier this year showed that U.S. history scores among middle schoolers are also falling — dropping to the lowest levels ever recorded since the assessment began in 1994. Reading and math scores of elementary school students also plummeted, demonstrating the far-reaching effects of education changes during the pandemic.”

ABSENTEEISM 

(https://www.attendanceworks.org/pandemic-causes-alarming-increase-in-chronic-absence-and-reveals-need-for-better-data/)

“The latest national data available from the U.S. Department of Education shows at least 10.1 million students were chronically absent during the first full year of the Covid-19 pandemic. This data, collected for the 2020-21 school year, is a substantial increase from the approximately 8 million students chronically absent in the prior years.

“Chronic absence continued to surge during the next school year. Although national data has not yet been released for the 2021-22 school year, data already available from several states – Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and California – show rates doubled from those prior to the pandemic. Given the diversity of these states, this offers evidence that chronic absence has at least doubled to an estimated 16 million, or one out of three students nationwide.”

READING 

(https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/#section-student-learning-experience?)

 “Fewer 13-year-olds are unwinding at the end of the day with a good novel, as only 14% reportedly say they “read for fun” almost every day according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress. The survey runs alongside the federal test commonly known as the nation’s report card, which revealed that Math and English scores for 13-year-olds have fallen to their lowest level in decades — even underperforming the 2020 results, when education was disrupted heavily by the pandemic. 

“It’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that the rise of screens and the internet has contributed to the slow demise of “reading for fun…” Perhaps most concerning is the 31% of students who reported “never or hardly ever” reading for fun, up from just 9% in 1999.”