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Home Schooling's Net Effect
By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
(http://www.washingtonpost.com)

David Botluk, 13, and his classmates are solving math puzzles with their teacher. David is at his mother's office in the District. His teacher is in Idaho. The other students are scattered throughout the country, all tethered to their computers, joined together as a class in cyberworld.

Through the wonders of the Internet, and $199 a month, David is being taught at home, taking a full seventh-grade curriculum through Christa McAuliffe Academy, based in Washington state.

His "e-teacher" guides him through his algebra, chemistry, geography and English classes while his parents work full time. Sometimes he does his course work at home by himself; other times he goes with his mother to her job at Catholic University's law library.

The Botluks pulled David out of private school because they wanted him to have a more individualized curriculum. That would not have been possible for the Annapolis family had they not stumbled upon the Web site for Christa McAuliffe Academy two years ago.

"We wanted something that provided an actual teacher working with him and an actual curriculum," James Botluk said. "This opened up a new avenue."

The Internet is revolutionizing the growing home-schooling movement. More and more parents are pulling their children out of schools, particularly public schools, but no longer serving as their sole teachers.

Rather, more are paying for online courses to make the instructional work easier and to free them so they can work full-time jobs. Others see the courses as a way to teach their children those subjects they don't feel qualified to teach.

"We're seeing more families who are convinced that home schooling is right but they're seeing gaps that they need to fill," said Scott Somerville, staff lawyer for the Home School Legal Defense Association. "The online courses are wonderful in filling the need for certain specific disciplines."

"I didn't feel comfortable with trying to put it together myself," said Ann Shiflet, of Montgomery County, whose 14-year-old daughter, Sarah, has been taught at home for three years, one year by the California-based Laurel Springs School. "It's a big undertaking, and I wanted someone else to grade her, too."

Concerns about the safety and quality of traditional schools have fueled a nationwide growth in home schooling. In less than a decade, the number of children educated at home in the United States has more than tripled to about 1.7 million. In Maryland, the number jumped from 2,296 in 1990 to 15,651 in 1999. The number of home schoolers in Virginia grew from 7,011 six years ago to 12,810 last year.

The online courses have particular appeal to parents of high-school-age students. Teaching reading and addition to the younger children is not so challenging, but once students grow older and start taking more complex courses, some parents feel out of their league.

"A lot of parents just don't feel adequate. They worry they'll miss vital skills, especially when it comes to high school courses," said Glen Blomgren, founder and executive director of Christa McAuliffe Academy.

A support network for home-schooling families has sprouted, with parents having easy access to any number of Web sites offering online courses--some with virtual classrooms that are essentially chat rooms for students and teachers.

Cyberschools like Christa McAuliffe Academy are finding a ready and willing pool of customers in home-schooling families. "Home schoolers are a free market in education where public schools cannot be," Somerville said.

Experts caution that a reliance on such schools for a full curriculum detracts from what should be the purpose of home schooling--bringing together the parent and child.

"It is a major distraction from the core purpose of home schooling, which is parent-child interaction," said Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association and president of a new college for home schoolers. "I think [the online courses] are great for supplemental activities. But I'm not sure it's the best thing to sit in front of a computer for four hours a day." Debora Harris, an early-childhood teacher specialist in Calvert County, has similar concerns, given the lack of social interaction some home-schooled students experience.

"I think it's a great tool but a tool that needs to be used carefully," she said. "I think with the whole virtual movement, you have to make sure that the children are socially and emotionally stable."

Others say the courses teach students to rely too heavily on Web sites rather than books for information. True enough, many courses will guide students to Web sites rather than books. Furthermore, some schools are unaccredited and employ uncertified teachers.

The ultimate challenge of cyberschools, though, may be the students. Many parents caution that it can be too tempting for students to slack off when they don't have a school bell ringing in the morning.

Sasha Wexler, 18, an aspiring actress who often performs in local plays, admits she has fallen behind in her online course work with the Laurel Spring School. In a regular high school, the District teenager would have graduated last month. But she is still finishing up a couple of courses this summer.

"Home schoolers have to realize that the structure comes from within," said her mother, Marsha. "You don't face your teacher in the morning when she asks for your homework and say 'Oops, I forgot.' If you're not checking as a parent . . . they can fall off track."

Still parents are flocking to the programs.

Blomgren, a public school teacher for 14 years, founded Christa McAuliffe Academy 15 years ago. In those early years, students turned in written assignments through the mail. Since the school started offering the online courses, enrollment has boomed, Blomgren said. It now has almost 400 students.

"Many of them come to us out of frustration," he said. "They find public school unresponsive to their needs." That's why Julya Myers, of Rockville, turned to home schooling her daughter.

"We objected to the curriculum being based on what 30 students need as opposed to what she needs," Myers said. Myers was trained to be an accountant. But that didn't stop her from deciding to teach her 8-year-old daughter at home. Coming up with a curriculum proved daunting. She downloaded work sheets from the Internet and bought workbooks, but it all seemed too dry, she recalled.

So earlier this year, after six months of home schooling, she again turned to the Internet, this time to an online school called Child U. The Florida-based company started marketing its online classes to students in grades one through eight in August 1999. Now, for $69 a month, Marcia logs onto her computer for about four hours a day and takes a full fourth-grade curriculum, complete with art and music courses--two subjects that Myers never felt comfortable teaching.

One art class prompts students to sketch nature scenes. First the students see pictures of a frog and salamander and read excerpts from children's books about animals and nature. They are instructed to "notice the shapes that make up each animal." Then they are told to gather sun block and sunglasses and sketch the outdoors.

A music class on Child U shows pictures of a snare drum, a harp and a cello and defines woodwind and stringed instruments. At the end, students take a short quiz and then click on Sergei Prokofiev's name to listen to a sample of his work.

Through e-mail, Marcia communicates regularly with an e-teacher who helps Myers oversee Marcia's work. "The amount of hours it would have taken me to put together that curriculum would have kept me from teaching her," said Myers, who works out of an office in her home.

While Marcia works on her lessons, Myers tends to household matters or does her accounting, but always stays nearby to respond to Marcia when she calls out with a question.

Offline, she drills her daughter on her vocabulary words, takes her to the grocery store to teach her how to calculate unit prices or helps her make paper, a project assigned by her e-teacher as part of a unit on Egypt.

Myers said she refuses to completely abdicate her teaching duties. "That was one of my concerns. I didn't want my child to feel like she's talking to a computer." Indeed, many of the cyberschools are trying to combat the concern that home-schooled youngsters are not properly socialized, a widespread complaint from critics.

At the Laurel Springs School, which offers classes in grades five to 12, the more than 2,000 students enrolled can join the pen-pal program, submit their work to the poetry and art journals, and reserve spots in the yearbook. Some of the online high schools have proms for each graduating class. Other cyberschools offer field trips to places like Florida and Hawaii.

What's more, parents say they still have plenty of interaction with their children, even if the learning comes from an online teacher.

The Botluks, for instance, rely heavily on a cyberschool to educate their son, but they make it a point to keep tabs on his work. They liken their arrangement to a private school that they oversee.

When both parents are home at night, they review his work. And when David's teacher held a chat room with her students' parents, they were eager to log on. What would have been a typical parent-teacher conference took on a new form for the Botluks. James logged on from Annapolis and his wife from Florida.

James tries to put in an hour of work with David in the morning before he rushes off to his job as a lawyer, and he returns briefly in the afternoon during his lunch break.

"You don't have the structure of a school with a principal and a teacher," James said. "That's the challenge with it. There's a lot of parental involvement to keep kids on the straight and narrow."