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| HIS WAY: Ross Hensley taught himself
special-relativity physics at age 13. |
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Glenn Matsumura
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MICHAEL BUTLER WAS NEVER TARDY to
his high school homeroom. He never left an assignment in his locker.
He never earned a disappointing grade--or any grade, for that
matter. He didn't get a diploma.
He did, on the other hand, raise honeybees, train
with an army and study modern Hebrew. And he managed to get into
Stanford.
His unconventional education has been largely a
solo journey, but Butler, '04, isn't alone. Together with at least
eight others on the Farm and thousands more nationwide, he's part
of a new demographic surge: young Americans schooled at home who
are now going to college.
Homeschooling isn't new. History is full of self-starters
who bypassed the classroom, sometimes with brilliant results:
Edison left school at age 7 and was soon building chemistry sets
in the cellar; Dickens picked up much of his knowledge on the
streets. But the practice of parents teaching kids at home didn't
draw much attention until the 1980s, when many fundamentalist
Christians, distressed by what they saw as declining academic
rigor and a lack of moral guidance, began pulling their children
from school. Homeschooling became a full-fledged movement, with
its own publications, support networks and Internet curriculum
providers.
No single organization tracks the numbers of homeschoolers
nationwide, but using state-by-state data, the National Home Education
Research Institute estimates that 1.3 million to 1.7 million students
were educated at home last year--or roughly 1 in 33 school-aged
children. Over the past decade, according to the institute, the
number has risen by some 7 to 15 percent each year. It's unclear
how many homeschoolers are currently of high school age, but according
to the Educational Testing Service, 5,663 students who took the
sat last year described themselves as homeschooled.
As a result of the movement's vocal--and still predominant--religious
wing, many Americans continue to picture homeschooling as a mother
and her children gathered around the kitchen table, alternating
between a math workbook and a Bible. But an increasing number
of families cite education, not religion, as their primary reason
for abandoning conventional schools. These are parents who simply
feel that neither public nor private schools will meet their kids'
needs. They want the freedom to focus on each child's strengths
and weaknesses and to let maturing students chart their own intellectual
journeys.
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Photo Credit
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Of course, there comes a point when even the most
self-directed learner can use guidance from scholarly instructors.
When high-achieving homeschoolers reach that threshold, many look
to top-tier colleges and universities. In competing for admission,
they want the same sort of academic recognition enjoyed by their
more conventionally educated peers, even though they're short
on formal credentials.
Among the nation's elite universities, Stanford
has been one of the most eager to embrace them. Despite the uncertainties
of admitting students with no transcripts or teacher recommendations,
the University welcomes at least a handful every year. Stanford
has found that the brightest homeschoolers bring a mix of unusual
experiences, special motivation and intellectual independence
that makes them a good bet to flourish on the Farm.
THE UNIVERSITY'S SPECIAL INTEREST in
these students originated, in large part, with a single admission
officer. Jonathan Reider, '67, PhD '83, is a national expert on
college-bound homeschoolers. He spent 15 years at Stanford as
senior associate director of undergraduate admission and as a
lecturer in the Structured Liberal Education program. Though he
left the Farm last summer to direct college counseling at a San
Francisco high school, his enthusiasm had spread and become institutionalized.
For the past two years, for instance, the University
has tracked every application from a homeschooled student. These
forms get flagged with a special code that lets reviewers find
them among stacks of applications and helps admission officials
chart emerging trends. Many top schools do not do this, including
Harvard and Yale.
"I don't think anyone has caught on to the fact
that these are such interesting kids," Reider says.
The latest Stanford numbers show a rise in homeschooler
applications. In 1999, the first year of tracking, 15 applied.
Four were admitted, and all four enrolled. In 2000, there were
35 applications, more than double the previous year's. Nine were
accepted, and five, including Butler, started classes on the Farm
this fall.
That's a tiny subgroup, just 0.2 percent of the
applicant pool. So why is the University interested? Admission
officers sum it up in two words: intellectual vitality.
It's hard to define, but they swear they know it
when they see it. It's the spark, the passion, that sets the truly
exceptional student--the one driven to pursue independent research
and explore difficult concepts from a very early age--apart from
your typical bright kid. Stanford wants students who have it.
Looking very closely at homeschoolers is one way
to get more of those special minds, the admission office has discovered.
As Reider explains it: "Homeschooled students may have a potential
advantage over others in this, since they have consciously chosen
and pursued an independent course of study."
Indeed, when he and his colleagues read applications
last year, they gave the University's highest internal ranking
for intellectual vitality to two of the nine homeschoolers admitted.
And an astounding four homeschoolers earned the highest rating
for math--something reserved for the top 1 to 2 percent of the
applicant pool.
"The distinguishing factor is intellectual vitality,"
says Reider. "These kids have it, and everything they do is responding
to it."
DOES STANFORD LURE MORE OF THEM than
other elite schools? It's hard to tell when others don't keep
the same statistics, but Reider has given the University a particularly
high profile among families in the movement.
A popular speaker at homeschooling conferences,
he has offered hundreds of families encouragement and advice on
getting into college. In 1997, the magazine Growing Without
Schooling published Reider's explanation of the University's
requirements and his tips for homeschoolers seeking to apply.
Written in the form of a letter to a Stanford hopeful, his article
went to thousands of readers and has been passed from family to
family. Today, homeschoolers who ask Stanford about its policies
receive that letter as part of the reply.
When Reider talks to college-bound homeschoolers,
he acknowledges the difficulties they face in completing the traditional
forms. It's hard to sell yourself in a college application without
grades or teachers to back you up.
"But wait," he joked at one conference in Sacramento,
mimicking a hypothetical student. "My mom is putting together
a transcript--I got an a in everything! I'm valedictorian!" The
audience laughed.
Reider may tease, but this is the crux of the problem
for application reviewers. In making sure a student has the right
stuff for Stanford, "what we want is validation."
Stanford likes homeschoolers to get at least two
of their three recommendations from non-family members--say, tutors,
mentors, community college professors, or civic leaders they volunteered
with--although a parent's letter will be considered. As for the
missing transcripts, Reider wrote in his article: "This is actually
not as serious a problem as you might expect, since there is not
a great deal of difference between someone with no grades and
someone with excellent grades but from a small, rural high school
with which we are otherwise unfamiliar."
Whereas some state schools insist on seeing grades--prompting
homeschoolers to cobble together course lists and rate their own
performance--Stanford asks gradeless applicants to describe their
curriculum in detail. The core of the application then becomes
what the students write about themselves and their education.
"We would like to hear about how the family chose homeschooling,
how the learning was organized and what benefits (and costs, if
any) they have derived," Reider wrote.
Standardized test scores also carry extra weight,
although tests aren't decisive by themselves. In addition to the
mandated sat and act tests, the University urges homeschoolers
to take some sat ii subject exams (formerly called achievement
tests), even though these aren't required.
Overall, though, the University isn't forcing these
kids through lots of extra hoops to prove themselves. Nor are
other elite private schools, such as Harvard or mit. But that's
not always true of public universities. Ross Hensley, a current
Stanford sophomore who scored perfect 800s on the three sat ii
exams he took, says one of the schools he initially looked into,
Georgia Tech, required homeschoolers to take eight of those tests.
And Michael Butler decided not to apply to the uc system after
discovering that every applicant must provide one of the following:
an official high school transcript, evidence of success in community
college courses, or a math/verbal sat total of at least 1,400.
STANFORD'S CURRENT HOMESCHOOLERS aren't
the first to reach top-tier institutions. The poster children
of the movement were the sons of Micki and David Colfax, two former
teachers who raised their children on a goat farm in Northern
California's Mendocino County. During the 1980s, three Colfax
boys headed off, in succession, to Harvard. Their admittance created
a national media sensation.
The Colfaxes happened to live not far from Michael
Butler's family. ("We bred our goat to theirs," he recalls.) "On
some level, they had really validated homeschooling," says Butler's
mom, Esther Baruch. "But I was not sure we had homeschooled the
same way, so I didn't take it as evidence that Michael could get
in." To cover the bases, he applied to 10 colleges. He was accepted
by six and rejected by four, including Harvard.
Butler's schooling was shaped in part by where he
lived. To get there, you start in the small city of Ukiah, drive
an hour west toward the hamlet of Philo and then turn onto a dirt
road. About three miles down, you turn off and go down a hill
into a clearing in the redwoods, marked by two mobile homes connected
by a porch. A proper supermarket is an hour up the road; the nearest
high school is a half hour's drive. It's a place where homeschooling
is vastly more convenient.
But conviction, more than convenience, is the reason
Baruch kept her children at home. At age 16, she vowed that if
she ever had kids, their education would differ from hers. Baruch
attended a traditional Hebrew yeshiva in Brooklyn. "I was very
much excited about learning, but there was not time to just learn
for the love of learning," she says. "There was an hour [for each
subject], and when it was up, the bell rang. That was it. Interested,
not interested, awake, asleep--you moved on to the next thing."
Butler, in contrast, has followed his fancy, learning
mainly by experience. His mother seized upon daily activities
like cooking and gardening as educational opportunities. Butler
and his siblings practiced math by dividing recipes in the kitchen;
they devoured books on dinosaurs and mammals. Through an afternoon
class offered at a local school, Butler got hooked on beekeeping.
NATURALLY, FAMILIES VARY in
how they school their kids. Ross Hensley had a different experience--also
self-styled, but decreasingly home-based.
His parents started homeschooling tentatively, as
an experiment, when Hensley was in sixth grade. He had attended
a local public school and two private schools, where he remembers
feeling bored by the workbook assignments. "They just piled on
pointless, easy work."
He took advantage of the freedom of homeschooling
to push himself beyond anything regular schools might allow. At
age 13, for example, Hensley got a textbook and dove into the
physics of special relativity, even though he hadn't been taught
the calculus that most teachers would consider a prerequisite.
Leaving school at an early age, he says, "gave me a tremendous
amount of time to pursue my interests in depth."
Later, he sought more formal instruction. The Houston
native--who passed seven advanced-placement exams, including the
tough calculus test when he was just a high school sophomore&emdash;spent
most of his senior year at nearby Rice University doing college-sophomore-level
coursework in math and electrical engineering. He attended a Stanford-run
summer program for gifted high schoolers and took distance-learning
courses over the Internet through Stanford's Educational Program
for Gifted Youth. Add all that together and you get enough credits
to enter the University with junior standing (although Hensley's
social class is '03).
AMONG HOMESCHOOLERS who
end up at Stanford, "self-teaching" is a common thread. Parents
usually teach in the early grades, assigning and correcting work,
but later shift to a supervisory role, spending more time tracking
down books and mentors. Stanford-bound homeschoolers typically
take several college courses before they apply. The admission
office encourages this, both to help with evaluation and to give
students a taste of classroom learning before they arrive on the
Farm.
A few, like Becca Hall, '03, pursue a free-form,
follow-your-heart sort of home education known as "unschooling."
During high school, Hall did an hour of math and an hour of writing
each day, but filled the rest of her time doing crafts, taking
nature hikes, apprenticing with an herbalist and studying labor
history through old folk songs. Along the way, she picked up enough
knowledge to earn a 1,480 on the sat (including a 750 out of 800
in math, a subject she once feared).
But a lifetime of "unschooling" can make it hard
to embrace a structured institution like Stanford. Hall, who grew
up near Seattle, says she's considering transferring to somewhere
"more liberal," perhaps UC-Santa Cruz or Washington's Evergreen
State. If she stays at Stanford, she will likely pursue an individualized
major blending her interests in ecology and religious studies.
"It's definitely weird being in an institution now,"
the sophomore says. "I want to be able to pursue what I want.
I want to be somewhere where it's okay if I don't want to follow
the rules."
HALL'S DISCOMFORT RAISES A WORRY often
cited by critics of homeschooling. Can these students learn to
live with the rules of the larger world? Are they properly socialized?
Parents say they can hear the socialization question
coming before it's asked--and it clearly annoys them. (They even
call it the "s" word.) "People always ask in this tone of voice
that suggests they're the first to have thought of it," Baruch
says. "I sometimes answer, 'Yes, I think the way schoolkids are
socialized is a terrible thing; I don't know what to do about
it.'" She dismisses fears that homeschoolers aren't well socialized.
"I don't think [those worries] are borne out at all, in any way."
Backing her up is a 1999 survey organized by Brian
Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute.
Ray found that the typical homeschooler takes part in at least
five social activities outside the home every week--from dance
classes and sports teams to scout troops and community theater.
He also collected previous findings by educators and psychologists
suggesting that children taught at home are actually socially
and emotionally healthier than those in schools. They are more
comfortable interacting with adults and less likely to pin their
self-esteem to the fads and whims of teenagers, Ray says.
The way these youngsters learn social skills--modeling
themselves after adults rather than peers--is more consistent
with the way children have been socialized through most of history,
Esther Baruch asserts. "Until about a hundred years ago, the rich
kids learned from adult tutors, and poor kids went to work early,"
she says. "Now, [kids in schools] model themselves after the other
kids, who model themselves after tv characters--and the results
of that are clear."
Homeschoolers tend to meet adults in the community
during the day when they're out running errands, doing public
service projects or seeking out mentors. Becca Hall, for one,
is grateful for her friendships with adults. One of her closest
confidantes is 35--"and that's fine," she says. "I also have younger
friends. I think that is more healthy than every one of your friends
being your age."
