Volume 4, Issue 1, Feb/Mar 2001
- Anatole France
"It is the mission of Lake Superior College Continuing Education and Extension programs to provide educational opportunities designed to meet the Home School students' needs in curricular activities that expands beyond the home schooling abilities. These opportunities will enrich the students' varying learning needs for knowledge and enhance personal interest, desires and understandings."
The ASF program offers learning and enrichment opportunities to home schooled students and others. Spring semester course offerings are:
Ceramics
ASF1803-01 Cost $40, supplies $15.
Tues., Jan. 30 - April 2, 4:30 - 6:30pm Room W1856.
Ages 8 - 18. Max. 20.
Introduction to wheel-thrown and hand built clay forms.
Creative Writing and Speech
ASF1805-01
Cost $25.
Fri., Feb. 2 - April 13, 11:00 am - 12:50pm, Room W2812
Students will be introduced to the basic language, concepts, and structures of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and drama. Debate techniques will be incorporated into speech for upper level students. Adaptable to various grades. Ages 8-18. Min. 20.
Introduction to Biology
ASF1804-01 Cost $25.
Fri., Feb. 2 - April 13, 3:00 - 5:00pm, Room E2018.
Basic biological principles especially focused on laboratory exercises that illustrate the scientific method, cellular structure and function, DNA and genetics, cell division, photosynthesis and respiration, biological interactions and systems, adaptation and classification of organisms. No previous biology experience needed. Ages 14-18. Min. 10.
Summer Course Forecast: Theater
Registration Process:
All registrations must be processed on the official form attached to the course schedule announcement (to receive a copy, please contact Sue Anderson, Director of Continuing Education at 218-733-7615).
February 6, 10-11am
Snowshoeing
Explore the wintry world on snowshoes designed just for you!
February 13, 10-11am
Animal Homes and Hideaways
Explore tracks and animal hidey-holes.
February 20, 10-11am
Trees are Magic!
Learn the parts of a tree, sing songs and do measurements.
February 27, 10-11 am
Snow Wonderful
Discover how cozy the blanket of snow is!
Editor's note:
I received an email from Kim Jaworski on Jan. 16th regarding proposed changes to the homeschool law. Following are excerpts from that email. MHA is the Minnesota Homeschoolers Alliance. I have included the text of Kim's letter to her representatives as a template for others to follow, if you feel so moved. I have personally never been a fan of standardized testing (having never learned anything about my kids I didn't already know) so feel rather strongly about this issue.
Please pass this information on to any homeschoolers you know. This is a subject our representatives need to hear from us on.
From Kim Jaworski: "I received this information from Kathy Fears, the Editor of MHA's newsletter, The Grapevine and I thought it warranted our attention. I have drafted a letter to my representatives, and I think they all need to hear from many of us so that this ends quickly (see end of article), feel free to use any part of it, if you care to, when talking or writing to your legislators."
Kathy sent: "I just got a very important piece of information this morning that we should all be aware of. Mark Sinclair, who is the homeschool liaison at the Dept. of Children, Families and Learning, told me that there is a proposed change to the homeschool section of the Minnesota Compulsory Education Law that would require all of us to report the results of our children's annual testing to our districts.
This is happening right now! I'm sure all of you would agree that this is an infringement on our rights and don't want this to happen. Mark's advice was to call your representatives and/or Christine Jax,the Education Commissioner to get more information."
"MHA will try to have update information as soon as it is available. Call the phone line or check the web page at www.homeschoolers.org. And pass this information on to all Minnesota homeschoolers that you know."
The following is an excerpt from an article by Mark Sinclair that will run in the next Grapevine (MHA's newsletter).
"The Minnesota State Legislature has convened its biennial "long" session (until at least mid-May) when most funding and many policy issues are debated and acted on in the form of new laws, rules and deletions or amendments to existing legislation. There will be many education-related issues that will be addressed this session ..........
Of particular interest to homeschoolers will be a proposed amendment to the reporting section of the Compulsory Instruction Law (M.S. 120A.24) that would require home school instructors (parents or other qualifying instructor) to submit the results of their homeschooled children's annual nationally norm-referenced standardized exams to their resident public school district.
While there have been different interpretations of this reporting requirement in the past, CFL position in the past 6 years has been to have school districts encourage the reporting of these test results by homeschoolers but not to require this reporting. The proposed amendment, brought forth by the CFL Commissioner, at the request of the Twin Cities Metro school district home school liaisons group, would make the reporting of those annual test results a requirement. This proposed change will be scheduled for legislative hearings at a later date and in a committee that has yet to be assigned. For further information on the legislative process, contact the Minnesota House Information at (651)296-2146 or the Minnesota Senate Information at (651)296-0504 or go to the website.
Kim's letter:
"Dear Representative, I recently learned of a matter before you about which I feel very passionately and which affects me at a most personal level. I understand there is a proposed amendment to the reporting section of the Compulsory Instruction Law (M.S. 120A.24), which would require homeschooling parents to report standardized test scores to their school districts. I abhor this possibility so deeply and for so many reasons that I barely know where to begin.
You would better serve your constituents by removing the testing requirement altogether, like our progressive-minded neighbors to the east in Wisconsin.
Please understand that homeschoolers are not required to follow the same curriculum and course of study as the public schools. Then you should see that a standardized exam based on the public schools system is hardly a fair assessment of homeschoolers learning. Would you require a child coming from another country to be assessed by American exams knowing that the foreign school taught a different progression with a different emphasis? This would only be acceptable to assess an appropriate placement for such a child into an American school. Homeschoolers are seeking no such placement.
Please see that requiring a norm-referenced exam for homeschoolers is itself inane! The only reason homeschoolers have tolerated it at all is that the scores were private. Our children could not be labeled by the system if their scores never appeared anywhere. As a parent degreed in psychology and home educating my children, I do not believe in the use of norm-referenced, standardized tests for anyone and I have opted for home education in part to keep my children out of a system that cannot possibly attend to the needs of the individual yet judges each individually and tracks them unmercifully.
Timed, standardized tests have been proven to be biased against girls, ethnic minorities and children with even slight learning difficulties. These exams were created on the basis of nineteenth century beliefs about learning, despite the fact that our understanding of the brain, learning paradigms and learning differences have progressed enormously since that time. The purpose of a norm-referenced test is to rank and sort students -- not to evaluate a student's mastery of the material. They focus primarily on memorization and cannot measure important skills like problem solving, decision-making, judgment, social skills or abstract thought. (see article, by Michael Farris, in Washington Times, Jan 2, 2001, titled: "We need teaching, not additional testing"
Homeschooling is everything an education should be: individualized curriculum, time to pursue personal topics of interest, freedom from comparison and labeling, time for each child to develop at their own pace, and one to one attention from a teacher who loves them and cares deeply about their future. A public school can never compete -- and the state should not try to make homeschools exist as mini-public schools anymore than you would expect an at-home-mom to follow the same guidelines as a licensed daycare as she cares for her own children.
Homeschooled students pursuing post-secondary education are out-performing their public schooled peers on the standardized entrance exams (see article by Andrea Billups in The Washington Times Aug 22, 2000 http://hslda.org/central/selected/docs/08-22-00.html). They are being actively recruited by top colleges in the nation (see Star Tribune article Sept 14, 2000 titled: Home-schooled students find colleges welcoming). This is not a situation that needs our state to legislate stumbling blocks.
Perhaps you should meet more homeschoolers before you start legislating their lives. I have met hundreds of others from across our state as I offered outreach information to new families considering homeschooling and provided workshops for all varieties of homeschoolers. Some are homeschooling children with special needs in an effort to avoid stigma and labels, others to challenge a gifted child, still others to allow a late bloomer time to come into their own skills in their own time. The reasons they homeschool and their approaches to it are as varied as the 15,000 children who are homeschooled in this state. No solitary exam could possibly measure the diverse experience of each child.
It is a parent's obligation and responsibility to see to their child's education. If a parent chooses a public or private school, then they and their child must submit to these exams just as they must submit to a generalized curriculum and periodic guinea pig experiments (profiles of learning, ITA approach to phonics, Whole Word reading-- to name a few). A parent who chooses to home educate asks nothing of the state in the way of funds or resources, and should not be required to take on the added financial burden of an annual exam. Most exams cost $40 per child, most homeschoolers are single income families, and many are rural families. Most also have more than one child, and a good number of homeschoolers have large families. We pay for the exams and all of our curriculum, materials and supplies without subsidy. The token reimbursement is barely worth the paperwork, and still would cover the cost of the exam and little else.
I thought laws should serve and protect the people. I am certain that homeschoolers (or even the general public) did not call for this change to the law. It is teachers, principals and others involved in public education that want control of every child's education, when they struggle to educate even the ones entrusted to them.
The governor said when he took office that he believed that government should do for the people only what they cannot do for themselves. Homeschoolers ARE doing for themselves -- and we want the freedom to continue to do so unencumbered. Remove the testing requirement for homeschoolers entirely because it is burdensome, biased and out-dated. Spend your time on matters of importance and not eroding the rights of conscientious parents who are successfully parenting and educating their children.
Until all children are declared wards of the state, it is the parent who decides what is best for their child. And until a homeschooling parent chooses to enroll a child in the public school system -- we should be allowed to learn in freedom.
For more information on Norm-referenced standardized tests please visit www.fairtest.org. I urge you to familiarize yourself with this topic before making changes in a law that will affect households across Minnesota. "
C.O.R.E.'s mission is to be a clearinghouse of information for home educators in the Twin Ports and surrounding areas. All home educators are welcome to participate in C.O.R.E. meetings or events regardless of methods or philosophies of homeschooling.
To find updates on current meetings and activities go to their website.
The next meeting will be:
February 13, 2001
Standardized Testing
Tom Watkins, Ph.D., Testing and Evaluation Coordinator
ISD 709 will be the presenter.
Date and location:
April 21, 2001; 9:00am - 3:00pm
Lakeview Christian Academy,
155 W. Central Entrance, Duluth, MN.
This is not a function of Lakeview Christian Academy.
If you are interested in being an exhibitor or presenting a workshop please contact:
Anne 218-729-8250 by Feb. 2, 2001
If you would like to help in the planning of this event please come to one of the following meetings:
2/6
2:00pm Duluth Library, children's section
Set-up of booths, advertising, attendee registration (forms, cost, misc. details)
3/6
2:00pm Duluth Library, children's section
List of responsibilities & volunteer jobs, letter to support groups, set-up workshop schedule.
4/3
12:00 noon at Anne's house
Final Details!!!!
THE BULLETIN BOARD, 2009 W. 8TH ST., DULUTH, MN 55806
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