ABC’s Good Morning America released a surprisingly positive segment Wednesday morning on the topic of homeschooling. And For an outlet that works overtime to make traditional and family values seem like anomalies, this was a bit of a shocker.
Host George Stephanopoulos started out the segment noting how much homeschooling has risen in the past couple of years.
Then tech contributor Becky Worley presented the story.
“While most experts thought families would return to schools after the COVID restrictions eased, that's actually not the case,” Worley said before talking about one mom, Alisha Wright of Richmond, Virginia, who’s been homeschooling her kids for nearly 10 years.
“She built the curriculum around subjects that pique their interest and banded together with other parents in a cooperative where multiple students learn from other parents - or in Wright's case, an outside instructor,” Worley said.
Wright spoke highly of her experience homeschooling her kids. She is part of a co-op where outside teachers come in and teach her kids, along with kids of other families. Wright also mentioned that though she homeschools, she and her family “don’t spend a lot of time in our house.” Instead they’re often visiting museums, plays, theaters, and getting involved in the community, she said.
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Jeanne Faulconer, senior contributor for thehomeschoolmom.com, noted that while experts thought that in-person student numbers would increase after kids were welcomed back to school following COVID closures, that didn't happen. Instead, even after kids were invited back to in-person learning, homeschooling numbers still went up.
Worley added the following:
The Washington post found that nailing down an exact number of children homeschooled is close to impossible. 11 states don't even require parents to report if their child is homeschooled. But the Post estimating that there are currently 2.7 million homeschooled kids compared to 1.5 million in 2019.
The GMA segment also highlighted Peter Jamison, staff writer for The Washington Post, who noted that many parents who support homeschooling do so to protect their children from bullying and to keep kids safe. Worley explained that some critics of homeschooling worry that kids won’t receive a “quality” education at home, “citing a lack of standardized testing and, in many states, no requirement to submit assessments of progress.”
As Faulconer mentioned, there are varying levels of quality with a homeschool setting, just as there are varying levels of quality among public schools. Neither is right or wrong, superior or inferior, but it's rather up to families to decide the best route for their kids.
As a nod to homeschooling, you can regulate what content your kids do and don’t learn. For example, at home, unlike at most public schools, you don’t have to teach your kids how to change their gender, how to masturbate, or where to get abortions … unless of course you want to?
Though I personally plan to homeschool my own kids because of how screwed up public schools are, I also recognize that there are some good public schools out there who don’t try to indoctrinate and groom their students. Unfortunately, those schools are becoming fewer and fewer.
“While we might think of homeschooling being one parent sitting at a table all day going over lessons, many are opting for a less traditional approach these days. They're creating more of a co-op and having some at-home instruction in addition to learning in small groups in the community or with other homeschooling families to share the teaching load,” Worley said before passing it back to Robin Roberts who said that information was “good to know.”
While GMA wasn’t praising homeschooling like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, the segment didn’t bash it - which, honestly, is a green flag for the outlet.
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