Why Regulating Homeschooling is Not the Answer
Bethany Mandel
A recent piece published by Slate and Pro Publica attempts to make a remarkable argument: Home-school parents don’t care enough about their children to submit them to government regulations, and they show this disinterest by preventing legislators from passing these regulations by bombarding legislative offices with calls and emails.
Got that? Parents don’t care enough to give kids a proper education, or ensure that they are receiving it, and they show that neglect with Herculean efforts to derail legislation, which they know about because they have decided to be dues-paying members of the Home School Legal Defense Association (full disclosure: I’m currently a non-dues paying preschool member).
The Slate piece starts off with a horror story about a malnourished 19-year-old from New Jersey who was discovered rummaging through the garbage of his parents’ home. The author argues that they were able to get away with the neglect of this young man and his three brothers because they weren’t under the watchful eye of the government in public school.
The piece also rails against the lack of regulation that allows those without high school diplomas and those who have committed violent crimes against children to home school.
Slate focuses mainly on abuse and neglect and tips its hand on the true origins of its bias against home-school families who join the HSLDA, the villain of the piece:
“Some of these families, and almost certainly a majority of HSLDA members, have religious motivations for choosing to home-school; many use alternative textbooks that teach creationism instead of evolution and offer a Christianity-centered view of American history.”
This, clearly, constitutes educational neglect in the mind of the author.
Slate also interviewed a mother in heavily regulated Pennsylvania who defended government efforts to increase monitoring and regulation of home schooling. The woman, Karen Myers Bergey, a self-proclaimed liberal home schooler, told the reporter she’s “never felt like she was ‘jumping through hoops’ to meet Pennsylvania’s standards and says she’s willing to deal with the regulation if it means keeping kids safe.”
“I’m confident that I’m doing a good job for [my children], but I’m willing to give up some of my freedom to make sure that every child is being educated in a healthy and beneficial way,” she said.
As any resident of Chicago would tell you, regulations don’t stop crime. Despite the strict laws surrounding gun ownership in the city, criminals are undeterred. Unsurprisingly, criminals don’t follow the rules when deciding how to go about breaking the law. If someone wants to commit murder, he’d probably break a gun law in order to do it. The same principle holds true for child abusers: If someone is the kind of parent who would starve, beat, and kill their child, they are also the kind of parent that wouldn’t adhere to regulations surrounding home school exams. Those exams wouldn’t prevent child abuse, but they would ensure that the state has a hand in the education of all of its residents.
And that’s the real objective behind the renewed push to regulate home school curricula.
Slate neglects to discuss why parents, both those who are members of HSLDA and those who are not, would oppose regulations for home school curricula. And yet, in a recent article on Fox News, the spread of Common Core education standards was directly linked to a significant uptick in home school families. Parents are deciding that their children are better served spending their time learning instead of learning how to take a specific kind of test. Under a more heavily-regulated regime, home school parents in New York, which is held up as the model for home schooling by Slate because of its heavy regulations, could be forced to send their children to public school if they’re not making “adequate progress.”
“Progress” as determined by the government, of course.
The war against home schooling is clearly not a fight to make sure that children are safe and better educated. If the goals of regulators and their supporters were to protect and educate children, public schools, the biggest educator in the United States by far, would be in the crosshairs.
Teachers unions protect educators like this one, also in New Jersey, who was late 111 times because he was “eating breakfast.” This genius, unable to come up with a better excuse, is paid $90,000 a year with the tax dollars of all residents of New Jersey, including home schoolers, to teach elementary school. Examples of inadequate educators enjoying lifelong job protection thanks to tenure are legion.
As well, less than one third of New York City’s high schoolers are college ready, yet Slate applauds the state’s far-reaching regulations, which somehow are supposed to save students from inadequate home school education.
There are, sadly, numerous cases where children enrolled in public school are subjected to chronic and vicious abuse at the hands of their parents. Maya Ranot, a 12-year-old girl in Queens, is a recent example. Despite dropping to 58 pounds and showing up to school dirty and bruised, the abuse she was suffering at the hands of her parents only came to light because of an emergency-room visit.
As the New York Times noted, “For the city’s child welfare system, Maya’s case essential amounted to a near miss. Her name could have just as easily have been added to a sad roster of child deaths, another case of overlooked warning signs.”
Home school regulations in New York didn’t save Maya Ranot and countless others like her, nor have they saved two-thirds of New York City’s students from a subpar education at the hands of the state. The regulations Slate applauds, which amount to state-administered exams, are being framed as efforts to protect children from abuse and neglect. What they really do is ensure that kids are still under the thumb of the same Department of Education that their parents have made a thoughtful effort to avoid.
http://acculturated.com/regulating-homeschooling/ |
