Parents of middle school aged children may want to be aware that the national MathCounts Foundation has changed the rules for homeschoolers this year. MathCounts provides an opportunity for 6th through 8th grade students to compete in academic problem solving and mathematical competitions which may be of particular interest to gifted middle schoolers.
Students either participate in the local, and possibly national, competition as part of a team or they participate in some components of the competition as an individual. For instance, some portions of the competitions, such as the Team Round, require competitors to be part of a team.
For this upcoming school year -- 2010-2011 -- homeschooled students are no longer eligible to form teams. They may still participate as individuals, but the national office decided to ban homeschool teams due to what they felt was an unfair advantage among homeschool teams. Apparently there have been instances of math tutoring centers forming teams of "homeschoolers" who may or may not actually be homeschooled students. Why the response to this was not to take action against the offending teams rather than ban an entire group of children, I do not know.
MathCounts has also expressed the concern that homeschoolers had the advantage of being able to draw from larger geographical areas to form what they are referring to as "super teams." While gifted students who attend public schools locally will continue to have the opportunity to compete as part of a MathCounts team, local homeschoolers will not. A number of Poudre School District middle schools such as Preston and Blevins do sponsor MathCounts teams for their students. MathCounts rules do not allow for homeschoolers to join a public school team, however.
Since homeschoolers account for a very small portion of MathCounts teams, they felt that the easiest route was to just ban homeschool teams. Anyone with concerns about this is urged to contact MathCounts' program manager Chris Bright at 703-299-9006 x 104 or chris@mathcounts.org.
Comments
I think perhaps brick and mortar schools don't like the competition from homeschoolers....
Typical public-school mentality response from MathCounts. Can't handle the competition. Bunch of babies.
I have no problem with this, they can still compete as individuals...I am tired though of people making fun of public schools. We have excellent teachers AND students in my area and we have no reason to homeschool...
The team competition is integral to the MathCounts competition. Our homeschool group has been participating for 16 years. Because some non-homeschoolers cheated and pretended to be homeschoolers we get kicked out. You are ok with that? We do have reasons to homeschool despite our being in one of the best school districts in FL. Our children have benefited greatly from the MathCounts program over the years and two of them participated in teams that made it to the state level. Yet you are ok with depriving kids of that opportunity. I would not support banning public schoolers.....
With all due respect, you don't know what "excellent" is.
Yes, if you compare your "really different" government school with LAUSD, DISD, or whatever entirely disfunctional urban school district is being implicitly used as a benchmark, your school looks pretty good. BUT, if you use a relevant benchmark - students from other industrialized countries (including China and India) with a similar SES to students in your school or to homeschoolers (without regard to SES) - your "really different" government school doesn't look so terrific. In fact, you would be appalled.
Don't believe it? I could point you to the TIMSS or PISA, but the most powerful way this point has been made is in Bob Compton's documentary "2 Million Minutes". You can find several clips on YouTube. Compton, who is a tech entrepreneur, tells the story by looking at two top students from the lavishly funded, exceptionally highly rated Carmel High School (Indiana) with two students from India and two students from China. The comparison is not pretty and explains why even our "good" students from ":good" public schools do poorly in international comparisons.
For the most recent data on homeschool academic performance, visit http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/ray2009/2009_Ray_StudyFINAL.pdf . The results are from the largest-ever survey of homeschool academic performance. The results, by the way, were published in a peer-reviewed journal. As a hint, the homeschooled children in a battery of tests of core skills scored on average 37 percentile points above their government school counterparts. Does the average student in your government school score, for example, at the 89th percentile in reading? Didn't think so...but the biggest problem with government education is the systematic character destruction performed daily by our highly trained education professionals. This problem is arguably worse in wealthier school districts than poorer ones.
I disagree with the ban - but I also get tired of people comparing the US high school students to other countries (such as Japan or China) where not all students go on to High School. After Junior High there are entrance exams to determine if and which high school your allowed to attend. Many students who do not test high enough go to trade schools or straight to work at that point. None of these are considered in the numbers when comparing the HS results of these countries to the U.S. so it isn't apples to oranges.
In either case it is still inappropriate for an educationally oriented program to lump all students in a category together just because some of them are bad apples. Say there was a cheat from Callifornia, or some other State, would they then ban all competitors from that State the next year? How is that fair to the up and coming youngsters who did nothing wrong?
You get tired of comparisons with other countries? That's too bad, because our kids will be forced to compete with their kids after graduation, regardless of how the results make you feel. Anyone with any sense would avoid the nasty surprise and start the comparisons as early as possible, when there's still time to do something about it, rather than making excuses about why the comparisons can't be made. The world won't hesitate to compare the output of our school systems soon enough.
Your argument that we can't compare because not all students in Japan go on to high school is so preposterous it makes my head spin. Virtually EVERY Japanese child gets a math education that is already so rigorous at the ELEMENTARY school level that few of our American elementary teachers could even teach it. This is true of Korea and Singapore, too, which I know because I lived in all of these places and even did some teaching. I also know it because the US public schools teach my (very American) kids math during the day, and I teach them from Asian texts after school. We're in a wealthy suburban school system, but my 3rd grader was chuckling the other day at the absurdity of my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that he ask his school teacher to help him with a math word problem I had just given him from one of his Asian 3rd grader math books. With several hundred million kids his age learning to solve problems just like that in their public schools, I could either figure out what those other kids are learning and make sure my kids learn it, too (by teaching them myself), or I stick to the "no way to compare schools!" mantra, as if it somehow helped. I don't like what I see, but I still have to deal with it, and it may end up requiring me to homeschool full time.
for more discussion on this issue a google group has been formed called Homeschool Mathcounts. There is also a facebook page with the same title. Please join and show your support for homeschoolers who love math.
North Carolinians for Home Education has also published a very eloquent reply to the mathcounts ruling (nche.com).
MathCounts is essentially claiming that homeschoolers bent the rules to form teams. Their solution was unfair to homeschoolers. The freedom and flexibility that homeschoolers enjoy should not be seen as an unfair advantage. Rules shouldn't be re-crafted to handicap homeschoolers in an effort to make it "fair" for everyone else.
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