Waldorf School, Home School, Win, Win

A couple of years ago, our slowly-growing high school had an idea: Why not allow homeschool students to take courses at our school? Maybe mom can teach everything except chemistry, or Spanish. Homeschool students could enroll in those courses at our school, pay us a prorated fee, and learn. Our classrooms would be fuller, we would have a few more dollars, and homeschool families would benefit from our school.

Objections included ones I’ve heard for years, about “disrupting the class,” “distracting our students,” “lowering, potentially, our standards,” and the “immaturity” of sheltered homeschoolers.

We decided to try it anyway.

And the objections turned out to be, almost entirely, wrong. New kid in Spanish? Our students perk up and pay attention—who is this person? As Elton Mayo’s “Hawthorne experiments” showed early in the 20^th century, change provokes an increase in productivity.

Also, any doubts we had about homeschool students’ preparation were largely unfounded. It’s true that they often don’t have a complete background in everything we could wish. I came to picture the profile of their knowledge like a piece of Swiss cheese—very solid in some areas (knows all about ancient Egypt), very empty in others (often, math). By contrast, students with a more conventional preparation—public middle school or Waldorf middle school—are more like cake, less dense than cheese, but with smaller holes.

Despite this contrast, which I’ve characterized only generally (and I’ve ignored the real differences between public middle school and Waldorf middle school students, a topic for another time), homeschool students are almost always eager to learn and have excellent work habits. If there are holes to fill, they fill them rapidly and well. Basically, kids everywhere are probably more resilient than we often give them credit for being, and, in the absence of experience, stereotypes about homeschooling (or Waldorf schooling) can spin far from reality.

Socially, too, the homeschool kids tend to fit right in. They are generally a bit quieter—new kids usually are—and more mature (less immature peer pressure and exposure in their lives?), but navigate quickly and successfully within a class.

The largest benefit, however, is not one we had anticipated.

Nearly every homeschool student who enrolls for a course or two—there have now been at least twelve (some of whom had tried other schools before coming to us)—enrolls as a full time student within a few weeks. The students discover the pleasure of the company of their peers, and parents are reassured that our school isn’t the “prison” one parent told me she believed it would be for her son. I also guess that parents, in many cases, feel some relief in not to have to carry on homeschooling an adolescent through high school.

Win. Win.

The Futures of Waldorf Education--Part I

There are roughly 53 million K-12 school children in the U.S.

Of this number, 44 million (83 %) attend public schools.

A few more than 6 million (11 %) attend independent (private) schools.

Approximately 1.5 million (3%) are homeschooled, a number that has grown significantly in the past decade and that continues to grow. Homeschooling, however, seems generally to be a reaction against available options—public or private—rather than a positive choice in itself. Can it represent a viable future for educating children in the U.S.? I don’t believe so.

About 1.1 million (2%) attend charter schools, a number that is growing but, given the grassroots energy required and the opposition of school districts and teachers' unions, also seems unlikely to be a route to the solution of educational ills in the U.S.

Finally, lumping independent and public/charter Waldorf school students together yields a number around 30,000, or 1/18 of 1 percent (.06 percent) of students in the U.S., and perhaps 1/2 of 1 percent of private school students. [The post just previous to this says 25,000, but, as comments point out, I neglected some early childhood programs. Either way, the order of magnitude is correct, if not the number itself.]

The number of independent Waldorf schools, which grew at a rate approximately doubling every ten years from the 1930s through the 1990s, appears to have plateaued. The curve is sigmoid; such a curve is sometimes called a saturation curve. That is, given the configurations of people's lives across roughly the past century, the demand for small, independent, relatively expensive, alternative Waldorf schools may be reaching its limit. Waldorf schools of this type may have saturated their possible markets.

(It also seems like the failure rate for Waldorf schools--which was low--a handful of schools--through the first six decades in the U.S., is increasing. I don't have hard numbers here--I'm working on that. But it does seem like the conditions for the growth of new schools has changed. Maybe they're being founded in some new, less hardy way. Or maybe the climate--cultural, economic--has changed. Or maybe the way they represent Waldorf education has become unpalatable. Regardless, it’s certainly true that service industries—like education—can’t benefit from economies of scale; hence the increasing cost of all education.)

This is not to say that new private Waldorf schools won't continue to be founded, but that their survival will be less assured, their road to sustainability harder. But, without some fundamental change in how Waldorf schools see themselves and conduct themselves--or without some fundamental change in the conditions in which they exist--their growth will be arithmetic, let's say, not geometric.

If the path to the future includes growth, it is likely not private school growth. Perhaps it’s public school growth. There are between 30 and 40 Waldorf charter schools (some call them “Waldorf inspired,” but I don’t care for this distinction) in the U.S., and the number is likely to continue to grow as the charter movement grows. But for how long will this be true? What is the saturation of charter schooling in the U.S.? Urban districts can absorb charter schools, but rural districts cannot. Charter schooling seems not to be a panacea for public education in the U.S., and therefore not a permanent growth area for Waldorf schools.

Homeschooling, too, is burgeoning, and many homeschoolers receive an education that is based on Steiner’s educational ideas. How many homeschoolers use Waldorf methods, and how they interpret them, is impossible to say.

Altogether, however, charter schools and homeschoolers represent fewer than 3 million school-age children. We may estimate that, like private schools, they represent a higher percentage of Waldorf methods than public schools—say 1/2 of 1 percent versus 1/20 of 1 percent, roughly an order of magnitude. If these numbers grow significantly, and if Waldorf methods grow as a constant percentage within this growth, they may represent the most significant possibility for the growth of the number of students receiving an education based on Steiner’s ideas.

In the long run, however—the next decade or beyond—it seems unlikely that charter schools and homeschoolers offer real solutions to whatever ails U.S. education. These movements exist within the framework of intractable teachers’ unions, increasing education costs, and pressure toward standardization from Washington that seems not to change from administration to administration.