by John Boyle
TAPE (Cheryl Carter 1#35)
Janae: 7+4=11-3=8+4=12-3=9
Cheryl jumps in, gets interrupted.
Janae: So they're adding 4 and subtracting 3 …
Cheryl: Right, so what we've learned from this is they can add and subtract even in the same sequence of numbers. Fade under …
NARRATION
This is Cheryl Carter's math class.
It meets Monday through Friday at 8 a.m.
Her school day ends with discussions of world events in late afternoon. The classroom is a converted den in Cheryl and Derek Carter's Uniondale home on Long Island.
Pictures of Bill Cosby and Rosa Parks hang on the doors.
Bookshelves and maps line the walls.
And, on every other available space, her student's best work is proudly displayed.
TAPE
I'm really teaching them from a very young age to be self-learners and the people who are independent thinkers are people who taught themselves.
NARRATION
Her students are her children, Jarrett, 13, Janae, 10 and Jolene, 7. Family members encouraged Carter to place Jarrett in the highly rated Uniondale School district on long island for his second grade. However, Carter says she soon got a sense
her son was not being pushed to reach his potential.
She believes it was because he is African-American.
TAPE (Carter)
It was not up to standards of what I thought was appropriate for my kids and I think largely, though no one would really want to hear this, largely because it is a black district.
NARRATION
The Carter's are among an increasing number of African-American families that are turning to home-schooling because of their dissatisfaction with public and private schools.
And their dissatisfaction is mirrored in statistics. A national survey shows in the five years between 1994 and 1999, the number of home-schooled African-Americans tripled. The 1999 survey is considered the most authoritative national snapshot of homeschooling. Parents cited three main reasons for homeschooling: a better education, religious beliefs and their desire to avoid the poor learning environment in the schools.
For the Carters, their reason to homeschool was a combination of all three that finally crystallized into a breaking point.
Jarrett wrote a report on a black regiment of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders
called the Buffalo Soldiers.
When Jarrett got a B minus,
Carter went to the teacher to find out why.
The teacher said Jarrett would have gotten an A
it was well written,
but he put wrong information in it
TAPE (Carter)
And I said what wrong information, and she said well the Buffalo soldiers … she said did you get that from a black encyclopedia? And I said no, it was true, its right in the encyclopedia Britannica.
And you know what … even if I did get it from a black encyclopedia. Yes, we do have black encyclopedias. The way she said it, it was a derogatory thing. That it was somehow inferior and it wasn't the truth. And at that point I said you know what, we're gonna home-school.
NARRATION
Carter says homeschooling allows her the freedom
to adjust the curriculum to fit the individual child.
NARRATION
Carter says children can't take skills they learn in one subject and apply them in another because school is too disjointed.
TAPE (Carter)
So your learning something in math class … math class has nothing to do with what your doing in English … and then your learning in English something which has nothing to do with what your learning in history. I think what my kids have is a holistic view.
NARRATION
This integration between subjects
is exactly what Diane McCoy looks for
when a home-schooled application to Columbia University crosses her desk. Ms. McCoy is the senior associate director of undergraduate admissions at Columbia university.
TAPE (McCoy)
Instead of just doing art history, they're doing stuff at the museum and connecting those things. I want to know everything about what they're doing because it gives you a sense of the total HOLISTIC approach to home-schooling because that's what home-schooling is. It's very, very holistic when it's done properly.
NARRATION
Plus, Carter says homeschooling allows her the freedom
to adjust the curriculum to fit the individual child.
For example, when Carter became aware of Janae's resistance to math, she just took a different path.
TAPE (Carter)
I said, you know what, its okay not to do math for her for 2 years. Now, some people would go crazy and would say, "what, you didn't do math with your kid for 2 yrs?"
NARRATION
But in those 2 years,
she was learning math,
just not in a traditional way.
She was learning to measure while helping her mother cook. And, Carter made sure that Janae's art projects became lessons in symmetry and geometry.
TAPE (Carter)
And when she was ready for math … she was really ready for math and she learned a college textbook. This is used by Loyola University and it's a 2 yr book. Janae did it in a year and Janae did it really well.
TAPE (Janae) Fade this under the following narration …
Read the problem and figure out what it is asking you. Then figure whether to add, multiply, subtract or divide.
NARRATION
Ten-year-old Janae can now do algebra, statistics and graphs, but she says she loves word problems the most.
TAPE (Janae)
After that you take an estimate so that after you solve the actual problem, you can look at your estimate to see if your answer is reasonable.
NARRATION
And, for the Carter family, education sneaks in right up until bedtime.
TAPE
I really encourage them to read books. Books that are really gonna cause them to think. Their dad usually reads to them at night. He'll read things like classics. What was the last book daddy read with you, the Odyssey, right?
TAPE (Jolene)
I remember it being about this guy named homer ...
Everyone laffs and calls out that homer wrote it …
(Then, beautifully, she says) … Odysseyus …
NARRATION
Back at Columbia, McCoy says homeschooled students who apply to the University, tend to be more adventurous and engaging than traditional high school students.
TAPE
I think they follow a path that assures them of being different in terms of what they are pursuing. They have to come up with innovative ways of getting to the same knowledge.
NARRATION
McCoy says one thing that has made homeschooling more competitive lately is the internet.
TAPE
Therefore, the students don't necessarily have to go to a classroom but they're going on the computer and they're getting these established places where they can actually be hsed at home by going online.
NARRATION
McCoy also said that parents need to be conscious of making sure their children have taken the right courses.
TAPE
Sometimes you see students who are very strong in the humanities and the parents don't push the math and science part.
NARRATION
Which is exactly why Josh Stamos took
calculus, chemistry and physics
from a private high school.
Josh Stamos is 19 and a 2nd year math major at Stony Brook University.
When he was younger, his mother realized that her knowledge wasn't sophisticated enough to give Stamos the math and science foundation he needed for college.
So she found a high school that allowed homeschooled children to attend for half a day.
But other than those classes, Stamos was homeschooled alltheway through the twelfth grade.
TAPE
Fade up on sounds of campus hubbub and fade under Josh.
TAPE
I think it was good, I never went to a public school, so I don't know … most of the people I know who went to public school, hated it. So I don't think I missed much.
NARRATION
In his advanced logic class at Stony Brook, Stamos formulates the Lewinsky axiom system for conditional negation logic.
TAPE
X implies that ro implies si implies that ro implies x and the third one is not ro implies
NARRATION
His teacher, Professor Gary Mar
didn't know Stamos was homeschooled.
He says what he did notice was that Stamos seemed to enjoy
the artistic side of logic.
TAPE (Prof. Mar)
I think Josh is one of the best-prepared students in the class because he brings to it, not only a technical ability, but a sense of the reason for studying logic for its aesthetic beauty.
TAPE
FADE UP ON KIDS PLAYING PIANO AND FADE UNDER THE FOLLOWING
NARRATION
Back in Uniondale,
Carter took advantage of piano practice
to reflect on her philosophy of education.
TAPE (Carter)
A lot of people have this idea that you prepare your kids for school because once they're successful in school that's it … you should be preparing your kids to do well in life not to do well in school …
NARRATION
To many homeschooled families then, learning-at-home is not merely an attempt to keep kids out of school completely.
It's just an end run around high school … on the way to college.
For Columbia Radio News, I'm John Boyle