1/19/2007

Homeschool News & Views, Issue 6

Greetings. This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers. This is issue number six of Homeschool News & Views.

The homeschooling movement is moving internationally now, spreading out from the United States. It has been going and growing in the US for about a generation, about thirty years since The Mother Earth News ran articles on homeschooling and John Holt. The number of homeschooled children in America is estimated at two million. But homeschooling is not an institutional movement; it is not run by the government or any church or any overall homeschool board. That makes it hard to know exactly how many children are being homeschooled. That also makes it more difficult to get control of the movement and kill it.

The US government was set up to try to prevent it from oppressing its own citizens. Over the last two centuries that government has grown ever bigger, and more burdensome. There’s a saying that the IRS is introducing a new simplified tax form. It only has three lines. Line A is how much did you make last year. Line B is how much do you have left. Line C is send in the amount on line B. It’s impossible to know how many families are homeschooling, because the government has no way to yet to count them all. But that’s good. If they can’t count you, they can’t control you.

The educational bureaucracy now is becoming more aware of the huge impact Christian homeschooling is having in America. They want to kill the homeschool movement, because it is their competition. Last summer the National Education Association passed resolutions against voucher plans, tuition tax credits, parental option or choice plans, sectarian schools, for-profit schools, distance learning, and homeschooling. In other words, they are against anything that might compete with them -- church schools, home schools, or whatever.

There are two big reasons for that.

One is religious. They are very much opposed to God.

The other is money. They are very much in favor of money. As long as they get it.

If the estimate of two million homeschoolers is close to being right, that is a sizable number. Even though they are still only a small percentage of the nation’s students, two million kids is a lot of kids. The movement apparently continues to grow. The estimates on that growth are from five to ten percent a year. Again these estimates are impossible to quantify, because the homeschoolers simply won’t line up to be counted. It seems that these estimates of five to ten percent a year would be too low for past growth. If you took a thousand homeschoolers thirty years ago and increased that number by ten percent each year for thirty years, you would still come out with less than twenty thousand homeschoolers. Even France has that many. To grow from a thousand to two million homeschoolers in thirty years takes a thirty percent annual growth rate.

Were there a thousand homeschoolers thirty years ago? We don’t know, of course, but at some point back then, there were almost none. Then John Holt wrote his books on homeschooling and unschooling, The Mother Earth News picked up on that as part of a simpler living lifestyle, and the modern homeschool movement began. It is very widespread today, more so in middle America, which the left wing socialists sneeringly call Jesus-land, and less so in the far left wing states, such as New England and the west coast.

If we took the premise that homeschooling has grown by twenty-five percent per year over the last thirty years, and projected that into the future, based on the current estimate of two million, that means we would add half a million homeschoolers this year, or an average of ten thousand per state. However, there is a mathematical principle that the bigger something grows, the harder it is to continue growing at the previous pace. Accepting a ten percent growth rate from the same base would mean that two hundred thousand more children will start homeschooling this year. And a five percent rate, which seems very moderate, would add another hundred thousand homeschoolers this year.

I find that very inspiring. A hundred thousand new homeschoolers is only an average of two thousand per state, which doesn’t seem like that many, but the hundred thousand total does seem like a lot. By and large, these homeschoolers are Christian families who decide to make a stand for Christ. They are fed up with left wing media, left wing politicians, and left wing schools. Once they decide to homeschool, they have left the left wing.

Here’s an astounding fact. If a hundred thousand American students begin homeschooling this year, that will save the American taxpayers a billion dollars this year. That’s in addition to the twenty billion dollars that the two million homeschool students are already saving them.

Each public school student costs the taxpayers about ten thousand dollars per year on a national average. This figure is as of this writing, is constantly going up, and may even be low, because school districts sometimes do tricky accounting, not actually reporting all costs as a business would report them. For example, capital costs to build new buildings might not be reported at all as current expenses, as a business would have to include part of it. Yet all those expensive new school buildings cost the taxpayers a ton of money.

Dividing that ten thousand dollars cost per student by eleven hundred hours of teaching per year means that the schools get about nine dollars per hour per student, on average. A one hour class of twenty-five students costs the taxpayers $225. Some homeschool families get a whole year’s education for $225.

Let’s consider this. The public schools are left wing schools. They are controlled by the liberals, because of the judges, and they teach the liberal religion. What is the main rallying cry of the liberals? They want to help the poor. Yet it is the liberals who are getting paid nine dollars per hour per student. This is one of the most expensive and exorbitant rates in all of secondary education. This is one of the greatest ripoffs in the world.

Have you seen some public school classes on TV? I don’t mean the fake, wonderful classrooms you see on left wing dramas. I mean real classes which have been videoed on rare instances. Those classes are invariably boredom at best, and at their worst are outright war zones. Very little learning takes place in each class. Studies have shown that much of a public school student’s learning takes place outside the classroom, in his homework and in what he does with his free time, of which he has precious little. Yet the liberals charge over $200 per hour for these boring or ballistic classes. That’s what lawyers charge for their services!

This is not just fictitious figuring when I say that the homeschoolers are saving taxpayers 20 billion dollars a year. In Nevada a study was done on how much the homeschoolers are saving the state each year. The Nevada Policy Research Institute concluded that homeschooling saves Nevada taxpayers $24.3 million to $34.6 million a year. They have a big ten million dollar range in their estimate, yet they pin the estimates down to a tenth of a million. So if they can pin it down as close as a tenth of a million, I don’t know why they have a large ten million dollar range, but that’s what they said. Nevada has a small population, so comparable figures would be much larger for most other states.

The Nevada Policy Research Institute also said:

In general, homeschooled students live in two-parent households where parents have attained a higher-than-average level of education; these households are typically less affluent and more rural than those opting for private education.

Parents choose to homeschool their children for many different reasons, including academic aspirations, desire for more time with children, safety concerns or a desire to impart religious, cultural or philosophical values.

Homeschooled students attain higher academic achievement as measured by standardized testing, college attendance and standing in national spelling and geography contests.

Homeschooling provides adequate opportunities for socialization and protection from negative social interaction.

That is the Nevada Policy Research Institute saying that.

Again, each home school student saves the taxpayers about $10,000 per year, nine dollars per hour per student. How else do homeschoolers save taxpayers money?

According to research of the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University, each divorce costs state and federal governments about $30,000, as of 2002. This cost comes from such things as the higher use of food stamps and public housing, and increased bankruptcies of divorced people. They also tried to factor in the increased cost of juvenile delinquencies among youth, directly caused by these youth not having a stable home and loving parents.

In the 2000 census, 1 in 3 American homes had been through a divorce. This was about the same for evangelical Christians and non-Christians. In addition to divorces, today many couples just live together, moving in and out and dropping a few kids along the way. Marriage has been cheapened, by Christians and non-Christians, to the point where it is now often being abandoned altogether.

The traditional family was a husband and wife and their children. This wasn’t just tradition, though. This is the way the Creator established his creation, from the very beginning. Now the country has reached the point where non-traditional households outnumber traditional households. That is to say, a family which has a father and a mother and their children is now abnormal in America. As a whole these non-traditional households have an enormously destructive effect on those people involved, the adults and the children, and they are an enormous spiritual and economic drag on the country.

Christian homeschool families, on the other hand, have been shown by research to have a family destruction rate that is less than 10%. Over 90% of those families stay together. That means that as a rule the mothers don’t go on welfare, the mothers and fathers don’t declare bankruptcy and shift the cost for their debts onto others, and the kids don’t wind up as juvenile delinquents, on drugs and in prison. The cost savings on this are impossible to quantify. The Rutgers research only looked at the near term costs. The fact is that when a family explodes, it sets up a multi-level pyramid of destruction.

We have all heard of the multi-level marketing programs which were most popular a decade or two ago, and a number of these still exist. A company has a product, like vitamin pills. They sell through a program where each salesman recruits other salesmen. He gets commissions on his own sales, and on the sales of his recruits, and on the sales of their recruits. For example, if he sells $1000 vitamins in a month and gets 10% commission on his own sales, that is $100 for him a month from his own sales. If he has five recruits who also sell $1000 a month, and he gets 5% commission on those, then he gets 5% of $5000 or $250 from that. If each of those recruits has five recruits – or 25 -- who sell $1000, and he gets 3% of those sales, that is 3% of $25,000 or $750. Then if each of those 25 recruits has 5 recruits, or 125, who sell $1000, and he gets 2% of that, that is 2% of $125,000 or $2500. Of course, at some point somebody has to actually ingest all those vitamin pills.

Family destruction works the same way. Children from divorced homes are much more likely to get divorced themselves. Not all do, but most do. Then those children from divorced homes are likely to repeat the same thing, as are their children. Children whose parents are in prison are more likely to wind up in prison themselves, and any children they have are more likely to follow the same path.

What is the total cost of all this?

Ultimately it will cost you your nation.

A society which tears down its families is tearing down itself. In spite of what the liberals say, their way does not work. Their welfare programs don’t work. They don’t really help people long term. They trap them. Their housing programs don’t work. They become the worst slums in the world. Their free sex approach, their live together without marriage approach, their homosexual approach, their abortion baby butcher approach – all of these are terribly destructive to all the people involved in them, and ultimately to the nation itself.

In this way, the multi-level savings of Christian homeschooling are too high to calculate.

A government bureaucracy is like a cancer. When a person has cancer, that cancer demands blood and nutrients from the victim. Then when the cancer gets the victim’s blood, it grows from that. Once it grows bigger, then it demands more of the victim’s blood, which again enables it to grow bigger. This is a never ending cycle until finally the cancer kills the victim.

The educational bureaucracy always demands more money, or blood of the victim. If they say they do a good job, they demand more money because they are doing a good job. If they do a poor job, they demand more money so they can do a better job. Because these demands sound sensible, and everyone wants to help the children, the educational bureaucracy always gets more money. That lets them grow bigger. Once they are bigger they only make bigger demands, just as the cancer does. This is a never ending cycle. That’s how we wind up with classes which cost over $200 an hour, turning out many graduates who can’t be hired for jobs by corporations because they’re too ignorant to do basic functions.

Christian homeschooling is about restoring the family, as God gave it, under God’s direction. Everything about the liberal approach leads to the destruction of the family. The results are there to see.

How much does each Christian homeschool family save in costs? $10,000 per student per year in direct education costs. Many times more that in people who don’t get divorced and go on welfare, don’t declare bankruptcy, don’t commit crimes, and don’t pass that legacy on to their multi-level downline. Even though homeschool families save taxpayers all this money, they get nothing in return. Moreover, they have to pay taxes to support the liberals who are out to eliminate them. But these homeschool families are willing to make that sacrifice. If enough Christians turn away from materialism and back to God, back to their own families, back to their own children – they will not only save their own families, but they may save their country, too.

At Homeschool Helpers, we try to help Christian homeschoolers any way we can. If you would like to help us do that, you can contact us at homeschoolhelpers@yahoo.com. This is Dan White. God bless the Christian homeschoolers.