Join me on Labor Day (Monday, September 1) for Home School Talk’s first ever holiday special! (Monday, 1PM CST)  The show is now archived at that link if you want to listen to it! This will be a shortened show, only half an hour, but will feature positive and encouraging stories about homeschooling.  I will also have a very special guest and co-host:  my own nine year old daugter.  She will be discussing the stories with me and talking a bit about her own homeschooled experience.  Which unfortunately hasn’t been entirely positive.  In fact, she doesn’t want to go to public school because she figures it is everything she doesn’t like about homeschool, but longer and without as many breaks.

My poor eldest daughter suffered the most under her drill sergeant mother who tried to make kindergarten and the beginning of first grade look more like boot camp a classroom than a home. I discussed this more during Back to Homeschool Week, but happily I’ve improved.  To her, school still seems to mean “copy work.”  Actually, everything she doesn’t like, she identifies as school.  Everything she does like is just life.  And she seems to be tired of me reminding her that “this is school, too.”  So I can’t win.  We’ll see what she thinks of being on the radio.

Note to iPod users: For some reason my show was moved to the Heading Right channel without my knowledge and that was the feed being used by iPod.  It is now moved back to where it belongs, but it will likely be a couple of days before the feed over at iPod is corrected.

Upcoming guests:

September 8: Ann Zeise of A to Z Home’s Cool

September 15: Kelly Curtis of Pass the Torch and author of Empowering Youth

Show Notes for 8/25/08

Barefooted Children

To begin, I relate a story about my children at a local carnival and an overheard conversation between a younger woman and an older woman about children not wearing shoes.  The younger woman thought they were cute; the older woman didn’t seem to agree.  But there are a multitude of reasons for a bias agains barefooted children.

The school in which I taught, for example, was previously known for being the school for children without shoes.  Possession of shoes was for many a recognizable division between rich and poor. I would guess that those who lived through that stigmatization might be more inclined to be sure that their children had nice shoes regardless of the health benefits known for children running barefoot.

Minority Homeschooling

Related, perhaps, are recent stories about the increase of homeschooling among minorities, particularly among African Americans.  The Houston Chronicle notes the increase, stating that blacks homeschool for many of the same reasons as whites while also having concern for teaching their cultural heritage.  Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute also noted one reason the black community has been reluctant to embrace homeschooling:

Peer pressure also might have kept many blacks away from trying something different, Ray said. In the black community, there’s always been a strong advocacy for public schools. Many blacks see them as a good route to leveling the playing field for everybody, he said.  Chron.com

Two years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a similar story with a little more information.  It includes some insight from Jennifer James who, as the founder of the National African American Homeschooler’s Alliance, likely understands the challenges this group faces a little more personally.

“Some educators and families think that because blacks fought so hard to get equal access, we shouldn’t abandon it.  But times have changed. It was a great step, but we have to think about our kids.” San Francisco Chronicle

I, on the other hand, as a white, middle class American never had to fight for access to public education and often take it for granted and often as not much of a privilege at all.  Walking away from the system was therefore not so difficult.

Connecticut Tax Revolt

An interesting story in the Wall Street Journal takes a look at Connecticut education and the dissatisfaction of tax payers who are paying more than twice as much for their education system while enrollment has only increased ten percent over the last 25 years.

One proposed solution?  Homeschooling.

The calculator [on the website of a local tax payer group] enables the resident of any town to compare the cost of constructing and staffing a new building (or addition) to the cost of simply subsidizing the overflow number of students to attend private, parochial or home schools. Says David Bohn, president of the group: “You could extend the subsidy to children already in such schools and still save hundreds of millions long term.”  WSJ online

And one politician has suggested paying students to not go to school:  $1500 for vocational school, $3000 to homeschool and a $5000 scholarship for private school.  All in the name of saving tax payer dollars.  It makes you wonder about all the programs out there trying to attract homeschooled students back into public schools even on a part-time basis.  Sure, these students bring money to the school, but at what expense?

Encouragement from Germany

Hans-Ulrich Pfaffmann, an education expert from the Social Party of Germany (SPD), which would be the more left-leaning of the major parties in Germany, was recently interviewed by the Bayerischen Rundfunk, a radio station in Bavaria.  He had some interesting comments on homeschooling in Germany (my translation):

I deem prison sentences or fines in this situation as a total overreaction because in reality, homeschooling can be very high quality.  To this extent, it is certainly a topic which one must work on politically.  There can be no black and white here, instead one must be able to discuss the subject without ideological blinders.

There cannot be a single dogmatic stance of the state that the state must educate all children.  I think we must really put the possibility of homeschooling on the discussion list, then I can envision starting a homeschooling pilot project as school replacement.  That cannot be put off until never-never day, but must happen quite quickly to see if it is an option.

If you would like to hear more on homeschooling in Germany from someone homeschooling in Germany, I interviewed Rina in July for the show, A look at homeschooling in Germany.

Those measly homeschoolers

I actually went into this a bit more on my blog this week as I talked about homeschoolers and vaccinations.  I don’t know that I made my point that clearly in the show, but really all I was saying is that you look at these issues a little differently when your child is affected, even as you continue to support the decisions of every parent regarding their choices for their own children.  It becomes more personal and you become more aware of the risks involved.

Guest:  Jube Dankworth

Twenty year homeschool veteran Jube Dankworth joined the program to talk about why she chose to homeschool, how homeschooling as grown over the years and ways to advocate for homeschooling.  She is also the founder of Texas Home Educators and national director of Homeschooling Family to Family, a ministry of Frontline Ministries.

homeschool homeschooling home education vaccinations

Rare for me, but a firm “what she said” to Valerie over at Home Education Magazine on the recent firestorm over vaccines and homeschoolers.  Her conclusion, backed up with nifty graphs and summaries:

In any case, homeschooling is not the cause of the choice to not vaccinate.   That cause, in the noted cases, is an objection to vaccination.

Case in point:  here, we are up in arms about 131 cases of measles.  In Canada, it is mumps with 116 confirmed cases.  Traced not to homeschoolers, but to the Netherlands Reformed community.  Who, as it turns out, also seems to have been responsible for outbreaks of measles and rubella, outbreaks which were perhaps more dangerous because the students attended their own private school, thus contributing to a quicker rate of transmission.  And I wonder, if we are concerned about partial coverage of vaccines…wait…this news is somewhat older, May of ’07, but anyone born between 1970 and 1992 are at risk because the triple MMR has been shown to not provide enough coverage for some people?  That covers most of the vaccine’s thirty year history!  But I digress.

Anyway, if we are concerned about the the partial coverage of vaccines and the small percentage of vaccinated children and adults who can contract one of these diseases despite two rounds of the injections, I would think the greatest concern would not be among homeschoolers, but among those populations who reject for whatever reason and send their children to school.

It is a topic I have been thinking a lot about recently, and I have even pondered just keeping my opinion to myself because I got somewhat tired of the emails I received after first discussing my daughter’s ulcerative colitis.  I have always supported a parent’s right to make decisions regarding prevantative health, and any time I have mentioned vaccines on this blog I have argued against government mandates.

But I am quickly learning that not all people have that view, and it is not only those who trust the government to make better decisions regarding the health of my children.  After that entry on my daughter’s ulcerative colitis, I was inundated by emails.  Most were supportive.  Even most of those which encouraged me to look at this or that alternative treatment were generally supportive.

But I also got my fair share of “You call yourself a Christian, yet…”  My faith, my parenting and my intellectual abilities were all called into questioned by an impassioned few who thought that my decision to follow the doctor’s recommendations was evidence of trusting man over God, science over faith.  It was a bit of a shock and I composed more than a few responses which vented all my frustration over my daughter’s chronic illness at these new “enemies” who were a little more tangible to me than the disease my daughter suffers from.  I did not have a lot of nice things to say, but at least I did not hit “send” on any of them.

Ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s are not well-understood, but the best model at the moment contends that it is an overactive immune system attacking its own internal organs.  Medications, such as steroid treatments, which suppress the immune system can bring the disease under control and put it back into remission.  Mouse was on these medications for a very short time and most of that was the tapering off period.  Yes, I read all the side effects.  Yes, it made me a bit nervous when I received two phone calls from the nurse emphasizing the fact that should my daughter end up in the emergency room with suicidal or murderous thoughts, they were under no circumstances to take her off the medications or the situation would get worse.  I completely understand why parents look at that and say, “No way!”

Funny thing is, my daughter’s emotional frenzy we had been attempting to cope with prior to her diagnosis completely levelled out within a week of beginning the medications.  It was like we suddenly had our daughter back.

But this brings me back to the vaccine issue.  While on these medications, Mouse could not receive vaccinations, nor could she be around unvaccinated children.  Nor could she be around sick children because her weakened immune system might not be able to fight off an infection.  At first, I was relieved she was not in school.  After all, I wouldn’t have to worry about any and everything being passed around in her school.  But then I started realizing just how big this “pocket” of unvaccinated children is among homeschoolers.

That, I suppose, is why I stuck so long on this statement by Jennifer Margulis which Spunky selected for her post:

“People say, ‘You’re putting my kid at risk, but that doesn’t make any sense at all,’” she said. “If the vaccine works, I’m just putting my child at risk.” MSNBC

But it isn’t true.  Like I said, I respect the rights of parents to make these decisions for their own children, but we need to make these decisions and the resulting public arguments based on truth.  If that is the result of her own research, I am not all that impressed.  Her children aren’t the only ones put at risk.  My daughter is at least some of the time, and many more thousands of children are as well.  These numbers from the article stuck with me:

In the first seven months of this year, 131 cases of measles were reported to the CDC, compared to 42 cases in all of last year. Of that total, 112 were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status, the CDC said. Some were too young for vaccination, but in 63 of those cases the patient or their parents had refused the shots.

112 were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status.

63 of those refused the vaccination.

That leaves 49 measles cases in unvaccinated people who did not refuse vaccinations.  Do they all fall into this “too young” demographic?  Or how many could not tolerate vaccines due to health issues, medications or a prior history of problems with vaccines?

And should my daughter have another flare up and should we again opt for the steroid treatment which worked so well for her, do we ask Sunday School teachers and homeschool groups about the vaccination status of the children in their care?  Or do we just stay home from church and other social gatherings as well?

homeschool vaccinations measles mumps