The Quick and the Ed’s Sara Mead responds to my post on the dramatic showing of homeschoolers at the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee. She writes:

But here’s an interesting thing: Evan O’Dorney, the Bee’s top finisher, who [sic] Coulson refers to as a “home schooler,” is actually a student of Venture School, a public alternative school run by the San Ramon Valley Unified School District. While most of students’ learning is independent and/​or home-based, they attend the school in person and meet with the public school’s teachers weekly, and also take state accountability assessments like other California public school students.

And the fallacy for today is: false dichotomy.

While Mead attempts to create an either/​or distinction between homeschooling and the home study program of Venture school, she is mistaken. There are four legal avenues for homeschooling in the state of California. One of them is to be associated with a public school home study program. Evan is not a “public school student” in the normal sense of that term. He is, as a local paper points out: “homeschooled by his mother Jennifer through Venture School.”

I had a nice conversation with Jim O’Brien, the Venture School official who liaises with the O’Dorneys. They meet about once every other week (not every week, as Mead asserts). He is available to consult with the family, but is not Evan’s teacher in the conventional sense of that word. Evan’s mother is his teacher. Mr. O’Brien himself describes Evan as homeschooled.

Mead also misrepresents the significance of homeschoolers’ showings in academic competitions. These showings are not based on “a few outliers” as she claims. In competition after competition, year after year, homeschoolers are overrepresented in the top spots. As I noted, public school students outnumber homeschoolers 40 to 1, but, in the 2007 Scripps Spelling Bee, U.S. public school students captured only 5 of the top slots — the same number as homeschoolers.

Perhaps public schools are teeming with brilliant spellers who mysteriously decided to stay away from the competition in droves. Again. Or maybe it has something to do with the educational freedom homeschoolers enjoy.…

Homeschoolers certainly “enjoy” far less of the vaunted “public accountability” Mead touts than do conventional public school children. Though Evan O’Dorney is registered through a public school, a great many homeschoolers are not. And yet, somehow, they manage to get by pretty well. Why, it’s almost as if this “public accountability” thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!