...Using anecdotal data.
As we are gathering the data required for our recent graduate to claim the 75% tuition scholarship she qualified for to study nursing/midwifery via Local U, a thought occurred to me. Statistically, only 20% of Florida students qualify for the scholarship in question. In a state with roughly 3,249,259 students, she's done quite well.
Interestingly I was never an intense homeschool mom. I know and love a lot of intense homeschoolers. I learned a lot from them. I gleaned a lot of ideas and implemented tips from them, but I could never get myself to stick to the rigid schedules, intense drills, high levels of extracurriculars, etc. To be clear, we did do all the stuff. We checked the requisite boxes (high school credits, music lessons, etc). However, never with the kind of tiger mom tenacity that is associated with successful homeschooling. When my kid made it clear that continuing to pursue a particular activity was a waste of time and/or money because she wasn't interested in excelling at it, I stopped paying and/or investing lots of time in it. As a result, she rarely spent more than a semester pursuing anything beyond academics, with the exception of Shakespeare/theater.
And yet... even with her "slacker mom" at the helm, my kid did better than a full 80% of all Florida students on her testing. How is that even possible when most kids are in school a full 35 hours a week under the tutelage of professional teachers?
This reinforces my encouragement to mothers who are afraid of failing at home education:
At this point in our nation's educational trajectory, you would literally have to TRY to do worse than the government schools to do worse than the government schools.
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