Educational Test Response: Positive

The Education Wars Part XI

Yesterday, I asked for one volunteer, and got around thirty.

Looking for a Willing Educational Test Subject

Special thanks for everyone's interest. I am sorry that I cannot answer each and every email, or work with every student. I did enjoy reading most of them already! Hopefully we will produce a video that will be educational to many parents working to understand how to homeschool their kids, or how to select teachers or mentors to work with them.

In the meantime, here is a snippet from one of the emails that I enjoyed.

I simply cannot believe you are offering this. After your post regarding the study with the lower income families being encouraged to spend time with their kids, I began to search online if you had published any essays/articles on teaching kids math. My daughter will be 12 on July 4th and really struggled this last year with a coach as her 6th grade math teacher. Her previously advanced math scores have likely dropped after last year and I am hoping to supplement this lack of teaching. I would like to volunteer her for your study.

I am a former GED instructor at a non-profit in Ardmore, OK. The Barbara Bush Family Literacy Foundation planted seed money to start our GED center for adults with preschool-aged children and was the first of it’s kind in our state. The thought was that the parent would be more likely to come to class if they had on-site childcare and the daycare worker would read to the kids and engage in educational play. Together, the GED instruction and child development might burn the candle at both ends so to speak. Our organization ended up receiving national recognition for graduation success rate. We out-performed any state-funded GED program. We employed the same practice you wrote about—encourage parents to spend time reading, playing, just being with their kids and watch the seed grow!

Thank you for your newsletters. They are the most consequential pieces that I read.

All the best,