Why Do We Need To Test?

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As we had anticipated, there have been many concerns regarding the new rules on testing.  We have had questions sent in (see some here!) and have been guiding people through the answers to the best of our ability.  This post deals with one of the big issues: the whole reason behind the rules themselves.  So stay tuned and hopefully concerns may be mitigated.

Question

My husband and I started standardized testing with our oldest daughter last year. This was the first year she was old enough for a test to be valid. We firmly believe that we should do this, so that we have a baseline of knowledge and so that we know that we are on the right track. However, we are concerned about others asking for her scores. We believe that as her parents, we are the ones who are ultimately responsible for her education. This is why we chose homeschooling and why we chose this group as our third-option support group. We were very grateful that you did not ask for these details about our children and respected our privacy. I am confused about your new policies. Are you going to ask us to send in our children's grades and test scores, or are you just asking us to continue to personally keep up with our children's grades and are adding a testing requirement—where we keep the results. 

Answer

We completely agree with you on who is responsible for the education of children.  We have a good group of parents who understand this, do the research to know what they need to do to effectively home school and just do what they should.  Unfortunately, we also have quite a few families who don't see home schooling that way.  More and more, we are getting families for whom home schooling is just another educational option to use when they think it will benefit them.  They jump around from public to private to home school and back again. They do not know and do not read about what they need to do to make this work.  We send them information but they appear to never read it!

The motivation behind asking for test scores comes from the difficulty we have experienced over the past 5 or more years as we process the senior scholarship applications.  We find that most parents do NOT do standardized testing with their students.  By junior year of high school most kids should have taken the SAT of ACT at least once, but on average about 20 out of 130 actually do this.  When we do the scholarship application we have to base the nominations on the grade point averages (GPAs).  We get students with either no test scores or very low test scores (300-400 range out of 800 possible) with GPAs that put the student at the top of the class.  This is the disconnect that was talked about in the PHEA letter.  If we wait until the senior year to collect this information, it is too late to sort out any discrepancies or to help families that for some reason just didn't know that they needed to do this.  We are asking for this information beginning in 8th grade as most home schooled students are advanced and do high school level classes in 8th grade.   In order to be able to calculate the GPAs we need all the high school classes and grades.  To do the scholarship submissions, we are required by state regulations to rank ALL eligible seniors so we have to collect the information from all our families.  (The only exceptions are special education students who do not do this kind of testing in public or private schools either.)  Until this year, we have asked for this information at the beginning of senior year, but as was said above, we are finding this is not early enough so we are now asking for the information year by year for those high school years.  

[When we do the scholarship submissions, the only things we send are the student name, school district (not address) the GPA and any test scores.  All of the information we receive to allow us to generate this stays in our files and no one besides the one or two people that do the GPAs and transcripts even sees it.]

This is what the home school playing field is looking like these days and we have to make our plan of action accordingly.  We want the best for our families and we work hard at smoothing this process for them - but we depend on you too!  Here's a shout-out of thanks to all the people who sent in questions: your questions and hopefully our answers will help other home schooling families.  As always, send us more questions if you can think of them!