The Homeschool Math Gap is Real
There is a lot of research indicating that homeschooled students can typically read at least on grade level, but that they tend to fall behind in math specifically.
For me personally, when I found out that this research existed, it was kind of like hearing that there’s scientific research proving that the sky is blue. As someone who was homeschooled myself and who’s known lots of other people who were homeschooled, this is something that’s always been obvious to me, and it’s crazy to me to think that there are some people who might be surprised by the results of this research, or who wouldn’t know that homeschooled kids are falling behind in math without this research.
This topic is very personal for me. When I was a kid, my mom taught me how to read, and when mom wasn’t doing school with me, reading was often the only form of entertainment I had access to. I didn’t have other kids to play with and no one even bothered to teach me how to turn the television on. Naturally, I became very good at reading because I spent a lot of time doing it.
Math was a different matter. My mom had no idea how to teach math. In public school, the way math instruction typically works is that you go to class, the teacher spends the first part of class giving a lecture about how to work a certain type of problem, walking you through various examples step-by-step and answering questions, and that usually goes on for at least thirty minutes before the students are turned loose to work practice problems independently.
The way my mom taught math at home was to basically just skip straight to giving me practice problems, with little or no explanation of how to work them. The actual instruction part of my mom’s math lessons usually lasted five minutes tops, if it happened at all. I would then get a bunch of the problems wrong, then Mom would throw a tantrum about how she just couldn’t understand why I was making these mistakes, and how math wasn’t a guessing game, and how math was easy if only you were logical (which I apparently wasn’t). Then she would have me try correct all of my mistakes (which I still couldn’t really do since she still hadn’t clearly explained how to actually work the problems), then I would get at least some of the same problems wrong again, and things would just escalate. At some point I would dissolve into tears in a misguided attempt to show my mother how deeply sorry I was for being so stupid, then she would get even angrier and accuse me of “throwing a tantrum” and “getting frustrated too easily” and “being a quitter” (even if I hadn’t said anything about wanting to quit), then she would pull my pants down and hit me repeatedly with a plastic ruler, thus validating that I had good reasons for being scared and increasing the likelihood that I would cry (“throw a tantrum”) in the future (but still not actually learn any math). Math usually took the entire morning, and by the time I was nine, my mom had me well-trained to start crying in terror pretty much as soon as the math book came out.
Once I started public school, I was mostly a good student, but I always made Bs in math. This was a source of some frustration for me, because I wanted to be a straight-A student, but could never achieve that goal because I could never make an A in math.
It also ended up being kind of a social handicap. Starting in eighth grade, my school sorted kids into two tracks. The upper track took Algebra I in eighth grade, and the lower track took Pre-Algebra. From that time on, you couldn’t take a normal math class with a wide range of students, instead, you were either one of the smart kids or one of the stupid kids. Pre-Algebra students were permanently a year behind Algebra I students, so once you’d been placed on that track, you couldn’t move up, no matter how good your grades were. Your math placement was also used to determine your science placement in high school: Pre-Algebra students were barred from upper-track science classes, regardless of previous grades or test scores in science.
Well, I got put in Pre-Algebra in eighth grade. That wasn’t what I wanted for myself, but I didn’t have high enough test scores to qualify for Algebra I. I didn’t fit in well with my classmates in Pre-Algebra: most of them were kids who had bad attitudes about school and who didn’t care about being good at math anyway. I didn’t know anyone else who cared as much about school as I did who got put in Pre-Algebra, and the only explanation I could think of at that age was that I must just be stupid. I also didn’t know anyone else who was missing five years of their math education, but at the time I was thoroughly brainwashed to believe that this couldn’t possibly have had an effect on me. (When I first arrived in public school in fifth grade, any time I couldn’t do things that were easy for everyone else, I would explain that I had been homeschooled, thinking that other people would immediately understand that I hadn’t had the same opportunities as everyone else, but everyone acted like I was just being difficult or making excuses for myself, and eventually I just started believing that.)
I took upper-track classes whenever I could (so basically just in language arts and social studies), but I didn’t really fit in with those kids either, since they were all taking upper-track classes in every subject together, and I wasn’t really a part of their group and I felt inferior.
By the time I was in my twenties, I did sort of come to terms with this by telling myself this is just the way I am, but recently I’ve been thinking, well, maybe this isn’t just the way I am. Maybe I could have been someone different if I had been allowed to receive professional math instruction starting at the age of five like everyone else. Maybe I could have been a straight-A student who took all gifted classes.
Maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Maybe there are no circumstances under which I could have been good at math. Maybe I’m just blaming my poor long-suffering mother for problems I would have had anyway.
I have to admit, I have a hard time imagining an alternate universe in which I was good at math. My mom always characterized me as simply not being a “math person”, and always spoke from an assumption that I was born good at language arts and bad at math. I’ve always kind of internalized that assumption, but then I think about how most of the homeschooled people I’ve known were bad at math, and the research that consistently shows low math achievement among homeschooled students, and then I think maybe I wasn’t just born this way.
Even if I never had the potential to be any sort of math genius, I probably could have at least made somewhat better grades in math, and qualified for Algebra I in the eighth grade, if only I had been allowed to attend school. And who knows — maybe on a different walk of life, I could have been some sort of math genius. I’ll never know what could have been.
A recent article in The Washington Post discusses Hallie Ray Ziebart’s allegations that her father Brian Ray (a notorious pro-homeschool propagandist and pseudoscience researcher) didn’t teach her any math at all. Brian Ray apparently defended this on the grounds that homeschooling offers a “customized education”.
While I can’t speak for Hallie, I know that I personally did not want a “customized education”. I wanted the same opportunities that everyone else got.
Ray also asked rhetorically “‘What percent of students in the public schools learn algebra and know it? Low!’”
But actual public school test scores suggest otherwise. Certainly there are more public school students who “learn algebra and know it” than there are homeschooled students.
Ray also asked rhetorically “If someone doesn’t learn as much in math but they are amazing in the language arts, what does it matter really?”
The reason it matters is because in the modern U.S. economy, knowledge of STEM subjects is way more valuable on the job market than language arts. If you don’t learn much math but are amazing in language arts, you’re going to end up unemployed and chronically dependent on the parents who denied you a decent education in the first place. (I would know from personal experience.) You’re going to be shut out from a lot of education and career paths because someone else decided for you that you weren’t going to get to learn all the same things as other kids, and euphemistically called this “customizing” your education.
Originally published at http://adventureandintrospection.wordpress.com on December 22, 2023.
