The Importance of Nontraditional Education Services:

PIONEERS Perspective

By Tim Smith, Third Culture Kid Coordinator for PIONEERS USA

More than 60 percent of our children are being schooled using nontraditional methods. However, over time, more of our kids are being schooled in MK schools.

Since the inception of PIONEERS in 1979, parents have been able to choose how their children will be educated overseas. At the outset, all educational options are on the table. Parents have the privilege and responsibility to sift through the available options, eliminate the ones that won’t work for their family, and then make a decision. It is parents who are ultimately responsible to make educational provisions for their children, not our organization. Not only must they decide, but they are responsible to raise the money to pay for those choices.

When applicants inquire about our “MK education policies,” they are usually surprised and often somewhat relieved to find out that we have no formal policies concerning the education of children. We have built no schools overseas. Nor do we have funds allocated from the home office for “MK education.” We have no formal accountability structures from the home office to ensure that families are complying with a particular policy. We have no “MK Education Department” to advise, guide, or decide the educational direction of children during the field selection process. (Note: We do have an experienced education consultant, Dr. Lila Bruckner, who meets with families at both our orientation and our pre-field programs. She helps them start in the right direction before they go to the field. She is also available to our families at any time before or after they go.)

Even though our system is not perfect, it is working quite well for PIONEERS and is unlikely to change in the near or distant future. Our corporate culture prides itself on being streamlined and places a high value on individuality and self-reliance. Our members do not expect educational services to be rendered to them. In the words of Ted Esler, executive vice president for PIONEERS-USA, “The U.S. office is a service provider in an organization that has not traditionally provided many services.” Members expect to make the decisions concerning their children’s education. If they feel they need help, they will likely first seek out peers on their team and then begin a creative process of networking to find solutions to their educational problems. This network may include their field leadership, other missionaries they know, schools near or far, and friends or teachers in the United States, and it may or may not include the U.S. office. Like parenting, the schooling of children is seen as fitting within the domain of personal preference and parental prerogative. Any effective approach to providing educational help of any kind must be nonintrusive and must respect the right of families to refuse it.

This is not to say that field leaders do not engage families on a regular basis with discussions about their children’s education—they do. There have even been cases of intervention to encourage families to do whatever it takes to meet their children’s educational needs. Giving license for intervention in the future (in rare cases when indicated) is PIONEERS’ soon-to-be-adopted child abuse and neglect policy, which at this writing includes the following statement on educational neglect: “Educational neglect includes the allowance of chronic truancy, failure to enroll a child of mandatory school age in school, and failure to attend to a special educational need.” (The footnote reads as follows: “PIONEERS-USA recognizes homeschooling as a valid educational option for children.”) Although PIONEERS’ U.S. office does not employ certified education professionals to take the lead in managing our children’s education, it is normal for us to have field missionaries and leaders engage educational consultants on an “as needed” basis.

So how does one go about providing services for “nontraditional education” in this corporate environment? How does one define those services? What is the best way to link services with families who need them? Can PIONEERS accomplish its strategic objectives without those services? These are the issues at hand.

How Does PIONEERS Define Nontraditional Education?

Any effective approach to providing educational help of any kind must be nonintrusive and must respect the right of families to refuse it.

PIONEERS has no definition, written or otherwise, of nontraditional education. To say or write what is traditional would not be important to PIONEERS families. With that point clarified, a working definition of nontraditional education for the purposes of this article might be “all options other than the international school and mission school, including either day or boarding schools.” Thus, nontraditional education can include but is not limited to “homeschool, teachertutorteachertutor homeschool, homeschool co-op, online school, correspondence school, and public national or private national school.” If one uses this broad definition, the children in 61 percent of our families are currently receiving a nontraditional education. [Note: I have intentionally not included any options in which we do not have families participating, such as public or private schooling in the home country, or homeschooling with an itinerant teacher.]

Some Statistics and Their Implications for PIONEERS

[Note: These statistics reflect PIONEERS-USA only and do not include the children of our six other mobilization bases around the world.]

Chart 1 shows the current age distribution of the children ages 0 through 24 of our field missionaries. For the sake of projection, it includes those on the field who are expecting (Exp). It also includes MKs on furlough but not those based in the United States.

So if all options are “on the table” and families are free to choose whichever one they feel is best for their children, what options are they choosing?

Chart 2 presents a comparison of the educational options chosen by PIONEERS families in October 2000 with those chosen in June 2003. [Note that those using a parent co-op homeschool were included with the “Home” group.]

Some implications of the numbers follow:

• PIONEERS is a young organization with young families. At IMKEC 2000, I reported that 80 percent of our children were age 11 and under. We are still young but getting older. At present, 60.8 percent of our children are age 11 and under—quite a change in only two-and-a-half years!
• The “older” PIONEERS gets (as the average age of our children increases), the less we are opting for homeschooling. Whereas over 70.5 percent of our children were being homeschooled in October 2000, only 57.2 percent are being homeschooled today. Note that this percentage still represents a clear majority. A quick survey of those who have switched shows that at least six families who used to homeschool have put their children in the local MK school. Furthermore, at least four families changed ministry locations to a place where an MK school would be available—in all casestheir children’s education was one consideration if not the key consideration in their move. At least one family that used the national school exclusively has moved their children to the local MK school.
• Those families that were homeschooling are, for the most part, switching to MK schools. The international, national, and boarding school options remained statistically unchanged between October 2000 and June 2003. However, MK school attendance doubled in that same time. We have a large presence in several MK schools around the world. Bandung International Alliance School, Hope Academy of Bishkek, Carachipampa Christian School in Bolivia, and Grace International School (GIS) in Chiang Mai are schools where we have between 10 and 20 students in attendance.
• Despite the increased complexity of home schooling high schoolers over home schooling primary schoolers, our families are not readily choosing boarding school as an option for their children of any age. At present, of 515 children, only 4 are in boarding school, 2 at GIS in Chiang Mai and 2 at Ukarumpa International School in Ukarumpa.
• In our October 2000 survey, 25 percent of those being homeschooled were also going to the national school primarily for language and culture acquisition. [“National” on chart 2 means that they went exclusively to the national school.] I do not have current empirical data now to compare. However, I can say with some measure of certainty that a decline in the homeschooling option has also netted a corresponding decline in the choice of the national school as a supplemental option. It is likely that attending the national school and an MK school in the same day is difficult if not impossible because of the allday class schedule as compared with two to four hours a day of homeschooling for children in the early grades. Furthermore, few seem to utilize this option for more than a year or two. I know a number of our families who have pulled their children out sooner than they had hoped to because of various aspects of the national school situation itself.

What Does PIONEERS Recognize as Nontraditional Education Services?

PIONEERS has chosen to partner with the Asia Education Resource Consortium (AERC)and SHARE Education Services as our significant effort to help our families. The services SHARE provides are the services we recognize and support. We also have various members with backgrounds in education who are serving in informal capacities where they can be of help. These human resources are located through informal team networks on the field.

PIONEERS is a founding member of AERC. We are pleased that our first full-time AERC member is now a full-time educational consultant in Chiang Mai. The spouse of one of our area leaders serves on the board ofAERC. We currently have 17 families who have joined AERC out of a possible 62 or more families who live in the AERC region. We expect more to join as their children get older and they feel the need.

PIONEERS has yet to join SHARE as an organization despite the urging of the TCK Coordinator. Any effective approach to providing educational help of any kind must be nonintrusive and must respect the right of families to refuse it. A few families have joined and have benefited greatly from SHARE, and more continue to join as they feel the need. We are pleased that SHARE/Interaction serves us through their Pre-field Education Planning Seminar conducted every year at PIONEERS in Orlando.

For those unfamiliar with AERC and SHARE, let me summarize some of the services these organizations have provided for our families. The list is taken largely from their literature. AERC and SHARE have helped our parents do the following:

• Develop educational plans for their children
• Evaluate educational options and understand their long-term implications
• Choose and use national schools successfully
• Address second-language and ESL issues
• Get started in homeschooling and in choosing curriculum
• Evaluate and adapt homeschooling curriculum
• Address homeschooling issues and concerns
• Understand the educational and reentry needs of non–North American students
• Assist students with special learning needs
• Understand TCK (third culture kid) issues
• Understand children’s learning styles
• Understand children’s development and stress levels
• Prepare children for reentry, both academically and personally
• Use technology more effectively in children’s education

AERC and SHARE have served us through the following:

• Resource centers that offer not only personnel but materials such as curriculum samples, teaching resources on educational issues, TCK and parenting resources, software, videos, and other materials (AERC)
• Regionally based conferences (AERC)
• Consultation with families on their specific educational needs and concerns, whether in person or through email, phone call, mail, or fax
• Testing and assessment services to determine whether children are functioning at grade level and to identify potential learning exceptionalities (such as giftedness or a learning challenge)
• Assistance to non–North American families with the unique educational and reentry challenges they face
• Assistance in preparing for academic reentry to home countries
• Visits to individual families
• The publication Interact
• Emotional support and encouragement for reluctant homeschoolers
• Recommendations of resources to meet specific needs

What Impact Have Nontraditional Education Services Had on Mission Strategy?

Steve Richardson, the U.S. director of PIONEERS, says the following:

Our vision is to partner with sending churches to see every unreached people group have a vibrant, multiplying church. Those sending churches can be in any country in the world. We want to partner with emerging mission movements in various countries. A big part of our vision is taking the gift of mobilizing that God has given us and transferring it to emerging churches in other countries so that they too can participate in what God is doing in this exciting stage of His harvest.

I interviewed Mr. Richardson on May 7, 2003, and asked him how he saw nontraditional education impacting PIONEERS’ overall strategy. Here is a summary of his key points:

• We are able to be in more places. The core of PIONEERS’ strategy requires a family to live on a church planting team on the field. Mr. Richardson estimates that the places where PIONEERS is now would be 50 percent fewer without the advent of nontraditional education options for our families, unless we switched to an itinerant approach in which the father (or mother, in some cases) made forays into the target culture while the children remained in a central location where schooling was available. He says, “Personally, I’m very excited because for the world of missions this opens up any destination. Not only has the tent-making and bivocational emphasis opened up huge new windows of opportunity, but the fact that young couples can go anywhere and still provide for their children’s education has freed up people to consider so many more options than in the past.”
• We include this generation in missions. Had PIONEERS not ridden the wave of the homeschooling movement in the past 10 to 20 years in America, we would have excluded a significant number of choice missionary families from service because of their desire to homeschool both here and on the field. As Mr. Richardson says, “[Homeschooling] does keep this generation really actively involved in going. Without nontraditional education options, the numbers would have decreased substantially over the last few years.”
• The educational options have multiplied. “The options have multiplied, or at least the perception of the options has broadened. I think there was a day when people really thought there was only one way to do it. Today you’ve got several different streams.” The more choices available, the more allowance there is for individuality and personal preference so that families have the flexibility to go to and remain in the location where God wants them to be.
• Homeschooling gives a holistic dimension to missions. “[Homeschooling] also gives a holistic dimension to the involvement of not just an individual missionary but a family. I think it makes a positive impression on the host community of the importance of family. Involving the whole family to one degree or another can make the missionary more effective.”
• Keeping children with their parents helps the children catch a vision for missions. “It also helps the children capture the heartbeat of the ministry rather than being separate from it and feeling as if they are paying a special price for someone else’s calling.”
• Keeping children with their parents creates healthier missionary kids (and adult missionary kids) overall. “We may see a different set of issues and problems than missionary families experienced in the past, but overall I’m optimistic. I expect we’ll see a much healthier attitude and response on the part of today’s missionary children…. My sense overall is that homeschooling has been a positive, healthy trend for missionary families.”
• Keeping children with their parents may create healthier relationships between missionary children and nationals. “Nontraditional education may provide greater opportunities for missionary children to build enduring relationships with local Christians. In my own experience with boarding school, I was pretty much confined to the Western subculture and had little contact with people outside the compound.”
• Homeschooling gives a significant role to the homeschool parent. Ted Esler, executive vice president for PIONEERS-U.S.A., adds that homeschooling gives a satisfying and significant contributing role to the homeschool parent (usually Mom). It allows her to have a fulfilling role on the field. In our organization, one spouse has permission if the parents so choose to limit his or her ministry primarily to the family. If both parents know their roles and feel they are active contributors, the family will have a greater opportunity and likelihood of staying in the host country long enough to accomplish the task.
• Nontraditional education options can be very cost effective. When one compares the cost of building or buying buildings overseas, recruiting staff, and then maintaining the buildings over time (not to mention the hassle of dealing with an overseas bureaucracy) the cost of providing support for nontraditional education seems reasonable, even inexpensive.

Implications for the Future of PIONEERS

1. PIONEERS will continue to allow parents to be “in the driver’s seat” in regard to their children’s education. There could come a day in the distant future when more direct involvement is expected from the U.S. office, but I cannot see that happening any time soon.
2. Nontraditional education services will become increasingly vital to the success of our organization. As we grow, we are likely to experience an increased need to assist families whose children have learning exceptionalities. Furthermore, some of our homeschooling majority will need significant support and encouragement when they have several children in the upper grades at the same time. The need is particularly great for those who are reluctant homeschoolers in locations where other options are limited or not available. It is likely that the needed services will be provided through individual sources and through organizations like AERC and SHARE rather than from growing a staff of education professionals at the U.S. office.
3. Whatever services are provided will need to be offered as “optional” services, not “top-down” services. Service providers will need to utilize charisma, relationship skills, and an alongside mentality in order to be successful in helping families. They must also respect the parents’ right to decline services.
4. Growth in the use of services offered by service providers like SHARE and AERC will have to build from a base of satisfied customers who can confidently recommend those services in the normal course of field communication. One family served with excellence can eventually result in multiple families receiving the help they need. The converse is also true: poor service can discourage multiple families from seeking the help of these providers.
5. Field leaders would do well to get behind SHARE and AERC. They could set up structures of loose accountability to ensure that children’s educational needs are being met. I personally believe that field leaders should standardize children’s education as a part of the annual review process (some already have) and normalize achievement testing every other year.
6. Field leaders need to involve educational consultants as soon as educational issues surface that are beyond the scope of untrained educators (e.g., learning exceptionalities). Field leaders also need to be fully informed of PIONEERS’ child abuse and neglect policy, which includes educational neglect; and they should be trained to recognize educational neglect. In rare cases, field leaders need to be willing to intervene on behalf of the neglected child.
7. Members must continue to be given the freedom to change locations in order to meet their children’s educational needs. Alternative career paths within PIONEERS need to be normalized; otherwise, we will begin to lose a host of families, especially during their children’s high school years, or just when the families are hitting their season of peak effectiveness.
8. If AERC and SHARE continue to be the primary vehicles through which nontraditional education services are channeled, then PIONEERS needs to increase its support of AERC and SHARE in order tosustain their viability and effectiveness. As member utilization of AERC and SHARE increases, PIONEERS needs to increase its provision of qualified educational consultants, invitations to speak at PIONEERS conferences, personal recommendations from leadership, and other types of practical and symbolic endorsement. [Off this particular subject, but in like manner, in schools where PIONEERS has a critical mass of students, the organization needs to do all it can to make sure that it is providing its fair share of resources—including personnel, finances, and volunteer support—to undergird these schools.]
9. It is time again to do a thorough survey of exactly where our families are educationally. Why are they making the choices they are making? What are the issues they are facing now as opposed to two years ago? What is the impact of nontraditional education on their cross-cultural ministry? What are their felt needs, and are they being addressed? What role can field leadership play in meeting those needs? What role can the U.S. office play in meeting them?

Conclusion

PIONEERS is anything but traditional. More than 60 percent of our children are being schooled using nontraditional methods. However, over time, more of our kids are being schooled in MK schools. Parents are primarily responsible to make educational provisions for their children. They generally do not expect educational services from the U.S. office. Educational needs are often met on the field through informal networking or through consultation with nontraditional service providers like AERC and SHARE. Help received is “from the side” rather than “from the top.” It is believed that, as we continue to grow, PIONEERS would serve its families best by devoting more resources and energy to its partnership with nontraditional education service providers like AERC and SHARE rather than establishing its own organizational consultants to meet these needs from the U.S. office. While the corporate values of flexibility and parental prerogative in educational choice will likely persist, PIONEERS field leaders may wish to set up a limited set of guidelines to ensure that educational issues are being addressed at the earliest possible moment. May we serve our children with the same passion and devotion we have for reaching the unreached.

PIONEERS Perspective  Q1 2004