Be True to Your Homeschool

My brother is a sports reporter, drives cars held together by NAPA and a prayer, and struggles to make ends meet. But still, he started his kids off with an education that money could not buy.

Have you heard about the extremely efficient education model that is worrying teachers unions? You might have even noticed it cropping up in houses on your street.

Truth be told, homeschooling is not only cost-efficient; it also offers an education that money just can’t buy. Today, we’re sharing an excerpt from Mike Thomas’s latest piece in The American Spectator for a personal look at this effective, cost-efficient education model.

Be True to Your Homeschool
The American Spectator
By: Mike Thomas

My brother has enough kids to field a baseball team.

One just earned her graduate degree from Notre Dame after getting her undergraduate from Boston College.

Another is graduating from Georgetown, which took one look at her grades and test scores and offered a full scholarship.

Another just entered West Point.

But it’s the younger siblings, the ones still in danger of braces, who really show promise. They devour books like Thin Mints and would destroy Donald Trump in the family Monopoly games.

These kids aren’t the products of elite schools; they don’t spend their summers in the Hamptons. My brother is a sports reporter, drives cars held together by NAPA and a prayer, and struggles to make ends meet.

But still, he started his kids off with an education that money could not buy. He sent them to a K-8 school with few resources and only a single teacher, one who possessed neither a teaching certificate nor a four-year degree.

The teacher is Nancy, Kevin’s wife.

They took a look at their public schools and were not impressed. And so Nancy taught herself to teach. She set high standards, compiled her own curriculum, and tolerated no disruptions in the classroom. After nine years in her one-room schoolhouse, her students are so academically advanced that a Jesuit college prep high school happily takes over from there with scholarship money and a bevy of Advanced Placement classes.

The per-pupil cost in Maine public schools exceeds $10,000 annually, not including capital expenditures. Multiply the number of my nieces and nephews times the nine years spent in Nancy’s homeschool, and she will wind up saving Maine taxpayers more than $800,000 in elementary and middle school funding. Her costs, which the family eats, will be a tiny fraction of that.

The quality of the education her kids receive is just as lopsided in the other direction.

Impressive? Not according to the nation’s largest teachers union…

Continue reading at The American Spectator.


Want to read more by Mike Thomas? Check out these pieces:

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