On First Blush, the Idea of a School for Home-Schoolers Seems Bizarre. It Isn’t.
Daniel Huecker, head of the Eleanor Roosevelt Learning Center in Visalia, California, tells us why.
Unless you were home-schooled, you probably have no idea what it’s like to teach a child — or to be a child — who learns everything outside of the traditional classroom. And even if you have some experience with home-schooling, you may not understand why residents of Visalia, California, felt the need to open the Eleanor Roosevelt Learning Center — essentially a public charter school for home-schoolers. Like most schools, Eleanor Roosevelt opens every Monday through Friday at 9 a.m., but unlike most schools, attendance isn’t mandatory, school bells don’t ring on the hour, and report cards aren’t issued at the end of a term. Instead, students can sign up for classes six days out of every month, and parents and kids can tap experienced instructors for help with everything from math, science, and reading to sewing, drama, and fencing.
Sounds like heaven. But why on Earth would homeschoolers want or need a school? We posed that question and others to Daniel Huecker, Superintendent of Eleanor Roosevelt Community Learning Center, who oversees the staff of 15 educators serving nearly 300 students from kindergarten to 12th grade.
People have a lot of preconceptions about the typical home-schooled student. Can you start off by telling us a little about the type of students and families who attend Eleanor Roosevelt?
One of the things that I learned early on is that there is no typical home-schooling family. We have families that knew they wanted to home-school on the day their child was born; we have others who never would’ve considered home-schooling until they saw that the traditional school setting wasn’t working out for their child. Some families seek our homeschooling for religious reasons, some for scheduling reasons. And it’s not just for wealthy families — more than 40 percent of our students qualify for free and reduced lunches, which may simply reflect the population of Tulare County or the fact that home-schooling requires one parent to dedicate their time to education rather than a full-time job. Really, the only thing that ties everyone together is the desire to take a more active role in their child’s education.
Most adults who grew up attending traditional public schools view homeschooling as “unusual,” at best. If we all need to learn the same grammar and math and history, why cater to students who won’t be catered to after graduating high school?
It’s true, we all need to learn the same fundamentals, but we don’t all have to learn it in the same way. And, in fact, we don’t all learn in the same way, so customizing the delivery of the information is generally more effective. We may have all learned how to divide fractions and then completely forgotten how to divide fractions because our teachers had to give one-size-fits-all lessons. By customizing the lesson to the child, you should be able to connect more directly with that particular student.
In general, the world is becoming more and more customizable. On the job, we’re all getting more opportunities to learn online or face-to-face, we’re discovering that some people are more visual learners, some are more auditory learners, and we’re seeing tech allow more of that customization. I think homeschoolers are at the forefront of learning more than traditional school programs, which adopted the old “assembly line” or “factory” model of education more than a hundred years ago.
Funny you should mention that — I just watched a Netflix documentary about Cas Holman, a designer who creates unconventional toys to encourage more open-ended play, and she mentioned that assembly-line approach really limits a child’s experience. Can you say more about that?
I went to school at MIT, where professor Mitch Reznick conducted research that showed the more defined a toy is, the less kids play with it and the less they explore. When a toy is open-ended and not explained in any way, kids take a more active role. And you can extend that idea to education: If you have a textbook that scripts out exactly how the learning should occur — step one, step two, step three — the child is fairly passive; the book is doing the work and the kid just tries to memorize things. But if you spend less time describing exactly how things “should” be done, and you turn it over to the child or even the parent — who isn’t a professional educator — and let them play, struggle, and turn problems around in different ways, then the learning that comes out of that whole process is a lot more active and personalized. And often, it’s a lot more fun, too.
Has home-schooling changed over the years? Why would a parent or a student need the community you’ve created at Eleanor Roosevelt?
Home-schooling used to be a parent and a kid at a kitchen table, and most of those parents were following a set curriculum sent by mail, from some sort of curriculum company. Today, home-schooling is much more mix-and-match, with parents piecing things together to meet the needs of the child, working on lessons together. That often shifts as kids get older, as the parent becomes more of a coach or facilitator, and the child spends more time learning from Youtube videos, online courses, books, other experts, or self-initiated projects that really motivate them. As the parent takes a step back and the child takes a step forward, our community supports that process, with staff members who have interests and skills in a variety of areas, including math, science, and social studies, but also drama, music, art, and carpentry.
We often hear about public schools dropping those more creative topics. Why are they so important at Eleanor Roosevelt?
Our parents focus on a lot of the core subjects at home, so they’ll often ask us to supplement the things they can’t do individually. Drama is a great way to bring kids together to work as a team: Last year’s drama production was written by one of our graduates who is now a playwright. One of our staff members loves fencing, so we offer a fencing course. Another one loves to garden, so we offer a gardening class. Many of our teachers are passionate about hands-on learning, so we give our kids lots of opportunities to make things, whether it’s hi-tech projects like robotics or more craft-oriented projects like sewing, which is incredibly popular with our students.
You don’t break students into strict grades per se, so how does that play out in classes and on campus?
That’s one of the things I really didn’t understand until my own children started coming to Eleanor Roosevelt: There’s something very artificial about putting 25 six-year-olds in a room with one or two adults for a big chunk of their lives. We’ll group students in certain age ranges, but a lot of activities are open for kindergartners through sixth grade. The younger kids really enjoy being with the older kids and the older kids really enjoy being with the younger kids — it actually helps the older kids act more mature, more responsible. A lot of the negative behavior and pecking order you see at a junior high school or high school just doesn’t happen on our campus, because there are always little kids around, and plenty of parents. If you think about it, most families have children at different ages, and we’re just re-creating that same environment on our campus.
For core instruction areas like math or reading, it’s best for parents and students to work one-on-one at home, but with something like sewing, a young kid and an older kid need to learn the same things when they’re just starting out. You might even find that a third-grader knows how to thread a needle better than the sixth-grader, so the younger one can show the older one how to do it, and they’re helping each other. “Helpfulness” certainly doesn’t appear on standardized tests, but it’s one of these key values that all families want to see in their kids.
Can you share any stories of home-schoolers who really thrived in Eleanor Roosevelt’s learning environment?
The one story I hear from parents again and again is that their child was bored in the traditional classroom environment — they grasped a certain concept and had to wait for the rest of the class to catch up, which often meant killing time doing worksheets. When they switched to home-schooling and Eleanor Roosevelt, they got that time back. Many of our families have found they can get the core instruction done in a more efficient manner and that gives them more time to focus on other things that really get them excited to learn about everything from Legos to cats.
When I see students graduate from Eleanor Roosevelt, their next step is often much braver than what you’d expect of students from a traditional school. Our students take time to travel or get involved in community service, pursue their passion for art or go live and work with another family member before getting a job or going to college. They’re more willing to take a nontraditional step to find out more about who they are and to explore some of their passions before making the next big decision.
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