Find out why my family left Classical Conversations, including the problems we experienced with the curriculum, expectations, and corporate.
Before I get in to why my family left Classical Conversations, I’d like to start from the beginning, with why we joined in the first place.
If you aren’t aware of Classical Conversations (which I’ll refer to as CC), they are an educational group for homeschoolers. According to their website, they have 117,000 students enrolled in CC, so it’s a huge, worldwide corporation.
After attending an informational meeting and practicum, we joined CC in 2015, and we were part of CC communities for 4 years.
As a first time homeschooling mom, who grew up in public school, I was definitely nervous about how to homeschool, and how to know if I was doing it “right.” Because of this, CC sounded like a God send to me.
- A community for my kids, so they wouldn’t feel like they were the only homeschoolers in the world.
- A curriculum that helped “Know God and make Him known.”
- Someone else doing art and science with my kids, so the mess didn’t have to happen in my house.
The closest community was about 45 miles away, but we were willing to drive that far each week, for 24 weeks, in order to make it happen.
That first year I had mixed feelings. I adored our community– they were incredible people, and I still feel fondly for them, so I hope that none of them feel offended if they read this post. If they hadn’t been as amazing as they were, we probably would have left much earlier, once I started to have doubts.
So what kind of doubts did I have? I would broadly classify them as problems with expectations, problems with the curriculum, lack of God in the curriculum, and problems with corporate.
For some reason, most of the negative comments I’ve gotten about this post are in regards to the fact that I wanted to outsource a small amount of our homeschool, and therefore I’m “lazy, and might as well send my kids to public school.” I have no problem with you leaving your comments that say you think I’m wrong, but it’s not wrong to outsource some of your child’s education. It’s why music teachers, sports coaches, and tutors of all kinds exist. If I put my kids in ballet lessons, it doesn’t mean I should just put them in public school. That’s a silly argument, with no logic. So if you feel offended by this article, at least do me the favor of reading the entire article, and attacking my arguments, instead of attacking me. Thanks!
Problems with Expectations
One of the first things that I struggled with was what was expected of me, as the mom. We had just dished out what felt like an awful lot of money to me ($820 for our 2 kids’ tuition, plus about $100 for the Foundations Guide). Then, at our first community day, we were all told we needed to volunteer for something. I had been willing to pay that much money to have less on my plate, not more, so that really bugged me. If it were a co-op, I would completely understand that, but then, co-ops don’t cost nearly a grand for two kids.
I also learned that the teachers were really called tutors, because it wasn’t their job to teach my kids at all. Their job was to teach ME how to teach my kids. That wasn’t at all what I had expected. I already knew how to teach my kids, and I didn’t need a class to teach ME to teach my kids.
Add to that the fact that in our 4 years of being in CC, I was typically the only mom (or one of 2 moms) in the classroom, with a bunch of other people’s kids, and it just didn’t seem to make sense. If the goal was truly to teach the parents, shouldn’t all kids in a family be grouped together, so the mom could be present with her kids?
Instead, I was not only the one being “taught” by the tutor, I was also helping herd other people’s kids to bathroom breaks, helping other people’s kids do art and science projects, and helping deal with classroom management. It was so not what I thought I had signed up for.
I had purposely avoided an actual co-op, because I was in a place in my life where I just needed to outsource a small amount of our homeschooling, and have less stress. Instead, I had paid far more than I would have for a co-op (in my area co-ops are typically just the cost of supplies), but I was still stuck with responsibilities of a co-op.
I also felt like Classical Conversations had been erroneously sold to me as a “stick in the sand” curriculum (this is literally a phrase they use to sell the curriculum). I was told that the ONLY thing I needed to buy was the Foundations Guide. Then it turned out that in addition to the Foundations Guide, I also needed a tin whistle for each kid (CC charges $11 per tin whistle). We also needed to buy the cd, so the kids would be able to practice the songs that they learned during community day (and there is a different set of cds for each cycle, and each set costs $35). Then I found out that really, you should also buy the timeline cards (another $100) and the memory work flash cards (another $30 per cycle).
It’s not that I had a problem with the things needed, but more with the fact that it was presented as ALL you need is the guide, when in reality, that’s not all you need. It ends up being so far from stick in the sand that it’s ridiculous to even keep saying that line.
(And in case you’re not following the math on this, we’re now at $1100 for our first year in CC.)
Problems with the Curriculum
That first year was eye opening for me. We loved the history sentences the kids learned each week. My kids adored the timeline song. And I’m not going to lie: it was kind of nice when people asked what the kids had been learning (as some people love to do to homeschoolers), and one of the kids rattled off the history of the founding of Islam, or a list of prepositions, or something like that.
However, I was quickly underwhelmed by the art and science. Let’s start with the art. Art is divided into 4 groups of 6 weeks each. 6 weeks of fine arts, 6 weeks of tin whistle, 6 weeks of famous artists, and 6 weeks of orchestra & composers.
The kids enjoyed some of it, but the new edition changed the orchestra and composers section terribly. For 6 weeks, the kids were supposed to listen to the same 3 songs over and over. Each week, those same 3 songs. And CC instructed tutors to have them just listen. No coloring, no acting out the music, just sit and listen. My kids could (and do) sit and listen to classical music at home, and it costs us nothing. It felt like a waste of community time.
The fine arts tended to be a lot of drawing pictures with crayons or colored pencils. Not a bad thing, but once again, something that wasn’t worth my paying someone else to oversee.
As far as the science goes, it was just awful (and it got worse with the newest revision of the Foundations Guide). There were something like 4 weeks in Cycle 1 where the kids spent the entire science time looking at rocks. Now I am fascinated by geology, but 4 weeks in a row of looking at rocks with a magnifying glass was just too much.
In Cycle 3, there are 6 weeks of probability. First off, I wouldn’t consider that science (though I know it is used in science), but rather math. Second, the kids were again SO bored with rolling dice and recording how many times we got each number, or flipping coins and recording how many tails and heads. Introducing probability is great, but 6 weeks of it in a row is overkill.
Science can be so exciting and interesting, but CC really doesn’t do it justice. There were many weeks that the science “experiment” took less than 5 minutes, and all of the moms were looking at each other saying, “That’s it?”
Strangely enough, while art and science were one of the greatest reasons I joined CC, they were actually the smallest part of the curriculum I had issue with.
I was told that CC was “a complete curriculum,” but that I might want to add a math and reading curriculum to it. It turned out that CC wasn’t much of a curriculum at all, in my opinion. Sure, the kids memorized a few sentences about Emperor Constantine (for example), but that was it. They knew nothing more about each subject than a simple memorized paragraph. They memorized cloud types, but never actually knew what those cloud types looked like.
By claiming it’s a complete curriculum, and being constantly told to “trust the process,” we weren’t being encouraged to let our kids dig deep into the subjects and really LEARN about them!
I would go and get books that went along with what we learned, and my kids and I would dig deeper, but that’s discouraged by CC.
I also struggled with why certain things were included in the information my kids would learn, while other things were skipped. Why did my kids need to know the commutative law for addition and multiplication, but not the order of operations? Order of operations seems to be used much more often, and would be a handy thing to know, but that’s not in there at all.
5th Edition Foundations Guide
When the 5th edition Foundations Guide came out, and we had to re-purchase a guide that I had been told would be the only thing we needed to buy, which had already been proven false, I was annoyed, but hopeful that maybe the new guides would be a little better than the 4th edition.
When we received our 5th edition guide, and I saw that there were flaws and mess ups throughout the book, I figured that like any good curriculum company, Classical Conversations would try to make it right (print out the wrong pages and send them to the customers, or at the least send an errata sheet to each customer so they could fix the errors). But they didn’t.
In fact, despite the fact that these issues were brought to their attention, they never sent out any type of communication to let people know what the correct information was. I had to dig pretty deep, and spend many hours to finally find an errata for the guide.
Instead of CC owning up to the mistakes, moms like me had to embarrass the tutors by correcting them when they were attempting to teach the kids (ahem, I meant while they were teaching us moms) the information. While I didn’t want to have to correct the tutor in front of the kids, I also wasn’t willing to let her teach wrong information.
Not only did CC not inform the purchasers of the Foundations Guide that there were mistakes, they went even further to pretend that one of the geography mistakes was on purpose, and recommended that if you’d like to “dig deeper” you can buy their cartography book (which is also riddled with mistakes).
Instead of owning up to the mistakes they had made, CC made those who questioned the mistakes look like they were in the wrong for questioning and not being willing to “dig deep,” implying that they maybe weren’t up to the challenge of CC.
This is their words in regards to the fact that one of the places the kids were supposed to learn wasn’t even included on the maps: “To inspire families to dig a little deeper, they can think of it as excavating treasure as they research or discuss ancient locations or compare locations to modern-day names or locations. Since ancient locations are the focus in this cycle, not all locations are shown on the Foundations maps.”
It’s definitely true that not all locations need to be shown on the maps. However, it stands to reason that the locations that the kids are supposed to be memorizing ought to be on the maps. It wasn’t inspiring to me that they couldn’t own up to their mistakes, when they expect perfection from children, with their Memory Masters program.
Where’s God in all this?
Most of all, I struggled with the fact that a curriculum company whose tagline is “To know God and to make Him known” had so little about God in the curriculum. My kids memorized history sentences about Greek and Roman gods, Islam, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and more, but not a single sentence about Jesus Christ.
The timeline includes Jesus, several missionaries, and some early church information, and there are a couple of verses memorized in cycle 1 and cycle 3, but other than that, and the fact that they write “God” in the middle of the board each week, there was very little God in CC’s Foundations curriculum.
This was one of the biggest things that bummed me out. I feel that it’s a missed opportunity. While I don’t mind my kids being exposed to, and understanding, what other religions are about, the number one god I want them to learn about is the One True God, and CC really misses the boat on that. (It’s possible that it’s better in the Challenge program, but I really can’t speak to that, since I have no experience with that.)
Problems with Corporate: Shady business practices
Through all the rest of this, I pushed the nagging, “something isn’t quite right” issues out of mind, and tried to focus on the positives. Fortunately for me, the person who brought the errata sheet to my attention also invited me to join a Facebook group where I learned more about Classical Conversations that went beyond the mistakes and poor curriculum.
I had never really given thought to the fact that CC is in fact a for-profit business. They really market themselves as a ministry. This isn’t just a “feeling” I got– I was actually emailed many times from CC corporate, about volunteering for this “ministry.” That seems like an odd choice of wording for a multi-million dollar, for-profit corporation.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you that CC is a corporation, but it is definitely a big deal in how they are running their communities.
First, the majority of communities meet in churches. While CC will tell you that they aren’t actually the ones placing communities in churches (which is true; however, the tutoring programs CC licenses are for-profit), I have been told that they encourage communities to meet in churches. Churches are non-profit and, therefore, don’t have to pay property taxes. However, if a church decides to start allowing a for-profit entity to operate inside the church, they could end up losing their property tax exemption and have to pay property taxes.
Think about it this way: if Starbucks suddenly decided to start operating out of “churches” in order to skip paying property taxes, it would be obvious that the building isn’t really being operated as a non-profit church. CC is doing the same thing, but it’s less likely to be spotted due to the fact that they portray themselves as a ministry, “just a group of homeschool moms,” along with the fact that often educational institutes are non-profit, so we just assume that’s the case.
Classical Conversations directors also may be misclassifying their employees. Tutors are hired as independent contractors, yet often treated as employees. In most cases, it is obvious that tutors are hired incorrectly- they should be employees (I’m no tax expert, but here’s the opinion of someone who is). This is how CC tells directors to hire the tutors, which then makes the burden of liability fall on those directors.
The hiring setup has been changed in California (one state that is really cracking down on this), which shows that CC Corporate is aware of the problem, but that they’re willing to skirt the law in areas where it’s not being cracked down on. It was implied by corporate that the fine wasn’t enough in other states to make it worth being aligned with the law.
CC also encourages volunteers. Every summer, highschoolers are encouraged to sign up to volunteer for Practicum. They are told that they can use these hours as volunteer hours for scholarship applications and other purposes. In light of the fact that CC is a multi-million dollar corporation, they cannot legally use volunteers.
Can you imagine Wal-Mart trying to recruit volunteers? For-profit businesses can offer unpaid internships, but there are actually strict guidelines on that, and CC Practicum volunteers wouldn’t fall under those guidelines, due to the fact that CC does gain something from the use of highschoolers (Practicum is a huge money maker for CC) and the highschool students are definitely displacing a paid worker that would be required if there weren’t enough volunteers.
I wish that these were the only shady business practices the Classical Conversations was participating in, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other issues that come from corporate down to the local level due to the hierarchy of the program.
Final Thoughts on Classical Conversations
While I absolutely loved the people in the two Classical Conversations communities my family participated in, we are leaving knowing that we already stayed too long. I cannot continue to support CC, knowing what I do now.
My hope is that in reading this, other families will see that CC is a corporation that is not operating in a godly manner, while claiming the name of God, and will find out that they could do so much better with their money & time, than join a CC community.
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We won’t be going to CC again. I really feel that they discriminate against kids with disabilities and single them out while judging them as well as the parent. Not for us and not a very Christian thing of them to do.
I’m so sorry you had a bad experience, Molly. I hope you’re able to find a true community of loving friends in your homeschool journey.
Oh dear. CC has been a Godsend for my family. I’m sad that someone may read your blog and be discouraged from joining when it may in fact be a wonderful thing for them.
I hope anyone who considers CC takes the time to participate in (try out) a community day — and THEN decide. We’ve now done CC for 6 years, and it seems your experience was negative in ways mine wasn’t – No one forcing me to buy another guide, our foundations classes aren’t boring, and our director is the one who deals with corporate (I forgot they existed).
Academically, CC has enabled my kids to do things like draw & label world maps freehand (challenge), write excellent essays with bibliographies (essentials), and have a well rounded knowledge of history & geography, etc. (foundations). The church history, sign language, science vocab, orchestra, etc. are all great, too. But I never would have gotten around to teaching them this on my own at home. Especially not at first. I NOW feel like I could (yup, CC does teach the mom how to teach!) The lifelong friendships made have sustained us through many ups and downs – the community aspect itself means that my kids spend time with friends (as do I) without me having to plan and host.
It’s true – the cost can get pricey. To keep my cost down, I’ve Tutored some years and that is something I really recommend. I’ve been in homeschool co-ops before where it is a constant struggle to get leaders – so I think there is wisdom in having Tutors get paid. No one is getting rich, but it makes it worth your time and makes CC affordable for families.
I will end by saying this – the internet is a large place. My CC group uses Matthew 18 in dealing with conflict and I would encourage it for your community as well, even if you are not in CC anymore. It seems like your local community could make some changes or explain things better. I don’t want to discourage you from sharing your opinion – but many of your complaints come across as moral objections when they could actually just be personal preference, no? So many in this world are against Christian homeschooling – it’s painful to see division where we need encouragement.
If CC is not for you, then that’s perfectly okay. But I have non-CC friends who ended up putting their kids in public school because they did not have enough friends & community or they did not know how to school them at home – That might’ve been me had I not taken a chance on CC. Please consider that your words could mean this difference to a family. It shows up first in a google search (thats why I’m here), so it may be the only thing someone reads about CC…
If you knew that, would this be the post you’d want summing up Classical Conversations to a stranger?
Regardless or anything to do with CC, as a fellow home educating mom, I wish you blessings as you journey through educating your children. It’s a labor of love, and so worthwhile!
It depends on your community and who judges you, but ours is really bad in my opinion and we have had nothing but bad experiences with Classical Conversations
I can identify with a lot in this article; I appreciate you framing it in a very matter of fact way about your experience.
We’ve “done” CC for over six years now. I think I’m pretty balanced in my view of it: I don’t think it is right for everyone, or wrong for everyone, and also I think CC can be right for a family and then that can change later.
Reading through a lot of CC-debates over the years, I think some issues boil down to understanding what CC is and isn’t. I’m going to focus on Foundations/Essentials here; Challenge is a little different.
(1) ANY time you get involved with someone else teaching (or “tutoring”), whether at CC or a co-op, you are ceding control to someone else. That person may manage a class or cover material differently than you do. There is a risk involved. (Remember, there are reasons you chose to home school!) If home schoolers keep this in mind, it can help deal with a lot of situations better.
(2) CC is not a school, nor a co-op, nor a “ministry.” CC is a CURRICULUM COMPANY. Their goal is to sell curriculum, and that is OK! That’s the job of EVERY curriculum company. Just keep that in mind.
(3) Community day really is part of the marketing and sales approach. The stated purpose of “Community Day” in Foundations/Essentials is to have “tutors” show the PARENTS how to teach the children. Yes, your children will learn on community day. Yes, they (hopefully) will get excited and enjoy the activities and time with peers, but…
(4) Using CC curriculum is NOT just coming to community day. The idea is that for the rest of the week, in whatever schedule you set, you will be reviewing the material at home. For folks new to CC or home schooling, the community time (IF DONE WELL) can give them ideas for activities and games, and can help frame how to present material. Is can also provide fellowship for parents and children.
(5) You CAN add to the CC materials. In my opinion, elementary school is a time for building enthusiasm for learning. Keep in mind how young your kids are and use the CC weekly facts as a springboard…go on field trips, watch educational programs, read books aloud that will even briefly touch on some of what is covered in CC. (Song about Galileo? Let’s look up pictures of the space craft named after him…then look at images of Jupiter, which the craft helped study, then let’s do our own drawing of Jupiter…). Now is the time to go down “rabbit holes”!
(6) You may want to focus on some parts of CC more than others. Keep in mind they are selling curriculum. They are not going to change their approach or curriculum; it is up to you as the customer to weigh whether to stick with CC year-to-year.
So…I’m not saying CC is the end-all-be-all and I am not saying it is an evil scam. It’s a curriculum company.
If anyone wants my two cents on Foundations/Essentials versus Challenge, let me know and I’ll share.
I agree with so much of what you said, Observant. I think one problem I had was that CC very much portrayed themselves as a ministry, even going so far as to say things like that in their newsletters. We were constantly told to pray about how God wanted us to serve, which no other curriculum company would ask.
I agree 100% that it’s not an evil scam.
I’d love to hear your two cents on essentials and challenge. In fact, I would actually love to have some posts on my blog about it, if you’re at all interested in that. My goal when writing the foundations post wasn’t to trash talk CC, but to offer another perspective on the program. I noticed that the main CC facebook page would always delete posts and turn off comments anytime anyone said anything even questioning CC. The information out there at the time was solely praising CC as the only way to homeschool correctly, and that’s just not true.
Thanks for your comments!
We started CC with our older daughter 10 years ago. She did two years of Foundations/Essentials, then Challenge A, B, I, and II. We left as we were ‘tailoring’ the curriculum a lot (we wanted more math and science, so enrolled her for those classes at another local co-op, and she was working towards a Spanish minor at our local college, so we left Latin behind).
We overall appreciated the curriculum. The classical model is geared towards appropriate learning stages; I found that refreshing as we pulled our older daughter out of a local private school that was utilizing the Common Core model. The classical model in that way was refreshing. We did definitely add, and I appreciated the minimalist approach in the Foundations/Essentials stage so we had time to learn typing, take field trips, and read together as a family. We also added a robust Bible curriculum
Your feelings about the business aspect definitely resonate. We are re-entering CC this year with our youngest daughter, and I was shocked to see how much the material has changed. I am buying ALL new Essentials material. The Ancient History texts, for example, have all new stories for students to read. Really no reason for that other than forcing families to ‘update’ the texts. And there are so many supplemental materials, priced on the high side, that it is frustrating.
The overall cost, however (in our southwest Michigan community) is not high. I am paying for a Spanish class at another local co-op. The family fee for the co-op is $70, plus $50 to opt out of our volunteer day, + $85 to “register” for the Spanish class, + $185/semester + materials (varies by class). Not counting the $50 opt out, we’re paying $535 + material for one class for one student. We have a second co-op in our community, and the costs are nearly identical. Families signing a child up for an entire day of co-op classes are paying half our the local private school tuition, and the co-op only meets one day per week. In this way, CC does not seem exorbitantly expensive. Like so many other organizations, I wish the tutors were paid more, and corporate collected less.
Anyway, thank you for the detailed review.
Oh wow, that’s interesting how much a co-op is in your area. In mine, most co-ops are very low price, and the only cost would be materials if needed.
I read this post and had many different feelings. I have been involved with CC for 12 years and have homeschooled for 16. I have had my own issues with this program and have came to the conclusion that CC is a business. It offers a product. We choose to either purchase or not purchase that product. Much like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. If you choose to immerse yourself in the program you run the risk of spending a lot of cash. And they want your money! For example, forcing the purchase of CC connected the last few years-something I have NEVER used, but I have never bought a book I didn’t want and I’ve supplemented my own things now and then (Greek vs Latin) with no issue.
I also see the community side of CC. It’s just like high school: If you are part of the “in” crowd, you reap benefits and get “chosen”. It has cliques, it has mean girls, it has biases and bullies. I have also noticed that the quality of the community experience depends on the SR and the directors. I’ve participated in 4 different communities and lived through 3 different SR’s, 6 Foundations Directors and a plethora of directors and tutors. I’ve experienced wonderful orchestra time and science and also the boredom of repetition. As a tutor myself, I made the day creative and fun and we danced and drew pictures and I made up my own science projects and painted T-shirts for art!! Believe it or not, some moms complained because I made planet necklaces with glass beads (which I purchased with my own money) because it was different than what the director wanted to do!
I’ve written 3 separate grievances-all were ignored because the grievance involved a person/situation who was a friend of the one who reviewed the grievance, and I was told I was a questionable candidate to direct challenge level students because I don’t go to church and the SR wasn’t sure if I could handle teen issues (by the way, I have my own Christian Counseling practice with a background in children, youth and families, I am trained in deliverance, healing of trauma, I work with sexual offenders and victims and have been in business successfully for 20 years!). I have questioned why directors and SR’s don’t get evaluated and have offered many suggestions from a business perspective-all ignored.
But at the end of the day, I choose CC because I love the Challenge program and I have watched my children thrive in confidence, independence, and self-sufficiency; they excel in debate, and they are becoming warriors for the kingdom! Every year we discuss what direction to go in and they all want to stay in the program. And because I have not been called to leave, I stay. There are so many other wonderful programs out there and each family needs to choose what’s best for them. I empathize with the post and the comments-I get it. But there are still so many variable that impact the experience. The question should just be, where is Jesus calling you?
One more thing! (I wanted to edit my comment but couldn’t!)
I have had fantastic directors that love the Lord, made wonderful friends and have been involved with very close communities where I felt valued. My experience has been both positive and negative with the business side holding the most negatives! Again, the quality of the community is what matters most.
Thanks so much for sharing your experiences, Lisa! I agree that the experience can be greatly affected by those in leadership. With multiple directors and tutors, we found that some of our years were much more beneficial, and some were a waste of money. We were saddened by the cliquey experiences as well, especially in a Christian group, but unfortunately even Christians aren’t immune to the ways of the world.
I am sorry this was your experience but there are really good communities out there and your article is going to dissuade people from those communities that are Christ centered and ran really well and are a blessing to many families. There are communities that don’t have these issues you experienced. You can’t judge every CC community in the United States based off the way some communities are ran. Every director decides how to lead that community. You have good directors and bad directors just like in everything. The way to fix this situation is we need more good directors. Dissuading people from joining is not the answer. God is using CC communities to help many families, especially those directors who are following Jesus and Jesus is leading their decisions.
It sounds like corporate needs to fix some issues. I’m completely new to CC but I have signed up this year because I have scholarship funding from the PEP program in Florida. What is absolutely horrendous is that CC is not allowing directors in Florida to take that scholarship funding, and they’re apparently making it very difficult for everyone else to get the proper paperwork to get reimbursed for tuition. That in and of itself is dissuading good people who would make fantastic directors from participating.
That’s another frustrating issue with CC. While they are adamantly against homeschool families taking government funding (they love to say, “With the sheckles come the shackles”), they had no issue taking a substantial amount of covid funding during the pandemic. Their hypocrisy is bothersome to say the least.
My son was emotionally humiliated and hurt by his director in front of many. I ended up taking him out of mock trial the week before the mock trial. (It’s a long story. The tutor has been very passive agressive throughout the year. We never knew what to expect from one week to another. Also, we were not the only family who the tutor treated unfailrly, I am just the only parent who dares to speak up, hence I get in trouble. The other family simply left CC and nobody cares why. We have both attended this comunity for over 5 years with multiple kids). Why is there no tutor evaluation form?? I have asked our SR, but he discharged my question.
When we had a meeting with our SR to resolve the issue the tutor lied and SR told her she did nothing wrong. He was 100% on her side. Could careless for the fact my child was hurt.
We are not allowed to go back to any CC community (per SR) because the issue was not resolved. Not even my older son, who would be in chall 4 and would like to graduate with his peers. Neither of my children have ever had problems and they have both made some life long friends at CC. Now we’ll have to make new friends at some other homeschool co-op. Which is fine, It’s just sad because it’s not by choice. And everyone who ask why we left CC will know the truth.
I am confused if the CC is about proving the tutor right at all costs, but carrying about the child’s feelings is irrelevant?? We’ve never been in an unresolved issue before at any schools, public, private, church or CC, except with this tutor and very biased, opinionated SR.
It’s very very sad that neither the tutor nor SR cared about my son, which was very very clear.
What I have learned from this conflict was that parents at CC, especially at chall levels, are at complete mercy of a tutor. If the tutor is a ‘Christ modeling’ person you are in luck, but if not, run for the hills. You as a parent, have no rights over your child even if he/she is treated badly. And there is no support from SR, etc, because they seem to be all ‘sleeping together’.
I’m so sorry to hear about your experience, Helen. I believe that one of the greatest flaws of CC is that your experience really can vary so much depending on who is in leadership in your local community. I’m lifting up a prayer right now that you’ll find an amazing experience for your son’s senior year of high school, and your other son will find wonderful friends for his final years homeschooling as well.
I just wanted to mention one helpful thing that order of operations is thankfully taught extensively in Essentials in grades 4-6. It is a major part of those two hours (a third of the class time is dedicated to just that through games).
CC is a tool, and no curriculum is master. Things quickly become idols when given too much power and authority. We combine CC along with a variety of other rich resources like Heart of Dakota. CC recommends this in their guide… they say they are not a stand alone by any means. CC also says the parent is the teacher and the tutor is more of a facilitator – they simply introduce and guide the kids, but the parent is the teacher. The tutor is never meant to teach the parent how to teach.
You’re so right to look at what’s working and what’s not, and I am in full agreement there is no one way to homeschool for every parent. But I think it does a disservice to discredit it as much as is done here, especially when it’s been used by the Lord clearly in the lives of other families and been an answer to prayer for their children when they needed it most.
We have homeschooled for 9 years now and have one year in CC, and it’s been the best one yet. But our group has a mom’s book club, a kids book club, nature study group, essentials “pie and pudewa” meeting times where we study and pray for each other, field trips, and sharing resources with one another like living books or other various helps. To me, CC is like a spine. And we wield it the way we choose to at home. In cycle three, the kids memorized a passage of scripture in Latin and English, and our tutors are the ones pointing them toward Christ in their instruction.
I have yet to find a curriculum that is perfect. We still need to pivot and add in and alter things because that’s the beauty of homeschool… we get to break out of the one size fits all mold.
Just remember that God doesn’t require perfect materials or perfect curriculum for any of us. We serve a perfect God who is a master of taking brokenness (all of humanity) and using these things for His purposes. There is just so much abounding grace for you, for the mama who loves CC, and for the writers of the curriculum.
Not all communities teach order of operations in Essentials. I’ve had two children, each have gone through Essentials for two years so far, and I am pretty sure order of operations has never been covered.
I am so happy to have found this! I have been struggling for a while. We just completed our 3rd year of CC, my first as a Foundations tutor for the “bigs”~ 9-12 year olds. It’s been hard having them recite facts over and over (seven times each) when they are at a cognitive stage where we should be filling in the blanks, giving them more information to keep them curious and not just bored. I frequently apologize for my “stick in the glitter” approach as I am compelled to give them more information, and hate that we are bound to a timer and strict recitation and governing rules that keep us in the box. This has definitely helped me make my decision for next year, that it’s not just me and it’s ok to move on. And I hadn’t even thought about the corporate issues (I’m just not business-minded, but I only have to hear it once!). I will continue to pray about it, but in a way I believe that reading this article and comments is God’s way of answering. Thank you so much for your insight and discernment.
I’m glad you found it helpful, Jen. It really is a shame that the rules are so rigid– one of my favorite things about homeschooling is how we can delve deeper into the subjects that interest my kids. I think memorization has its place, but when it’s so strict and dry, it takes the joy out of learning.
For what it is worth, I’ve always used Foundations as the springboard for for in-depth learning. CC day would introduce the ideas for the week, and then as we practiced at home, we could supplement with interesting videos, museum trips, etc. It doesn’t have to be a lot of super-intensive add-ons. It was cool when we’d be on a museum trip visit or watching a PBS program and one of the kids would point out a term/idea from CC being mentioned.
To me, the idea of Foundations is to introduce terms/names and a factoid about them. That’s it. I know some families who ONLY do that and leave it at that, but to me that is a missed opportunity. I’m not testing a third grader on what they know about the Kush and gold mining for example, but I use the opportunity to explore a video on what gold is or what the land of the Kush looks like. Children are curious and this is a time to introduce new ideas and spark curiosity…but that is where parents, not CC, comes in.
Thank you, for writing this article. I saved it to come back to finish reading, and I completely agree with you. CC is completely misleading. CC use of the classical method of learning with learning stages, repetition, and (supposed) biblical center overall sounds like a great, logical implementation of teaching, but once a person puts it into practice, it falls apart. As a new homeschooling parent eight years ago, I had a hard time trying to navigate through the overwhelming options of curriculum and teaching methods. At the time our income wouldn’t allow me the freedom to purchase curriculum outright. Dropping $300-400 just wasn’t feasible. We started with a subscription with Old Schoolhouse which was great, but not a good fit for our family. I wanted something that would teach well-rounded subjects while being flexible (not too much lesson prep and open ability to deep dive into a subject). I came upon CC and became extremely excited until I saw the price tag. Just as you mentioned in the article, everything added up real fast. Why was a homeschool curriculum adding up to the price tag of a private school? If I wanted to pay for a private school, I would have sent them to private school. Yes, it was tempting to want to attend for the community. Who wouldn’t want to teach subjects with other families? As I researched, it didn’t make sense why I would pay for us to attend a co-op that was doing the very things that I was able to do at home for free. I ended up buying the 5th edition Foundations book and used it as a literal foundation of topics in each subject we were going to learn for the week, and for co-ops I joined local free homeschool groups. At first it was working well for how I intended to use it. I “trusted the process” when it came to not buying curriculum to supplement subjects, because I believed other people’s testimony/opinions who didn’t supplement. (I think it also didn’t help that we didn’t have income to provide for supplementing; we were already tight on money) I thought we would be fine since studies of brain development have shown that what is taught in all 5 elementary years can be learned within a year by the age of 7-8. I taught all the subjects and reinforced those topics through free resources and youtube videos. It was A LOT of work and time to find what I needed. I became exhausted trying to find resources without having to pay a monthly free for CCconnect. Fast forward to the present, I regret not supplementing. So much for all-one-curriculum! When CC had a sale, I purchased their essentials hoping to use it to teach it on my own with them, but I find the guide book confusing to teach. I regret buying it. It is like the essentials guide was designed to be confusing so that you would give up and pay for the tutors…. a set up for failure? I wish I wouldn’t have slacked into using free curriculum like Good and the Beautiful just because an influencer wouldn’t for reasons that weren’t unreasonable, but now that I look back were not reasons enough to shut the door shut on it. Now because of personal, family, martial issues, my homeschool has gone down the tubes the last 2 years, and I am trying to get it back together. In the end, I personally think that CC can still be used for homeschool parents if they implement it the way I started with it, but I wouldn’t waste the money on the book and just pay the $9 for the individual apps. For those who are auditory learners, they would thrive on it. My daughter who is an auditory learner thrived learning the subjects this way. I just didn’t understand the strengths and weaknesses of auditory learners to have realized where I need to supplement to help her. Now, I know better. I just wish I would have known sooner.
I’m so sorry to hear that things are rough right now, Kayla. I’ve just taken a moment to pray for you, that God would fill you with peace and joy, even as you’re struggling; that God would redeem the years of the locust (Joel 2:25-27).
Thank you so much for sharing your experience!
Hi! Thank you for this article. I just had a baby girl and immediately knew I wanted CC but now having read a thoughtful, well-articulated, and fair and logical reason *against* CC, I’m open to considering other options for homeschooling. I was wondering if you have another article recommending other curriculums. I just want a God-centered, superior education for my children. Thank you so much in advance and God bless you!
Congratulations on your new baby, Paula!
When my kids were younger, we used First Language Lessons for English, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, Berean Builders for science, MathUSee, and we’ve used Story of the World and America’s Story for history.
I don’t use an art curriculum, we just add in art to go along with history, mostly, and my kids are always doing some sort of art project.
As the years have gone by, I’ve found myself more and more drawn to a Charlotte Mason style education, using lots of living books and read alouds.
As far as community, we’ve created our own community with a couple friends who also homeschool. We started getting together about once a month (this was actually while my family was still participating in CC), and we’d have a little lesson and craft that went along with a holiday or season (things like a Valentine’s party, or learning about colors of the rainbow for St. Patrick’s Day, or having a Reformation party).
Over the years, as our kids have gotten older and become closer friends, we get together a lot more often. The kids are all taking a ballroom dancing class together right now, they do youth group together, and several of them have taken a CAD class together in the past. We get together for the kids’ birthdays, and just to hang out.
We’ve found that our community works better as just community rather than a co-op. All the kids are at different levels in their individual lessons, so trying to do a writing class together, or a math class together would be difficult.
Be creative in finding a community. It could be a group that gets together on a regular basis to play board games, or go for a hike, or have oral presentations about whatever they’re interested in at the moment.
Check out Generations! Amazing curriculum. No affiliation :p
Our family was required to purchase the CC Connected, which was about $100. I don’t know if it was the director or corporate that requires you to purchase it, but our director wouldn’t put us on the roster until I purchased CC Connected. So, you’re right. I had to purchase more than just the foundations book. That being said, I was able to purchase the foundations book, tin whistle and CD from a friend at church at a much cheaper price since it was second hand. But it is upsetting to be told that all you need is the book, then they turn around and make you purchase CC Connected, which I rarely use.
I believe that’s a corporate requirement at this point– it wasn’t when my kids were in CC (though it *was* highly recommended). I was most frustrated when they released a new edition of the Foundations guide, and our director was told not to enroll existing families unless they had bought the new guide. It felt like CC was just trying to make even more money.
We haven’t done CC but all of these reasons are what turned me off! Plus the fact that many who attend are so aggressive about defending it! People have told me they left the enrichment group we use and they didn’t like it, my response is “oh ok, we really enjoy it” no harm done!
Yeah, people get really offended if you say CC wasn’t the right fit for you, as can be seen in this comment section. One of the reasons many of us homeschool is so that we can tailor our children’s education to best teach each child, so it seems like more people would realize that not every curriculum will be the right fit for every child or family.
In a nutshell, would you be able to explain about CC corporate again? This is my third year in CC and I have never thought of paying attention to the corporate side of things. From what I have read, it doesn’t sound very good.
This is extremely abbreviated, but CC is a corporation. Most educational institutes set themselves up as non-profits. As non-profits, they could legally meet in a church (another non-profit) without jeopardizing the church’s tax statues. As a non-profit, they could legally use volunteers. But for whatever reason, CC continues to *not* become a non-profit. Instead, they market themselves as a ministry, pressure people to volunteer (which isn’t legal for a corporation to do), and have their communities meet in churches. But they’ve set up their business structure in such a way as to put the liability back on the homeschool moms who are unknowingly running for-profit businesses in churches.
That’s just one issue– there are many more. I really recommend the group I linked in my post, Let Us Reason- For Real, for more information. There are women in the group who dealt with lawsuit threats from CC, others who are very knowledgeable in tax law, and more. They’re much more educated in these aspects than I am.
I am comforted knowing I’m not the only person that feels this way. We had the impression we would meet one day a week, get some guidance for the rest of the week at home to teach the kiddos and be good. Yeah, not the case… AT ALL! My kids always felt like the other kids were WAY ahead of them and we were always scrambling to catch up. This is our first year and we have had the worst time. I have quit and not quit and quit and not quit like 5 times, currently quit. I can’t see the cost value for being this completely lost. My kids and I are all in tears half the time and the curriculum for the most part, esp coming from public school recently has us completely bored and confused. I’m so sad because I wanted it to work out so bad, but it’s been eso hard for my 10th grader who’s had no cc intro at all, but the plus side is we met some really cool families so at least that’s a win. We will finish out our year at home because the curriculum is paid for but I can’t promise we will be back.
I’m so sorry for your experience. That’s so frustrating. I hope that you’re able to find a curriculum and structure that works better for your family. We have experienced so much freedom and educational growth since quitting, but I know it can be difficult to feel like you’ve thrown away that money.
Im sorry you had a bad experience but I think you are being extremely harsh. A lot of the issues you had were clearly because of the tutor that you had. I’m sorry you came into CC with the impression that the tutor was a teacher like in public schools but that’s not how CC works. You as the parent are the teacher, that’s why CC is homeschooling. The tutor presents the new information to the kids each week. Also, CC is VERY centered around God. I have no idea what you are talking about. And Like I said, your tutor was clearly the issue here. I grew up in CC and my faith was increasingly strengthened each week. CC was the best education I could imagine. You can tailor the curriculums for the good of your child and everything is so cleverly intertwined and strengthens their faith and knowledge. To this day, I remember the timeline and Latin declension endings and types of volcanos and history sentences and the definitions of the parts of sentences. The presentation time helped me strengthen my public speaking skills at a young age and all aspects of the program fostered my creativity. We played games in class that encouraged my love for learning. And again, the thing with the science experiments is completely about the tutor y’all had. One of my favorite things about Foundations was the science experiments which were long and thorough and educational. Yes, CC is expensive but it’s worth it. I have no idea who told you that the foundations guide was the only thing you had to buy, that’s nonsense. All the things you need to buy are necessary and important and enhance the CC experience. Yes, a math and reading/spelling curriculum is necessary, CC doesn’t claim to be a complete curriculum in foundations but it has plenty of information that makes it worthwhile, not to mention the Challenge Levels are a complete curriculum. I could go on and on but I don’t have enough time. CC isn’t for everyone but I only wish that all parents could be intelligent enough to take advantage of the opportunity to give their kids an education like the one Classical Conversations offers. I’m sorry if I came off in a harsh sense, but I do think you were being unreasonable. I only mean to respectfully argue with you and I respect your opinions on this program.
I’m sorry that you feel I’m being harsh or unreasonable. However, this was from our experience with four different tutors in two different communities, and has also been the experience of hundreds of other people who have contacted me from across the country, so it definitely can’t just be chocked up to a bad tutor.
I attended multiple practicums in which Classical Conversations itself said it was a “stick in the sand” approach, and all you needed in the foundations level was the foundations guide. So that’s a corporate issue.
I’m so glad that you were happy with your experience, but I feel that parents need to get both sides of the story in order to make their own informed decision.
That’s understandable, but I still feel that CC is one of the biggest blessings in my life and the lives of countless others. I think homeschoolers should try out CC for themselves and get a firsthand experience with it, not rely on an extremely negative, or for that matter, extremely positive report of it. I’m sorry that you had bad experiences with CC but I’ve never really experienced any of these problems you brought up so I don’t think its always CC in general, just the individual communities. Thank you for replying to my last message, and like I said, I respect your thoughts but I wanted to make sure you knew, and other people that may perhaps read the comments, that CC is still a wonderful program that blesses so many people.
” CC isn’t for everyone but I only wish that all parents could be intelligent enough…” – Wow, that is harsh.
NO one curriculum or teaching method is right for EVERYONE, and that has NOTHING to do with one’s intelligence.
Yes your very right, bad choice of words on my part.
One class was enough for me to find something else. When I tallied the cost to benefit it was leaning away heavily from benefit. My spouse laughed at this article because she thought I had written it because I was saying the same things you had discovered. She kept pushing for me to just experience it. The report was as you written it. Currently we are trying to get most of money back and use that towards more learning experiences and equipment. P.S. your replies to some of the comments are awesome. Keep up the good work!
We did CC in 2020-2021 with our 6 yr old. It was really a great experience. Then, the community had drama and majority dismantled and left. We went to a Classical Christian private school for 2 years. Left there and thought “We will go back to CC.” (Didn’t pray about it specifically. Know God wants us to homeschool. Anyhow, I should have gone and observed prior to paying. But, I didn’t. I thought I couldn’t homeschool without a specific curriculum or community for support. I had several issues but my main one… not trusting the Lord with our homeschooling. Regardless, I thought I’d try a different community. I did, and I thought it was a better fit. Long story, I thought we could just transfer but I was told it’s not that easy. We ended up going 3 weeks too long knowing it wasn’t right for us. We were told we can’t transfer and it’s up to the original Director if we get our money back. I knew she wouldn’t because she got in her feelings about us wanting to leave her community. She emailed me and said she was not refunding our money. So, I wanted to know if you’ve gotten anywhere with a refund. I asked for a refund for something else with Corporate when I thought I had double paid for CC Connected and they said all monies are non refundable, transferrable etc…
I am following what the Lord wants. He wants me to trust Him for our homeschool journey and not CC. I have soooo much peace, less stress and we’ve had 3 amazing school days. This was my child’s first year in Essentials. It’s A LOT! Anyway, Just curious. I pray you will get your money back.
Unfortunately, very few people get refunds with CC, even if they leave the community before the school year begins. When you pay for CC, you’re actually paying the director, who is her own small business (though many directors don’t even realize they’re a small business). Therefore, CC will say that it’s not something they can refund, since you didn’t actually pay them. That leaves it up to the discretion of the director.
The cost really is ridiculous for what you get out of it. I now have free community with friends, and we’re all happier!
You guys are really lazy. CC is amazing and not a fraud. Please check other websites and see for yourself how CC is the best. Also, whoever created this, did your kids complain? Or was it just you? You seemed to complain a lot. It was all, “me, me, me, me” and so on. Your pretty lazy for a homeschool mom, and public school is definitely for you.
Dear Peachy, thanks so much for commenting on this post! I find it humorous that often people that advocate for a group with the name “Conversation” in it instead resort to name calling and rudeness in their argument about why others should be part of the group. If you’d like to have a conversation about the points in my article that you feel are invalid, I’d love to converse. If you’d like to simply be rude and name call, you can find a different venue for that attitude. Perhaps you should sit in on the logic class, and see if you’re able to figure out how to have a debate without resorting to logic fallacies.
i have
“You guys are really lazy”? I suspect you are a troll, but in case you are not…you sound very judgy, and interestingly, don’t offer anything substantive to this discussion.
It’s not a perfect program, but I believe it is one of the best.
Thank you for sharing your opinion. Unfortunately, after moving away from CC, I’ve found there are so many programs that cost far less and are quite superior. But even if it were an amazing program, I cannot support a corporation that is practicing in such shady ways.
I just found you, do you share info regarding what you found after CC? Would love to know.
I’m happy to share what we did after CC. I’ve pieced together curriculum that works really well for my family. It’s a pretty eclectic curriculum, but we’ve done some trial and error over the years. How old are your kids? That will make a difference in what I recommend.
As far as community, we’ve created our own community with a couple friends who also homeschool. We started getting together about once a month (this was actually while my family was still participating in CC), and we’d have a little lesson and craft that went along with a holiday or season (things like a Valentine’s party, or learning about colors of the rainbow for St. Patrick’s Day, or having a Reformation party). Over the years, as our kids have gotten older and become closer friends, we get together a lot more often. The kids are all taking a ballroom dancing class together right now, they do youth group together, and several of them have taken a CAD class together in the past. We get together for the kids’ birthdays, and just to hang out.
We’ve found that our community works better as just community rather than a co-op. All the kids are at different levels in their individual lessons, so trying to do a writing class together, or a math class together would be difficult.
One of the moms has just decided to do some home-ec type classes with her own kids, and has offered that if any of the rest of the kids want to join in they’re welcome, but that’s possible for all the kids to participate in despite the range of kids being from 5 years old to 16 years old.
Be creative in finding a community. It could be a group that gets together on a regular basis to play board games, or go for a hike, or have oral presentations about whatever they’re interested in at the moment.
I was involved with CC from 2012 through 2020 with my two sons. I directed five different programs within that time. You are definitely right, they charge a lot and ask us to do so much on top of that, but I saw it as a wonderful investment in my two sons! It was very good for them. They both scored nearly perfect scores on their college entrance exams! My oldest scored so high on his asvab that he could pick any occupation in the military that he wanted, and at the age of 22 is earning nearly $85,000 per year. My youngest will be graduating with his bachelors degree next year, God willing, at the age of 18, and had he not gotten injured at camp would have been the youngest commissioned officer since WW2. He to not a perfect program, but we made it work and I am very grateful for CC.
Ruby, while I don’t support CC at all, I am glad that it was a blessing to you and your sons. I’m not out to get CC, I’m simply trying to share some of the issues with the corporation that I wish I had been able to find prior to our joining.
Thankfully, there are a lot of different educational philosophies and approaches that can result in students scoring well. In fact, in my state homeschoolers of all different types score much higher on state testing than public school students, year after year. I believe that it mostly comes down to how involved parents are in their child’s education– and you sound like a mom who worked hard to help her sons succeed!
I respect your insight and opinion! However, you have a few inaccuracies. CC does not discourage digging deeper into material. They actually encourage it!! The memory work is simply a starting point or building block into what you can teach at home. The reason they do not go beyond memory work in class is because tutors are encouraged to ask questions and get the student’s minds working, then for students to go home and dig deeper in what sparked their interest. Also, it is correct that the only mandatory material is the Essentials guide. Everything else is fun and helpful, but not mandatory.
I am sorry you had a different experience, but I wanted to reply to that because it is not accurate. CC is definitely not for everyone, but there is positive reasoning behind what and why they do things.
Thanks for your comment, Stacy, and how respectfully it was worded. I really do appreciate that.
Perhaps it varies from community to community, but we were constantly told that the memory work was “enough” and to “trust the process.” That’s what I’m talking about when I say that CC discourages digging deeper. I was that mom that went to the library and checked out books that correlated with the memory work, but I was told time after time that that wasn’t necessary, because we were simply building “memory pegs.”
And in our community, we were required to not only buy the foundations guide, but also a tin whistle and the memory work cds. We were also strongly encouraged to buy the timeline cards and memory work cards, as well as a CC Connected subscription. That last part may be different now, since what used to be CC Connected is now included in the tuition cost.
So perhaps these things weren’t accurate for your community, but they were for mine, and for the communities of many of the parents I’ve spoken to across the country.
I do have to agree with Stacy here. While many of your points are things I’ve considered or agree with, my experience matches hers. We are encouraged to dig deeper into topics at home, and in fact my community has a few smaller groups that meet during the rest of the week to dig deeper together, whether that be History books, art projects inspired by whatever artist we’re studying, or an expansion on science. I’m sad that not everyone has experienced this, because this is a high point for CC in my opinion. We also have not been encouraged to buy anything other than the guide and tin whistle. No cds, Timeline cards, or the like are necessary. Some of us wanted these things though and have bought of our own accord. But our director has never ever required more, we actually have people who ordered their tin whistles from Amazon and that has worked perfectly. I do agree with several of your points, but I’m sorry that you experienced the communities you did…seems like they are out of line.
It sounds like your community is pretty great, Jenna!
I’ve heard the same issues that I’ve had reiterated by hundreds of moms across the country, so unfortunately I believe communities like yours are probably more of the exception than the rule.
I am a 30-year veteran teacher and have worked with many homeschooled children in private, public, and college-level settings who have had remarkable success. I encountered this program through a relative whose children are struggling (as is she). I reviewed this program, and the more I read and researched, the more it appeared to be a fraud. There are no actual qualified teachers. No genuine reviews monitor the program itself and its success beyond its own program. The program itself is almost non-child-based. It relies on the parents’ total belief that what is going on is 100% true because they throughout a bible verse every now and then. That’s not a curriculum. That’s a cult. I am a Christian. This is outrageous. There is no special needs support in the program. Over 15% of all students have some special learning, behavioral, physical, or emotional need that must be dealt with during this time. Suggest that for future children and parents that those who have experienced this collectively report this group to the U.S. Department of Education
Office of Inspector General Hotline
400 Maryland Avenue, S.W.
Washington D.C. 20202-1500
Fax: (202) 245-7047
Cc is not a school, it is a community that helps parents learn the classical method of learning- very different from compulsory learning. It’s very important that parents understand expectations and who CC is and what they offer, how they do things before they join. People in US in general expect to “outsource” like the OP… that’s not what CC is for and can be identified as the source of most of her complaints…as for business structure and the tax “issues” she is incorrect but that can be chalked up to not understanding the full picture, simply asking a friend who knows about taxes isn’t enough, they need to understand the details of how it’s all set up, then maybe they would understand. Also, there were several spots where OP clearly had the wrong expectations of the CC curriculum or was given the wrong info.
CC is a curriculum company. It is not a school and not under the control of the US DOE.
I am curious about your comment of “there is no special needs support.” (1) Home school students are taught by their parents. (2) Special Education is broad…you can take any random diagnosis and argue that a public school is not providing support for that situation, even if it has the biggest SPED department in the district.
Interesting, I’ve seen CC Foundations work well for dyslexic children and delayed readers, because it is a highly auditory program. Again though, it is not a school, it is a curriculum company, and they introduce students/parents to new material each week in a group setting. It is up to the parents to then present it at home for the remainder of the week.
Wow! I so appreciate all that you all have shared about CC. We left CC years ago, and have no regrets in leaving. CC has many holes and weaknesses. I am a music educator having taught music for 30 years and was a Pianist and Organist in our area. I was shocked to see the way they approached the Tin Whistle class. Sadly, there were mistakes in the Foundations guide, and the approach the book had was so unappealing some mom’s said they wanted to through the Tin Whistle in the closet. Broke my heart as music learning is so important.
Sadly, at a practicum, I learned that after talking with the author of CC that she knows nothing about music. I offered to write a program for the Tin Whistle, and I was told that I wasn’t allowed.
CC as a group, also seems to gaslight anyone who has a problem. In real life, real problems can arise. The leadership with our CC was hugely lacking in resolving issues. Jobs were given to mom’s who had no training or skill. and false accusations were made with no resolve.
I truely would never recommend CC. Beware of this business. They are greedy and out for all the money they can get.
My recommendation is to steer clear of CC.
Thank you, Jamie, for your very enlightening post that’s now a few years old. My wife, S, who posted above and I read your post and the responding comments with great interest. We were part of a Classical Conversations community quite a while ago now, officially leaving in 2015 after three years. We saw the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. Ultimately, we left after experiencing too much of the regional support system and learning too much about the corporate operation of CC’s distributed schooling system at a time when our special needs child needed a different approach than what Foundations and Essentials would offer. We had invested much into our community, found it to be too painful, and also found quite a few weaknesses within the corporate structure. Fast forwarding to today, we found your post and many of the comments to be validating after-the-fact. Having very recently come back into contact with some members of that campus now that their children are graduating from CC and dealing with yet another negative experience with that campus, my wife found your blog. From what we now know in addition and with what we knew then, we’re glad we left. To be completely open, CC would not have continued to work for our special needs learner anyway beyond Foundations, but we left with a bad taste that recently revived. At the same time, we are grateful to the Lord for bringing us to CC as we are thankful for Him moving us way from them. My hope is that our story can bring the same validation for you and others that we received while providing a bit of “buyer beware” warning for those who might be considering CC for their families.
The good: Our child received a solid foundation in useful facts from Foundations that we still use and, in some cases, rely on in the high school years with more traditional curriculum – truly foundational. For a solid portion of the three years we were part of a CC campus, we enjoyed a warm fellowship and were connected with a larger group of homeschoolers. We did some pretty cool things and had some great outside ministry opportunities. And considering the kind of special needs, this approach really worked in ways that more traditional ones would not have. To some extent, this many years afterward, we are still “fleshing out CC” sentences.
We also appreciated that the memory work worked from a young earth Creationist standpoint. Our continued homeschooling has as well, and this Biblically accurate stance along with the memorization of Bible verses were very much appreciated as Christian homeschoolers.
The bad: Classical Conversations was growing, particularly in our region but also nationwide, from 2012 through 2015. Things were new. Support beyond our director was non-existent at first. That was probably better. And our campus was a new start so the parents and children didn’t have existing friendships that might be hard to break into for older parents with a special needs child. As time went on, structure became more apparent and cliques started to form. There were those on the inside and those on the outside. CC became more of a group for moms with a particular look and pocketbook. We persevered through.
One of the issues that troubled us about continuing was the so-called art being presented even on the cover of some of the books for sale by the CC bookseller. It was basically pornographic. Once we saw that, we decided that there would be no way we could continue with a full Classical Conversations approach.
We also did a bit of fill-in-the-gaps during our CC years trying to add content to the summary sentence or facts that our child was to memorize. The speed of movement through the years, though, made this difficult to keep up. As was once posted on “Half a Hundred Acre Wood,” the overall CC plan was to build these out during the various Challenge programs. While it seemed impressive that our student could spout a sentence or two basically like a trivia machine, which made outsiders consider the education solid, the depth especially at the Foundations level was very questionable.
The ugly: Robert Bortins made a tour through the country and stopped at church in our region to discuss his experiences as an original CC grad and drum up interest of sticking with CC through high school (I don’t know if he was the CEO yet and don’t remember him being introduced as such, only as Leah Bortin’s son). We attended. My wife asked him what any discerning parent looking toward high school ought to ask – what percentage of CC graduates are accepted into the college of their choice? We had never met an Area Support Manager until this evening. This woman jumped all over my wife, declaring that college is overrated and devalues the working class, blue color skilled worker, and gaslighted my wife for asking a very important question. We were shocked and never got an answer. It was the first time we had experienced gaslighting within CC, but not the last. The other thing we learned from the future CEO was that his brothers were in top university programs or attempting to represent the US in the Olympics in rugby; we joked on the way home, perhaps unfairly or perhaps not, that we were supporting the Bortins’ ability to pay their college bills.
My wife is a professional musician, director, and music educator. She found the Foundations plan to teach tin whistle abysmal and heartbreaking. She reworked it and taught the campus students how to play the right way so the course material made sense and the children learned to play as a group, which they did in multiple venues. But a Foundations campus isn’t designed to operate with this program and the hierarchy was having trouble figuring out how to address it. What we were discovering was that people had been hired into positions for which they obviously had no training or effective oversight and to some extent, were unqualified. I chalked it up to being an immature organization that was growing faster than its support capabilities. But a point came in which these women started to try to make decisions about how my wife would lead her tin whistle group, trying to be impressive at a Practicum that Leah Bortins attended. My wife fended off a potential disaster while receiving some very unkind and unwarranted treatment from the new campus director coupled with poor leadership from the Support Manager and the Area Manager. But it highlighted for us that our time to depart CC had come.
We had seen too much from the regional support system. Looking back, the less we knew about what was going on beyond the campus and behind the scenes, the happier we were. It was somewhat similar to sausage and sausage-making; we may like sausage and buy it at the store, but the less we know about how it’s made, the better we like it.
I also became rather concerned about the corporate office. We too had found problems within the Foundations Guide (version 4) and had communicated those through official channels. Corporate minders were not cancelling parental concerns at this point as some have documented, but the responses were less than appropriate. It was a ho-hum to them. In fact, nothing fazed them. But we’d also plunked down a lot of money in the annual payment for the campus, a CC Connected account, cards, etc. They had from us what they needed. So our special needs student, who doesn’t tolerate differences in “facts” very well, had to learn the CC answer and the real answer.
What they lacked in professional nationwide and reginal structure along with concern over accuracy, CC had in legal protections. CC was very protective of their content and processes to the point that, like you, looking ahead toward Essentials or the Challenge programs got a brief glimpse without enough substance to make a decision about whether or not it would work for our special learner. But as I found in doing a short-term contracting support position for the region, I had to initially sign a non-disclosure agreement which stated that I couldn’t reveal any corporate information or plans anyone including to aliens from outer space (my NDA expired in 2018 for those wondering). What CC did not have in corporate structure and operation, they certain had in their legal support team to protect the corporation!
Finally, we both were concerned that CC encouraged parents to attend a Practicum, which we found to be mostly a pep-rally for the CC methodology and system. It just seemed like we had to drink a whole ton of Kool-Aid to keep in everyone’s good graces and really “understand the classical model.” That’s a whole lot of effort to keep families within the fold, it seemed. It was too much effort, in my opinion, and that became suspicious to me as it seemed like almost as if it were indoctrination. Wouldn’t the quality of the local community and education provided keep parents engaged with the school?
So we left formal CC, although we did look at some other campuses around the region. One would have needed to make a specific exception for us to continue using the Demme Learning’s Math U See curriculum, otherwise, we’d been “forced” to use Saxon. But CC said that we were supposed to do math, reading, and handwriting on our own? We never figured that one out and never went back. We used the CC curriculum we had purchased for the next three years on our own and addressed child’s specific educational needs using a variety of curricula from a variety of publishers. We felt much freer and less stressed.
As the Lord would have it, we reconnected with one of the families from that original campus in the last couple of years. Their children are sweet and pleasant, and my wife wound up giving them piano lessons. Their mother kept looking for opportunities to bring us back onto their CC campus. Which brings us to our latest and likely last CC experience – my wife’s oldest student was graduating and my wife asked if her student could play something for graduation, even during the prelude. My wife has taught hundreds of children from every educational option and understands the homeschooling culture very, very well. When it came down to working with the small group of graduating Challenge students so her student was involved with a musical anything in the ceremony, she found that the dynamic with the class to be one that reminded her of the private Christian schools she had attended. It was so troubling that she came home and started Googling…and found this blog among others. Then, in attempting to resolve the issue that arose via Matthew 18, she contacted a mutual friend in the CC community, who basically told my wife that my wife had sinned by being upset at the children’s behavior – classic gaslighting. To be fair, we don’t know if this response was from the CC point of view of this friend’s church. But it was too familiar…having a problem is the problem so if you have a problem, you are the problem. In the end, we found that there is a strong effort to protect the Tribe at the expense of the Truth.
What we’ve determined from our observations and researching sites and blogs like yours is that Classical Conversations is really a commercial hybrid school, not a homeschool entity, and that becomes more apparent as children move up into the Challenge levels, essentially becoming an elite private school in which parents are largely outsiders in the classroom. My wife did not find the students to behave like homeschoolers as they were not easy to work with and ultimately she had to walk away. Judging from the comments made by various parents in multiple places, what my wife calls “snottish” behaviors must not be a universal experience, but it does appear that cliques have developed in this particular campus which ultimately hurt everyone, which is what brought us to your blog looking for answers.
In our years of homeschooling, we’ve interacted with a sizable number of curricula providers (can’t recommend attending an annual homeschool convention/curriculum fair strongly enough with lot of time spent in the sales areas exploring options). Only Classical Conversations is operating in this manner from the ones we’ve seen in which a low pay network of contractors, really just a bunch of parents as corporate explained to me once, operate a global series of hybrid schools that at least appear to masquerade as homeschooling co-ops. As a parent with an advanced degree and significant experience in leading organizations to success, it was unimpressive, especially considering the cost being imposed upon us just to participate. I didn’t see the return on investment to be equal to the outlay of funds, especially once we were supposed to move up to the Essentials level and begin to pay approximately $1,000 year just to participate. My wife is quick to point out the cost of a private Christian school is far beyond that, but my response is that traditional homeschooling is much less. And in my opinion, that lesser cost and lesser stress is worth all the money in the world.
There are undoubtably a number of satisfied families who have seen their children through CC and on to whatever pursuits the Lord had for them afterward post-graduation. There are also dedicated campus and program directors who are doing their level-headed best to teach as well as they can. Some families may thrive in these kinds of environments and are able to separate the corporate-level and organization stuff from what they experience from those reasonable campuses. One of the joys of homeschooling is rather pragmatic…finding what works best for an individual family within the boundaries of what the Lord says is right. CC is the right answer for some families. But not all families fit and not every campus works as well as other campuses. The problem is that there is a high financial and potentially relational cost of finding out the CC is not for your family.
Parents, especially fathers, are charged by the Lord to raise their children in the fear and admonition of Himself per Ephesians 6:3. As we seek out the educational options that work for our families and our children to carry out that mandate, Classical Conversations deserves a place in that list of options. But I would encourage families to take a very close look at how their local campuses are run and what they can expect from CC as they move through the various levels. And I encourage Classical Conversations to increase their transparency, tighten their regulation and oversight of regional and local operations, and turn that team of attorneys who tried to prevent me from speaking with extraterrestrials about CC corporate plans (like I would know!) to creating better support for local franchises to head off legal troubles with various entities. It is my firm belief that our years with CC were good overall. It is also my firm belief that moving on was for the best. And it is my firm belief that there is something wrong with CC as a corporate entity. It is my hope and prayer that CC corporately can work through these issues as a maturing corporation. But in the interim, there are many, many very good options for educating homeschool children in terms of curriculum. If it were me and my wife making this decision again, especially with what we know today, we would not choose CC nor encourage anyone else to step on board that system.
Thank you so much for the articulation of your journey. It was helpful and healing for me.
You’re welcome. I’m lifting up a prayer now for your complete healing.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience! After talking to parents from all over the US, the gaslighting and leadership problems seem to be widespread. I’m so sorry they weren’t interested in taking you up on your offer to help.
I’m curious, as to why the gaslighting and leadership problems are universal. A reoccurring theme/reoccurring issue,… what is driving it. No one is coaching to do so, and yet the spirit of this is prevalent and damaging across the board.
I wish I understood that, too. However, the reports of gaslighting and spiritual abuse are being told from people all over the country. It’s really quite heartbreaking that a homeschool group that could have had such a positive impact has ended up hurting so many.
maybe God guided you to join CC for those few years so that you could use your discernment and research things further and put this post together to warn other homeschool families years down the road about it (: thank you for all the work and research and thought you put into this post. i was trying to find something to help me and my kids in our homeschool journey but didn’t want something that was outrageous in price and a lot of work at the same time and felt overwhelming. it seemed rather overwhelming for the expense to me so i came across this post in my research. i was intrigued by their teach the parent model bc i feel i could use that… but it sounds like it is not a route we want to go down. it already felt expensive on the surface so i would not have room for surprise fees like you outlined in your post. and don’t like the shady business practices. just bc you can get away with skirting the law doesn’t mean you should. that is dishonest and against God. and lastly i want more God in our curriculum than it sounds like they truly provide. thank you again for putting this post out there for me and others to find years later😌
That’s a great way to put it! I’m glad my experience can help others.
If you want to chat about curriculum, feel free to email me at asformeandmyhomestead@gmail.com. I’m happy to help people try to find the right curriculum for them– there’s nothing worse than ordering curriculum only to find out that it really doesn’t work for your family, or isn’t quite what you wanted.
I did CC for 5 years. That was all I knew. At one point I was asked to direct a community and did the training and then I backed out. It’s an awful amount of work for the pay. Then they raised the fees last year, and now if you’re not in a community you can’t even buy their books and certainly not joking CC connected, so we left. I still use their material because I like the grammar content, but at our own pace and however we see fit. I felt like they used the excuse of “this is a ministry” a lot, but it’s just a business, and with a bad business model even. People will agree to get paid very little for all the work and call it labor of love. It became the MLM of homeschool, sadly.
I agree completely. I was also pressured to direct, and I’m so glad I didn’t. Leaving CC was the best thing we did for our homeschool. I don’t think I realized how much it stressed us all out until we didn’t have that anymore, and we all felt such freedom.
I really appreciated your take, and have experienced some of these same issues/questions as we went along. I’m currently torn about next year, as I’m finally wanting to use CM methods exclusively. My children are getting older, all will be in a Challenge program next year, so I feel time is of the essence. There are some great things in the Challenge curriculum, but also things I find very dry & a lot of time (& stress) wasted on *electives*….Latin, logic, debate, etc. Much emphasis is put on these in high school. I find inconsistencies with using very tough curriculum in (middle grades) Challenge A & B, college level Latin & Logic (eyerolls), that have caused many tears at my house, rather than a love of learning. While other subjects are left out or given very basic treatment….The ONLY thing causing me to think twice is the social aspect! My 3 children love the friends, as do I. But it will be almost $5 K for my 3 children, that’s so much money to not be really pleased with curriculum. One last thought I’ll add, is from a Challenge perspective it has been hard to feel that I can adequately keep my students accountable! Back to that tutor/mom is teacher thing you mentioned. Older students need much accountability with increasingly harder subjects. I feel pressured to be an expert or “hold hands” with mine all day to make certain they are understanding & doing all weekly tasks in the guide. I have no desire to go back to school & become proficient in ALL of these subjects! I want to help of course, but I feel out of the loop & frustrated unless I do each thing with them, which isn’t possible with 3, plus life!!
Oh to be reading living books today!😊😊
While my kids aren’t at highschool level yet, here’s what we’ve found works best for us: We have a few homeschool families that we’ve decided to deepen relationships with. Rather than do a co-op, we each homeschool our kids the way that works best for our family, and then we get together in the afternoons several days a week. Sometimes we’ll do an elective class together (right now we’re doing ballroom dancing and a CAD class), sometimes the kids just have unstructured time together, where they can play card or board games, ride bikes, build things, bake, or whatever they’d like. We’ve found this to work so much better for us. None of the families feels pressured to school in a way that works better for another family, and the time spent together is the kids actually interacting with each other, and building solid friendships.
Lauren,
I understand being overwhelmed in the Challenge years with accountability. There are ways to scale. CC is a buffet to use as a guide with a high bar set, but with the ability to tweak, so you the parent are in control.
I love CC and love the Challenge program. It is actually what sold me on CC.
Ive directed 3 of the 6 levels, started a Foundations community and tutored Essentials. We’ve home educated for the past 15 years and the last 8 with CC.
CC is not perfect, but it has been our happy place – and we truly have done “everything under the sun” before comming to CC! Many people overlook or don’t understand the classical portion of CC. Due to being a classical program, certain “electives” are core subjects. Throughout the Challenge years CC uses content to cultivate skills like Grammar, Debate, Research, Reasoning, Logic and Exposition. The skills don’t change from year to year, although the content does as layers are added. For example, DEBATE: changes from Geography to American Biographies and Mock Trial then Team Policy/Lincoln Douglas debate and Am.Government, then Western Cultural History, American History and finally Ancient history. These debate skills are necessary in forming a well rounded person who knows from whence we came, where places are in the world, how the government is supposed to work, our part in it, and finally where we are going. This is more than education, it is paidea – an inculcation of the whole person.
This year, I’ve had to choose a couple strands that my student most needs help with that I find most important.
I liked directing because it offset tuition and helped me to engage more with my students.
I’ve been in coops and CC communities. They are similar and yet very different. My former coop was enrichment classes and basketball teams and each parent had to help in some way teach or volunteer in other capacities. My CC Community is like extended family. We support each other, fellowship, field trip, etc… We all strive to high, but realistic academic goals, while “teaching from rest”.
From a director perspective, the community is what you make it and there are plenty of opportunities to volunteer or tutor/direct. Each community takes on the personality of its leaders. Some are very basic, sticking only to what is in the Director Guide, whike others get creative and sometimes “extra”. Like the body of Christ, we are all important and needed.
Financially, the “stick in the sand” idea is true, for those on a budget, I say it all the time. Although, as your budget allows and if you desire we have a plethora of tools to expand your teaching toolbox! I’ve never been pressured to purchase nor do I pressure others . (Now Challenge is different- just like college, you must have the necessary resources to be prepared for class.
As far as the “corporate” end of things, I feel supported. Ive done lots of subcontractor/independent contractor positions, and with CC, don’t look at my pay as a regular job. It offsets tuition and covers our other educational expenses as well as gives me some “mad” money.
CC is a for profit entity. As a business owner, I don’t begrudge them of that. I understand the demographics of homeschoolers, mostly, not always, single income households, moms who sacrifice a job to stay home while dads work. If CC had to pay regular wages, tuition, books and resources would all be higher, and probably out of reach for this demographic. I think theyve struck an affordability balance. There is now a CC Foundation that pours back into churches, communities and individuals all in the name of knowing God and making Him known!
I’ve never not felt the the genuiness of their mission. I’ve felt the prayers when our community was devasted by a 1000 year flood and received care packages from communities all over the US. Ive felt the commitment to that mission with our weekly Public Reading of Scripture and other things like that. The training leaders receive always starts with a devotional corolating to the topic. Each parent lesson help points back to God and His thoughts, promises, laws, etc…God is always weaved in and through everything we do at CC!
Ultimately, I am thankful for God giving a former engineering mama a vision to homeschool her own children and enlarging that vision so one day I’d have a solid educational option, support group, family that has helped me give my children a strong Biblical worldview.
Mamat this has been almost exactly our experience. We have 7 children, 3 have graduated CH IV. 4 .ore to go. I had previously took an early retirement from the public school system. Looked for options for a while before finding CC. Been in CC 11 years. We have had enough adversity to keep us humble and enough success to keep us moving forward. I’m grateful there are many ways to homeschool and currently the freedom.to do so. Let’s stand together as Christian home educators and reconcile with the Lord first and then with others on what divides us. Praying for all.on this journey.
Thank you for writing this post. This has answered a lot of questions for me. Today, I was told that CC (just the Foundations books) could be used as a curriculum all by itself for my daughter. I almost ordered it today without doing any research about it. Then my husband mentioned there was an issue or something along those lines with CC and few years back. Then, I stumble upon your website and I am so thankful that I did! Thank you for going into such detail about this! It answered a lot of my questions!
Is there another curriculum that you would recommend? My daughter has a tutor for dyslexia so I am not able to do much in the area of reading with her. Only the papers the tutor gives me. But I need something with science, history, art, and those important subjects. We do Abeka for math which is great. Any recommendations? Thank you! Jeannie Beavers
I’m so glad to be of help, Jeannie! How old is your daughter? I use Berean Builders for science for my kids, and we’ve used Story of the World and America’s Story for history. I don’t use an art curriculum, we just add in art to go along with history, mostly, and my kids are always doing some sort of art project. As the years have gone by, I’ve found myself more and more drawn to a Charlotte Mason style education, using lots of living books (we do many of these as read alouds).
I appreciate your insight. I have never done C, but my sister did and I have many friends who do an it definitely hasn’t seemed quite right to me. I do teach at our co-op, which is a non profit, but I signed up knowing that!
You’re welcome! I have had a lot of people be negative about my remarks about having to help in the class– I have no problem helping in a class, I was just surprised by it, considering the cost, and that it’s a co-op. That’s why I wanted to include that information. At the time we joined CC, I was looking for something that would make life easier for me, not add more, so I wanted people to know going in, if they choose to join CC.
Families should refer to these and great insights.
Interesting guide and ideas that everyone can refer through it.
Thank you for this well thought out post. I can’t tell you how helpful it is for me just starting out and attempting to navigate homeschooling. You mention Claritas as a God centred Classical option and a quick look into their material reveals a wealth of well laid out cycles of learning. Later on in your replies to various comments you listed the curriculum that you are currently using and I did not see Claritas mentioned there. Did you complete their cycles and then move on to other things or are you not using them for other reasons? My son is 6 and in Grade 1. We are currently considering joining a CC community and so I was so thankful to read your post as all the things I had heard and read about it were almost glowingly positive and that warranted more research. I have read some books on Charlotte Mason’s philosophies for education and am drawn into that as well. We currently are using The Good and the Beautiful for language arts and RightStart for math. I am a covid homeschooler who never considered homeschooling our son prior to all the craziness of 2020. I look at homeschooling as covid’s gift to our family because in being throw into it we found a treasure that we would have otherwise passed over completely. I am looking for curriculum recommendations and how to find communities when you are new to an area.
What a blessing that something terrible ended up bringing you to the lovely experience of homeschooling!
We started out using Claritas after we left CC, but I’ve just found myself so much more drawn to literature and hands on learning, and less towards rote memorization, so we stopped doing memory work aside from scripture.
I think that Facebook and word of mouth can be a good way to find community these days. We found a couple other homeschool families that we share values with (we don’t all homeschool the same way, but we all love Jesus and have similar parenting styles), and created community for ourselves. While we don’t do classes or a co-op together, we started out getting together for things like Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, St. Patrick’s, etc, and as we got to know each other better we’ve become more involved in each other’s lives. I hope that helps!
As a homeschooling mom whose kids have been enrolled in CC for the past 10+ years across 5 communities and 2 countries, I can definitely appreciate (and agree with) many of your points. Ironically, my end result is different – we cheerfully continue to be a CC family, bearing with the negatives. I entered CC completely incompetent both as a Christian parent and a home educator; over years of participation and increasing competence my family has been incredibly blessed. In our time abroad, our previous USA CC experience provided a bespoke opportunity for our family to bless others.
In my mind, the beauty of CC – equipping ordinary moms to grow into increasing roles of capacity/service within the home/community – is also the root of many of its evils. CC preaches that mums can learn anything they set their mind upon, but when ordinary mums have increasing positions of authority/responsibility, novice mistakes are to be expected. I love that CC is a parent-run organization, but I wholeheartedly agree that many CC products enter the marketplace with inexcusable errors. It is a hard balancing act. Using Christianity and the empowering of parents as an excuse for poor business acumen and perhaps some legal transgressions is not a good witness. I suspect they do now have ample capital to hire experts where needed, but such requires discernment/humility to know where they are needed. Thus, I agree that CC organizational culture fosters a degree of unprofessionalism, but I consider most of CC’s errors the result of incompetency/inexperience instead of malicious design. Perhaps as you discussed CC Corporate has not duly corrected mistakes when identified; admittedly, I haven’t pursued those details myself.
I’ve had the opportunity to participate in the growth of a CC organization abroad and can attest that out of necessity many moms (including myself) were serving in ways in which they felt ill equipped – our legal status as we adopted to a foreign economy was probably also a bit dubious. We did the best we could with limited resources, and the Lord used the existing CC framework as an assembling point for international home educators desperate for community often with no existing family, church or community support. CC is a for-profit organization but does have an element of ministry. Having tutored/directed over most of our years, I fully believe the worker is worthy of her wages, but abroad all of my CC earnings were willingly fed back into the infant communities. All of the CC leaders abroad with whom I interfaced saw it as a ministry to support families, beginning with their own children. Admittedly, over the years my family’s opinion of CC USA corporate has been not entirely favorable, but all the corporate individuals I personally interfaced with worked tirelessly to support CC internationally and were passionate about CC as a ministry, at times waiving fees and bypassing hurdles, understanding that in many locations it was a Godsend to the participating families. Ultimately, knowing the international corporate team raised my opinion of CC corporate. Internationally, profit and quotas are not yet sources of corruption – the idea of marketing is repugnant.
I believe CC is a great program – but there is a bit of variance on a local level in terms of academic expectations. I find I’ve always expanded upon the art/science under my cognizance and have found it to be quite suitable when so approached; I agree that the bare minimum as written in the Foundations Guide is a bit limited for the older classrooms, but I appreciate the freedom the simple framework provides. Families digging deeper into material at home (given it doesn’t overwhelm them) has always been encouraged and becomes necessary as students mature. I’ve appreciated using CC curricula as a framework from which we have shaped our family’s ever shifting homeschool methods and preferences. Sometimes I disagree with the timing or particular choices dictated by CC but appreciate having the freedom to teach what best suits my family at home. I find the framework liberating rather than restrictive.
Every CC group has its own subculture, into which they insert prayer, scripture memorization, and/or Christian message, but admittedly with Foundations being rather scripted there is limited time for additional Biblical teaching other than seeing all subjects and students from a Biblical worldview. (Later programs are less scripted and much Biblical conversation takes place.) I suspect the decision was made to avoid direct Christian teaching (for the youngest program) so as to avoid denominational conflicts, but that is just my hunch. For example, I’ve been really blessed to be graciously rebuked by Catholic friends, whom I inadvertently offended, in handling some of the differences. Given the greater spiritual darkness abroad, I found that within the CC community there was a comparatively greater focus on community day being an offering of worship and true Christian fellowship. Grace and relationships trumped program, though academic content was faithfully administered.
I’ve witnessed one situation of extreme poor judgement in conflicts at the USA regional level, but I think the CC policies for conflict resolution within a community are rather appropriate and God-honoring. Perhaps they are not always appropriately implemented as they require spiritual maturity, relational sensitivity and humility of leadership. CC has spread rapidly and needs to better investigate/oversee leadership where grievances have been addressed.
Just wanted to repeat that I really appreciated your clear and logical argument; there were a few small points upon which I disagree, but overall, I concur. As all human institutions are liable to corruption so too is this one despite its Christian ideals. While the Lord led you to leave CC, He guides my family to stay put, bearing with the negatives and doing our part to uphold the integrity of the programs by exhorting leaders to serve faithfully abroad and endeavoring to serve faithfully in our own local, domestic community. May God bless both our choices and raise up this generation to serve Him faithfully!
Thank you so much for sharing your experience with CC, Christy!
I went for a trial session today, with my four year old, and everything you said here, is how I felt. I got instant MLM vibes from the director, asking about opening up a CC in my town and how they’re trying to find someone who is willing, if I’m up for it or know anyone etc.
They were memorizing basic sentences and songs but not actually learning anything. Singing a song about “between 1800 and 1900 the monarchs were…” like my child is FOUR. She doesn’t know what 1800’s or what monarchs are. I’m not paying for her to memorize things that I can write down on a piece of paper myself.
Song were played off a parents phone and again, aside from the assembly in the beginning, there was no mention of God. They mentioned an Islamic monarch and takes about space.
I had such high and innocent hopes for it but so glad I got that gut feeling. The director literally just messaged me as I’m typing this (7:40pm what?!) to see how I feel about it. Yikes.
Thank you for your testimony ❤️
I hope you can find community in a way that will fit your family better, Natasha. I actually did like some of the history sentences, but you could easily just buy the cds, and save a lot of time and money. Lol. And I agree, learning the sentences with no background or framework for understanding the information is just silly.
Yes to everything you shared. I had similar experiences and thoughts, and even more. I was part of a lovely community for 4 years. I tutored foundations for 2 of those years and directed challenge for the other two. And I loved it. Until the last year, when the other directors and I finally submitted a grievance to our sales manager about some problems that had been going on for a DECADE with one of the people in our “chain of command”. After MONTHS of not being listened to, the whole thing culminated with me being FIRED simply because I wouldn’t recant what we had written. When I complained further up the chain, they decided that the other directors (who were apparently going to be fired as well) and I could finish the year, which we did for the sake of our students. None of us were asked to come back. Not that we would have wanted to. CC has no way of dealing with conflict. They will repeat the “Matthew 18!” mantra over and over, which apparently means just deal with it yourself. But if the conflict isn’t resolved, they do not have a conflict resolution or HR department to help. My entire community folded, and most of us ended up at a new, amazing, TRULY classical co-op that has been nothing but a joy.
I think the saddest part is that so many people have reached out to CC, trying to help the company do better and operate ethically, and they’ve either been ignored or treated like you. There are women who were threatened with lawsuits due to speaking out about the issues of a corporation operating within a church, or the issues of a corporation using volunteer labor, or other issues. Others have had their name besmirched, or been shunned by their former communities, and so many have dealt with spiritual manipulation. It’s just heartbreaking.
I’m so glad that your experience ended up for the good. What a blessing to have a life-giving co-op to be part of!
Thank you so much for sharing. Did you still with a classical education? What did you do after you left CC?
Right after leaving, we continued with a classical education, switching to Claritas for memory work. However, as time has gone by, I have realized that I really appreciate a Charlotte Mason approach more, so we’ve switched to a more literature based education instead.
I absolutely love that you had the courage to share your experiences with CC. I understand that everyone has a different experience, but I so wish I would have found your blog before I hopped in and paid $1,000. I had the WORST experience and was treated poorly by the Director when I mentioned things that I felt were wrong. Sad. I have left CC and did not join a similar group in town. I feel like I wasted my time and my children’s time. We also came to CC because I desperately wanted my children to feel like they had a community and I just loved the idea that they would have a teacher. What a bummer to find out that, among other things, were not what they appeared.
Thank you so much for sharing your story.
I’m so sorry you had a bad experience. I had looked all over for reviews of CC before we joined, and couldn’t find anything negative. I thought this was a good thing, but later found out that it’s because CC is great at censoring those who speak against them. I’ve now heard stories of CC moms being threatened with lawsuits due to speaking out about the things they experienced. It’s so sad.
I am praying right now that God will help you find the community you desire for your kids. For me, that’s come about with 2 other moms who have similar aged kids. We started out getting together to celebrate holidays, or go on field trips together, but our kids (and us moms) have become dear friends. I pray you find something similar!
I am not a member of CC, although I did visit an open house in the spring, and everyone was so nice. Like you the money just kept adding up. I believe for my three kids it was going to be over $2,000!!! I have decided to use Notgrass as my main curriculum, Apologia, The Good and the Beautiful and the math-u-see…I am a new homeschool mom, this will be my second year and like you I wish I had done it sooner; however, I know He has a plan and that wasn’t part of it…I’m sorry you were so unhappy, and I completely understand your liking the idea of CC I felt the same way…I just wanted to have some help and a day to be with other people in the same situation. I wanted my kids to have some friends that are homeschooled and could hopefully connect with. I was thinking of purchasing the CC CD for them to listen to in the car and was wondering if you thought it was worth it? (it’s on clearance) Mostly for the President song and just to memorize some facts. My kids are 6, 10 and 13, so I would probably get the first cd. Thanks!
We actually really loved some of the old songs. I haven’t listened to the newer CDs, so I’m not sure if they’re as good.
Yes, the price tag is quite steep. While we were doing CC, there were so many homeschool things I wanted to do, but our budget was always tight. It was nice that after leaving, I was able to buy everything I wanted to, and I still didn’t spend even half as much as we had been paying! In fact, the difference nearly funded a family vacation.
Thanks!!! I appreciate it!!!
Thanks for your review! New homeschool mom here putting the pieces together day by day while researching possibilities. I have found some great resources on Youtube in regards to the songs and I downloaded the CC app ($10) which has all the memory work week by week. Between the two my kids are learning the material without a current community.
That’s probably the best way to do it, in my opinion. I think some of the songs are really catchy and helpful in remembering information.
I agree 100% with everything you wrote. We did CC for 3 years. My husband became “famous” for his science videos on YouTube because he actually taught how to do the experiments. VanCleaves book is a disaster among all the other things you listed.
I agree with you, the people were what kept me there. Luckily our campus dissolved (all but one family out of 13!) and we all started a Scholé group. It was amazing. Truly classical learning. I wouldn’t do CC again if it was free. ( I know I know, it’s SO cheap compared to a private Christian school).
Elizabeth, I completely agree on the science. Out of all the wonderful curriculum out there, I just can’t figure out why they stick with VanCleaves. Especially at the younger ages, science should be hands on, fun, explosive, exciting, and it will make kids want to learn more in the older years.
That’s fabulous that you were able to take your community with you to a new experience!
Thank you so much for writing this. I am using it right now to steer someone away from this organization.
I had a friend who kept trying to recruit me to
C C but I had a funny feeling about it and I went digging and found similar stories. I don’t remember exactly what I found but it was enough to make me not want to join. I know that “feeling” was the Holy Spirit warning me. Over time I’ve come to understand I shouldn’t ignore Him.
My friend also kept saying “stick in the sand” but then she would tell me how much work she had to put into it. It just didn’t seem to fit.
She invited me to a special event at the end of the year where the kids all sang a song together and talked about a certain historical figure. I personally DO have a problem with my kids learning all about False gods as the Bible says to not even name them. So it actually goes against the Bible.
Let me encourage anyone struggling with CC to get out. Look up the expose last year by Julie Roys who found that CC exploits its “tutors”. And PRAY about it. I have been homeschooling on my own for going on seven years now. Th Lord has guided me in finding books and curriculum and I trust he will continue to do that. I (and you) don’t need anyone to do it for you. As believers we have the Holy Spirit to guide us if we will trust Him and let Him do his work instead of trusting in companies and in man.
Blessings. 🙏🏻
I have homeschooled for 15 years, the last 6 have been with CC and have been our happy place!
We all have freedom to share our experiences, but your “experience” was quite limited with CC. As someone who has been in various leadership positions from directing F/E as well as most Challenge levels, you totally missed the heart of our organization.
Everything we do is for a purpose. God is truly at the center. We use a classical approach to learning, which means we go with the natural grain of development, to cultivate a love of learning and curiosity about God and His world.
Did you realize there are 5 crisp components to a CC day? 30 minute segments to keep it fun and engaging while building classical skills.
The 1st component- New Grammar is just that, a set number of pegs of information in 6 subjects when they are young, and their brains more readily able to memorize, on which to hang a framework to make connections as they mature, for greater understanding, knowledge and wisdom when they are ready. We keep the main thing the main thing in New Grammar, which is memorization, otherwise the memory peg gets lost.
Fine Arts – Like you mentioned above, four 6 week segments:
OiLs – Basics of Art
Music Theory using the tin whistle – which by the way, I always say is required because we use it every year.
Artists Study – learning about the artist and mimicking their work. Project choices are at the directors discretion. I always chose projects that mimicked the artist as closely as my budget allowed balanced with being fun and engaging.
Composers – this section focused on attention to detail. Listening closely for the various instruments introduced in Music Theory. Students also learn about the composers.
*During Fine Art we always made sure to guide conversations back to God
Hands on Science – rotation between experiments and experiences of God’s world! *Perfect time for God at the center of conversation!
Presentation- students choice to present on any topic. Show and Tell to get students accustomed to talking infront of a safe group, while practicing public speaking skills like eye contact volume, not fidgeting, etc…
And finally Review- Review of 6weeks of memory work in a fun and engaging way.
The above is just for prep thru 6th grade.
Students 4th-6th grade are maturing to handle a rigorous English grammar/writing program the 2nd half of the Community day called Essentials of the English Language. This leads them step by step from a key word outline to a 5 paragraph paper as well as learning English Grammar in an organized and comprehensive manner. They celebrate the work at the end of the year with a Faces of History report which displays the grasp of skills like research and an understanding of correct grammar usage.
Now, for what I actually joined CC for, the Challenge years!
Each year has a theme all building towards developing leaders who think for themselves and love God.
7th grade- Challenge A
Personal Investment builds Ownership
Highlights: Science Fair, Draw the world from memory, draw the body from memory
8th grade- Challenge B
Ownership Builds Discipline
Highlights: Defeating Darwinism, Mock Trial, Write their own short story to be published in the class anthology
9th grade- Challenge 1
Discipline Allows Freedom
Highlights: Learn to formally debate, pretend investment, study of original American Documents
10th grade- Challenge 2
Freedom Brings Choices
Highlights: Policy/Lincoln Douglas debates, write an Art Grant, think deeply about “How Should We Then Live”- based on art affecting culture and vice versa
11th grade- Challenge 3
Choices Bring Consequences
Highlights: More debates, Shakespeare, Am History, philosophy
12th grade- Challenge 4
Consequences Define Leaders
Highlights: Student led classes with Director to facilitate, Research, present and defend their Senior Thesis!
Now, I’ve facilitated class discussions where the students blew me away with the ideas that were grappled with and it was good! I am still in awe of the conversations CC kids have between each other, important topics to make a difference instead of being caught up in trivial fodder.
I’m sorry your “experience” wasn’t as beautiful as mine. I jumped in when my son was in Challenge 2 and went through 3 and 4. I wish I would have started earlier! But, my daughter is getting the full scope and sequence. It is truly an education that I could not have provided alone!
I’m glad your CC experience has been so great! I wouldn’t say mine was awful– like I said in my post, I loved our communities, and I left with no hard feelings towards anyone. However, I just can’t support an organization that pushes so much liability on churches and homeschool moms, asks people to “volunteer” for “ministry” to a million dollar corporation, and skirts the laws in many ways. In my opinion, there are far superior programs.
As far as my “experience” as you put it being limited (not sure why it’s in quotation marks, but I can only assume you’re implying that my experience isn’t valid), if you check out the Facebook group I referenced in the post, you’ll see that my experience is echoed by other homeschool parents from all across the United States. You’ll also find that some of those homeschool parents were tutors, directors, and even SRs and ARs. These were people who were all in.
CC is not a good fit for every family. Nor is every family a good fit for CC. Admittedly, there are some things that I struggle with in being part of a CC community. However, most of your testimony of CC is either slightly skewed or flat out dishonest. (I agree with you on new guides riddled with mistakes – grrrr!) I am entering my 13th year with CC, having tutored Foundations for 7 years, Chal I and II the last 2 years, graduated my first in May, and starting my last this fall. I have had my complaints. But being in leadership and spending many years with CC gives you a perspective into what they do. In other words, it’s easy to be an armchair quarter back.
I don’t have time to address all of the fallacious accusations in your post. But there is one. You mentioned a lack of focus on God and His Word. Well, in cycle 3 we memorize John 1:1-7 in English and Latin, cycle 2 is Ephesians chapter 6, and cycle 1, which just ended (my favorote) was Exodus 20:1-17. I mention that one last for emphasis, for in that passage is the commandment not to bear false witness.
I’m glad you are happy schooling outside of CC. But that doesn’t mean CC is wrong. I hope those interested will seek further than your testimony alone.
I’m sorry you feel like I’m being dishonest in my feelings, Stephanie. I didn’t say that there was no Biblical memorization, but that it seemed like such a small part. You’re right, there is some biblical memory work, but not nearly what I expected considering it’s lauded as “To Know God and Make Him Known.” In Claritas memory work, there is Bible work every week, not just for a couple of weeks out of the year. For us, this was a big thing– I want the Bible to be a priority. Also, I really don’t understand why there are history sentences about Buddha, Muslims, and Greek and Roman Gods, but not Jesus. I think that’s a terrible oversight.
Every reason you left mirrors every reason I’m having reservations about joining CC. I want to be part of something with my kids but your experience matches what my gut feels. Thanks for the well written review. I believe you helped confirm my “keep out” feeling.
I’m so happy to help, Melinda! I hope you’re able to find the community you desire for your kids, but a true community, not just a paid-for community.
I’m so glad you wrote this post. We were invited to join a CC group years ago and it sounded good, but when I started looking closely at what it was, it did not seem like memorizing things and paying tons of money were the direction we should go. This is a very informative post and I appreciate your honesty even though I’m sure it wasn’t easy to write.
Thanks for the positive comment, Kristi! This was an agonizing post to write, and one that took me about a year to write. I wanted to convey my feelings while also not allowing it to become too emotional. I also wanted to give a fair judgement about CC. I didn’t really want to write this post at all, but when I was looking into CC, I couldn’t find anything negative about it. Now I know that it’s because many people who have written honest reviews have been bullied into taking those reviews down. I want people who are looking into CC to see both sides of the company so they can make a more informed decision.
Same!
This is so spot on. I was a tutor for a few years there. I tried extra hard to make it easy on the parents in my room, but I loved having the moms there for the extra hands. But the business side of CC is lacking integrity in a major way. The first years I tutored, I was paid for the weeks I actually tutored. If I needed a substitute, the director paid them for the weeks I used them. That switched later. In my last year tutoring, while I was already feeling these things you mentioned, they changed it so that you got paid for every week, and had to pay a substitute directly when you used them. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? Well, we tutors got 1099s at the end of the year, which repotted we made a certain amount of money, and then I was taxed accordingly at tax time. But guess what? I didn’t actually make that money. I paid out of my own pocket to cover substitutes. They might have made more money than me if they subbed each week, but they were not given a 1099 by the director. So the tutors were effectively paying the subs’ taxes. And yes, you can write those costs off, but with the increase in standard deduction, you do not get that money back. Paying tutors as a 1099 employee is shady as anything, too. When you are told what your hours are, and how to do your job, you are an employee, not a contactor.
We finished the 19/20 school year. When I asked my director what CC would do if for some reason we were shut down (2020/2021 year), all she said was they hadn’t been told, but she was sure corporate would make it right. I absolutely wasn’t so sure after putting all of these other shady things together. So I decided to take a break that year. I was pregnant and just wasn’t willing to risk thousands of dollars for a maybe. Oh, and when we left, we didn’t hear from any of those wonderful friends anymore either. When you’re in, you’re in, but when you leave, you’re out. Even when I told my director I was taking the year off, I didn’t hear a thing back. Not a single word. So there I was, in the middle of a pandemic, pregnant, and the community I’d been a part of for 3 years was absent. It was tough going through the pregnancy isolated, but I felt worse for my daughter who had loved being a part of the group and no longer being invited to play dates or outside activities.
I’m so sorry you had that experience during your pregnancy, but what a blessing that you didn’t have to deal with the pandemic nightmare. I’ve heard horror stories about that year and CC.
I hope you’ve been able to find a community that will truly stick with you and your kids, no matter what curriculum you use.
Since being out of CC have you found a program that ACTUALLY incorporates God in the curriculum? Like so many i am seeing reply that was one of my selling points as well for joining. This coming up year will be my first year with CC, of course i would have just finished paying for all my kids programs when i found this post.
I’ve actually put together my own curriculum from a variety of sources, in order to focus our homeschool more on the things we think are important. Initially, when we first left CC, we did a year using Claritas. I definitely preferred Claritas to CC, since it has a 4 year history cycle instead of 3, and I felt like the math facts were much more usable than CC’s were. However, in the years since, I’ve found that I gravitate more and more towards a Charlotte Mason style approach to education, so we’re using less memorization of facts, and much more literature. If you’re wanting something similar to CC with more God in it, Claritas is great, though!
I just left Classical Conversations last year which was my first year in an official group though my second year doing it on my own. Our community did three performances. One was a nativity play another was in essentials history performance for the kids dress up as characters and give a speech is a biography and the audience guesses who they are. It was so much fun and the kids did it end-of-the-year celebration performance that was really funny. I just love the confidence that my kids got from doing presentations every week. My kids often quoted poetry or sing a song from a musical or recited Bible verses that we had memorized at home. Just doing homeschooling by ourselves we could not have done that. And at our community the teachers for the ones who pulled it all together bringing God to the center of every subject and drawing correlations. Were you using the online resources? I loved the sound box which has about 80 pages of curriculum that you can print at home. You don’t print all of them you just pick and choose for your child’s interest in each level. I had all kinds of science and history and music resources and I told you how to do it at home. They also had poetry readings and science videos that my kids loved. It’s a really great resource. I was an essentials tutor last year and I didn’t know anything about it and now I really learned so much about grammar. I thought it was a really awesome program. It challenged my kid but he was really proud of what he had done at the end. As the essentials tutor I had made a portfolio of all of their assignments for each student and gave it back to them at the end of the year so they could see how much they improved and it was truly astounding . I can see your guises point about corporate. But I think at the local level all the Christian homeschooling moms are on the level. Also the statistics for students outcomes are amazing. Classical Conversations has been around for a long time so they are able to track the success. Classical education is so amazing and even if Classical Conversations doesn’t do it purposely I still think that it is the best program .
There are definitely pluses to CC, but for me, the negatives at the corporate level made it a program I could no longer support.
As far as success, are you referring to the graduate surveys included in the catalogs? I do want to point out that the success that is tracked is completely voluntary (which will likely weed out any unsuccessful students, since who wants to brag about being unsuccessful?), and the last time I checked one of their graduate surveys, it was based off of around 25 students’ reports. That’s such a small survey result that we really can’t make any inference about CC based on it.
Thank you for the article. CC is everywhere in my community and I thought I was missing out on something. I never joined because of the cost. However, a lot of people seem to meet good friends in the CC community. I think that is the biggest pro.
I agree, the community aspect is definitely nice. Sadly, we found that most of the people that we thought were our friends while we were in CC have stopped being our friends now that we’re not. 🙁
Thanks so much for sharing your experiences. The post and these comments make me feel less alone. I also left our CC community right at the pandemic and I have a lot of the same issues you had. The curriculum was really incomplete despite the insistence that it wasn’t and repeating everything every 3 years seemed like such a waste of time. There were big holes in the curriculum like the omission of the Civil Rights movement, the Holocaust and of course the Bible. My husband is a science teacher so he especially found the science memory work and the science experiments very weak. I had homeschooled without CC for several years before joining and I felt like joining CC was way more work for me despite the fact that I was paying way more money too. I too despised the Practicum and thought they were a waste of time but my kids loved seeing their friends at camp. Basically I was paying a lot of money for friendship and community. However our time with CC ended during the pandemic when our CC community continued to meet together regularly despite our state’s public health laws. I know people have different opinions about COVID but I was really shocked that these Christian families were blatantly disobeying state and county laws with their kids in tow. When I brought it up with the director who I thought was a friend, she got very defensive and insinuated that I wasn’t being supportive of her. My kids and I ended up joining an independent study program with a public school district here and it is a much better fit. It was rough at the beginning. My kids were behind academically despite CC’s complete curriculum but I love their teacher who makes my job as mom and educator so much easier. I don’t have to pay for anything anymore and I can request special books and resources as needed for free. My kids are thriving and I’m glad I left when I did because my kids might have been even more behind. I wasn’t the only one from that CC community that left. That CC community now is half the size. I believe the families that remain are mostly anti-science. I do have a question though for those who have left CC. What do you say to friends who are still in the community? Do you still keep in touch with them? A lot of them still believe that CC is the best and only way to homeschool despite the obvious problems.
It’s so important to find a place where your kids can thrive. I’m glad to hear that yours are!
I’m not sure what others do, but I’ve tried to let the members of our former communities know that our choice had nothing to do with them, and was entirely about the corporation and curriculum. I’ll tell them that we loved our community, and we’d love to stay in community with them. I also let them know that if they’d ever like to sit down with me and talk through the issues I found, I’m happy to do so. Sadly, now that we don’t participate in community days, we don’t really feel included with the members of the community that we thought were our friends.
To know God and to make Him known!! Of course I was sold. Right?! I thought I finally found what I was looking for. Christ centered/based program OH I AM IN FOR SURE!!
We finished our first year of CC CYCLE 1 this year and I, along with the kiddos, learned so much geography and science in such a fun way. Bonus, in a classroom at a church.
However, I am contemplating on doing one more year (we are also a part of a charter school in which we do separate curriculum). I adore the group of homeschooling moms/tutors but GOD IS NOT THE CENTER.
I attended the Practicum yesterday and I just didn’t get it. The motto of TO KNOW GOD AND MAKE HIM KNOWN is a joke. I am not here to bash CC but don’t use GOD to suck in Christian homeschoolers.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR INSIGHT!!
I agree completely, Rachel. I really feel like they missed the boat on this one, because we really wanted there to be a lot more godly education in the program, but it’s just not there.
SO VERY THANKFUL you took the time to write down your experience with CC ! I am a homeschooling gramma and loving it !!!! We are currently using BJU Press Grade 1 and loving it . I have heard so many great things about CC . I am going to attend an info meeting next week . Currently we start every morning with a Bible lesson , Scripture memory and a hymn !!! So precious to start the day focused on Scripture and worship !!! Sounds like if we choose CC that will not be the focus .I will still attend the info meeting in order to meet other homeschooling families in our area but so far all my research into CC leads me right back where we are at … a truly Christ centered curriculum … BJU Press.
What a blessing it is to have a Christ centered curriculum! I hope you’re able to find the community you’re longing for, without feeling like you need to pay a lot of money for it!
We’re enrolling our soon to be 2nd grader in Foundation this coming school year. I understand your personal issues with CC but our reason is to get her used to public speaking, she’s an only child so we want her to experience doing academics with other kids, and “extra arm” on elective subjects. Is CC worth it for those reasons?
Also, I personally want to do the heavy lifting on math and language arts. I have solid curriculum on these two subjects and want them to be mainly under my control. Will I have enough leg room to do our own? I’m afraid CC will suck all our time and leave us with very little room to do our own Math and LA curriculum.
I did appreciate the skills my kids learned by having to do public speaking each week, so I understand. The truth is that you can defintely choose to do as little or as much as you’d like to do at home as far as CC is concerned. If you’re happy with the curriculum you’re using, you could definitely just use CC for the community days, without implementing it at home. In my opinion, you’d be better off joining a co-op, or starting a group where the kids could do presentations, instead of joining CC, because it would probably give you more of what you’re looking for at a fraction of the cost (or even free!).
I just this week took my little to an open house with CC. I haven’t researched any other homeschool curriculum but this one appealed to me being a Christian mom. We haven’t enrolled yet and I was looking over the application just a few minutes ago and decided to just do a quick search on the internet. Now I’m just sad/conflicted. It’s a very large homeschool group in my area. May I ask what you’re using now for your kiddos?
Thanks in advance for sharing this article/blog.
It was so disappointing for me, too, Heather. I really wanted to love it, and I did enjoy our community, but it came down to me not being able to support a corporation with shady business practices, and a subpar curriculum.
My sister is using– and loving– Sonlight. It’s a great option for open and go curriculum, though it is on the expensive side.
I’m using a mixture of curriculum, as I’ve found what works best for my kids. We use Math U See for math, and Fix It Grammar and IEW theme based writing for language arts (my youngest used First Language Lessons instead of Fix It Grammar and IEW). Each child is in their own levels for those.
For science, we do Berean Builders with all three kids together. History we also do together. We have used Story of the World for history, and this year we’re using America’s Story. History is my kids’ favorite subject, so we do a lot of it, and we use it to dig into geography as well. We also use history to inspire art projects, cooking experiences, and more.
I feel like I might be forgetting a subject, but I hope that helps!
Since we had desired community, we also went ahead and created our own. We’ve found about 4 other families that have similar aged kids, with similar interests and values, and we get the kids together for fun experiences. Things like Valentine’s parties, game nights, field trips, and book clubs. It’s been so much more fun, and it’s free!
The point of home schooling is for PARENTS to teach their kids. Not some agenda driven education system. It seems like public school is what you are looking for and other people to take an interest in your kids and their development. More or less, a babysitter that will teach your kids what you think they need to learn, then complain when it isnt what you expected.
Just my observations from your very long winded complaining session.
I’m not sure where you got that, but thanks for sharing your opinion! It does help if you can actually attack the argument instead of the person, though. I believe I gave a very calm, thought out opinion, without any name calling, so I’d appreciate the same from you. 🙂
MARK- The point of homeschool, for me, is to not put my kids in public school. Yet, I can not afford private school. Not all parents are teachers and not all parents have the knowledge or emotional energy to do it All. It takes a village. Do you homeschool Mark or does your wife do everything?
As I bang my head again over an assignment to write a four paragraph paper with my fourth grader who is currently enrolled in Essentials and Foundations, I am asking myself so many questions. Is it typically age-appropriate to require writing like this for 4th and 5th graders? No, not really. Is it possible? Yes. I am sure this type of workload is appropriate for some children. Is my child thriving? Hmmm. Not sure. I am her teacher. I can determine whether we do the complete or partial assignment or none of it, but my daughter feels quite a bit of pressure to turn an assignment in because all her friends are. How many other kids in our program cry and are overwhelmed weekly? Is this character-building? Am I instilling hard work and grit in my child or are we just missing the point of home education: lead my child to the next step (not leap ten steps ahead and expect them to peacefully be ok with that).
Reading your article does indeed make me uncomfortable with CC’s corporate practices. Our community is comprised of a large percentage of families from our church. My daughter loves the community. But am I just paying a lot of money for friends?
I have enjoyed the accountability and continuity of being on the same page as our co-op. The other mamas are fantastic humans. Our CC director leads with grace and efficiency.
I have already committed to and signed up for another year with the proviso that all deposits are non-refundable. My oldest wants to return because she doesn’t want to make yet another change. I get that. Me too. I like knowing what’s going on and getting a handle on things. The CC memory work has become our Morning Basket so to say and helped our daily rhythm be more sane than past years. I am 5 years into this home education gig. The first four were with a virtual school (provided curriculum and I taught) and this past year was with CC.
Looking ahead at Challenge, I love the idea of rigorous work and incorporating Classical traditions, but I am not a fan of thinking about my student staying up to all hours of the night and stressing over assignments. I did that in highschool. That wreaked havoc on my joy and health.
You have given me much to consider. Thank you.
Best advice? Walk away and do not look back. Once your child enters Challenge, it is a cold bucket of water to the face. You are made to feel as though you should not sit in with your student and the work load is a recipe for complete burnout. Yes, my student was more than capable in class, however , guess what? I am still the official teacher of record. Not the director. CC plays games with titles and dodges responsibilities in numerous areas. Yes, they use churches to avoid taxes. Yes, they set their own prices for Challenge students as far as supplies and you must pay it. Our director charged $75 in Challenge A for something that cost less than $10 to print and with a class at the maximum amount, he made quite a profit. It continues on and you, as the parent, are slowly made to feel like you need to step aside because the student should be responsible. While I am not arguing that either way, YOU are still the parent and the one who has to ensure that YOUR student comprehends and is knowledgeable of what has been taught on one day for 45 minutes. It’s both too much and not enough.
Again, walk away while you can. Good luck.
my middle child went through CC 17 years ago. A friend invited the founder and I to lunch and we looked at the program as we were simultaneously thinking of developing our own. The work was done and we knew the teachers underwent training. As the middle of six children, I needed more time with the younger ones.
The Challenge program seemed more than I could provide. This son wanted a career in Physics. I had no time to give him. Year after year he completed the math and “passed”. When he took the placement test for math at the community college, he was told none of his high school math counted. He had to start with Algebra I. He took a LOT of math, went on to get a PhD in Physics and is doing well. It was a waste of time and money. He did love the Shakespeare performance and still is active in his church but the Christian worldview class did not help him navigate current world views. It did keep him focused on learning to achieve his dream. Some get the book as a foundation for their co-op.
The difficulty overall with home education is that each mom is head of their own unique education program and as the children get older, there is a greater likelihood of missing key information. Start early in a hybrid school or co-op.
I’m sorry to hear that, Mary. We quit before my kids got into Challenge, but I’ve heard from many moms that the science and math are below grade level. It’s unfortunate when someone has paid so much, to end up having it not be enough.
This post was very helpful. Having worked in a for-profit education sector for years, I can say that although that typically leads to more resources available, it truly does mean the bottom line is the main focus. That alone is enough for me to stay away. I do think the songs are helpful and found many on youtube. We plan to incorporate those into our current curriculum. Also, I wondered if we purchased the foundations book (the $100 one), if we could use it as our curriculum from home, without joining CC? I didn’t want to do it because of the co-op day for many reasons, but the curriculum itself seemed like a good approach. Please let me know! 🙂
I love hearing your viewpoint! The Foundations book is available for purchase and use for any families, whether they’re in CC or not. The Essentials and Challenge guides do require your child to be enrolled to purchase, However, if you’re looking for input, you might want to check out Claritas memory work from Cross Seven. I really appreciated the 4 year history cycle instead of 3 year, and I feel like more usable memory work is included over CC’s foundations guide.
My response to this post , respectfully, would be that in terms of persuading to the facts you present, you have no viable sources to back up your statements. Are we to take this on your authority? This argument does not stand as it ks written. As we learn in debate, what is the authority for the accusations of lack of integrity on the part is corporate? This may be true, but am I to take a bloggers word for it!? What is the source to know what you purport is, in fact, truth, rather than conjecture or sour grapes? If I need to make a decision for my family, I would say that this article is lacking in proof and full of anecdotes and opinions, not facts and valid sources. Can you point to sources so that we may fact check these claims at least?
Pardon my typos. Phone typing is never ideal.
For me it replaced the bottom of the barrel education my kids were getting. I felt then as I feel now the English program was solid.we had to out sorce a spelling book but the dictionary I purchased purchased for $60 had all the words we needed. My kids had been in a private school and we paid the amount CC was asking each month. How ever when we pulled them out the school they called child protective services. The humiliation was excruciating and the trauma still lives with us. As we stuck it out we learned Latin. If a parent is interested in their kids education anyone can learn how to make soap as a science experiment or study the stars. I pushed my kids to over come dysgravia, dyslexia, and ADHD. We learned how to ignore the cobwebs and how to cook in a Crock-Pot for our dinners that were late many nights. No my kids sat me down and after almost 6 years revealed they no longer believed in God. I wanted them to be closer to him and wile their was a incident with another kid who became sexually explicit with my daughter, they realized the fallacies of human beings trying to create a community but abusing each other with the word when things didn’t go their way. We all need to remember children are fragile at the beginning,like new relationships in a church. I was attacked verbally by the leader of our group but I have thicker skin. I didn’t agree with her and in my opinion she was always attacking someone . But that didn’t get in my way. The real learning happened at home. Where we felt safe. We tried things beyond CC. Finding what you enjoy in life is what learning is for. It’s sad that people didn’t ask for sells tax and some director’s got in trouble with the IRS. The Mom that helped me navigate the beginning of our homeschooling experience, when all my family and friends told us not to do it, I can never pay her for her kindness how she rebuilt my confidence that was god’s blessing, and Grace, true Grace. Our country needs Grace and selfless kindness. Joy needs to rejoin our lives. I won’t let the thing’s that didn’t go well rob me of the things that did go well. If criminal behavior by a company happened. Remember your scripture handling it swiftly call them out. All those people who tried to get me not to home school they are homeschooling now . Take pride in your accomplishments you don’t have to be an entrepreneur, and I guess you don’t have to be a Christian , but you should at least be a human being . Teach your children how to be a human being. kindness never hurt anybody and it’s not a weakness in fact I think it’s a badge of honor and we could do with a lot more honorable people out there.
It sounds like you really went through a rough time! I’m glad that you had that other mom that helped you navigate the waters of homeschooling. What a blessing that is!
Unfortunately, many people have reached out to CC, asking them to change policies so that they’re in line with the law. Not only have they not changed, they went so far as to threaten to sue several of the homeschooling moms who reached out to them. I wish they would just do the right thing and choose to operate their business ethically, but it’s been many years of people begging them to do that, so it doesn’t seem likely. 🙁
Sherry, I wouldn’t want you to take me at my word, but are you simply taking CC at their word? Either way, all homeschool parents ought to be doing their own research into this. I DID link to the errata for both Foundations guide and the cartography book, so you’re welcome to check out the fact that they do in fact have a lot of mistakes in their products.
I DID link to both a CPA’s opinion about the tax issues, as well as several articles from law firms about the legality of using volunteers in a for-profit business.
I tried to keep this article as succinct as possible, and even then it turned out much longer than I wanted it to be. There are so many other things I could have delved into, and perhaps I will, but they’ll require articles of their own. Thank you for disagreeing respectfully, I really appreciate it, and I hope you have a lovely week!
I do not believe that the churches could lose their NPO status as the directors are not financially benefitting from the CC meetings. They’re providing space free of charge, with no expectation of receiving monetary or other benefit, to a community organization (even if the licensing fees paid by participants benefit a for-profit entity). Many, many homeschool co-ops and commonwealths are formed using for-profit assistance for creation and licensing (New Commonwealth Schools, etc) and they also meet in churches. See: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/How%20to%20Lose%20Your%20Tax%20Exempt%20Status.pdf
I appreciate this post and your honesty, I enjoyed reading your perspective. I just wanted to provide the above information as it would be a shame if churches and other community organizations with NPO status shied away from assisting homeschooling co-ops for fear of losing their status as that’s not really a concern unless they’re benefitting in some way (which they don’t with CC or other co-ops/commonwealths, that’s why they don’t offer to compensate churches for the space… they can’t).
Actually you are very wrong. The original poster is correct. My father is a pastor and yes, you can complete lose your tax exempt as well as be personally sued should a child be on property and be hurt while having a profit class going on. The directors are paid a salary and percentage from the tuition which means they are financially benefiting. I’ve actually tutored myself with CC so know the contracts personally.
soooooooooo well said. CC is full of false advertisements. Christian, Classical, Community. Two of which are big lies. Not Christian; there is no hymns of scripture memory. Not Classical,, more like neo-classical. Weak memory pegs that are totally unconnected to anything real for the kids. Subjects are not even integrated most of the time. Community,, only if you’re willing to pay a tremendous amount of money!!! Yep, leaving CC was the best thing we also did as a family!! So much better now, I feel so bad for all of those still stuck in CC : (
I agree! The freedom we’ve felt since we left has been such a breath of fresh air in our homeschool. I loved the people in our communities, but I don’t regret leaving a single bit.
We are at a small private school, which is decent.
My daughter is struggling with learning to read, but scores at the top of her class in reading comprehension and word recognition?!?!
We have a lot of past family trauma which could be affecting her learning. So I thought, “let’s homeschool “ but the idea of putting together a curriculum and being fully responsible for their education scares me.
I have heard nothing but great things about CC, and I love the classical approach and higher expectations. I feel Americans and expected to learn less than Europeans anyways.
Also, CC does not seem expensive at all, not am I concerned about volunteering as we do that at all private school and we are required to fund raise.
I am disappointed to read this review because i was looking forward to my children actually learning.
Could your experience be based on your location?
I don’t believe that my experience is location based, because CC is very much about having the same thing at every community, so they have a lot of oversight. I suppose that my feelings of it being too high-priced might be location based, since there are a lot of co-ops that are free in my area.
I have actually fallen in love with Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy since leaving CC. In truth, it was what came naturally to me, but I felt like it wasn’t enough, which is why we ended up joining CC in the first place. I just didn’t know that it had a name, and was actually a real educational philosophy. Basically, it’s lots of reading, orally narrating what was read, and spending a lot of time outdoors studying nature. For the early years I think it’s ideal. As kids get older, the narrations change to written narrations. I’m not sure if that’s something you’d be interested in, but I just wanted to share that with you. I hope you are able to find something that works well for your daughter!
Your article does a great job summarizing several things to consider with CC.
If you work for CC
–in writing, you sign something saying you’re not actually working for them – you’re working for the local director/SR, who is “independent of CC”, although this is blatantly false in actual practice – it just removes all liability from CC–,
there are other tremendous eye-openers that will make you question the ethics of CC. I worked for CC for several years, and wrestled more each year as they seemed to become more money-focused (behind the scenes and in training) and less people-focused. They seem progressively less transparent or honest. Talking to people ‘up the chain of command’ was not productive, answers were not given, just excuses or blank responses.
Another thing about CC – they often just copy other curricula (with permission – you’ll see the other curricula listed in a tiny section of their materials). “Everything You Need To Know About…” series – You’ll be amazed if you see the majority of Foundation’s material sentences from those books. Except – the books give in-depth information – visuals, explanations for how/why/when, etc. Shurley English is credited for the Essentials program’s grammar, and IEW runs the writing portion 100% – CC doesn’t contribute much themselves, it seems, except the idea to run it as a community (which we like). Regarding Shurley, though, it is easier to understand and has a much better flow than how CC decided to “organize” it. CC turned it much more complicated to read/understand/practice than Shurley.
Most recently, at the Challenge levels, CC is replacing decent books with new books that CC has written – that are truly unimpressive. CC bookstore makes even more money with this change – you can’t purchase the books at a different christian supplier – you have to support CC alone. Example – They stripped away the subject “Current Events” (most people’s favorite subject, according to online forums) and replaced it with a simple reader about ‘American Heroes’ that feels as if it’s at the 4th grade reading level (includes people like George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison). 14 year olds are now going back to reading about basic people we learned about in grade school, at the expense of ‘Current Events’ discussions. After reading the stories each week, the students are to answer the question “Was ______ a hero?”.
I’ll stop. I could write a book on the ways I feel CC has been deceptive and profit-focused at the expense of the people, but it won’t stop those who desperately need community and have little options.
Thanks so much for sharing about your experiences with CC, Marie. I have seen all these same things, and it really saddens me. I truly feel that CC was originally created to help homeschooling moms, but it has evolved into something full of greed. I know for myself, the amount of freedom we’ve felt since leaving CC has been amazing. I have absolutely no regrets.
Marie, I was hoping to ask you about the “Everything You Need To Know About…” series. After reading your comment, I went to research those books. Are those series the “Everything You Need To Know About Homework Series” by Anne M. Zeman, or are they the “Everything You Need To Know In One Big Fat Notebook” series? I am sincerely interested so that I can utilize them for my kids. I also looked up Shurley English. I can’t wait to use their materials from their YouTube channel.
Kayla, I’m not sure if Marie will see this, so I thought I’d answer. The books she’s referring to are by Anne Zeman, and published by Scholastic. The ones that CC originally “borrowed” information from are cheap to buy used. I’m finding them on AbeBooks for about $4 each, and that includes shipping.