Excelling at Home

There is actually good education news in California, although it does not emanate from the state’s public school system.

“The Advanced Placement Test results have just been released and local homeschoolers have ‘aced’ the exam,” according to the Excellence in Education (EIE) Academy in Monrovia, California. EIE works with homeschooled students.

“Nationally on the AP US History exam, only about 52 percent pass the exam with a 3 or better compared with 100 percent of the homeschool students from EIE,” according to the Academy. “Approximately, 8.2 percent of students in the nation pass with a score of 5 (maximum score) compared to 40 percent of EIE students.”

“The fact that 90 percent scored a 4 or 5 on this exam is remarkable.” Truly, even with a test-taking pool of 10. Still, the results stand in stark contrast to the numbers coming out of public school districts nationwide.

Many of these school districts are seeking waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind Act. These waivers would allow them to continue to receive the same federal funding without the higher test scores or other benchmarks of improved education that the law requires in order for principals to continue to get equal amounts of taxpayer subsidies.

Case in point: my home state of Virginia. Back in 1998, two courageous iconoclasts on the Virginia school board—Michelle Easton and Cherie Pierson Yecke—crafted and introduced challenging new tests to determine whether the state’s schools were actually teaching anything, such as rudimentary reading, math or history. These would be the Virginia Standards of Learning.

The state’s public schools are finding it harder and harder to meet this challenge. “Instead of a 70 percent passing rate on standardized math and reading tests, a school now meets required benchmarks if 63 percent of students pass math and 65 percent pass reading in the determination of whether schools make ‘annual yearly progress’ under the law,” Zinnie Chen Sampson of the Associated Press reported recently.

The feds use the state SOLs to determine annual yearly progress and that’s not a benchmark that makes the schools look good, despite the happy face that bureaucrats are trying to place on the results. “This is really just an adjustment,” State Department of Education spokeswoman Julie Grimes said. “The good news is that these are still higher than pass …required last year.”

Those rates would be 61 percent for reading and 59 percent for math. Homeschoolers in Virginia are not required to take the test but their parents do pay attention to it. “We use it as a starting point,” one homeschooling parent told me. For about a third of this state’s students, the tests are an unreachable finish line.

Against this backdrop, what local school officials do fret over can seem bizarre. When a Spanish teacher at Tabb High School in Yorktown, Virginia put up a poster of George Washington praying at Valley Forge, administrators tore it down. Perhaps these bureaucrats would do well to apply the same approach to the curriculum that they offer.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.