We Don't Homeschool for the Test Scores
People want to know if homeschooling pays off. They usually mean the test scores, or the college, or the paycheck somewhere down the line. That was never the scoreboard we were playing on.
Someone almost always asks, usually kindly, whether our boys are keeping up. It is a fair enough question. Are we setting Zachary and Pearson up to do well, to get into a good school, to earn a living someday.
You can find research that says homeschoolers run circles around everyone, and research that says they trail behind. Both sides point to whatever helps their case. I have stopped paying attention to it. A test score is not how we decide whether any of this is working.
We keep score on three things.
- Can the boys think for themselves. When they hit a claim or a problem, can they reason their way through it instead of repeating whatever they were handed.
- Can they read something and actually understand it, and write clearly enough to say what they mean and be understood.
- Are they becoming solid, Godly young men who will do right by the people around them and carry their weight in the world.
That is the whole scoreboard. None of it prints out at the end of a bubble test. Everything else we do points back at those three.
We wanted the time
We did not pull our kids out of school to see them for the tired two hours between a bus and bedtime. We wanted the day. The ordinary one, the good hours and the hard ones, the lesson that clicks and the morning where nobody wants to work. The stretch of years a kid actually wants you close is shorter than it looks from the front of it. We decided to spend that stretch on purpose instead of handing most of it to someone else.
We wanted a say in how and what
A classroom has one teacher and around thirty kids, so it has to move at one speed and cover one list. That is not a knock on teachers. It is arithmetic. At home we can slow down where Pearson gets stuck and run ahead where Zachary is bored out of his mind. We can stay on something for a week because it grabbed one of them. I would rather a boy learn one thing deeply because he could not put it down than a dozen things because they were going to be on a test. That kind of learning tends to happen off the worksheet anyway.
We wanted a say in who
We also get some say in who is around our boys while they are becoming the men they will be. People hear that and picture us hiding our kids from the world. We are not. A nine year old does not have to spend six hours a day inside whatever culture happens to form in a room of other nine year olds. The world is not sorted by birth year, and we would rather our boys learn to move through all of it with us close enough to talk about what they run into. My kids do not have to be friends with everyone. They do have to be kind to everyone. Those are different things, and homeschooling gives them room to practice both.
The part I will just say straight
I am a Christian, and I am not raising a paycheck. If the goal were the largest possible income, I could aim at that, and it would be a small and sad thing to point a childhood at. We are trying to raise two men who are kind, who work when no one is watching, who can fail and get back up, who know they are loved and know how to love people back. That is the same reason we have never paid them for a chore. If they also earn a good living, good. It was just never the target. Nobody paid me to become a decent person, and nobody is going to pay them either. That is the job, and it is ours to do.
None of this is an argument that everyone should homeschool. Plenty of good families make a different call for good reasons. It is only the honest answer to why we made ours. We are not trying to rebuild public school in the dining room. We are trying to raise our kids.
So when someone asks whether homeschooling pays off, I do not reach for a percentile anymore. I think about the two of them at the kitchen table, and the fact that I get to be there for it. That is the return I was after. The rest can sort itself out.