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Home-Schoolers Shouldn’t Be Targeted

Home-Schoolers Shouldn’t Be Targeted

OPINION

by Sen. Bill Morrow

The California Department of Education has been engaging in some interesting practices lately.

The state bureaucracy, supposedly dedicated to furthering the education of our young people, has apparently decided to raise the specter of prosecution against those families who have made the sacrificial decision to home educate their children.

For many years, California parents have been teaching their own children privately at home. This has been a great success both here and across the nation with students doing very impressively in standardized test scores, advancement to higher education institutions, performance in the labor force and as thoughtful and motivated citizens.

A recent Gallup survey found that nearly half of Americans view home education positively, a much higher percentage than previously recorded.

Despite this, some in our state’s educational establishment seem to find something objectionable about the practice, and are stepping up their efforts to either stop it or have the government step in and control these otherwise highly successful families. The bottom legal line is that under current California law, anyone (except someone with a specified criminal background) can establish and operate a private school, enroll any children they want, and operate their private school at any site (including in their home). Those who represent home school families have affirmed this for years, and thousands of California families have operated accordingly, with no notable challenge from the state, despite the pining of a few ideologues in the Department of Education.

The law has not changed, so why is the state sending out such ominous notices to home schooling parents, saying their children will be declared truant if they continue doing as has been accepted for so many years?

Those in the educational establishment, the high-ranking state officials and the academic elite, argue that more government involvement is needed for the sake of accountability. It isn’t beneficial to engage in public school bashing and I certainly do not consider the many well-meaning public-school teachers, students and families to be in any way adversaries in this dispute.

However, it is worthwhile to note that the so-called accountability which will be provided by the government must not be particularly effective, given the low performance in test scores, literacy rates, and so on, of so many of our public schools today. Remember, all of this has taken place under the rather dogged oversight of the government.

And that government, or more specifically those in the educational establishment, seems to be letting down the teachers, students and parents for whom they are already responsible and supposedly so concerned about.

So what is the real reason for the educational establishment’s opposition to home education? For the big-government types, home schooling represents a direct challenge to a long-held monopoly. This monopoly brings with it millions of dollars each year in federal funding.

The funding formula, however, is based on enrollment in public schools. So when more and more families decide to eschew public education and opt instead to set up a private school at home (some estimates see this nationwide movement growing by 15 percent a year), it’s money out of the public school’s pocket.

For the academic elite, the success of home schooling is shattering their cherished notion that nobody, and certainly not parents, can possibly have a better understanding of how to teach children than they do.

So, seeing their preferred version of the world falling apart, these entities are willing to go to extreme measures to cut into the ranks of home-schoolers, even so far as to threaten prosecution of thousands of decent and successful home schooling families.

It would seem that California’s state educational resources would be better focused on the public schools and those who choose to enroll in them, and not on pursuing those who choose to enroll and successfully graduate their children from these small private schools.

Morrow represents the state’s 38th senatorial district, which includes much of coastal North County.

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