A home schooler, 13-year-old Evan O’Dorney, is once again the winner of the Scripps National [sic] Spelling Bee. In fact, home schoolers took fully one third of the top 15 spots in the Bee, utterly out of proportion with their share (about 1/40th) of the U.S. student population. Another two spots were taken by private school students, and three were taken by Canadian public school students (hence the “sic,” above — we’ve yet to anschluss the Canucks so far as I can recall).
That left five spots for U.S. public school students — the same number taken by home schoolers whom they outnumber by 50 million or so kids. And it isn’t as though the homeschoolers are fabulously wealthy and able to hire special tutors. The winner’s father is a subway train operator and his mother oversees his education.
Homeschoolers excel in such competitions because they enjoy more educational freedom than any other category of learner. They can pursue their interests and competitive drives (spelling isn’t even O’Dorney’s favorite subject) without being constrained by the pace of a classroom targeted at the “average” student — a pace that must be, by definition, too fast or too slow for the majority.
Private school students — whose showing was also disproportionately good for their share of the population — also have more educational freedom than those in public schools because they and their parents have chosen their schools from a minimally regulated, though currently small, private sector.
Public school students have the least educational freedom because public schools are explicitly or implicitly constrained to offer a uniform education to their charges. Even when parents “choose” a public school by choosing the neighborhood in which they live, their educational “choices” are artificially homogenized.
Imagine what heights America could achieve if every family had the freedom to choose from among homeschooling, public schooling, independent schooling, or some combination of the three, without facing a financial penalty for doing so. It would be an easy thing to accomplish through a program of personal use and scholarship donation tax credits.