For the past 25 years, professional educators and politicians have been trying to level the playing field in education. The reason? No matter how wonderful the teacher, or beautiful the school, or dynamic the teaching strategies, we still find that, as a group, rich children do better in school than poor children. Children with well-educated parents do better than children with less-educated ones. Children in rich schools with highly-trained teachers do better than children in poor schools with less-experienced teachers. It’s a problem we have not been able to fix, although many education initiatives have tried to do so. Can anyone say “No Child Left Behind” or “Common Core Standards?”

Educators and politicians may have looked high and low for the answers, but they didn’t look right under their noses. They need to look no further than the homeschooling community for answers.

The research coming out of the modern homeschooling movement proves home education to not only be a superior educational choice, but it holds true, and to the same degree, for all genders, income levels, family educational backgrounds, amount of money spent on education, and the credentials (or lack of) of the teaching parent. Even more astounding is that homeschooling accomplishes this not by holding the “haves” back (as is typical in most educational initiatives), but by propelling the “have nots” forward. Check out the research: ALL children perform well in homeschooling (from 20-30 percent better than their private and public-educated counterparts) despite differences in gender, economic background, money spent on education, parent education level, and the teaching credentials of the parents. Why are there so few failures in homeschooling, even among categories of students who typically struggle in traditional schools? Because…

Love is the great equalizer.

Unlike school systems and classroom teachers, parents love their children. Most parents will sacrifice countless personal gains, spend hundreds of sleepless nights, consider every possibility imaginable, if they think it might help their children. If a child has a need or a deficiency or a weakness, parents will do everything possible to help. To the best extent they can, parents insure their children’s success at learning and life.

If a classroom teacher ever tells you she “loves” your child, or a school official tells you he has the best interest of your child in mind, don’t believe them. They don’t. Only you do. I know because I used to be a classroom teacher. I liked the kids I taught. I cared about the kids I taught. But I didn’t lie awake in bed at night trying to figure out how to make them smarter, nicer, and more productive. That activity was rightfully reserved for my own kids.

When I moved from teaching other peoples’ children to teaching my own, everything about my teaching got better. Despite a lack of salary, I now immersed myself in learning all the different teaching strategies available to me. I read books and Internet articles. I went to homeschool conventions. I listened to speakers, sorted through curriculum, joined homeschool message boards, and picked the brains of homeschooling veterans. I became a good teacher and my children became good students, far more successful than they were in classrooms presided over by the parents of someone else’s children.

As we progressed in homeschooling, I applied my energies to fixing problems as they came up and making our homeschool days more effective and appealing. If my child was unmotivated, I devised methods of motivation. If they were confused, I teached over again. If I simply couldn’t do it anymore, I hired a tutor to help me. I switched math curriculums at least 10 times. I changed the time and place of my homeschool classroom, I sought out a number of different homeschool classes and cooperatives to help teach things I couldn’t teach well at home.

I tried out both traditional and untraditional approaches to education and my teaching strategies covered the gamut from textbook approach to unit studies to unschooling. I tried teaching all day. I tried no teaching at all. And still my kids kept on learning. The consistent factors? A parent, a child, and a home.

Parents with children in traditional schools love their children just as much as homeschooling parents. And they will work just as hard to try to help them. But school systems are set up to deny them any significant input at all. And, even if they did, at the end of the day, no matter how hard people who loved the children tried to change and improve things, schools would still remain institutions, cold places that, by their very nature, can not care for or deal well with the individual needs of children. Parents, on the other hand, were perfectly and uniquely created by God to do just that.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who is struggling to homeschool her fourth child. She listed off all the things she had tried in order to motivate her daughter, an impressive list that had occupied many of her waking hours. Her current idea was to hire a recent homeschool graduate who also runs a sewing business to be a tutor. Because her daughter loves to sew, she thought the two would relate well to each other. And she planned to use the promise of sewing together as a motivational tool.

I thought this was a creative and splendid idea, a perfect example of how homeschool parents roll. We set education and life goals based on the unique needs of our children and we don’t rest well until those goals are accomplished.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, once referred to education as “the great equalizer.” I disagree. Love is.

Until next time…Be fearless.