NEWS
- D.C. Board of Education Launches Task Force to Ease High School Credit Restrictions
- In most states, you don’t need a high school diploma to home-school kids
D.C. Board of Education Launches Task Force to Ease High School Credit Restrictions
The Washington Informer
WI Web Staff
July 30, 2015
The D.C. State Board of Education announced Thursday it has created a task force to help make the high school credit system less rigid for students.
The High School Credit Flexibility Task Force, spearheaded by Ward 1 board member Laura Wilson Phelan, will be a a cross-city effort to develop a set of recommendations for rules and parameters for high school credit beyond the Carnegie unit, which is based on students completing a minimum 120 course hours for a given subject.
The State Board of Education, which approves high school graduation requirements for city students, said the current Carnegie-based system may be too restrictive for students better served by competency-based education, which awards students who show a mastery of the subject in question.
"Meeting the learning needs of all students requires a personalized approach to ensure that they acquire the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to succeed in college, career and civic affairs," Phelan said. "A critical step to enable personalized learning is to create flexibility beyond the time-based Carnegie unit for students to earn high school credit."
The Carnegie unit is defined as 120 hours of contact time with an instructor — i.e., one hour of instruction a day, five days a week, for 24 weeks, or 7,200 minutes of instructional time over the course of an academic year.
The system has its share of advocates and detractors, with its focus on minimum time requirements for courses seen as both a benefit and hindrance for students.
In most states, you don’t need a high school diploma to home-school kids
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
July 30, 2015
Just 13 states and the District require home-school instructors to have minimum qualifications, in most cases a high school diploma.
The other 37 states have no such requirement, according to a recent report by the Education Commission of the States that highlights wide variations in rules governing home schooling across the states.
Twenty-three states and the District have attendance requirements for home-schooled students, and fewer than half of states — 20 — require an assessment of home-schooled students’ academic progress. Just 12 states require home-schooled students to take a standardized test, a marked departure from federal K-12 law that requires annual testing of all students in grades three through eight and once in high school.
Though home-school rules have received criticism for being too lax, many home-school advocates say that their movement is built on the notion of trusting parents to understand and provide the best education for their children.
“A parent does not have to be highly educated in order to home-school successfully, but regardless of academic credentials, the motivation to further one’s self-education needs to be there,” home-schooling proponent John Rosemond wrote in his syndicated column Thursday.
Mike Smith, president of the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association, said research has shown that home-schooled children of less-educated parents do just as well on standardized assessments as those with better-educated parents. “As long as they’ve got this love of learning, they’ve got all” they need, he said.
The report also says that home-schooled students are increasingly taking part in online schools, virtual charter schools and other online education options, many of which are paid for with tax dollars.
“As more students seek out opportunities through state-sponsored programs, students are pulled under the canopy of state standards and the lines between home schools and public schools are becoming fuzzier,” the report says.
Home-schooled children are a tiny slice of the nation’s students, but their numbers have jumped in the past decade, rising from about 1.1 million in 2003 to 1.8 million in 2012, according to federal data released in May.
Long seen as an option favored by parents seeking to give their children a religious education, home schooling has been attracting a more diverse group, according to federal survey data.
In 2012, about 64 percent of home-schooling parents said they wanted to provide their children with religious instruction, down from 72 percent in 2003. In the 2012 survey, religion ranked fourth among the most important reasons parents gave for home schooling.
The top-ranked reason was concern about the environment of the nation’s schools: Twenty-five percent of parents said that was the most important factor in pushing them to choose home schooling. Second was “other reasons,” including family time, finances and distance; and third was dissatisfaction with academic instruction at schools.
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