A legal option for parents concerned about their child/children education is homeschooling. Of course, homeschooling and non-homeschooling have challenges, advantages, and disadvantages for parents to weigh.
Given the failure of the national/state/local educational system to set reasonable and useful standards which a large proportion of the children meet, homeschooling may become more and more of a viable option for parents. For example, for my home state of Arkansas for the 2018-2019 Year 9th Grade Mathematics only 35.64% of the students achieved ready or exceeding. For English Language Arts, it’s 42.96%. For Science it’s 34.87%.
Given the large scale disparity in educational achievement across racial populations which certainly has nothing to do with the intelligence of the children, homeschooling may become more and more of a viable option for parents. For example, for my home state of Arkansas for the 2018-2019 School Year 9th Grade Mathematics, only 43.96% of white students and 13.59% of black students achieved ready or exceeding. For English Language Arts, it’s 51.45% and 20.69% for whites and blacks, respectively. For Science, it’s 43.18% and 13.73% for whites and blacks, respectively.
COVID-19 has seen an increase in homeschooling according to US Census data. Note homeschooling is different from vitural learning. However, I would expect that homeschooling could leverage virtual learning technologies to enhance the educational experience.
References:
More Blacks Choosing to Homeschool
Homeschooling On the Rise During COVID-19 pandemic
Best Online Resources to Help Kids Learn From Home
