High School Senior Credits Home Schooling for His Perfect College Board Scores
After acing his SAT and ACT tests, Connor Long, 18, who was home-schooled until high school, has a bright future ahead of him. (Photo: WTOL)
When it comes to getting into a great college, Connor Long has a ton of strengths in his corner: he’s in the top 10 percent of his high school class, is a semifinalist for a National Merit Scholarship, and he has a standout rep as an actor and musician in his school’s musical theater department.
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Oh, and there’s one other thing: this high school senior from Bowling Green, Ohio, racked up perfect scores on his college boards. The 2400 he earned on the SAT and the 36 he got on his ACT puts him in an elite group of young scholars who ace not just one but both tests.
Long, 18, plays down his own role in getting such good scores. “I just did a ton of practice tests and read test-prep books, and I learned the formula for the tests so I knew what to expect,” Long tells Yahoo Parenting.
But he freely credits others for his academic and testing success, first his high school, St. John’s Jesuit High School and Academy in Toledo, Ohio, as well as his first and best teacher: his mom.
Home-schooled by his mother (along with a younger brother and sister) until he entered 7th grade at St. John’s, he says that the experience helped foster his love of reading and excitement about learning.
Home schooling also gave his mom a chance to understand his learning style. “My mom would prepare lessons and use a curriculum that worked for me, because she was tuned into how I learned,” says Connor. “She was really committed to us learning, it was more than a full-time job for her.”
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Home-schooling tends to be seen as something with a religious or political bent, or it’s viewed as less rigorous than regular school. But Connor says the curriculum his mom came up with wasn’t political or religious, and it afforded him plenty of opportunity to interact with other kids.
“We had school 4 to 5 days a week, depending on whether we went on field trips with other home-schooled families,” he recalls. “We also had the chance to be as social as other kids; there were sports teams to join and ways to pursue other interests.”
About 2.2. million kids are home-schooled in the United States, according to the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), and Connor is hardly the only home-educated student who has done so well academically.
Children who learn at home typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above traditionally-schooled kids on standardized tests, reports NHERI. And they go on to succeed at the same or better rates as other students in college.
Michael Donnelly, staff attorney at the Home School Legal Defense Organization, tells Yahoo Parenting that he isn’t surprised Long did so well on his college boards. “Two factors that have been shown to lead to academic success are parents who are involved in their children’s education, and kids who are engaged in learning,” says Donnelly.
“Home schooling allows for both of these: parents have to be committed to take on the responsibilities of educating their kids, and they tend to foster an environment where the child is inspired to really learn, not respond to what a teacher wants,” he says.
While Long has several months to decide what colleges to apply to, he’s leaning toward the University of Michigan and Ithaca College in New York. Though he’s clearly an academic star, music is his focus. He says, “Writing, dancing, singing, acting — I can’t imagine having a career that doesn’t focus on music in some way.”
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