


The education establishment in California has long been on the attack against families who home school. Back in 2000, as a home-schooled child from Alameda County, Calif., nearly won the national spelling bee, the Berkeley Unified School District challenged the legality of home schooling, saying homeschooled kids were truant from public schools.
Attacks and legal challenges have continued ever since, with the Feb. 28 ruling giving home-schoolers their greatest blow yet.
"The court has assaulted parental rights again, and this time with a sledgehammer," said Dr. James Dobson, founder and chairman of Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, in a recent radio broadcast. "Listeners in all 50 states should take notice."
Children in home schools, the home-school opponents argue, may not be getting adequate educations. They parade out rare home-school horror stories, involving parents who are just too negligent to get their children to school no matter what the law says. They ignore the fact that home-schooling has generally been proven superior to public schooling.
The National Education Association, a teacher's union with a well-deserved bad reputation, has spent more than the past decade advocating the abolition of home schools. The union and other home-school foes seem unfazed by the fact homeschool students have a veritable monopoly on winning spelling bees and math contests, and consistently score higher in comprehensive testing. A study of 5,402 home-school students in 1997 shocked the academic world, finding that on average they outperformed their public school peers by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects. The study was reinforced by another study involving 20,760 home-school students.
Top universities, such as Stanford, used to reject homeschool applicants outright. Today, they're given admission preference in many cases because universities have found that home-schooled students outperform others.
So why do public schools, the teachers unions and courts want to impede home schools? Mostly, for money. It's real simple: schools get public funds based on their average daily attendance. In Colorado, one child taken from a public school for the nurturing environment of a home school takes roughly $6,000 out of the school system each year. With every spelling bee winner, every successful study of home-school students, the institution of home schooling has grown. With that, and a variety of school choice measures such as open enrollment, public schools have found themselves in competition for students. Some administrators and the NEA don't like it. They would rather under-perform and count on every child who's born eventually bringing money their way. They prefer the old monopoly, and they're asking courts to restore it.
And there's another issue at play. Statists hate home schooling for all the reasons religious organizations admire it. Religious organizations like home schooling because it enables parents to teach their children about God, all day every day. They can teach children about the joys of living life to its fullest, in an independent way with the skills to independently learn and adapt. Children can be taught to grow their own food and make their own clothes. Statists prefer that our children learn from the state - hearing collectivist notions of entitlement, dependence on the collective and, worst of all, equal outcomes - an ugly distortion of equal opportunity.
The California ruling is an attack on children, an attack on families and a threat to liberty itself. And watch out, because the attack is going to spread.
(gazette.com)