Gregkar
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Posts posted by Gregkar
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Could you please specify your question?
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Wow! So glad I dodged that bullet. One visit told me it was a crazy cult. After Montessori I just won't fall for another bowl of kool-aid. Thanks for this. It doesn't surprise me.
We are test driving CC. They have a reasonably good turn-key system for younger children. Our local group is filled with fabulous people- especially the TEACHERS (not "tutors-" this "distinction without a difference" should be informal fallacy 1 that they teach.). The material is otherwise more than adequately challenging for crumb crunchers.
The first important disconnect occurs in the discussion of the Philosophy of Science. There is a BIG disjunction between the Empirical method and metaphysics, and no amount of frosting is going to ever smooth this over. It's the Religion of Public School in reverse. Now, to the extent that the parents wish to maintain their children's purity of creed, this is EXACTLY what you want. However, if your goal in education is for your child to be properly prepared for the sciences and/or to be a competent apologist, then knowing the Empirical method inside and out is *sine qua non.*
That said, without stirring any other parents' soup (because unlike the government, I RESPECT the SOVEREIGN RIGHT of parents to educate their children as they see fit), I can assure you that our children will not be lacking in this area.
Finally, despite the wonderful things our local group is and does, make no mistake that CC is about as much of a ministry as Scientology is. Like Scientology, you are kept in the dark about what future steps REALLY are (in detail) and fed a lot of malarkey about proprietary systems and materials. ("Hey guys! I think I'll go out and patent arithmetic, puppy dogs, fluffy bunny rabbits, blue skies, and sun shine! I'll be rich! Whoo hoo!" CC plays a bad game of hiding the ball and they contort what is clearly a MLM business to masquerade as a ministry.
As of now, the market is wide open for a competitor or some other honest broker of a Soup to Nuts, Lock, Stock, and Barrel, CompleteTurn Key Homeschooling system. That day has not arrived as of yet. Maybe someone will get on the ball. The barriers to entry are ridiculously low.
And speaking of WIDE OPEN, keep your EYES wide open should you decide to purchase their products. In case your experience with CC goes sideways, always know in advance what your contingency plan(s) is(are).
PS, One other thing- CC members are NOT background checked. If I walked in as a parent, and met another version of myself... ("myself" as the example so I do not unwittingly slander some other father and muddy their good reputation) ...with a nice suit and hair cut, would I simply TRUST that person to instruct my 12 year old daughter unsupervised?
Yeah, neither would I and nor should you.
Are females "safer" perhaps? Without being sexist, I think we all intuit the answer to that one. Some things are just tacitly understood. But you never know. I believe in background checks on EVERYONE. It's a pity that we can't do FORE-ground checks and predict the future bad behavior of people, a la the screen play *Minority Report.*
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For those feeling like CC is a MLM.....google Noble Gibbens. He is CC’s marketing director and also sells......Amway. He is actually pretty high up in Amway. And is absolutely running CC like a MLM. This company is neither Christian or a ministry.
A non-human incorporeal entity can neither be Christian nor a ministry. This should be self evident.
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Agree. I don't know the name of the study, but Andrew Pudewa has discussed many times a study that showed once you accounted for two parent households (with a parent involved with the child's education) it erased the "homeschool" advantage when it came to test scores. It makes sense that parental involvement is the biggest factor if test scores are the only end result being measured for sure.
Comparing Apples to Apples....
GOOD POINT on the rival hypothesis.
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Re: medical school in the Caribbean
The students who go to medical school in the Caribbean do so because they didn't get in anywhere in the US. The quality of the education is lower, and everyone knows it. This causes them to have a more difficult time passing required board exams. This also affects where they will be accepted into residency, which determines what kind of doctor they can be. Their choices of residencies will be severely limited because they attended medical school in the Caribbean.
EXACTLY!
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I will preface this by saying that I'm not completely sure what year CC's average scores were from. Since they were listed in the 2016 catalog, I'd assume they were from around 2014 or 2015. The information I found from nheri.org is from 2014. Given that the national scores mentioned from both sources are identical, I'd say that it's safe to assume that they are from the same year.
I did a quick search for homeschool SAT scores. One of the first websites I found stated:
"The SAT 2014 test scores of college-bound homeschool students were higher than the national average of all college-bound seniors that same year. Some 13,549 homeschool seniors had the following mean scores: 567 in critical reading, 521 in mathematics, and 535 in writing (College Board, 2014a). The mean SAT scores for all college-bound seniors in 2014 were 497 in critical reading, 513 in mathematics, and 487 in writing (College Board, 2014b)."
The scores I posted earlier (CC vs top state vs natl avg):
SAT Reading
630 vs 612 vs 497
SAT Writing
577 vs 587 vs 487
SAT Math
569 vs 620 vs 513
More directly compared, the average CC Homeschooler Score vs Average Homeschooler Score:
SAT Reading
630 vs 567
SAT Writing
577 vs 535
SAT Math
569 vs 521
According to this, the average CC homeschooler scored higher than the average homeschooler on every section.
Without the context of the Z-Scores, percentiles, study design, etc. this doesn't tell us as much as it would appear. Yes, the raw scores may be higher, but if they are still less than 1 SD above the mean, it tells us NOTHING (for certain).
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Gregkar, I am not sure what you are are saying.
Homeschoolers who prepare their children well have a pretty good track record of getting into good colleges for at least a couple of decades now. I don't know that we can say the same about CC or if there are any available stats on that. How many kids are even "graduating" high school from CC after four or more years of the program?
I don't think we actually have reliable, unbiased data yet. I only have anecdotes from other homeschoolers of all stripes (which encourage me a LOT!) and unverified claims by CC.
It seems like you are worried about homeschool transcripts for college admission vs. CC, with the idea that CC or another program like it would "look better".
No, my concern lies with transcripts produced by ANY non-accredited person or organization. We're in California, so we're are probably going to be on the forefront of any legal conflict.
Nothing comes for free.
I know this all too well.
Homeschooling high school requires an investment of significant time, energy, and usually money, more or less depending on various circumstances. If you want excellent academics without any DIY element and don't like your ps district, it will cost you, and at some tipping point, if you want cookie-cutter, hands-off, and high standards, you might be looking at private school. I truly think the university model or cottage schools might be the best in-between, but, like any private school or CC or anything else, a lot depends on the people involved.
I am well aware.
My main goal is to give my child the BEST possible education within my means without foreclosing his college and grad school possibilities, should he choose to pursue that.
I am myself a "product" of the California PS system. (Actually, I'm a product of being autodidactic, but that's another story.) As such, I know all too well the horrors and institutionally wasted opportunities provided by PS. I want my child to have BETTER so that he can choose to become more than a proletarian thrall, if he likes.
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Right now, I don't think a homeschool-in-a-box product is an easy feat for high school. And perhaps that is why CC has not been able to offer one that is consistently high quality.
I wonder why in-a-box is even desirable for this age. If you want a box taught by other untrained parents, why homeschool high school at all?
Homeschool In-a-Box SELLS. CC's growth is the proof of that. And clearly this is adequate for Elementary school levels.
But is it an adequate bridge to top colleges? This REALLY matters a LOT for those potential Phi Beta Kappa (or equivalent) level students. This also REALLY matters for students headed to grad school. Imagine your child having to attend medical school in the Caribbean, say, because their pre-med program program was at XYZ State. And suppose this occurred because your student couldn't get admitted to Cal, University of Spoiled Children, UCLA, etc. pre-med? Suppose the difference in education caused a 5 percentile shift in the student's MCAT score? And suppose, in turn, that this whole chain of events started because some uptight admissions counselor stuck his/her nose up in the air at the prospect of a "Homeschool" high school transcript.
When you consider the opportunity costs, lost earning potential, and so on, it quickly becomes obvious why failure isn't an option for at least SOME students. After all, are not most of us not here because we elected to FIRE the Public School system? Imagine the irony of our children getting a stellar HOMESCHOOL education only to have the door slammed in their faces at the post-secondary or graduate level. Imagine the irony of some Public School student with half their mental faculties and breadth of education taking YOUR child's seat at Harvard?
That would the WORST. That would be like getting scalded with boiling oil.
Maybe I'm too anxious and uptight. Maybe I'm worried without good cause.... But I do not wish to blithely make mistaken decisions on my child's behalf which will hurt him later in life.
I don't think that it's unreasonable to be cautious.
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How do you determine a company's net worth?
Assets minus Liabilities equals Net Worth
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:iagree: :iagree:
I think when CC came out, it met a real need/desire for a "community" for many, both students and moms. Better models are already starting to sprout up. MP's Cottage Schools, CAP's Schole communities, etc., may meet the community desire but also have better academics and better instructors.
When we did Foundations and Essentials, my boys LOVED the peer aspect. It was definitely something we did not get on our own at home nor in other peer activities like park days. I'm an introvert, so socializing w/ other moms wasn't a driving factor for me, but it is for many more extroverted moms.
In hindsight, I see some real advantages to group learning, for SOME subjects and assuming the children in the group are at the same level, interested in the same subject matter. I would not dumb down just for social interaction. We used CC purely as a supplement, an extracurricular. It was something fun for the kids to do one day a week.
CC corporate made it easy to start a campus. They provided the infrastructure & the PR. It was plug-and-play simple.
I think people try it and love it at the beginning, but then find that it's not an academic route they want to follow. They grow disenchanted with it as they discover that the corporate restrictions on it (can't hire the best tutors, tutors have to teach all subjects for their level even if they have no interest in one or two, tutors have to have kids in the program so every campus loses its best/most experienced tutors right when they have the most time and experience to tutor!...) The CC restrictions benefit corporate's bottom line, but they hobble the local communities. At some point, the benefits of ease of set-up and ready-made PR will be outweighed by weak academics, lock-step academics, and inability to bring in the best teachers. I think it's reaching this point and, for this reason, other types of communities are popping up. It remains to be seen how successful those will be.
All true above, but let us not forget that CC provides an economically disruptive and competitive force to the education economic and social markets, and this is a GOOD thing. Let us remember not to make the Perfect the Enemy of the Good. Clearly, CC has failed to invent the perfect mouse trap and if even a tenth of the negative reviews are true, they are incapable of remediation.
That said, this leaves the market WIDE OPEN to new entrants. New entrants have to solve the economic market problem and be a successful bridge to post-secondary education.
So this brings us back to: Is it possible to bring a homeschool in-a-box product to market, have it affordable, have it succeed, and have it work in communities so that all the angles are covered and specialized cooperation results in superior education? Or is the preceding question predicated upon a Socialist Utopian Scheme that can never be anything more than Dystopian?
We have ONE best opportunity to educate our kids and it is essential that we not miscarry that opportunity. If we fail, how then are we any better off than we would be sending them to Los Angeles Unified School District?
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Then there's CC corporate. Maybe families don't see much of CC corporate because the wonderful directors at their campuses shield them, in a way, or as much as they can, from any aggressive sales tactics and tight legal restrictions of CC corp.
In fact, there isn't much info on CC corporate available online, but one gets a sense of an almost cultish control that corporate seems to wield, and the methods they use to establish and wield that control, by the verbiage in their contracts and by watching their reaction to blog posts or other web posts that are at all critical of CC. Here's one thread that doesn't seem to have been quashed, yet. The OP asks for info on CC corp's business/financial structure, apparently a touchy topic. It's interesting to see what defenses come out. (Scroll down to the 2-18, 3:36 pm, post for an apparent comment from corporate.) Maybe this is why there's a sense that CC is a cult.
Out of curiosity..... Are there online databases you can search for legal actions against a company or against an officer of a company? Or is that sort of info inaccessible if the company is privately held? (PM if that's easier.)
Here's a link snapshot of their gross financials: $4.2 million AGI in 2016.
http://www.buzzfile.com/business/Classical-Conversations,-Incorporated-910-673-0100
Dunn & Bradstreet or ChoicePoint would have better info.
Remember that Gross is NOT the same as the bottom line, but that there was enough bottom line in 2010 for Leigh Bortin to pay out a cool million in taxes- in her OWN words- link below:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/27/pf/taxes/warren_buffett_tax_millionaires/index.htm
As for the history of litigation, Lexus/Nexus would be the place to start. Your local law library may grant free access to this service- or not. Unless it's REALLY big, you won't find it just scanning the internet.
But as I've said elsewhere, I'm not convinced that I have seen evidence of some overarching evil scheme.
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Really what exactly is it? People peddle it like they are selling Avon.
I might endure flack for this post, but there ya have it. I have always wanted to know this.
It is EXACTLY like Avon Multi-Level-Marketting- You've hit the nail on the head.
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The reviews on CC are indeed mixed. The FACTS about CC, like the reviews, are ALSO mixed.
If you are new or need a turn-key, Lock, Stock, and Barrel, all-in-one package, then this is a good choice to examine. If you NEED a homeschool community and don't otherwise have one, then it's a good choice to examine. The package curricula is pretty good- You can sure do a lot worse than CC curricula. If you have more than one child, your capital investment can be reused for each kid. CC honestly is a really good simile of Classical education, insofar as the curricula is concerned.
Finally, and this is VERY important, they bring a genuine concentrated competitive force to counter-weight the Public School system. Competition is the very thing need to improve ALL school systems from homeschool to private school to public school.
On the flip side....
If you are on a tight, tight budget, and your money is more valuable than your time, you can invent the wheel yourself and save a fortune using FREE or less expensive resources.
The Tutors are NOT teachers, although they would like you to believe the contrary. YOU, the parent, have to stay on top of this and not lean into the tutors too much. You may win the lottery and get a super brilliant, highly educated, motivated tutor that loves kids- or perhaps not. The ones I've met so far are above reproach.
Got a special needs kid or one who thrives on Montessori or Charlotte Mason? CC might be a mismatch for you. Maybe.
This IS Multi Level Marketing- make NO mistake about it.
This is a BUSINESS, not a "ministry" ("ministry" that's just giggle silly).
If you ENTER the business, and your ONLY reason for doing so is to make money, you are likely to conflate cash flow with profit. But have no fear, the IRS (and state tax agencies) won't make this mistake and will likely disallow your business losses as HOBBY losses, and therefore you lose the tax deduction if you lose money more than 3 years out of 5. This is that same way they treat Avon, Amway, etc. MLM reps during tax return examination. It's an audit flag, unless you actually make a profit. Does CC pass all 17 Independent Contractor tests? Nope. You ARE a defacto employee, so just be sure you don't get hurt on the job, because then there will be a fight over whether you're a de jure employee or not (varies by jurisdiction). Your accountant can help you with the byzantine tax rules on this "IC vs. Employee" situation. Speaking of accountants, unless you are experienced with small business bookkeeping, hire out your bookkeeping.
The Bottom Line: It's mostly great stuff and good people. But... EYES WIDE OPEN.
I suggest googling NEGATIVE reviews. They are more telling than when everything goes well.
Read these for example:
http://www.thecorkums.com/2015/06/10/why-cc-is-on-probation-for-our-family/
http://oneduffy.blogspot.com/2013/12/cc-verify-then-trust.html-
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Here's the video link I referenced above: Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John M. Barry. It's a historical perspective and philosophical analysis of the history of the Separation of Church and State and why it was so prominent in the Founder's thinking. This could definitely be on topic for home schoolers teaching the history or religious liberty in the USA.
This piece is NOT opinion neutral or unbiased, so "Eyes Wide Open" everybody.
There's an old CSPAN lecture on the religious and jurisprudential freedom movement which immediately precedes the USA and how it laid the bedrock foundation of our society. IF I can find it, I'll post the link.
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The article below is excellent food for thought. I highly recommend it. Even if you completely disagree with it, it will give you perspective.
Someone posted this link in another thread just yesterday. You might find it interesting.
https://welltrainedmind.com/a/bias-compromise-teaching-history-children/-
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The best way to screen out bias to either the Left or the Right is to get recommendations for texts which are plain vanilla OBJECTIVE without author bias, values paradigms, and editorial commentary. If the author *does* comment, make sure the author presents both sides (or rather ALL sides). Dopey would-be Know-It-All textbook authors are chock full of consensus and confirmation bias- and they do not even begin to realize it. Joseph Goebbels would have been sickeningly proud had he lived to see the modern age.
By ANY measure, American history is a mixture of Good, Bad, and Ugly. That's just an objective fact. What we do NOT want is some wing nut from either extreme inculcating young minds with questionable and objectionable dogma. We want them to know the FACTS. And then, when they are capable of critical thinking (not to be confuse with Frankfurt School Critical THEORY), *then* they can start testing value judgments, building arguments, and reaching conclusions.
The childhood indoctrination I experienced in public school is a HUGE part of the reason why we plan to home-school to the greatest extent possible. When we are finished, I won't be nearly as concerned about what my kid thinks as I will be concerned with WHY he thinks that way. Whatever he thinks, I want him to be fully possessed of the reasons WHY he thinks the way he does.
When you are finished instructing your student on American History, he/she should know HOW the Americas (in particular the USA) came to be. They should know WHY it came to be. They should know what was GOOD about it. They should know what was BAD about it. And they should know what polices were both good AND bad simultaneously.
There's an old CSPAN lecture on the religious and jurisprudential freedom movement which immediately precedes the USA and how it laid the bedrock foundation of our society. IF I can find it, I'll post the link. -
Thank you everyone. Notifications are working.
Greg -
This is just a sandbox style test post. If someone wants to send a reply, that might help me know whether I have my notifications settings correct.
greg
And this is my test reply....
greg
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This is just a sandbox style test post. If someone wants to send a reply, that might help me know whether I have my notifications settings correct.
greg
Is classical conversations a cult..or product..or..
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
Ditto. CC has huge gaping defects, but for today they are the best of the limited options in our area for our child.