Resource Description
Calvert Homeschool offers self-paced learning for students with step-by-step lesson plans for parents. Calvert Education was acquired by Edgenuity as part of their Glynlyon purchase in 2019 and currently offers mainly digital curriculum (K-2 is still print-based). According to their website, the new curriculum includes:
- Best-of-class digital resources
- Step-by-step lesson plans
- An online learning platform with 24/7 access to lessons, assessments, progress tracking tools, and more
For grades K-12, families can enrolls students in the accredited Calvert Academy online. For grades 3-12, families can sign up at more affordable rate to use the Calvert online curriculum without enrolling in the academy. For grades K-2, a colorful print-based curriculum is available for purchase.
Website: Calvert (may contain affiliate links)
(102 Reviews)
Before investing in any homeschooling resources, please read "How to Choose the Best Homeschool Curriculum."
Contributor Reviews
Reviews are solely the opinions of the contributor.
I loved Calvert. I homeschooled my daughter from 1st grade thru 7th grade using their ATS and Calvert's curriculum of books and online resources. It was such a warm, loving experience. And than....it went corporate. They sold out to a cold corporate entity. No more books, no more discounts to the poor, single moms with no support from their dead beat dads. Even their website is shallow, grey and cold. It's so depressing to lose such a wonderful friend to my childs education. Prices skyrocketed so only the rich can afford to homeschool. Good-bye Calvert! You'll be belly up in a few years as your CEO's collect all the money they can, realize it's not working and either sell out or go bankrupt like so many other failed corporations. Ya don't need a crystal ball to foresee that one coming.
Cons: Online only, not homeschooling, is odysseyware with calverts name on it. Bad customer service.
Grades Used: K, 2
We started our Homeschooling journey in fall 2018. We used it for 2nd and K. I liked the interface but the books provided were overpriced through Calvert. They could have been purchased for half the price on amazon.
It was very English heavy and was too much work at times. The grammar and spelling was weak or non existent. I had to supplement with other curriculum. The books provided very little reading and really varied from too easy and short to too advanced. I ended up using the same assignment for different books through another curriculum because they would ask you to read the same book 5-6 times. It was ridiculous.
The science interactive components no longer work and tech has been working on it forever. They said they fixed it then said the email was sent in error. They provide links for videos and the speaker has such a heavy accent it is heard to understand. They rely on things that are free. It still doesn’t work. It is very dry and boring. Social studies is also very boring. We ditched it.
Health was boring and the videos were miserable to listen to. The cadence of the speaker was so boring and monotonous I can’t believe people pay for that. Art was ok.
The worst part of all of this is I worked out all the kinks and knew how to make it work for us and without notice they sold the company and the new company won’t even admit it. THEY WERE BOUGHT BY NORTHWELD/GLYNLYON/OFYSSEYWARE. The treatment of the customers is horrible and the lack of transparency. They lied and still don’t admit they aren’t even the same company.
I sat through the seminar on the academy and it is ODYSSEYWARE down to the teachers having email from the company. It is no different than odysseyware. They read a boring passage and answer questions. They get to talk to the teacher but they raise their hand and wait their turn like a real class. Parents aren’t even needed apparently. It is OW with calverts name slapped on it. They have no idea what the homeschool option is. Still in development but based on customer service, I doubt it is good.
We are piecing together a curriculum next year. OLD CALVERT IS DEAD. They still won’t admit it.
Cons: digital only, terrible pacing, very little reading, science is a joke, awful customer service
Grades Used: 1,2,3,4,5
I have used Calvert for my two children for the past three years. This year will be my last with them for many reasons. Partly because our educational needs have changed but mostly because Calvert is unrecognizable from when I started using it. I started with Calvert because it was well organized and completely offline. I did not want my children on the internet all day. Without notifying their customers (I found through some online sleuthing), they have gone completely digital starting 2019. I am still using the paper workbooks and textbooks from last year but those will no longer be available if you buy now or in the future. I don't like that they are going only digital but what I like even less is they didn't say a word about it- if I hadn't done my own research (checking on glassdoor.com to read how everybody who works there hates it so much) I would have repurchased the curriculum for next year. Besides the massive change to online only, the quality of materials has gone down significantly. The pacing of the math curriculum is maddening- speeding through multiplication (2 weeks only for third grade) and crawling through basic geometry that most kids would know in first grade. Also, the customer service has gone to complete pot this year. In the past, if I had a problem, I could call and get the help I needed often in one phone call. Now, good luck getting anyone on the phone and forget leaving your information, no one will ever call you back. It's a shame that they have gone downhill so quickly- I believe the massive changes are mostly due to the fact that they have added thousands of charter schools to their programs. And again, they didn't inform me of this, I had to find out myself. I am switching to Sonlight- a program I know that I can trust not to change on a whim and leave me to find out on my own. Don't waste your money.
Cons: unrecognizable from the Calvert a few years prior. complete waste of time and money. zero workbooks. zero response from customer service after numerous complaints. no flow.or freedom in lessons. actually quit using it. spent $2500 on a headache.
Grades Used: 2nd and 8th this year. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th in the past
Calvert was great in years past but has completely changed its format and has only become convoluted and cumbersome at best. when i reached out to Calvert with my utter frustration and disappointment they responded with an explanation of how to "navigate portals" and that I must not understand how to work their new system and find the materials embedded in the lessons. the truth is much more simple. their entire new system is inane. just dumb. they ruined a good thing and offer no apologies and certainly not a refund. we spent $2500 on 6 library books, a massive headache, and brain pop jr. we spent weeks trying to tough it out. Luckily, this is not my first year homeschooling and i have enough of my own materials and experience to draw from, as well as some Calvert (actual) textbooks from years past. awful curriculum, awful customer service, awful experience.
Update to my November review.
Highly inappropriate materials have been removed from the daily assignments, but are still accessable through the curriculum -as the option to click on them pops up after student views other history videos used in daily assignments.
Cons: See Below!
Grades Used: 5,6,8,9,10 (Skipped 7th)
My wife and I ...and our daughter, LOVE Calvert homeschool. My daughter has been attending for about 5 years... She is in High School Honors classes and just turned 13. She is doing very well. imagine my disgust this morning to find out, by accident, that THEY HAVE SOLD THEIR HOMESCHOOL DIVISION without any notification to parents or students.. and information is not being given to us now that we know.. They say, "They aren't able to share the details." WHAT!!! My kid has been going here for 5 years and planned to graduate from here... Parents need to know WHO the school was sold to, what changes will be taking place - if teachers will remain .. Or if we need to find other schools to attend next year. This late in the school year will make it almost impossible to find an alternative school. I'm furious at the secrecy the irresponsibility of how the school is handling this. They are giving parents NO information.
Cons: Expensive and antiquated technology lessons
Grades Used: K-7
We used Calvert with 2 kids—from kindergarten-7th grade. We tried to order 8th grade today and were told it is now an entirely online curriculum. As inconsistent as their online platform is now for HOmeschoolers, I cannot imagine forcing my kids entirely online. We are jumping ship to Moving Beyond the Page.
Grades Used: k - 6, since changes 4th and 6th
We have used Calvert for 5 years prior to this year. I thouroughly enjoyed the curriculum until this year. They totally revamped the program for the 2018-2019 school. While I understand that there is bound to be problems with such a large overhaul, that is not my concern. The content is. In my 6th graders SS unit, I don't know how to say this discretely, there was content saying Catherine the Great of Russia died tring to have sex with a horse (not our first problem with highly inappropriate materials). Obviously I do not recommend Calvert Homeschool and am currently trying to figure out what I am going to do for the rest of the school year.
Cons: Too expensive, not a complete curriculum, lacking old Calvert quality
Grades Used: 3rd and 5th this year, K-8th previously
My family has been using the Calvert homeschool curriculum, grades 3 and 5, for the 2018-19 school year for almost 2 months now, and I am ready to throw what there is of it in the trash and start again. We will not be using it again next year. A little background on our history with Calvert: this is the 14th year I have homeschooled my children, and we have exclusively used Calvert for the lower grades. Over the course of 13 full years of using the Calvert curriculum, we have covered the entire range from Kindergarten to 8th grade. We are not new to Calvert. I have always been happy with the education my kids were getting, even as things began to slip the past year or two. This year is an entirely different matter.
Calvert has revamped their curriculum to the point that it is not recognizable as Calvert anymore. Gone are the rich science and social studies/history texts that covered topics in depth. Now, the texts provided give a few paragraphs on a subject and ask the kids to learn more by doing a project. The projects can be done by a single student, but, based on the manuals, they appear to be geared towards a classroom setting because students are encouraged to share their work/ideas/findings with other students. This curriculum was obviously not put together with the single homeschool student in mind.
The enrichment subjects that augmented a student’s learning and became a highlight of the school day, like Greek mythology in 3rd grade, have been replaced with a physical education subject, most of which used to be covered in science.
Grammar and spelling are a thing of the past. There may be a paragraph or two in the manual each day regarding some grammar rules, but often the rules they introduce are glossed over so there is no real understanding of them. Forget about being able to put the rules into practice. There are no workbooks, worksheets, or any form of practical usage in which to apply the rules and build a solid foundation in grammar. Spelling does not exist. At all. My kids actually asked me to supplement spelling for them because they missed it - and this is a subject that one of them doesn’t even particularly like. When kids can see something is lacking in their education, there is a problem with the curriculum.
One bright spot is that Calvert has kept its own art curriculum. Unfortunately, even if you bought the physical books for the 2018-19 curriculum, like we did, the art text is not included. It is only available online, and the links to the current chapter take you to the beginning of the book, so you have to scroll down to get to the appropriate chapter. Every. Time. This might not be an issue for the first couple of chapters, but there is no reason why a student should have to scroll through an entire book to get to the last chapters. Luckily, my family has a physical copy of the book from previous years, so this is not an issue for us, but it would be a great annoyance if we did not have that available.
In their quest to push everything online, the Navigator that students can use to access their daily schedule and online materials, such as videos and texts, is fairly useless. Calvert does not, in my view, provide adequate assessments anymore. There used to be short online quizzes for each subject that students could take after covering that day’s material. Then there would be longer online quizzes at the end of a unit that were used to review material before taking an in-depth, offline test on the material that had been covered to that point. I’m not one for subjecting kids to a lot of testing, but providing the short quizzes did allow the students to see if they were understanding the material. Now, the only assessment on a daily basis for a large portion of the material is answering the question, “How well do you feel you understand the concepts from this lesson part?”. There are some longer quizzes that briefly review material at the end of a unit but no formal tests, which may or may not be a positive, depending on your view of testing.
Links to videos, activities, and online articles are often broken. They either won’t open a page, or if they do, the page is broken, or it is the wrong page, or it requires a login, or the page is filled with ads, or the video just won’t play. A lot of time is being wasted with a poor product. BrainPop is a big hit in our household, though, so there’s that.
The Navigator also does not allow the home teacher to clear out assessments, so if a student enters a manual answer, that day’s lesson will always stay as pending. I guess Calvert is expecting all of its students to use the ATS program.
Manuals are filled with errors. It is obvious that no one took the time to proofread them with mistakes like the following sentence being common: "What do ou think it are?" That’s an easy mistake to just laugh off, but when the manuals consistently get the page numbers for math work wrong, too much time is wasted trying to figure out what information is supposed to be covered and what workbook pages are supposed to be used. Quite often, titles that are used in the manual for subjects such as English, science, and social studies do not match titles that are used in the texts, so, again, a lot of time is wasted trying to get your kids on, literally, the same page as you.
As a long-time Calvert user, I am disappointed to say that I can no longer recommend it to anyone. The company has decided to put profits over performance, and it shows. The program is too expensive for what it provides, and your money would be better spent putting together your own curriculum.
Cons: So much busy work
Grades Used: Preschool-4th grade
Let me preface this by saying that I was a Calvert homeschool kid. Most of my relatives were also Calvert kids. We all transitioned easily into college, which was the biggest reason why I choose Calvert for my kids. But we won’t be coming back next year. They switched to a new “project based learning” model which might as well be code for massive amounts of busy work. I’ll give an example, my 1st grader was assigned to read/listen to the children’s book Stella Luna every day for several days. The point was to be able to understand plot/characters etc. He understood that on the 1st day. Every day after that just made us both hate the poor book. Also there is no phonics, for my 1st grader! There are, however daily paragraphs assigned for him to write. Similar issues with my 4th grader. She has no spelling words assigned, and once you wade through the ocean of busywork; math, history, and geography are a solid 1-2 years below what she last year in Calvert 3rd grade. I’m so very disappointed. This is not the private school education on a budget that it used to be. It’s public school busy work that’s even been dumbed down. I had two kids who loved school, now they dred it.