They say COVID-19 homeschooling is causing an education gap that, prior to the pandemic, was actually shrinking. Headline after headline declares 2020 a wasted academic year. If you’re a parent battling your own child’s inconsistent “hybrid” school schedule, this news only undergirds your frustrations with your child’s disrupted education.
It seems like 2020 has brought us more bad news than ever before. If you watch the news consistently, you might become convinced that taking five steps outside of your home could make you a victim. You could fall prey to a horrific plague, politically or racially motivated violence, or a natural disaster of epic proportions. And if you’re black or brown, the emphasis is even worse. Yet at the same time, you’re told that because people are becoming more sedentary, they’re dying faster. Because people are losing their jobs, our economy is falling off a cliff. And because students can’t go to school, they’ve lost almost an entire year’s worth of education. The conflicts are overwhelming and enough to keep you paralyzed with fear.
Everywhere we turn, we’re faced with negative facts and everyone’s negative opinions about them. And when it comes to our students, it’s not hard to see firsthand the negative impact COVID has caused. Through distance learning, students have only been learning “a fraction of what they would learn in the classroom,” the studies claim.
But Aren’t There Benefits to Homeschooling?
Yet homeschooling has historically proven statistically superior to public schooling. Homeschooled children on average show 15-30% higher grades than publically schooled children. And approximately 67% of homeschool students graduate from college, as opposed to 57% of public school students (see this study for more data on homeschooling outcomes).
I know for us, when COVID hit we embraced the opportunity to homeschool our daughters. It was something I always wanted to do. But I’d convinced myself that adding education to my already busy work schedule would be near impossible. Then the pandemic hit and showed me that we were, indeed, up for the challenge.
Prior to the pandemic, we would have thought of ourselves as very involved in our children’s studies. But these past nine months of COVID-19 homeschooling have given us a closer look at what and how our children are learning.
Evaluating Your Child’s Educational Growth
When our elementary school age daughters started this year with grade level assessments, their results fell short of our expectations. When the coronavirus pandemic hit last Spring, we worked on building their basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. We also incorporated music, physical education and language enrichment. But we were not using the computer program i-Ready on a regular basis, which is what their district uses for learning assessments. So, after three or four months of our “hands-on” homeschool, they were not used to computerized testing. We had some work to do to get them up to speed in this new digital world.
As we discussed in a previous blog post, i-Ready is a digital learning platform that uses artificial intelligence to deliver targeted lessons. It’s a great supplemental resource to round out a student’s educational growth. But we realized that we also had to keep our daughters up to speed with how their school district’s measures their progress. That meant we were going to have to make i-Ready and other online resources less supplementary and more of an emphasis.
Creating a Homeschooling Strategy
After a few months of making some adjustments and increasing our daughters’ use of digital platforms, they’re now on target for their grade levels. My husband is all about measurable data. So he created some benchmarks and a daily strategy to reaching those goals. Now we’re working to help them exceed the public school standards. In this process, we learned it takes some intentional effort to get there!
The daily strategy has been critical to our success. That’s why we created our line of calendar planners. It helped us so much that we wanted to help other parents create their own success strategy. There’s simply no way around it: we have to plan our days if we don’t want our days to get away from us. Having a plan doesn’t mean you have to be rigid with it. It just means you now have a framework to follow. A well thought out plan makes life so much easier.
Beyond standardized testing and digital assessments, our daughters are learning far more than they could have learned in the classroom. We have woven in music, art, and advanced physical education to their curriculum. We’ve taken some really cool field trips and read the bible together. We’ve experimented with new recipes together in the kitchen and taught real-world math with trips to the grocery store. Most importantly, we’ve done all this as a family. Thanks to the pandemic, we’ve grown exponentially as a family, and no artificial intelligence program can measure how important that is.
Rolling with the Pandemic Punches
It goes without saying that many parents weren’t as well positioned to embrace the homeschooling challenge as readily as we were. We had both been working remotely for years, so we had long since adapted to working from home before we had to also assume the role of school teacher. Most other working parents were thrust into COVID-19 homeschooling while having to quickly adapt to full time remote (or essential in-person) work schedules.
Even now, nine months later, many parents are still trying to figure out how to juggle work with distance learning. Many schools created online distance learning that mirrors their in-person bell schedule. This can place students in front of their computers for 6+ hours a day on Zoom sessions. They are literally under computerized supervision. So, in this landscape, to say that pandemic homeschooling is inferior to traditional in-class schooling is probably true.
Stepping up to the Challenge of COVID-19 Homeschooling
My point in this blog post is not to reinforce the already bleak outlook on education during this pandemic, but to encourage parents to embrace the challenge. Just reading this shows that you are a concerned parent who has carved out the time and energy to raise your child in a very intentional manner.
No parent is perfect. And in this day and age it is the rare family who has the ability to endow one parent full-time parenting status. But it is possible to educate our children at a high level without the help of an established school system. Let’s change the perspective. We can view COVID-19 homeschooling as an opportunity to become more involved in our children’s academic growth. Then we can begin to find ways to make it happen. Let’s stop thinking that this job belongs to someone else. Let’s realize it is our own personal responsibility to see to it that our children become thinkers, leaders and innovators.
When we step up to this challenge, we can turn it into the opportunity of a lifetime. We can change the headlines and paint the picture that we want to see. After all, the future is in our homes.