Salon: Home-schooled and illiterate - for some kids it means isolation with little education

[Igel]

24. Oversight is the issue.

Regulations and the like.

The problem is finding a disinterested overseer and legislators.

Some legislators support homeschooling. Parents' rights and all that.

Some legislators are convinced that socialization in a school--preferably a public school--setting is indispensible.

The conversation's driven by two (here absurdly stereotyped) views. 1. "government interference in the family is good and wholesome at all times; government cannot have too much power and since kids are ultimately society's responsibility they should be subject to societal control." 2. "Government corrupts everything it touches so government authority should be circumscribed to the greatest extent possible, especially because bureaucrats and legislators have primarily their own authority and how to expand it in view; no bureaucrat loves kids more than their parents, so kids are properly the responsibility of their parents and subject to nearly solely parental control; kids should be brought up in keeping with their parents' cultural views and with a view primarily to socialize them into adult society and not to socialize them into transient, temporary teen or pre-teen society." Yeah, stereotypes. But we see views closer to one or the other in many areas; oddly, people tend always to pick the views that benefit themselves in some way.

You're not going to get something that respects "reasonable" homeschooling because there's no definition of "reasonable" that we can all (or mostly) agree upon. In one state I lived in you needed to take the standardized tests. If you score too low, you must go to public school, even if you do better than you did on the last standardized test and your failure is actually an improvement. If you score too low and you're already in public school, oh, well. Circumstances beyond the parents' control simply don't matter if they're homeschooling; they do if the kid's in public school.

California's teachers unions and bureaucrats a few years ago managed to get homeschooling parents classified as teachers. I don't know if this continued, but the effect would have been to require all homeschooling parents to be certified for their charges' ages and content areas. Only a certified teacher can teach kids, apparently; and all certified teachers are apparently qualified. (One has to imagine that if this stuck, in a decade there'll be required procedures and policies for somebody to conduct teachscapes and observations to evaluate the efficacy and adherence to best practices of homeschooling parents. Perhaps a decade after that, since parents are almost always the first and primary teachers of their kids, certification and annual performance goals/evaluations of all parents can be instituted.)

In Texas you're almost guaranteed liberty in homeschooling. You need to have some written curriculum to show that you're teaching 3 things--reading, writing, and, I think, civics. (Maybe reading, arithmetic, and civics. Don't feel like googling it now.) This has been construed rather broadly on the side of homeschoolers; principals, who want enrollment and are former teachers, convinced that only they can teach and only they truly are able to love kids and love all kids more than their parents ever can--thousands of nameless faces at a time, but pure, true love--usually try to push enforcement. There's a group in Texas to support homeschooling parents in their legal defense.