Yet Dakota spent her formative years being educated in the same place- Las Vegas- that produces some of the worst education results in America. So how did it happen? What was in the water at the Root household? Can others learn from Dakota’s story? Can others replicate her remarkable Homeschool to Harvard story? YES they can!

The key is the same as achieving success in all other areas of life: being relentless, taking action, and taking charge. Taking back the power from government. 

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and a Republican-dominated Senate have given new life to an effort to pass legislation that would give permission to students who are homeschooled to play on the athletic teams of their local schools.

There are three bills in the Virginia legislature that are modeled after a Florida law informally known as the “Tim Tebow law,” which was passed in 1996 and gave the homeschooled Tebow a chance to play for local private and public schools on his way to an NFL career.

In the State of the Union address President Obama called on all states to raise their school compulsory attendance age to 18, unnecessarily adding to bureaucratic requirements for homeschoolers.

Homeschool advocates at the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) are dedicated to protecting the educational relationship between parents and their children. Parents — not the federal government and certainly not the president — are the ones who should decide how children are educated and when they’re ready to graduate from high school.

As with anything out of the mainstream, homeschooling has its fair share of misperceptions. One is that most families that choose to homeschool their children do so for religious reasons. Exacerbated by persistent rumors and pop culture stereotypes played out in films like 2006′s Jesus Camp, many are still under the impression that homeschooling in the United States is a religious phenomena where parents seek to minimize secular society’s impact on their children and instead, insulate them in a fundamental religious worldview. The reality is far different.

As a young mother, Tina Razzell made the difficult choice to school her four children at home.   

It is her 15 years of experience in homeschooling her children that fueled the content for her book Homeschooling Boys-Gaining Maximum Success With Minimum Cooperation in hopes of helping others who also make the decision to educate their children at home.

The Pretoria News caught up with some home-schooling moms, who shared their motivation for keeping their children out of mainstream schools and the normal education system, and also told of the long-term and short-term benefits of keeping them at home.

They gave different reasons for choosing to home-school their children, ranging from the inaccessibility of good learning facilities to the lack of proper Christian values in schools and the need to oversee the day-to-day quality of the education and well-being of their children.

I love homeschooling. I’m a huge advocate of the lifestyle. But when you scope the landscape, there are some glaring problems.

For one, it’s lily white in here.

I’ve rarely met a black homeschooling family. I know they’re out there. There’s the National Black Home Educators, and Black Homeschoolers Magazine, and there are rumors that the number of black homeschoolers is growing rapidly. But there are no hard numbers, and even less anecdotal evidence in my personal experience.

On Saturday, the Ron Paul campaign issued a statement announcing the naming of several new members of the “Homeschoolers for Ron Paul” coalition.

 The formation of the group was originally announced in August and since then has been very successful in motivating homeschool advocates to rally to Dr. Paul’s campaign for the White House.

 

As the statement released on ronpaul2012.com stated:

 

Today, interest in Ron Paul by this population segment has spilled over to many other states and the national campaign. The campaign’s expanded use of the homeschool and other coalitions is proving itself a useful tool in helping to make Barack Obama a one-term president.

So, did you know that January is officially “Get Organized” month? That’s probably pretty timely when you figure just how many of us have created New Year’s resolutions with some form of the word “ORGANIZE” in them. And we homeschoolers – - especially – - have more than a few things lying around the house that we’d like to bring order to, don’t we? So this 316th week of the Carnival of Homeschooling is going to be dedicated to tips and tricks that homeschoolers can use to curb the chaos and get organized for 2012!! Shall we get started???

Of all of the reasons I have for homeschooling, avoidance of public schools is way down near the bottom of the list. I usually prefer to focus on the positives of homeschooling rather than the negatives of public schools.However, I feel obligated to point out that there is a dark side to public schools. History tells us that at times public schools were used for the purpose of brainwashing children. The Communist Manifesto argues for the free education of all children, because Karl Marx believed that children needed to be removed from the influence of their parents so they could be taught how to be good little Communists. Indeed, under Joseph Stalin, public school textbooks in the Soviet Union contained object lessons about ants working together for the good of the colony in order to emphasize the benefits of embracing Communism.