The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia

The unreported story on homeschooling

As usual, the "mainstream" media glosses over the achievements of homeschoolers at national academic events. The Home School Legal Defense Association recently pointed out the achievements of a couple of home educated kids at the national Spelling Bee and Geography Bee...

The winners of this year’s National Geographic Bee, Caitlin Snaring of Washington state, and the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Evan O’Dorney of California, were educated primarily by their parents in home-based instruction programs, a fact that was underreported by the media. Another underreported fact is that despite homeschoolers making up just 3 percent of the school-age population, they consistently represent, on average, 12 percent of the finalists in geography and spelling bees...

Few dispute that homeschoolers, who are around 2 million strong in the United States, are academically successful. Research shows that the average homeschooled student scores, on average, 20 to 30 percentile points higher than his or her public school counterparts on standardized tests.

In the Petoskey News-Review, they have featured the work of several local homeschoolers who have competed in an international engineering event:

Woo-hoo!Homer’s done it again!

A group of home-schooled students from Northern Michigan recently showed the world they have what it takes to compete on the international stage in science and engineering.Homer in this case is not the famous Simpson patriarch, but a cleverly designed, built and operated underwater robotics device.Constructed by five area home-schoolers, Homer tied for first place in the engineering category last month at the Marine Advanced Technology Education Center’s 2007 remotely operated vehicle (ROV) competition in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.

Students were challenged to use their robots to complete a series of underwater missions. Homer’s builders, the Great Lakes Homeschool Group, took sixth place overall out of 22 teams in the Ranger competition category, which was made up of high-school contestants as well as college-level teams competing for the first time.

Local home-school students involved in the project included John and Benjamin Ford of Wolverine, Hannah and Nathan Zowada of Petoskey and Scott Rhudy of Charlevoix. They qualified for the international matchup in St. John’s by winning a regional ROV competition last April in Alpena.

I am glad that when local kids do well academically, even though they are homeschooled, they are recognized by the Petoskey News-Review. Too often the same achievements by homeschool kids are glossed over by the "mainstream" media.