Money makes the world go around...especially in the schools. Unfortunately, this is often at the expense of the students. As a former educator in New York City, I can assure you things are not always as they seem even in “the best school district.” This episode will give you an inside peek into what’s really the focus in our schools and if you homeschool, I hope you’ll feel more empowered to homeschool a lot more confidently!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Raising Children Who Love Learning Free Starter Kit
Simplyfreeing.com/learn
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Did you know that I have a FREE starter guide called "Raising Children Who Love Learning" It is so good and will give you that powerful mindset shift along with some other practical things that you can do to transform the way that you live life with your kids. This starter kit is helpful whether you are a homeschooling mom or not! You can download it at simplyfreeing.com/learn
This Episode Discusses:
Why our public education system is broken.
Why so many public school teachers end up leaving what they initially viewed as their “dream job.”
What crushes creativity in our schools.
How differentiated instruction isn’t truly accomplished.
Why many of the top performing students might be suffering in our schools.
What type of conversations I was being faced with during a parent teacher conference.
Why many children are unnecessarily being labeled.
What to do if you choose to send your child to public school to ensure that they are thriving.
Tips to help bring you confidence as a homeschool mom.
Don’t have time to listen? Here’s the episode all typed out…
Simply Freeing? Motherhood doesn’t feel simply freeing when you’re on autopilot in a home filled with chaos, stress and a ton of pressure. In order to survive the chaos we NEED the right strategies and mindset to embrace the simple and enjoy the few short years we have with our kids. I believe that we are called to see that we CAN rise up, get out of our head, shut out the expectations of the world and what mom life is supposed to be like and change what’s not working so that motherhood is fulfilling. Join me as we discuss all things motherhood, homeschooling, minimalism, faith and health. My mission is to help you embrace simplicity and find freedom in your motherhood. I’m Jackie from Whole9Family and this is the “Simply Freeing” Podcast.
Today’s podcast is really hard for me to talk about but I think it’s necessary to share what happens behind the scenes in our public schools for 2 reasons:
The 1st reason is that the more people that become aware of what truly goes on, the more power we’ll have to change a broken system and make better equipped decisions around our children’s education.
The 2nd reason it’s necessary for you to hear this episode is because I know many of you are struggling with feeling confident as a homeschool mom. You feel that you aren’t good enough to homeschool. I know this because I was PLAGUED with a lack of confidence for years even though I had a "teaching degree." I was trained to be a teacher and I felt like I was a terrible at homeschooling. A lot of us have unrealistic dreams of what will happen when our kids get sent to school. We think that by sending our kids to school, they will be given an education that they can’t get at home. That’s simply a lie! There is no one that’s more equipped to teach your child than you! So if this is you, you need to stop that thought right there!
Teachers are not oblivious to what’s going on in our schools. I’m specifically talking about public schools here. They know what's happening but their hands are tied. Many of them got into the teaching profession because they absolutely love it but they quickly found out that it's not as amazing as they originally thought and lots of teachers end up leaving because of it...myself included.
There are some that push through and stay and they do it for their students. There is something so special about a teacher who truly loves her job and her students. It is really beautiful to see and because of it, the best teachers are always being fought for. Getting your child to be in a classroom for the year with an amazing teacher is gold.
I want to give you a little background on the types of teaching positions I worked in before we dive in...I was a substitute teacher for a few years before I got my full time position. I chose to sub in the schools that were close to my home. I wanted to be away from my daughter as little as possible. That was always important to me. I ended up landing 2 different part time jobs. I was a part time science teacher in one school for K-2. I didn't have my own classroom. I went into other classrooms to teach around the school for a class and left. I also was a 4 day a week test prep teacher for a season. I was hired solely for the purpose of doing test prep with small groups of students. I'd pull them out of their classrooms and work with time and send them back. After a few years of being in a lot of schools, I got my full time positions. I taught 3rd and 5th grade in 2 separate school. I witnessed a ton of classrooms in action in NYC.
I chose to leave what I used to call my "dream" job as an educator and there were some people that ridiculed me for it because I worked in what was known as the best school district in NYC. I had a great job with a teachers union that had my back and made sure that I got paid well. But when you begin looking past the “best school district label” and see students struggling through a broken system, things are not as great as they seem.
Our public schools in the US need a major overhaul and I believe it’s exactly the reason why charter schools are growing in popularity. Charter schools are government funded but they have more freedom to set up their curriculum, focus on their own visions/philosophies and run each school the way that they please.
Despite all the talk about individualized instruction for each of the levels, it’s really not a reality. Your kids are getting a cookie cutter education in public schools even if there is talk about differentiated learning. Input is essentially the same. Think about all the time it would take to truly cater to everyone’s unique learning styles and needs. Individualized Instruction is very difficult accomplish unless you’re a master teacher, the ones that are in high demand. You know what drives the instruction that happens in our schools...standardized testing.
Any chances of getting creative and really diving deep into subjects often gets crushed because we’re making sure our students are getting great test scores always comes first.
I mean the school that I worked in had budget to hire someone just for test prep. Drill those kids until they get amazing grades and drill them hard.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest student in the class...you must make progress. If you had a perfect score in 3rd grade you must keep that perfect score on the test in 4th grade or the school’s overall grade will drop. It was a priority to make sure that the smartest students in class didn’t become lazy or make careless mistakes and receive a drop in their scores.
Many of my top performing students would be called into the principles office to review one or 2 careless mistakes that they made on a practice test. I'm all for principals being involved but when they start looking at the tiny details of the brightest students in my class, that's a problem. I actually had a sweet 5th grader come back to my classroom sobbing after meeting with the principal to review a few of the careless mistakes she had made on a practice test. This girl was already a perfectionist and was hard on herself. Getting called to the principals office for a few wrong answers was the last thing she needed. What she really needed was to explore her creativity and learn how to use her unique gifts and talents to make a difference in this world! She shouldn’t have even had to sit through the endless boring test prep nonsense she endured.
It wasn’t just the brightest students that were impacted the struggling students were effected also. There were times that struggling students got pulled out of their daily math class just to do test prep with another teacher. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way on paper but when the schedules just didn’t work out the test prep was always a priority.
What were the average students doing during all this test prep? Many were bored to tears, a few of the analytical ones loved testing season but most of them just wanted to get on with it and do something else. When is lunch?
This next group of children is what really crushed me... the children that just weren’t good test takers. There were a few kids that needed more time to process questions and carefully select their answers. Since the NY state test was timed, some students needed a time extension in order to finish. Parent's of these slower test takers had to have a meeting with the teacher to encourage them to make an appointment with the pediatrician.
Sometimes the children had difficulty taking the test because they were too energetic and couldn’t focus while others just needed more time to process the questions and they were really meticulous about it. But regardless of their reason for needing extra time, as a teacher I was told to meet with the parents and this is what I was told to say to them.
It’s no big deal...they just need a formal diagnosis that basically labels your child with a condition that will allow you to to legally have more time to take the test on that big testing day!
So I had these meetings with parents kindly requesting that they take a trip to the pediatrician to get their label when I knew in my heart those students didn’t need a label at all. Most of the kids just needed more freaking time to take the test! Once a child gets labeled with ADHD for example, having difficulty focusing, for example, it’s very hard to get rid of that label. And many times that initial label led to the students coming back to class on mediciation that they really didn't need. Just to help them focus.
I saw happy, outgoing students start becoming withdrawn and quiet all because of the test. In many cases I saw absolutely no reason for a child to be labeled as having a special need. Did you ever think that a child labeled with attention deficit disorder might be having difficulty focusing because they just aren’t intrinsically motivated. Most of what they are being taught in school is BORING!
This is not what I was taught to do in college. My teaching job was starting to feel very slimy.
Here’s the bottom line...The best test scores brought more money to the schools. Money makes the world go around. Amazing end of the year test results meant everything to a school.
Teachers in NYC get paid really well and some stay until retirement because of that. There are many that love their job and have such a heart for their students but there are others that are burnt out and just stick it out until retirement. They don’t like their job and it shows.
I’ll say it again. Money makes the world go around...especially in the schools. Unfortunately, this is often at the expense of the students and I’m not okay with that.
I’m not okay with teachers being chained to the system giving up their God given creativity just to teach test skills for standardized tests given to children that are being put into a box. Each of my students were so unique. (Each of my own kids are so unique.) They learned at different paces, they were interested in different things and were able to bring so much value to the world if we’d only let them experience that love of learning and pursue their passions. That is very difficult to do in our school system. In fact, it's not something that our school system was created for.
Children are required to be in school in North Carolina for 185 days which 1025 instructional hours in a school year. Do you know what that means? That means they are in school for about half of each year. Wow! I don’t know about you but spending half of my life in school is a lot of time!
Our education system has failed our kids. Money talks. There’s a lot of corruption going on behind the scenes in the “best schools.” Charter schools are growing in popularity and you know what else is growing in popularity? Homeschooling! I am excited about this and I hope you are too!
Now if you’re thinking that all my talk about us teaching to the test is really no big deal that not surprising. Over the years we have become so desensitized to the corruption in our schools. When we begin to accept certain things that happen in our schools without questioning them, our students suffer.
If you choose to send your kids to school and I’m not judging you for that in any way! You do you! My biggest encouragement for you is to be involved. VERY involved. Know exactly what your children are being taught. Get to know your teachers. Have conversations about what your kids are learning. One teacher cannot possibly do it all and make sure that your child is well taken care of.
If you are a homeschooling mom, you need to hear that you are amazing and are the best most equipped person to do this job!
Most would agree that we want our kids to prosper academically but what would happen if we stopped searching for the “right curriculum” or the "perfect school" but instead set up our lives in a way that their passions and interests are cultivated.
Would you rather raise a child to grow up loving what they end up doing for a living or ending up in a job they hate just to make ends meet?
The academics of homeschooling our kiddos is just one tiny piece of the puzzle. I see tons of homeschool moms fall into the trap of believing that their homeschool curriculum is the most important thing instead of trusting their intuition.
The better the curriculum, the greater the results. This is a trap. Homeschooling effectively has much more to do with your confidence as a mom and your belief in your kids rather than the curriculum.
You are the best mom and educator for your kids. PERIOD. If feeling confident as a homeschool mom is something you are struggling with I have some tips to help you. When a child is in school for 7ish hours they are not learning the entire time. There is so much time wasted in school between transitions, endless behavior problems and time spent doing Independant work that spoiler alert...most kids are faking. Most of my classes spent their time gazing at the clock waiting for lunchtime when they were supposed to be doing independent reading. The distractions in a classroom are endless!
You don’t need an entire day to homeschool your children. The more you know each child individually, the quicker you’ll be able to teach them especially when you focus on what they are interested in. The younger the child, the less work they need. So if time is your issue, like in some way you feel that the longer the school day is the more quality learning will happen, it’s not. If anything, I would argue that in the afternoons in the schools, the students are done, they might as well go home because mentally they just aren’t paying attention. Our brain can only take so much at one time even as adults.
If you’re not feeling confident because you feel like you don’t know math or you don’t know enough history you have so many resources available to you. Don’t feel that you have to teach every subject. You can delegate what you don’t feel confident doing.
It is okay to learn alongside your kids. To show them that you aren’t perfect. You don’t have to know it all to be a teacher. Sit and Think about where your lack of confidence is coming from and work on changing your mindset from feeling defeated to empowered. Once you let yourself think through what’s causing you to feel a certain way, the root causes usually pop up.
I hope this episode empowers you as a mom to show up everyday for your kids and fight hard to give them a valuable life giving education. Remember, in public school there has to be a way to decide and show proof whether or not a child is showing progress but with homeschooling you’re able to educate the whole child. You’re able to nurture their mind and soul and give them a life giving education. Sometimes it might not seem like they’re learning much if you’re taking a week to establish good rhythms, routines and build their character but this is type of learning is essential to creating an environment where the best learning happens. Slow progress can often be more powerful than steam rolling through the curriculum just to get it done and keep up with the public schoolers. You are doing a great job!
I really appreciate you taking the time to listen today. If you could subscribe and rate the Simply Freeing podcast on iTunes, this will help my podcast reach more people. There are a lot of things that you could be doing right now with your time. Your time is so valuable and I want to protect that time. I really thank you for being here and putting this podcast into your earbuds and making it a part of your day!
Did you know that I have a starter guide called "Raising Children Who Love Learning" It is so good and will give you that powerful mindset shift along with some other practical things that you can do to transform the way that you live life with your kids. This starter kit is helpful whether you are a homeschooling mom or not! You can download it at simplyfreeing.com/learn