Former schoolteacher: Homeschooling ‘challenged me to redefine success’ in education 

A former public-school teacher thought she knew how to measure educational progress – by “standards, benchmarks, and measurable outcomes” – until she started homeschooling her own children.

“I had to unlearn the idea that rigor requires constant measurement,” wrote Nicole Schildt, a mother of six, in an essay for Business Insider.  

“I had to let go of the belief that learning only counts if it can be assessed. Most uncomfortably, I had to confront how tightly my own sense of worth had been tied to productivity and performance.”

As homeschooling continues to expand nationwide, more educators are coming to the same conclusion: giving students freedom and flexibility to learn at their own pace, often without one-size-fits-all rubrics, makes learning more effective.

“Success … looks like a child who asks better questions, not just faster ones,” Schildt concluded. “It looks like confidence built over time, not urgency driven by comparison. It looks like learning that bends to fit the learner, rather than the learner bending to fit the system.”

‘No grades at the kitchen table’ 

Schildt, who taught public school for more than 10 years, describes the first time she questioned whether “learning might be happening in ways my old definitions couldn’t measure.” 

After printing a math worksheet for her son one night, she watched the next morning as he “stared at the page for 10 minutes before pushing it aside in frustration.”

“Later that afternoon, I watched him outside with his brothers arguing over batting averages and calculating which player had the better on-base percentage,” she recalled. “No worksheet. No rubric. Just numbers, curiosity, and a lot of debate.”

Because of Schildt’s classroom training, the lack of quantifiable measurements “felt unsettling” at first.

“There were no grades at the kitchen table. No standardized tests waiting at the end of the year. No pacing guides or bell schedules to keep us on track.”

However, over time she remembered circumstances “that never fit neatly into a rubric when I was in a traditional classroom.”

She gives the examples of a student “lingering over a book” out of curiosity, not compulsion, and another “explaining a concept back to me in her own words, not because it would be tested, but because she wanted to understand it.”

“Progress unfolded unevenly, sometimes invisibly, and often in ways I couldn’t chart,” she admitted.

“That lack of measurable proof forced me to sit with a harder question: Had I been mistaking structure for success?”

Ultimately, her homeschooling experience “challenged me to redefine success not as something to be proven, but as something to be lived,” Schildt concluded.

“As an educator and a parent, I no longer believe success is something you can always measure in real time. Sometimes it shows up years later, in ways no test could predict.”