Homeschooling tends to work well right up until it doesn’t, and the breaking point is rarely the decision itself or the early years. It is a particular afternoon somewhere in a student’s sophomore year, when the algebra on the page stops making sense to the parent who is supposed to be teaching it.
That moment is not a failure of commitment. It is a ceiling, and every curriculum has one. Mackler Associates works with homeschooling families at exactly that point — upper-level math and chemistry, and preparation for the admissions tests that a homeschooled application often rests on. It is a narrow part of home education, and it is the only part we do.
Every session is taught by Jason Marks personally. There is no roster of tutors, no assignment process, and no handoff to an associate partway through a program.
He was a National Merit Scholar, attended the Honors College at the University of Missouri, graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and holds a J.D. from Washington University School of Law. He has been teaching St. Louis students since 2000, which means he has taught algebra and chemistry to roughly a generation of them.
Most parents who homeschool are better teachers than they give themselves credit for. They manage reading and writing, they manage history and literature, they manage arithmetic and then pre-algebra, and they do all of it while also running a household. What defeats them in the end is almost never effort.
It is that somewhere around algebra 2 — and again at chemistry — the material stops being the kind of thing you can stay a chapter ahead of. Teaching those subjects well requires having taught them many times before, to many students who got stuck in different places. A parent learning the material a week before their child does can get them through the problem set. Getting them to genuinely understand it is a different job.
That is a reasonable point to bring in someone from outside, and it asks for less than it might sound like. A student who has hit a wall in one subject does not need a new curriculum, a different educational philosophy, or anyone second-guessing how the family has chosen to educate their children. They need the twenty hours of instruction that will carry them through the part their parent cannot teach, after which the family carries on as before.
The second situation is admissions testing. The ACT and SAT are their own discipline, substantially separate from the mathematics and reading they appear to measure, and they carry a particular weight for homeschooled applicants that is worth understanding early.
More on algebra tutoring, chemistry tutoring, ACT preparation and SAT preparation.
It helps to look at this from the admissions office’s side of the desk.
When they read a transcript from a conventional high school, they are reading it against thousands of others from that same school. They know roughly what an A in its chemistry class is worth, how hard its honors track is, and where its graduates have tended to land. The transcript carries meaning because it sits inside a context they already have.
A transcript written by a parent carries no such context. It may be scrupulously honest and entirely accurate — most are — but there is nothing to calibrate it against. An admissions officer reading it knows what one family concluded about its own child’s work, and has no way to place that judgment among the thousands of other applications on the desk.
A standardized score is the one measure that closes that gap, which is why homeschooled applicants are frequently asked for one even where other students are not. Some universities that are test-optional for the general applicant pool still require an ACT or SAT score from homeschooled students — the University of Missouri among them, which matters for a great many St. Louis families. And a number of test-optional universities still require a score before a student can be considered for merit money, which can be the difference between an offer a family can accept and one they cannot.
These policies change from year to year and vary considerably between institutions, so check each school directly rather than relying on any general summary, this one included. But the broad pattern has held for some time, and it is far easier to plan around in a student’s sophomore year than to discover in October of their senior one.
Missouri is one of the more straightforward states in which to homeschool, and a fair amount of what circulates online overstates what is actually asked of you.
The statute requires 1,000 hours of instruction across the school year. Six hundred of those hours must be in reading, mathematics, social studies, language arts or science, and 400 of that 600 must take place at your regular home school location. Alongside the hours, you keep a log of the subjects taught and the activities covered, samples of your child’s work, and a record of academic evaluation.
There is no notice of intent to file, no registration, and no mandatory standardized testing. A standardized test is one perfectly good way to produce the record of academic evaluation, but it is an option rather than an obligation.
Families receiving MOScholars ESA funds sit under a separate set of rules that do include annual testing. For anything you intend to rely on, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is the authority — not a tutoring website, this one very much included.
Programs run twenty hours for a fixed fee, payable in full at the start, and are scheduled around whatever your week already looks like rather than around a timetable set by someone else. All sessions are in person, at the Creve Coeur office on North Mason Road.
Twenty hours is enough to work properly through the ground a student has lost, or to prepare seriously for a test, without becoming a standing commitment that reshapes the family’s year. Most families come for one subject, finish it, and go back to teaching the rest themselves.
The most useful first conversation is usually a short one about where exactly your student has stalled and what the timeline looks like. Schedule a free consultation or call the office, and we can work out whether a program makes sense before anyone commits to anything.
Families across Creve Coeur, Ladue, Clayton, Chesterfield and the rest of west St. Louis County work with Mackler Associates in person.
No. Jason Marks holds a J.D. from Washington University School of Law and has taught St. Louis students since 2000, but he is not a certified classroom teacher. A teaching certificate is designed to qualify someone to manage a room of thirty students and deliver a state curriculum across a school year — a genuinely difficult job, and a different one from sitting beside a single student who cannot get past logarithms. For one-on-one work in advanced math, chemistry and admissions testing, depth in the subject and years of watching individual students get stuck matter more than the classroom credential. It is a fair question to ask, though, and the honest answer is no.
No. All instruction is one-on-one, which is the whole point of it. There are no group classes, co-op sessions, camps or summer programs.
The subjects Jason teaches himself — mathematics through calculus, chemistry, and preparation for the ACT, SAT and PSAT. He does not teach foreign languages, music, art or physical education, and there is no laboratory on the premises. Where a family needs something outside that range, he will say so rather than take the work.
No. Missouri requires that you keep a record of academic evaluation, and a standardized test is one way to produce one — but it is not required, and plenty of families satisfy it with a portfolio and a written assessment instead. Families receiving MOScholars ESA funds fall under different rules that do include annual testing. For anything you plan to rely on, confirm it with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.