kmoney said:
What standards are homeschoolers held to?
In some states in the USA NONE! That is the worry! In NSW Oz, where i come from, The Board of Studies ensure that every child has a minimum standard of education that must be met.
How good was the homeschooling at the People's Temple or at Jonestown? Should such crazies be allowed to homeschool?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Testing the Boundaries of Parental Authority Over Education:The Case of
Homeschooling
This essay is included in
olitical and Moral Education, NOMOS XLIII,
Stephen Macedo and Yael Tamir, eds., NewYork: New York University Press,
2002.
An extended version of the essay is included as chapter six in: Rob Reich,
Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American EducationUniversity of
Chicago Press, 2002.
Rob ReichDepartment of Political ScienceStanford University
pp 34 ff
......
IV. Conclusion: Regulating Homeschooling
It is worth exploring briefly the kinds of regulations the state might
promulgate and some likely problems with such regulations. Over the past
decade, as I noted in the firstsection, the regulations on homeschooling
have eased dramatically and, where they exist,
are often unenforced. Whereas some states once forbade homeschooling, its
practice is now legal everywhere, with actual regulations varying
significantly from state to state. Such regulations have included
requirements that parents be certified teachers or have a collegedegree,
that parents submit a curricular plan to local educational authorities for
review, that parents administer standardized tests to their children in
order to gauge their academic progress, that school officials make periodic
visits to homeschools to evaluate the educational progress of children, that
parents keep attendance records and meet a minimumnumber of days in school
or hours spent learning, and/or that parents submit regular reportsto local
educational authorities.
The fact that regulations have diminished and in some cases disappeared, and
the increasing prevalence of wholly unregulated homeschools, is cause
forconcern. The state must indeed regulate homeschools in order to assure
that its and the child's interests in education are met.
What regulations are most appropriate to this task?
Regulations are properly amatter of democratic politics, not deduction from
theory, but at a bare minimum, I imaginethe following will be necessary.
First, the state must require that any homeschooling parents register their
homeschools with
local educational authorities, who in turn should berequired to collect this
information and report it to the state. Such action will allow states
tocollect more accurate data on homeschooling, help make decisions about how
to distribute resources for homeschoolers, and enable simplified
communication between school leadersand homeschooling parents. At the
moment, since many parents have never notified districts of their
homeschooling intentions and arrangements, states have few means toregulate
such parents. By requiring registration with local officials, the state can
more effectively distinguish between truants and homeschooled children.
Second, the burden of proof that homeschools will satisfy the state's and
the child's interest in education must restwith the parents who express the
desire to homeschool. Parents must demonstrate to relevant education
officials that their particular homeschooling arrangements are up to
determined educational standards. Aligning the burden with parents is
important, because if the homeschooling arrangements were presumed to be
satisfactory unless the state were to show otherwise, the state would have
to resort to difficult and intrusive means to make sucha case. Especially in
light of the number of homeschooled students today, school officials cannot
be expected personally or closely to monitor the activities of all
homeschools.
Third, because the state must ensure that the school environment provides
exposure to and engagement with values and beliefs other than those of a
child's parents, the state should require parents to use curricula that
provide such exposure and engagement. I imagine that parents could satisfy
such a regulation in a variety of ways: they could submit their curriculum
for review to local school officials, they could choose curricular materials
from astate-approved list, they could allow their children to take periodic
assessments that would measure their success in examining and reflecting
upon diverse worldviews. Surely other methods are possible.
And fourth, the state should require homeschooled children to take annual
standardized tests to measure academic progress. If a child repeatedly fails
to makeacademic progress relative to his or her peers in public or private
schools, the state should intervene and compel school
attendance.
This short list of regulations is tentative and provisional, for I am unsure
about the most effective way to craft regulations pursuant to meeting the
state's and the child's interest. It is far easier to point out the problems
with regulating homeschooling.
Foremost among these is that religiously motivated homeschooling parents may
simply reject the very notion of submitting to a secular authority over
matters concerning the upbringing of their children.It is not that deeply
religious parents refuse to acknowledge the power of the state generally,
for such a position in a liberal democracy would be clearly untenable.
Rather, the problemarises when secular state authority is exercised over the
rearing of children. Conflict between the state and religious parents on
this score may be endemic and inevitable. On my view, even given the deep
importance of religious freedom, the state cannot relinquish its regulatory
role in education in cases where parents invoke their religious beliefs as a
bulwark against
secular authority.
Another problem with regulation is that the supposed beneficiaries of
educational regulation - children - are not politically organized and are
therefore incapable ofadvocating for their own interests in the policy and
legislative arenas. In contrast, homeschooling parents in
recent years have been exceptionally powerful lobbyists for their interests
at the grassroots, state, and federal level. Following the lead of the
ChristianCoalition, homeschool parents have banded together into networks of
advocacy organizations, and they are able to flood representatives' offices
with phone calls and mailon short notice in order to urge or kill the
passage of specific bills. In the face of suchorganized advocacy, the lack
of any comparable lobbying effort on behalf of children'sinterests means
that homeschool groups representing parental interests will likely continue
According to a recent news article, Pennsylvania Congressman Bill
Goodling, who chairs the HouseCommittee on Education and the Workforce, has
called homeschoolers "the most effective education lobbyon Capitol Hill"
(Daniel Golden, "Home Schoolers Learn How to Gain Clout Inside the Beltway,"
TheWall Street Journal, April 24, 2000, A1). to lessen and erase
regulations. The problem, it must be stressed, goes beyond the
recentpolitical efficacy of homeschool parent groups; it appears to be
built-in to the politicalprocess of enacting regulations. Because children
are a politically inert group, regulationsin their interest must be defended
by other organizations, such as the Children's DefenseFund, which typically
have less at stake in homeschooling, or by state officials, who are ofcourse
responsible for a much broader children's agenda than guarding against
homeschooling abuses. Thus, successful regulatory action is likely to
be stimulated onlywhen the homeschool parent lobby loses its power and/or
comparably powerful children's advocacy groups decide to press specifically
for homeschooling oversight
A third problem with regulating homeschooling is what Cass Sunstein labels
the overregulation - underregulation paradox. The idea is that aggressive
statutory controls designed to maintain strict compliance often result in
practice in under-enforcement or minimal regulations. When regulations are
many and elaborate, they often require significant spending, time, and human
resources in order to enforce them. I can imaginethis paradox at work in
homeschooling regulations quite easily. Given the numbers ofhomeschoolers,
local school authorities need to devote their time and energy to
trackingparents and children who have opted out of the public school system.
To the already harried educators, spending
significant time or devoting significant resources to tracking homeschools
may seem wasteful. After all, by removing their children from public
schools, parents in effect reduce the public system's funding. Moreover, the
very idea of making periodic home visits or meeting with parents to assess
curricular materials and monitor educational progress can be unappealing.
Being a truant officer or homeschool monitor issurely among the more
thankless jobs in society.The overregulation - underregulation paradox can
be mitigated by placing theburden of proof on parents to demonstrate that
homeschools will meet the educational interests of the state and the child.
But it does not remove it entirely.
It appears, therefore, sensible to keep regulations strict but minimal and
as non-intrusive as possible.In the past few years, another and very
different regulatory problem has arisen.Some parents who homeschool their
children wish to avail themselves and their children of the resources of the
local public school -- extracurricular activities and sports teams, the
library, computers, and internet facilities, guidance from school teachers
on
curricular matters, and in some cases select academic offerings. Most state
laws currently make it difficult for parents to claim such resources as a
right; homeschoolers are assumed to have exited the public school system and
thereby foregone the resources it has to offer. As thenumber of homeschooled
children continue to grow, this is likely to become a new frontier in
homeschool legal battles. Some school districts have adopted a conciliatory
approach and have set up offices to provide curricular and pedagogical
resources for homeschooling families, and to facilitate connections with
school activities. But the administrative burdens placed on public school
teachers and administrators to allow homeschool parents selectively to
choose the resources that the public school has to offer are undoubtedly
large, and they distract needed attention from the regular students in the
classroom. It is possible that technological advances will mitigate these
burdens by
permitting wholly new ways of providing and distributing information. At
least one district has set up what it calls a "virtualcharter school", where
it offers homeschooling families via the internet the guidance of public
school teachers, standardized testing, career counseling, real-time chats
with teachers and students, and the purchasing power of the district. The
avowed purpose of the virtual charter school is to lure families that had
deserted public schools to re-connect with public education.
Though some might worry that continued development on this front heralds an
era of education where the public school is essentially a provider of a menu
of services and activities from which parents choose what they want, the new
technology also can serve to connect people back with the campus-based
school in different ways. There are a host of open questions about the
consequences of homeschool-public school partnerships, but to the extent
that bringing children back within a campus-based school environment
conduces to meeting the interests of the state and the child in education -
especially to the extent that it brings children into social and
intellectual contact with other children of diversebackgrounds - such
partnerships should not be summarily dismissed or discouraged. Infact,
finding ways to draw homeschooling families back to the public school system
seemsto me a necessary complement to the passage of effective regulations.
Paul Hill, for example, believes that as more and more people homeschool,
most homeschooling families will form networks that will come to resemble
regular schools.
