What are the laws about educating children?

Question

I am confused as to why someone needs a college degree to be a teacher, but any parent is allowed to teach their children. What do the parents have to do to qualify?

Can you home school in groups, like one mom teaching 6 kids from the block?

Answer 1

Teaching in a group is called a coop.

Yes, that does happen in many area's since many home school parents like to share their time, and talents with each other, as well as develop friendships.

Teaching the children on your block would be called a private school, you can start one as well; many private schools are successfully run without "credentialed teachers".

Why do you need a teaching degree?, good question.

As I understand it this is a requirement set by a group of people, who have decided that to teach in a public school, college, or university, you have to fill the following squares; X, Y and Z,  which equals a teaching degree.

Who sets the standards? Check with many colleges, most have different requirements.

Does a teaching degree make you more qualified to teach a specific subject, no.

A teaching degree has very little to do with actually having any experience in the subject matter, but rather focuses on how to "manage" a group of kids in a classroom setting, while providing a preset curriculum dictated by a teachers guide.

Most teachers are far from subject experts.

Any person reading the guide can lead a guided discussion/lesson, or provide the information to another.

Home school parents have the same materials available to them, they just do not on a day to day basis manage a large group of children.

I have asked on numerous occasions, and never have received a satisfactory answer to the question yet, so I'll pose the same question to you;

"If the conventional schools do such a great job, and all who have graduated from there have received such a wonderful education, how come they would assume, or even question our qualification, and if we are not qualified, would that than not indicate that the education we received is not adequate; if that is the case why would we subject our children to the same?

Answer 2

This is a good question but most likely, even with  reasonable  answers, it will not change the minds of people who think that a college degree creates a good teacher.

The only way I can answer is by giving you our story.  

I am a product of public school. I was a good student.  I  basically have a compliant personality.    Most elementary classes were taught by the teacher explaining the material, classwork worksheets, homework reading and written work, and review of material.  My high school classes were taught in similar style,except with more homework.   The teachers needed to know the curriculum.  It helped if they were enthusiastic and caring.

I homeschool my 15 year old son.  He and I are very different in personalities. He was in public school until the 8th grade.  He gave up on learning in early elementary.  The teachers gave up on him learning in mid-elementary.  He was tested for LD and did not qualify for extra help.  He had a couple of teachers who cared enough to offer afterschool tutoring.  He did well in small groups or personal individual attention.  He learned very little in classroom situations.

We worked each night for 2-3 hours on homework.  The school suggested Sylvan.  It was cheaper and easier for us to simply teach him in the style that he learns best without wasting the classroom time, both for him and the teachers.

I have a high school education. I have been able to teach my son both in tutoring while he was in school and by being his 'teacher' now that he is home.   It is a more efficient way of teaching for him.

Many public schools are learning that there are alternate ways of teaching.  It is very difficult for any teacher, no matter how gifted and educated, to give each student the attention that they require.

Homeschooling is the answer for some of those students.  Teaching, tutoring, guiding, correcting, and parenting can be done in the home with a parent who can read and has a desire to learn.

By the way, my son's social life has improved because he now has more time.  His afternoons and evenings are not spent learning what should have been learned in class.

He has learned in the last 2 years.  Not only does it show in his school work and everyday life,  the standardized testing required by our state shows his improvement by 3 grade levels.

Answer 3

i believe all home schooling should be outlawed and no one should be allowed to teach a child educational issues except certified, trained teachers who are constantly having to update their education taking continuing ed classes.

and no a mom with no education or teaching credential cannot school children that are not hers.

but this is a state issue and every state has its own rules.

Answer 4

KIDS NEED TO GO TO A SCHOOL. Its where social interaction is learned. I never met a homeschooled child without issues.

Answer 5

Your question would be a legitimate one if teaching certification were not a total joke in this country. According to the report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce released earlier this year, the average SAT score of a new K-12 teacher in this country places him/her in the BOTTOM THIRD of college graduates. The National Survey of America's College Students found that education majors had the LOWEST average prose and quantitative literacy scores of all majors studied. When Massachusetts started requiring prospective teachers to first pass an exam testing 10th grade English and Math, an astonishing 59% flunked!

Why aren't you outraged about the abysmal quality of teachers in government-run schools (who educate 85% of the children in this country compared with the 5% being homeschooled)?

For what it's worth, studies of home educated students found that there is NO significant difference in standardized test scores of children taught by a parent with a teacher's credential compared with those taught by a parent with a bachelor's degree in another subject.

Answer 6

Bwahahahah...hahaha! oh wait...hahahaha!

I mean, honestly. The only reason teachers need to go to school to teach is so they can learn how to teach the MASSES. The classes are on classroom management, how to give tests, what certain disabilities are...I think i took ONE class on HOW to teach. The rest is all beauracracy. Teaching one or two children is completely different, especially when you know that child intimately, which no public school teacher COULD do until a month or two into term IF they had time to spend one-on-one, which they don't if they have 30 kids in there.

Most private schools don't even require teaching degrees, only a degree in the subject that they are teaching. That's because they recognize the truth, that a passion and love for a subject is a much better motivator than a degree for teaching, much less certification. The same is true for colleges and universities. But for some odd reason, if a child is under 18 and in public schools, the only requirement is a teaching certificate? NCLB has changed that some, that's true, by mandating 'highly qualified teachers', but in the real world, the same teachers are still teaching science and math and history without the background IN THAT FIELD...just a certificate saying they know how to teach.

As for what parents do to qualify, it depends on where you live. However, studies through NHERI show that even parents without a high school diploma have children who score on standardized tests as high or higher than public school students. Why? Because they have a passion for their kids. Parents would run into a burning building to save their child, why would they not do all they could to ensure that they were fulfilling their potential? They learn alongside their child, and both are fulfilled.

As for homeschooling in groups, it depends again on where you live. but in most states the onus is simply to make sure the child is proficient, so if they wanted to learn in groups, it wouldn't be illegal. Make sense?

Answer 7

Uh, why would a parent need a degree in order to teach their own children?  Next thing you know, you're gonna propose that there ought to be a law against having kids without a college degree.  Do you know how ridiculous that question sounds?

And, the laws differ from state to state about group teaching.  Frankly, I think we'd all benefit from allowing that more regularly. But most states limit teaching the children of other people unless you are registered with the state as an state-approved authorized teacher.

Answer 8

You might enjoy a bit of history on this one. Actually, the law requiring public school teachers to have certification is very recent. I remember when the bill was moving through the legislature. It was only about 10 to 15 years ago. There was great concern among homeschoolers at the time because the wording of the original bill was vague enough that it could be interpreted to apply to homeschoolers and private schools. The impact to homeschooling would have been devastating because there wouldn't be just one certification to deal with but an impossible series needed. Elementary education certification would have had to be followed up with certification for every subject for the high school level. Studies had already borne evidence that homeschoolers with certified teachers as parents scored statistically the same as those without it but with a bachelor's degree (in actual numbers, the kids of the certified teachers actually scored a bit lower). Homeschoolers were ready to engage in battle with that bill's wording to be sure it did not apply to homeschoolers. For the first time in history, the federal switchboard was actually shut down because of the flood of calls from homeschoolers, teachers, public schools, and private schools. This was not a popular bill! If the original vague wording had not been cleaned up, it never would have passed.

Have public schools improved in the last ten to fifteen years because of certification laws? I don't thinks so. Statistics still bear witness that, among homeschoolers, certification of teaching parents doesn't give a statistical advantage to homeschool students.

What do parents have to do to qualify? Take enough interest in their kids to feel committed to giving it a try for a while to see if they see improvement for their children. The vast majority of these families do exceptionally well.

Can you homeschool in groups? Certainly! Some states will have laws that stipulate what percentage of a student's education can be done by non-custodial instructors. My own state has only recently lifted a law like this. Now homeschoolers here are free to 'hire out' even 100% of their student's education if they so chose. Many homeschoolers hire tutors for subjects they feel uncomfortable with, sign their children up for college classes, enroll in an online private school with a homeschooler option, co-op locally, or even co-op nationally via online course co-ops using online classrooms. The great thing about it is feeling like you have the final say who will be the child's instructor. You don't HAVE TO accept the public school teacher that your child is assigned to who may have passed a certification test but obviously isn't wired to teach in a real classroom. Free market rules apply!

Answer 9

Laws about educating children see this site

http://www.OnlineStudyInfo.com

Sana

UK

Answer 10

The law says it is the child's parents who are responsible for providing their child with an education...not the government, not the local school, not teachers etc.

Parents can provide that education themselves (homeschooling) or they can bring in someone else to educate their child on their behalf (schools, teachers etc).

By law, the only thing parents have to do to qualify to educate their children is give birth to them.

Answer 11

There is a huge difference between trying to teach anywhere from 30-120 students during the day (elementary teachers who have the same students all day to upper level teachers who teach 5 classes) and teaching your own child(ren) at home.  Beyond huge.

My parents are teachers, and darn good ones.  I grew up working in their classrooms both during the summers and tutoring through the school year during my free periods.  I saw firsthand what issues they faced in their classrooms, and they are light years from what I face while homeschooling my son.

Also, please bear in mind that many homeschool parents ARE certified teachers.  For whatever reason, their children are better off at home.  Homeschool parents also have to follow state laws that require their children be taught certain things and according to certain standards, the same as classroom teachers.

And why, if I am qualified to give birth to and raise my child, am I not qualified to teach him?  I did actually pass all of those classes myself, with flying colors, and I am able to research whatever I need to in order to teach him.  I am not teaching 30 kids, all from different backgrounds, all at different levels, and all with different needs; I am teaching one child - my child.  I am his mother - who can tell his needs better than I can?

We homeschool because we live in a state where my son is not allowed to accelerate (skip grades) because of strict age laws.  At age 9, he is flying through an advanced 6th grade English book, teaching himself Greek (and discussing it with our pastor, who's taking it at the college level), starting Algebra next spring, and going through 2-3 full year science curriculums every year.  He reads The Hobbit and can tell you pretty much anything you'd want to know about history from ancient civilizations through the American Revolution.  Yet the schools won't accelerate him due to silly laws, and his last teacher threatened to "strongly recommend" him for Ritalin because she didn't know what to do with him.

Can you honestly tell me that he's better off in a classroom that openly refuses to meet his needs?

Homeschooling in groups is known as co-op.  This covers a pretty wide range of things, everything from a couple of families getting together to study one or more subjects to a group hiring in teachers to teach various subjects.  I studied to be a linguist and translator, and teach Latin and Spanish at one co-op in town.  Our math classes are taught by a certified math teacher with more letters behind her name than I care to try to type.  Our science classes are taught by a certified science teacher who also teaches at one of the best schools in town...she moved her classes to mornings so that she can teach at our co-op two days a week.  She has about 40 or so students between 3 classes.  Our AP Spanish is taught by a former college Spanish professor, and our Government and other Civics classes are taught by an attorney.  I think they qualify...

The other co-op that we're involved in is a full day, one day a week.  A former classroom teacher and I teach a history class and a world geography class, a college Spanish professor and native speaker is my 5th grader's Spanish teacher, a degreed scientist is his science teacher, and a former English teacher teaches his writing class.  The art teacher has her MFA and is a certified, working art teacher.  We all get together to plan out the year and teach *our* kids in a group, each mom teaching to her strengths.  According to the English teacher and the college professor, our 10 and 11 year olds are already writing better than most of their former and current 17-19yo students.  Again, I would easily say that our teachers qualify and our students are thriving.  And yes, this is legal.

What needs to be understood is that there is no one prescribed, mandatory way that every child will learn.  Homeschooling is not beneficial for every child, and classroom school (public or private) is not beneficial for every child.  There are abundant social opportunities for both homeschooling and classroom kids, and independent studies have proven that homeschool kids are actually often more mature (socially and academically) than classroom kids.  By age 13, they are statistically up to 4 years ahead.

When I say that they are more mature socially, I mean that they don't generally exhibit the same age/class dependency that classroom schooled kids tend to show.  Socialization doesn't mean being able to survive the feeding frenzy that is high school; it means being able to function well in society.  Because homeschooled kids are socialized - taught social norms - by actual society rather than by a homogenous age/class grouping, they are often able to function better in "real life".  They may not be completely into the social scene of wherever they are, but they tend to be better able to focus on their studies or career in spite of that social scene.

To qualify, a homeschool parent needs to be willing to whatever it takes to give their child the education they deserve.  It takes finding 5 different ways to review multiplication facts because their child can't stand rote review.  It takes reviewing curriculum choices to make sure that what they have will work for their child.  It takes sitting down and working on timelines with their child, reading great literature, and watching History Channel videos and discussing them to make sure their child has a strong grasp on the flow of history and why things are the way they are.  It takes drawing a big map of the US in sidewalk chalk on the driveway and taking a hop, skip, and jump through each state while reviewing its location, capital, and interesting info about its history, geography, and culture.  It takes dissecting a cow's eye with your kids to help them understand how the sense of sight works.  It takes lesson planning, researching, and reading into the wee hours of the night to improve your skills and reach not only your child's mind, but their heart as well.  It takes constant modeling of what you want your child to learn.  That's what it takes to qualify.

Answer 12

Every state has different laws about educating children.

All teachers may have degrees (not sure about this), but all teachers are not certified by the state.  In many private schools the only requirement to teach is a college degree.  I homeschool my son in the state of Illinois, and I don't have a college degree; however, Illinois is one of the easiest states to homeschool in.  There are no parental qualifications for homeschooling in Illinois.

Other states have many rules/laws that homeschooling parents must follow.  Please see the links below for homeschooling laws in Illinois vs. homeschooling laws in New York:

http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp?St...

http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp?St...

It is possible to homeschool in groups depending upon the state laws/regulations.  Some parents enroll their children in coop classes for one or more days a week.  Often, these classes are taught by other parents who may or may not have a college degree.

My son attended a private Christian home learning center for kindergarten with nine other children.  Prior to this, he had attended a private school for 3 to 6 year olds for his kindergarten year.  When the school closed due to low enrollment, the former owner who also happened to be his kindergarten teacher offered to teach him and nine other children, ages 3 to 6, in her home.  Some would consider this to be a form of homeschooling.  In the state of Illinois, home schools are considered to be legal, private schools.

In other states, homeschoolers must use an "umbrella" school in order to homeschool their children.  Yet other states require that the parents have a high school diploma, a college degree, teacher certification, etc.  If they don't, then they have to teach their children at home via a public school independent study program, a church school etc.

I hope the above is helpful.

Answer 13

It's a parents rights issue.  In most areas you are not allowed to teach someone elses child full time unless you meet the qualifications as a teacher.

You can do it parttime as a tutor.

Goverments sets up rules and regulations for the "good of the people" to prevent abuse and misuse of the people.

They regulate WORDS

You can't use the words Psychologist, social worker, counsellor, guidence, etc. unless you are licensed by the state meeting certain critera.

There is, however, no law that says you can't put up a sign and charge a fee to be a

Guide Throught Life's Difficulties

You can then charge a fee as basically do the work of a psychologists or social worker SO LONG AS YOU NEVER USE THE REGULATED TERMS

You can hang out a sign that says

Music Instructor

You can hang out a sign in MOST AREAS saying

TUTOR

But you can't hang out a sign saying

SCHOOL

or

TEACHER

with meeting state rules

Answer 14

http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/commerce.w...

The link above is to a homeschool study done in Canada and the United States that was updated this year.  One of the findings was that kids who were homeschooled by parents without a highschool degree did much better than their peers who went to public school and had parents without high school degrees.  It is an advantage to have parents with college degrees, those kids scored higher, but homeschooling seems to mitigate some of the disadvantage of being born into a low socio-economic background and poorly educated parents.

College education for teachers, qualifies them to deal with the logistics of handling a large classroom of kids.

Answer 15

interesting question

would like to see others answer this too

so i dont know the answer

Answer 16

The reason places require degrees, be it public schools requiring education degrees or private schools requiring some other form of degree, is to ensure a certain minimum level of education for the people who are BEING PAID to educate a whole bunch of children. This doesn't mean that somebody who doesn't have a college degree can't be a good, or even a GREAT teacher. It's all about a person's drive and willingness to learn, their ability to connect with their student. A devoted parent is going to connect to their child more than a teacher in school will. There are also plenty of high school-aged tutors out there who are GREAT teachers to those they tutor.

Parent qualification for homeschooling will depend on where you live. Where I live, that you are a parent with custody is enough. It doesn't even matter if you have a high school diploma or not. Why? Because education isn't limited to what we learn in school. Thomas Edison didn't have a high school diploma; after being taught the basics, he was unschooled. Afaik, he never went to college. Would you have trusted him to give science lessons to school kids? I sure would have.

As for homeschooling in groups, whether you could homeschool 6 kids from the block full-time or not would depend on the laws where you live. My guess would be that many places would require you to be a private school. (Of course, in at least a few states, you're already considered a private school if you are homeschooling, so it really would be fine.) If you function like a school, with set hours and all that, then it really would be a private school and you'd have to follow the laws concerning private schools. There are a lot of people that set up what are called co-ops where they meet as a group once a week for lessons. This still fits in with homeschooling.

Answer 17

The requirements are different in every state. In Texas, there don't seem to be many!

Answer 18

each state has their own rules,, as far as home schooling its ok for someone to teach their own kids ,,even the parents who do home school has to follow guidelines set by the state an by the federal rules