Home Sweet School
The homeschooling movement continues to grow
By Rebecca Ray
Photographs by Carrie Jensen
Each morning, at about 7:30, Sarah Katz wakes up before her parents. After she makes herself a "pre-breakfast," she and her father, David, review her math homework.
Like most families, David, Sarah and Sarah's mother, Ann, eat breakfast, before David, who is a physician, leaves for work. But after Sarah eats breakfast, she doesn't race around the house to get ready for school. Instead, she and Ann, a full-time mother, sit down at the kitchen table, and Ann asks Sarah to do a history worksheet. After Sarah finishes, she reads and answers questions about an Old English ballad, works on a fiction story she is writing and studies life science. By about 1 p.m., Sarah has the rest of the day free.
Ann and David Katz have homeschooled Sarah, an 11-year-old sixth-grader, since she was in fourth grade. Five years ago, not everyone could say they knew someone who was homeschooled, says Christine Webb, public relations director for the National Home Education Network. But today, Webb says, this is no longer the case. An August 2001 report released by the national Department of Education estimates that in 1999, 850,000 of 50 million--or 1.7 percent--of children in the United States were being homeschooled, while the Census Bureau estimated the number of homeschooled children in 1994 to be around 360,000.
Webb, who lives near Portland and has homeschooled her children for 15 years, says that people have become more accepting of homeschooling. They no longer raise their eyebrows when they see her children in public places besides school in the mornings and early afternoons, she says.
According to homeschooling parents, there are almost as many reasons why parents homeschool their children as there are homeschoolers. While some parents just want to continue to watch their children learn and grow after they reach school age, other parents pull their children out of mainstream schools to keep them away from harassment and bullying. Some parents see mainstream school curricula as too easy or too hard, or they don't want their children exposed to certain ideas. Other parents homeschool their children for religious reasons, so that they can integrate religious practices and beliefs into their children's education, Webb says.
"People still have this idea that our kids are locked behind an iron door. They never socialize. They don't associate with the outside world, [and] they don't know anything about life," which is wrong, Ann Katz says. According to Ann, Sarah can relate better to adults and children of different ages than a lot of children in mainstream schools. Also, Sarah makes friends in her fencing, Sunday school and tae kwon do classes.
Sarah also takes playwriting, math and art classes at the Loma Prieta Independent Home Study center in Los Gatos. The center, which is affiliated with the Loma Prieta Joint Union Elementary School District, provides enrichment courses in the arts and sciences for homeschooled children in grades K-8. Parents of homeschooled children suggest classes they'd like to see the center offer, and the center sets up classes and provides credentialed teachers to teach them. Like college students, the children in the program choose which classes to take from a course catalog.
The center tries to keep children who are the same age together in classes as much as possible, says activities coordinator Rhonda Schlosser. The center maintains a student-to-teacher ratio of 15:1 in each class.
Homeschooled students participating in a class at Loma Prieta Independent Home Study center, include (from left) Austen Blease, 8, Zoe Schneider-Smith, 9, Whitney James, 9, and Corrina Powell, 8. Some 130 students come to the center two or three days a week to supplement their home school education with social interaction.
Each homeschooling family meets with a teacher consultant on a regular basis. The consultant asks the family what the child is interested in learning, provides the family members with books from the library/resource center, and evaluates the child's work to determine whether he or she is on track.
Genoa Fox, 18, a Los Gatos High School senior who participated in the Loma Prieta home study program for seven years, says that consultants would ask her what she wanted to learn in each subject area. After she chose a topic for each subject, she learned about the topics in detail. For instance, when she took a class at the center about the Erie Canal, she and the other students learned how the locks worked, built a model canal and sang songs about the canal, rather than sit at desks and listen to a teacher lecture about it.
Sometimes, Fox says, she finds it limiting to sit at a desk in her high school classes, when she would like to get out of her seat and do a hands-on activity. In homeschooling, she always chose what she wanted to learn and when she wanted to learn it, instead of an educator choosing topics for her. One thing that drives her crazy, she says, is when she asks teachers questions, and they tell her they can't answer her, because the class will learn the answer next week.
When Fox took classes at the center, students even had a say in who their teachers were, Fox says. After parents and school board members interviewed candidates, the candidates did projects with the students, who gave their approval.
Fox, who hadn't attended public school since second grade, chose to attend public school in ninth grade, because she wanted to experience what mainstream school was like. One advantage the high school has over the center, she says, is that it offers more activities. At the school, Fox helps run Friday Night Live--activities for students that don't involve drinking, drugs or tobacco--participates in the Gay-Straight Alliance, drama, tech crew, leadership, ceramics, peer counseling and the science club and helps set up for dances.
However, Fox says, she wouldn't trade her homeschooling experience for anything. She had a huge support base when growing up; she knew almost everyone at the center and had built up trust with every adult who worked there. She had much more time to spend outdoors, with friends and getting to know herself.
Fox's parents decided to homeschool her and her brother, Kyle, now 16, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed their home. The family traveled to Italy and stayed there for seven months, since Fox's father, Tom, a moviemaker, had to be there to help film The Godfather III. With Tom's career, he and his wife never knew how long the family would be gone or where they would be staying, so they decided to teach their children at home.
Also, Fox says, her second-grade teacher at Loma Prieta Elementary School was strict. Fox would stay up late trying to make her homework perfect so that the teacher would accept it. Fox says she would wake up with stomachaches, probably because she was so nervous about school.
Ann and David Katz explain the scientific method to their daughter, Sarah, during a science lesson at their home in Saratoga. The Katzes have homeschooled their daughter for the past two years.
As a kindergartner at Saratoga Elementary School, Sarah Katz also got stomachaches. Ann says that at school, Sarah didn't smile or laugh, as though she was a different person. On Saturdays, she cried about going to school on Monday.
In first grade, Ann started bringing Sarah home for 20 minutes at lunchtime, so that she could take a break from school. But Sarah remained uncomfortable at school. One month before she would have finished fourth grade at the school, Ann and David pulled her out and began teaching her at home.
To David and Ann, it seemed intimidating at first to monitor Sarah's curriculum on their own. However, "we got to the point where we needed to do something different," David said.
For the first six months or so, Ann and David feared that Sarah was falling behind. But teaching consultants at the center reassured them that Sarah was staying on track.
"Then I realized it's OK to think outside the box," Ann said. "Parents know their children better than anyone. They know their burnout points.... We [parents] will teach our children more throughout their lives than any adult in any walk of life will ever do."
"[A lot of teachers] are taught, in public school systems especially, to teach to the mainstream, right down to the middle of the bell-shaped curve," David said. "What happens is that children on either side of the average, of the bell-shaped curve, lose out in the end."
Bethany Black of Monte Sereno, a bookkeeper for her husband's home business, also believed that a public school environment was not the best one for her children. Not only had they never gone to pre-school, but her children, Jonathan, now 15, and Deborah, now 12, who'd been labeled as having learning disabilities, couldn't read at the levels that Daves Avenue Elementary School wanted them to. To make matters worse, when the resource teacher pulled Jonathan out of regular class to work with him, he fell further behind in class, which affected his self-esteem, Bethany says.
At first, Bethany, who had attended Saratoga public schools, was against homeschooling her children. She'd seen children who'd gone through homeschooling, and in her opinion, they hadn't developed the skills necessary for real life. But Bethany, who would spend at least one or two hours each night helping her third-grade son with his homework, believed she had few options. Also, Jonathan's resource teacher said that the one-on-one time would probably help him.
So Bethany pulled Jonathan out of school and taught him at home from fourth through eighth grades. She has homeschooled Deborah, a seventh-grader, since second grade. "Because of the amount of academics and the amount of homework [at mainstream schools], you end up losing any other interests that the child has," Bethany said. She says she also fears that students in mainstream schools spend so little time covering each topic that they don't learn the basics.
Deborah starts school at 8 or 8:30 a.m. and studies various subjects, including typing, analyzing literature and doing various types of writing, until noon or 12:30 p.m. In the afternoons, she takes dance and oil painting classes, as well as classes at the Loma Prieta Independent Home Study center.
Ann Katz says that with homeschooling, Sarah is not "caught in time frames" like students at mainstream schools, who receive a certain amount of time to do work and must finish it at home if they don't complete it right then. "[Sarah] doesn't have all this extra homework and things that keep her occupied or stress her out ... so she can enjoy things a little bit more," David said.
However, a disadvantage to homeschooling, Bethany says, is that students don't learn how to take standardized tests. Although she makes her children take the annual, state-mandated Stanford Achievement Test, Ninth Edition, each year, Jonathan often took the tests given in textbooks when he was homeschooled.
During the 2000-2001 school year, when Jonathan started attending Los Gatos High School, he had to learn the routine of homework, tests, reports and essays. Jonathan, now a sophomore, says he was surprised by the amount of homework, and that he takes at least two tests each week.
Fox says she wasn't used to so many deadlines, either, or with having only a limited amount of time to take tests.
Also, Fox says, at first, the number of students at LGHS overwhelmed her, and she felt like just "another brick in the wall" or ID card number. More than 1,550 students were enrolled at the school in October 2000.
Jonathan Black is getting used to the crowds at Los Gatos High School after having been homeschooled in the fourth through eighth grades.
Jonathan says he prefers homeschooling. "It allows you to go at your own pace," he says. "There's nobody else to slow you down except yourself."
However, high school is a good experience, Jonathan says, in that it teaches you self-discipline, how to work under pressure and how to be responsible. "I like being able to feel successful," he said. "Being able to work hard and see your results ... really makes you feel good."
In addition to maintaining A's and B's, Jonathan competes on the school tennis team, plays the piano and takes classes at West Valley College. He says he'd like to enroll in the Middle College program, where high school juniors and seniors take college classes and receive twice as much credit as they do for high school classes, next year.
Fox says she definitely recommends homeschooling for people who have a passion for learning. It has worked well for Sarah, Ann says, because she is responsible and independent. However, Fox says, for children who need teachers to push them, mainstream schooling is probably better.
"One of the things we're trying to teach Sarah is that you do have choices," David said, "and that people don't always have to travel down one road to reach their goals."
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
