Any school program that relies on true/false and multiple-choice questions and answers is basically useless for students and parents who want to assess student progress. It is great for teachers: machine grading. It is part of dumbed-down, high-priced classroom education.
Fill-in-the-blank exams end when we are out of school. This should tell us that these exams are for teachers, not students.
Here are the three skills that formal education should provide: critical thinking, writing, and public speaking. Courses should be structured in terms of a set of specialized criteria, but all of the courses should teach these three skills.
If you cannot think clearly, or write a clear report, or defend yourself verbally in front of a group, you are going to sit in the back of the bus.
The Good Curriculum requires a weekly writing assignment in every social studies and humanities course. After your children completes the TGC courses, they will have mastered the basics of writing: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
The students are also expected to set up a blog site where they publish these weekly papers. (We still call them papers.)
Parents can see that their children are improving, course by course, year by year. How? By reading the papers.
This assumes that parents are actually reading the essays each week. If they aren’t, then they are imitating classroom teachers, but without true/false, multiple-choice exams.
The Good Curriculum is 98% self-taught. The 2% is for parents to read the weekly essays.
No matter what curriculum you use, require an essay every week per non-math course from the sixth grade on. The student will master this crucial skill by graduation day. Practice makes perfect.
Here is the simple procedure for success:
(1) read well-written material;
(2) write a weekly essay in each non-math course;
(3) have a parent who knows how to read correct the essays.
If parents slack off, students will tend to slack off.