A potential problem is the linkage of funding and curriculum.

Homeschoolers' curricula are very dynamic things and quite different from family to family and child to child. And districts which serve homeschoolers through tech are more or less doing so in the homeschoolers' own style and getting state money for that. Nice arrangement. However, state auditors can come in any time and say, "You're not using the state-mandated curriculum so you shouldn't get state money for serving these homeschooling children." End of programs, possibly.

That hasn't happened yet, but it could at any time. The districts could fight it through channels, of course, and they might win, but that's just more headache and energy spent on rear-guard instead of forward movement.

1. So, as usual, the answer has to lie in the conceptual realm, to head off the crisis before it can materialize.

The legislature just passed the 'Outcome-Based Education' law and the districts and state and parents are now trying to discover what that means to the way they do business.

The law moves the emphasis of the education process from the process itself to the end of it, namely, to the outcome. So instead of having Jonny move through the grades by age level, as she has been doing, she now will move through by achievement. More achievement, faster movement. Less achievement, slower movement. The issue is her acquisition of skill and character, not her time in a seat against a state-mandated curriculum.

Some of the folks dislike this idea, of outcome-based education. It is a major paradigm shift. It can appear like an avenue for tyranny. Some are concerned that government employees intend to track and control students throughout their life, turning them into glassy-eyed consumers. This agenda has been present among public schools and merchants for the term of public education itself. It's not the whole story, but it's not a new one, either. The worries are mooted when the outcome is defined as skills and character that are genuinely and universally desirable.

1. So, the solution to the curriculum/funding problem is to decouple funding from A particular curriculum, the one the state mandates or any other as well.

How to do that and also satisfy legislators' and bureaucrats' partially justified desire for communication and control? Simple. Identify curriculum with outcome, in the sense of the new state law. And, identify outcome as the habit of study.

1. Make the curriculum the end result, not the process, and make the end result an educated person, whom we now define as an individual having the habit of study.
2. So there are many curricula, in the ordinary sense, that get to the outcome of an educated person, one having the habit of study.

This satisfies homeschoolers, who have produced the most educated people in the society today using dynamic custom curricula of their own devising, largely. It also satisfies legislators and bureaucrats, who are justified in wanting to see a definition of what they're writing checks for. And it obviates or palliates tyrannical impulses -- "use THIS curriculum" -- by saying there are a variety of ways to achieve the outcome, an educated person.

The new law, in fact, recognizes that there are a variety of means appropriate to the goal of producing educated citizens. Implicitly, it recognizes that homeschoolers are successful educators and successful students.

The key to solving the problem of curriculum and funding exists in the articulation of four identities:

1. curriculum = outcome
2. outcome = habit of study
3. modem time = seat time
4. interactive electronics = custom dynamic curriculum

The underlined words are the areas of passionate interest.

These equalities preempt the play of state auditors informing districts they can't serve homeschoolers unless they force the state-mandated curriculum on them -- a thing which would drive homeschoolers away in the blink of an eye, obviously.

January 1994
David R. Graham
Maywood Homeschool Leadership Team