Unschooling with Geri Lane: Freedom with A Framework

On November 3, thirty-six states choose a governor. Eight elect the person who runs their state education department. Two to three dozen ballot measures touch schools directly. Most of that won’t make the national news, but it will reach a classroom near you faster than anything Congress does.

In this episode I walk through the five sets of people who actually decide what happens in a school day: the governor, the chief state school officer, the state board, the legislature, and you. Then I follow how a vote in November turns into standards, tests, textbooks, and class sizes the following fall.

Then there’s the “to a point” part. Homeschooling gets your kid out of the building, but homeschool law is state law, written by the same legislatures on this ballot.

Finally, I cover what’s sitting inside this election for kids who are curious: the yard signs, the state capitol, the sample ballot, term limits, and the ads. None of it is a plan or a voter guide, and I won’t tell you how to vote. It’s just what’s down the road if your kid asks, so you can follow instead of stalling.

Read the companion essay on my Substack.

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In this episode, we look at what “art” usually means when it does make it into a classroom. Sometimes it’s thirty identical reindeer ornaments from a kit. Sometimes it’s copying Van Gogh’s brushstrokes, with no time left to use that technique on something of your own. Both are copying. The part that gets cut is creation.

Then we walk through where the arts already show up in an unschooling home: the kid who’s been a cat since breakfast, the beetle drawing that sends them back outside to count legs, the living-room show, the picture book that tells you where to look, and the song Grandma sings in the car. There’s no plan here and nothing to buy. It’s just what to recognize so you can follow when it happens.

Based on this week’s Substack essay from Geri Lane, retired educator and author of Freedom with a Framework: A Parent-Friendly Guide to K–5 Standards.

If you want to see what the arts standards, and all the others, actually say for K–5, in plain English, that’s the reason I wrote Freedom with a Framework: A Parent-Friendly Guide to K–5 Standards (under revision; it will be back soon). You don’t have to follow them. You should get to read them.

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In May, South Carolina banned grade floors — the policies that require a teacher to enter a minimum score instead of a zero. The law took effect this school year. Texas did something similar in 2009, and Harvard capped A’s at about twenty percent of a class two days after South Carolina’s governor signed.

This episode is the audio companion to this week’s essay.

It covers the part I’d rather not have said out loud: health was on the report card in my district, health was not taught, and there was a box on the form that had to have a letter in it. So I put a letter in it. Every teacher I knew did.

It also covers the thing that happened to me as a student — honor roll, principal’s list, journalism team, drill team, and then a transfer and a remedial placement that nothing about me had changed to earn.

And it gets to the point of all of it, which is that the question people aim at homeschooling parents — how do you know your child is actually learning — is a fair question that the schools have not answered either. Research has found that parents trust report card grades more than test scores. Of course they do. The grade came from a person who knows the child.

Near the end there are three things I watch for instead of a grade. None of them are assignments. You are probably already seeing all three and not counting them.

Roughly 10 minutes. Read the full essay here: South Carolina Banned Minimum Grades in May. I Was an Honor Roll Student Who Couldn’t Do the Work.

If you want to see what the standards behind all of this actually say — what a child is expected to know in K-5, in plain English — that’s the whole reason I wrote Freedom with a Framework: A Parent-Friendly Guide to K-5 Standards (Under revision; it will be back soon). You don’t have to grade against them. You should get to read them.

Episode two in my series on the free resources I used in the classroom. What Quill does, where it starts, and where it stops.

A parent on Threads asked me for a free English language arts resource the way I’d given one for math. The honest answer is that language arts isn’t one subject. It’s reading and it’s writing, and they need different tools. This episode is the writing half.

Quill.org is a nonprofit with more than a thousand free literacy activities. Not a free tier, not a trial. The whole library is free, the code is open source, and the only paid product is a reporting dashboard built for school districts. What makes it work is sentence combining: a child takes two or three choppy sentences, folds them into one, and gets feedback on the sentence she actually built rather than on a multiple choice answer.

Also covered: why a child can read three books a week and still write in fragments, why Quill’s floor is around third grade and what a six-year-old needs instead, how to set up an account at home when the site only offers teacher logins, and the student I still think about, who couldn’t finish a sentence and later wrote his own admission essay without help.

Reading support is next.

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Forty-six states adopted Common Core. A dozen renamed it. What almost nobody tells you is what happened to everything downstream of that decision — the curriculum on the convention table, the test your child sits, the money some states are now offering you to educate at home.

In this episode: the research that laid nine states’ rewritten standards next to the originals and found most of the pages untouched, why a publisher prints one national textbook and swaps a single alignment sheet for each state’s market, and what a nationally normed test is actually measuring when it reports your nine-year-old’s score as a percentile.

Adapted from my essay, “Your State Repealed Common Core. The Standards on the Page Mostly Stayed.”

Nothing here is a directive. It’s a map of the ground, so you know what you’re holding when somebody hands you a document with your state’s name on the cover.

Twenty-five years on, most schools still skip September 11th. There’s a pacing guide, and it isn’t on it. Homeschooling and unschooling families don’t have that problem.

This episode is what’s actually inside the day. The boatlift that moved up to half a million people off Manhattan in nine hours, which almost nobody teaches. The firefighters going up while everyone came down. A picture book about September 12th written by a class of first graders in Missouri. And the grandparent at your kitchen table who remembers exactly where they were standing.

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Also the practical part — what to say to a five-year-old, why being precise about who did it protects a child rather than frightens them, and how to decide about the footage. I taught third grade for twenty-five years and showed it to my class. I’ll tell you what I knew about those kids that made that possible, and why the call is yours.

No lesson plan. Nothing to execute.

Get the book: September 12th: We Knew Everything Would Be Alright (#ad)

The written version is on the Substack. This isn't a reading of it — we get into a few things the essay doesn't.

Labor Day's on every calendar and in every store window, so your kids are going to catch pieces of it whether or not you bring it up. This episode is about what's actually sitting inside the holiday — and what to do when a child asks about it, which mostly amounts to answering the question and getting out of the way.

I go through the history first. Ten thousand workers marching through New York City in September 1882, most of them giving up a day's pay to be there. The strange fortnight in 1894 when Grover Cleveland signed Labor Day into federal law and then sent federal troops to break the Pullman strike days later. The fact that we built a whole national holiday and still can't agree who thought of it. And the fifty-six-year gap between workers asking for an eight-hour day and getting one in 1938.

Then the part I think gets told wrong. Children working wasn't invented by the factory — for most of human history, kids learned by working beside adults who had a stake in what became of them. What the mills broke was that second half. The owner didn't know the child's name.

Which is where my own story comes in. My mother learned dog grooming as an apprenticeship because she couldn't afford to have our standard poodle groomed. Then she lost her job and started a business in my brother's bedroom, and all of us worked in it. I was eight. I designed the flyers, answered the phone, fielded complaints, booked the schedule, and by ten or eleven I was keeping the books. Nobody in that house said the words "standards-aligned." It was a bedroom full of wet dogs.

There's also a practical thread for anyone weighing whether homeschooling is even possible: for a lot of families, the home business is the reason it works. Not the philosophy — the logistics. Somebody's already home, already working, and the children are already there.

In this episode:

The 1882 parade, and the arithmetic hiding in "ten thousand people"

June 1894 — the law and the strike, and why both are true at once

Peter J. McGuire or Matthew Maguire, and the receipt we lost

1938, and the gap between asking and getting

What the mills actually broke

My brother's bedroom, and what a child learns running a phone

Why the home business is what makes homeschooling possible for many families

What this looks like on a real Monday, which is nothing like a lesson plan

The full essay is on the Substack if you'd rather read it.

If you want to see what the standards behind all of this actually say — the chronology, civics and economics language for K-5, in plain English — that's the entire reason I wrote Freedom with a Framework: A Parent-Friendly Guide to K-5 Standards. You are already doing most of them every day; you just don't know it yet. Get the book free when you subscribe to my Substack.

Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville at 80.

I taught for twenty-five years, and in all that time I never once got to teach a week like this one. Something enormous would happen on a Tuesday, the kids would come in carrying it, wanting to talk — and I had a textbook to be on a particular page of by Friday. I could give them four minutes. Sometimes ten, and I felt the clock the whole time.

You don’t have that problem. That’s the whole reason I made this one.

In this episode I walk through what’s actually sitting inside her life. Geography in the East Tennessee mountains she grew up in, one of twelve kids in a house that didn’t have electricity at first. Chronology in a life that started there and went on long enough for her to hear her own songs come out of a phone. Economics in the night she told Elvis Presley no, because his manager wanted half her publishing rights — the decision that broke her heart in 1974 and made her a fortune when Whitney Houston recorded the song nineteen years later. Civics in the Imagination Library, still mailing a book a month to children under five. And a song about a coat sewn out of rags that does more work than most primary sources ever will.

I also spend a few minutes on the harder part — how to answer a small child’s questions about death in plain words, and what to do when your child doesn’t want to talk about it at all. Some never do, at any age. That isn’t a gap you have to fill.

None of this is a plan. There’s nothing here to execute. It’s just what’s down the road, so you’ll recognize it if your kid heads that way.

Full written piece at authorgerilane.substack.com.

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A Classroom Management Expert Just Made the Case for Unschooling — And He Doesn’t Even Know It

A popular classroom management blogger recently asked: What happens when students don’t care about consequences? His answer accidentally reveals everything wrong with traditional school — and everything right about structured unschooling.

In this episode, we break down why even the best teachers can’t create the learning environment children deserve when they’re trapped under textbook publishers, mandatory pacing guides, bell schedules, superintendent pressure, and classrooms of 28 kids with one curriculum built for nobody in particular.

When you remove those constraints — when one child, one curious mind, and the entire world become the classroom — consequences stop being necessary. Because the learning experience itself becomes the motivation.

That’s not a theory. That’s Freedom with a Framework.

What you’ll hear:

* Why consequence systems are a patch on a structural problem

* The six institutional barriers blocking even great teachers

* What structured unschooling actually looks like — and how it delivers standards-aligned results

* How Braindance Publications builds curiosity-led learning that’s documentable and defensible

For homeschooling and unschooling parents who already knew traditional school wasn’t the answer — and want the framework to prove their kids are thriving.

Keywords: unschooling, homeschool curriculum, structured unschooling, STEAM learning, homeschool standards, Freedom with a Framework, Braindance Publications, child-led learning, homeschool podcast, Geri Lane

Worried about preparing your child for the future? You are already teaching them every day. Let me show you how to translate everyday tasks into parent-friendly Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. From counting fruit salad patterns to calculating recipe ratios, I show you how easy and affordable hands-on learning can really be.

Ready to swap public school anxiety for homeschooling confidence? Subscribe to my Substack at

authorgerilane.substack.com for your free bonus lessons. Visit GeriLane.com to explore my homeschooling and unschooling resources.