“Teach Your Children Well”

The first rule of any civilized society

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
03/08/08

Bad law can result in bad decisions. Californians found that out this week when an Appeals Court ruled that parents wishing to homeschool their children must have a teaching credential.

I don’t blame the court for this. The facts of the case were clear enough: two of the children had filed for declaratory relief, citing emotional and physical abuse by the father. That it was the intent of the parents to keep the children at home from school in order to conceal abuse was made evident in the father’s statement that he kept his children home because “educating children outside the home exposes them to ‘snitches.’”

The findings in the lower court trial were that all eight children in that family had been homeschooled, solely by the mother, and the lower court opined that the quality of the education they received was “lousy,” “meager,” and “bad.”

Article IX, section 1 of California’s Constitution states: “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement.” The State Legislature, to this end, passed the education code, which required that parents either send their children to private or public school or have them taught at home by people credentialed to teach each grade.

Most people think homeschooling is an unalloyed right in California. It isn’t. You need a license to teach.

So the court, seeking (and finding) justice for the children in the case, followed the law and ruled in about the only manner that it could, given that it appeared before them not as a child welfare case, but as a home education case.

But the law is inadequate, even bad, and even though the court performed exactly as it should in this particular case, it was a bad result.

The uproar was immediate and vociferous, especially from the religious right, who saw this as a case of the state trying to destroy their right to raise their children as good Christians and lousy scientists. Every politician in the state vowed that something Must Be Done, up to and including the Governator himself.

I doubt anything good will come of it. When you combine a controversial decision based on a bad law with panicked politicians, what you usually end up with are even worse laws.

One of the big problems is that we really don’t know how good homeschooling is. I’ve met people who were homeschooled who were literate, curious, and who could do math and reading tests with ease. If they had strange views on biology and natural history, it probably didn’t matter if they were planning on becoming accountants or office managers or line workers. A lot of them didn’t: usually about the age of 16 or so, they realized that the folks were a pair of religious nutballs and started reading subversive evolutionary material on the sly. Surprisingly few people raised in fundamentalist homes become fundamentalist adults. I’ve met people with degrees in biology who get around the essential conflict between science and belief by simply noting that belief doesn’t concern itself with the details. Whatever works, as they say.

I once met a 16 year old who had no idea who John F. Kennedy was, and thought the US had half a dozen states, of which he could name four. The father was a paranoid schizophrenic who thought that if the boy went to public school, the state would be able to instill mind control. The kid was a whiz at taking apart 10 year old computers and bicycles and putting them back together again, but that was about it. His future didn’t look particularly bright. That’s the down side of home schooling.

What we do know is that the quality varies wildly, and that it sometimes is used to conceal physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.

The problem is the parents aren’t the only ones with rights. The children have a right to access to a decent quality education, one that will allow them to function in our complex and technological society. They also have the right to be outside the home and meet other children and develop social skills.

The problem with the court’s decision is that under “No Child Left Behind” a teacher must be credentialed in the primary subjects that they teach, and for very small schools and home school, this would mean seven or eight credentials – all of which require college courses – in order to provide a well-rounded education. This puts the ability to teach by California standards out of reach of all but a half dozen people in the state.

The law imposes an undue burden on people who, in good faith, want to homeschool their children. It needs to be changed.

But the children have rights, and those need to be protected, too.

As it stands, children in public schools have to take proficiency tests each year in order to show that they are, in fact, learning. (“Is our children learning?” as that good example of private schooling, George W, once said.) This should be applied to all children, in public school, in private schools, or who are being taught at home.

For years, private schools claimed to have better results than public schools, but it never was a fair claim, because, among other things, the test taking was self-selecting on the private side. A poor private school could opt out. (Even with that intrinsic advantage for the private schools, it turned out that for students with the same SES, there were no academic differences between either type of schooling). And of course home schooling wasn’t tested at all. I often wonder what happens to homeschooled kids from poor environments who decide they want to go to college or get a good job and find out that bible banging daddy has seen to it that they will spend their lives repairing lawn mowers.) Test all the kids, and make sure none of them are being cheated out of their birthright.

Second, have the parents submit a yearly course outline /curriculum. If they can’t manage that, they shouldn’t be trying to educate their kids.

Third, make it easy for the kids to opt out of homeschooling – the older the kid, the easier it becomes. Any 12 year old who wants to go to public school should be allowed to do so, regardless of the parent’s wishes.

Finally, treat cases like the one the court just ruled on as child welfare cases, rather than as educational issues. It sounds like the court had standing to order the children removed if the home was found to be abusive, and that’s what should have been done.

Just because a parent doesn’t have some college courses doesn’t mean he or she can’t teach their children. But similarly, just because god came to them and told them to avoid the sins of the secular world doesn’t mean that the children can be kept in a cave.