[Serious] Huzzah for homeschooling!

[Succubus]

Homeschooling is illegal here in the Faroes, and private schools are frowned upon, culturally speaking. It's mainly public schooling. PISA examinations have yielded low scores, with a lot of people getting flunking grades. Public schooling isn't a safeguard against illiteracy, but neither is homeschooling IMO. Competence is, and our teachers suck.

I wouldn't worry about PISA scores.  Shanghai is measured so highly simply because in order to be placed there the PISA people agreed with the Chinese to show the tests to teachers ahead of time, and by allowing the Shanghai authorities to select who took the tests..  And then they compounded that major fuck up by benchmarking everybody else against Shanghai.

And this is one of the main reasons Catholic schools have such a high rating, they are very selective. You have to be smart to get in one.

[arewethereyet]

I wouldn't worry about PISA scores.  Shanghai is measured so highly simply because in order to be placed there the PISA people agreed with the Chinese to show the tests to teachers ahead of time, and by allowing the Shanghai authorities to select who took the tests..  And then they compounded that major fuck up by benchmarking everybody else against Shanghai.

And this is one of the main reasons Catholic schools have such a high rating, they are very selective. You have to be smart to get in one.

Some Catholic schools are like that.

I grew up in a town where the only grade that wasn't run by the Church was kindergarten.  You had to have a pulse to be able to attend.  

Jesuit schools are a whole other thing.

[mathetes]

One of my relatives, a young man, shared my enthusiasm for the USN. He took the screening tests preliminary to enlisting a few days ago and got the results today. According to his scores he's functionally illiterate.

His parents homeschooled him and he passed all the tests the state requires for a high school diploma. I know the proctors, relatives of mine. I'm sure they didn't want to "embarrass" anyone by flunking him.

He let me know about all this while he was in transit to another relative in California. She's a school teacher there. We'll get the boy fixed up.

I know a guy who used to be a school principal in western Kansas. 

When parents brought their home-schooled kids to rejoin the school system they invariably tested years behind their age groups, and then the parents invariably flipped out -- they couldn't believe they hadn't been superior. 

More dumbing down.

The public school system is no different. Some kids are functionally illiterate and far behind, others are ahead, most are mediocre. We homeschooled one of our daughters in a phenomenal program. Several other families did the same and there was a group of about 10 of them. Today, those kids are all in dual enrollment college programs locally as sophomores in high school, and most of them are at the top of the classes in literature, writing and math in their college classes. Our daughter took the PSAT last year as a freshman and scored higher than all the other students in the district. Every child, every program, every school, and every family is different. Although, the story of this boy is certainly tragic, it is no more tragic than the child who is allowed to go through the public school system with the same outcome. In fact, it is happening with increasing frequency with parents and administrators complicit, and teachers powerless to stop it or advocate for their students.