Well, if a parent is really, really crappy, people have not only the obligation but the duty to report them to Children’s Protective Service.
How about an equivalent for home schoolers?
If the kid’s soccer coach notices that he can’t add simple numbers (if we have 3 points and score 2 more goals, how many points do we have now?), or during a checkup the pediatrician notices that the kid does know basic biology (she doesn’t know that food goes into your stomach when you eat it), should there be an agency whose job it is to check on these things?
So, if there are credible reports that a child is not being homeschooled adequately, should there be a board or something who would then investigate?
Would you agree to this minimal amount of oversight?
autz, the total failure of parents to provide for their child’s education is educational neglect. This can be investigated by child protective services (in some places) or the county prosecutor and police (in the others).
The inability of a child to add is not proof of neglect; the child might have severe dyscalculia. I’m not even sure it’s enough to justify an investigation, because stating that it is would tend subject families with learning-disabled children to even more intrusive “interventions” than they already get (and generally do not need, as they have, in many cases, already made all the arrangements they can).
That kind of minimal oversight already exists. Each person the child comes into contact with, (and it’s a stereotype that homeschooled kids are somehow cloistered, even in rural areas homeschoolers are very active and interactive with other people across many walks of life and ages) has the ability to report gross educational neglect. Educational neglect is already against the law, and, as KellyM observes, is a matter for child protective services to investigate. All the definitions for “Educational Neglect” I could find were talking about a public school framework, essentially parent’s allowing nonstop truancy although not seeking aid for a child with learning disabilities was mentioned once. Still the fact remains that educational negelect is already illegal and there are mechanisms in place to test for and remedy it.
Once we can get past the stereotype of homeschooled children as shut-ins, then we can assess the likleyhood of such an abuse going unnoticed in a homeschooling family. In my experience, and IMHO, it is less likely to be a problem for homeschoolers because homeschooling is much more flexible than most public school schedules and it’s hard to be truant when you live at the school(much to my chagrin when I was a wee lad :p). Some of the more detailed of the literature on educational neglect had things like “allowing your child to sleep past school start time” as one of the “disallowed” behaviors. This is simply not a problem for most homeschools.
All we need to do is be reasonably sure the child will have enough exposure to society for cases of abuse to have a reasonable likelyhood of being noticed. Given the high extracirricular activity levels of modern homeschoolers, and given that homeschool co-ops and group classes are becoming more the norm than single families doing everything on their own, I think this is going to take care of itself.
I’m supposed to call the police if I think a child isn’t being homeschooled well?
As for CPS, they are overwhelmed by their current mandate! I can imagine me calling and saying, “I know you don’t have time to deal with all the suspected cases involving children being raped and beaten, but would you mind investigating the fact that Jane’s geography knowledge is lacking?”
It seems much more logical to have a committee whose job it is to look into cases in which a child is family is suspected of not adequately educating the children. It could even be conprised of current or former homeschoolers.
I just don’t understand the knee-jerk reaction against ANY form of oversight. It’s just a constant, “We are doing a great job! Really! Trust us!”
I don’t think a lack of accountability in this important area is a good idea. There must be safeguards against abusing the system.
autz, I think it’s flat-out wrong to send government officials (of any sort) into a private home absent evidence of wrongdoing. And any oversight of homeschooling that involves mandatory entry into the home for inspection or any other reason absent credible evidence of misconduct is both wrong and unconstitutional. And I am made leery of any system that forces a parent to constantly prove that they are not neglecting their child’s education. We don’t force parents to constantly prove that they not neglecting their child’s health, after all.
I am not bothered by having an entity (either an existing one or a newly created one) to investigate credible claims of educational neglect. I definitely object to any regime that presumes the existence of educational neglect and forces parents to prove that they are not neglecting their children without a specific, credible claim that they are. Having to go “See, we aren’t hurting our child” every n months is, at the very least, demeaning.
It’s a lot like “I’m innocent! Really! Trust me!”. In the US, fortunately, we have the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the one alleging the charges. Unless there are charges and credible evidence of wrongdoing, trust is indeed granted to the citizen. What I don’t understand is the arguements that homeschooling should be different than the hundreds of thousands of other situations where the citizen is presumed innocent. How is mandatory homeschool oversight different from calling everyone to the police station once a month for a drug test? Does the fact that children are involved change matters? So should we require everyone to bring their kids to a state clinic once a month to be examined for bruises or evidence of neglect? Make parents prove the kid actually did fall off their bike?
Laws in America are almost all reactive not proactive. In order to put a proactive law in place you better have a damn good arguement that even one instance of an infraction causes permanent damage so severe as to be a danger to the state. You notice there aren’t mandatory psychological evaluations to head off possible serial killers.
I don’t support mandatory “checkups” on homeschoolers any more than I would support state-mandated drug tests or psychological evaluations.
Now I’m shifting gears to play devil’s advocate.
There are proactive laws in the US. Driver’s licenses expire and have to be renewed, in a majority of states this means taking some sort of skills test. Law enforcement officers constantly patrol the streets, their presence reminding people not to violate the laws as much as providing reaction to crimes. Vehicle inspection and registration to ensure your vehicle is up to certain standards and is not a danger to yourself or others on the road. Hunting licenses have to be renewed each year. There are a myriad of laws where the state DOES prevent people from engaging in an activity without its sanction. These sanctions are usually given after some proof of competence to adequately perform the role being licensed.
[/devil’s advocate]
If one looks carefully it’s pretty easy to distinguish the two types of laws. Proactive laws generally apply to priveledges such as driving. Reactive laws apply to rights such as freedom of speech. You’ve got to have a license before you start driving. You’ve got to go way overboard before the law says you have to stop talking. Then there are the grey areas of “entitlements” such as welfare where you can get something you’ve got a “right” to but have to go through the framework to have it.
So which category is homeschooling in? Is it a priveledge? Is it a right? Is it an entitlement? Those who see it as a priveledge will probably think oversight and licensing are as natural for homeschooling as they are for driving. They would have absolutely no problem denying anyone the priveledge of homeschooling if a person was not licensed or did not agree to be overseen. If a person was evaluated negatively during an oversight visit supporters of homeschooling as a priveledge would probably say the child should be placed in public school as a result.
Those who see it as an entitlement would probably also agree with oversight of some kind, although they would recognize it as something you’d have to prove gross negligence in order to restrict someone’s ability to homeschool. Tests would likely be fairly easy to meet, oversight minimal and the litmus test for taking a child out of a homeschool and placing them in public school as a result of a poor evaluation would be more strict. Entitlements are, after all, inalienable.
Those who see homeschooling as a right do not recognize the need for oversight or parental licensing of any kind. It’s as fundamental as the right to have children in the first place and is not to be abridged by the state. There is nothing a parent can do short of being abusive to justify taking their child from them, even part-time for school. Abuse laws are already in place to remedy children who live in abusive households, so why would homeschoolers need additional rules?
I think the category of homeschooling, right, entitlement, or priveledge, is a more fundamental question than the question of what oversight is appropriate. Once we’ve hammered out which category homeschooling fits into we can decide what legal status it should have.
So, would agree to the idea of a committee dedicated to investigating credible reports of homeschoolers who are accused of neglecting their child’s education?
The shaky word there is “dedicated”. This makes it sound like it’s their job to find cases to take action on. Given the history of such specialized task forces I would not feel comfortable setting up one for homeschooling. This creates an adversarial system in which one side has a vested interest in finding fault in the other. If they don’t investigate X cases per year their budget or staff may be seen as unnecessary and be cut. The employees wouldn’t want that and neither would the department the committee was part of.
Ironically I feel the same way about a committee dedicated to investigating reports of homschool abuse as people who are in favor of homeschooling oversight feel about homeschooling. Too much potential for abuse. My justification is that the committee has a vested interest in finding cases to continue to justify their existance, and a file cabinet full of “they’re doing great” reports doesn’t seem like it would cut the mustard. I think such a committee would end up looking for the bad in homeschoolers instead of trying to help them educate their children.
My best suggestion would be to have some social work reform and get Child Protective Services adequately staffed and trained then they can handle abusive/neglectful homeschoolers the same way they handle other types of abusive/neglectful parents. Train CPS workers to fairly evaluate children in homeschools as PART of their job. If there aren’t any cases of abuse/neglect in homeschools to keep them busy during a certain time period there won’t be pressure to find some. Those caseworkers can work on something else.
Any time you single someone out, there is a higher scrutiny on them than on others, and that’s just not fair. The relative number of cases of abuse/neglect in homeschoolers as compared to cases of abuse/neglect in non-homeschooling families isn’t so far off the chart to warrant special treatment IMHO.
What one person would consider “neglecting” a child’s education is not the same definition another would use. I mean, you look at the range of ways to homeschool and you realize all homeschoolers do not agree one particular method of educating homeschooled children is THE best way to homeschool ALL homeschooled kids. A person who sits their kids at desks in a room at home all day doing bookwork and basically doing at home exactly what is done in a public school could very easily consider an “unschooler” or child-led learning advocate as being neglectful in educating their child.
What about the parents who don’t push their kids to learn addition by “x” age, division by “x” age, writing by “x” age, reading by “x” age, etc.??? Yet their children DO learn these concepts . . . just at an age when they are ready and comprehend it more easily than they would have at an earlier age. Are these parents neglectful? If no, says who? If yes, says who?
I used to work in CPS, and I have to say, CPS caseworkers are not trained and really can’t be to evaluate homeschooloing to that extent. Nor do they evaluate other specialized forms of neglect to that extent. There are two particular issues regarding homeschooling. One is that people who may or not be aware of the homeschooling report that the children don’t go to school, causing an investigation. The second would be the quality of the homeschooling. Of the many, many reports I received about children not being in school or being excessively absent, only one involved a homeschooling family. The rest were families who registered the kids in school, but kept them home to watch younger children, or didn’t make sure the children went to sleep early enough to get up for school, or had kids who simply left home but didn’t arrive at school, etc. The one family who homeschooled was reported by the neighbors as having children who were not attending school. It was pretty obvious that the children were in fact being taught and not just sitting in front of a TV.But I simply didn’t have the training to determine whether they were receiving an appropriate education on my own, any more than I could determine whether surgery was necessary on my own in a case of alleged medical neglect. Sure, I could tell that a five year old capable of reading chapter books and performing multiplication is at least meeting minimum standards. But what about a nine year old who couldn’t read or couldn’t add? Maybe the education is inappropriate or maybe the education is appropriate and the child is delayed. I wouldn’t know. So what I did with my homeschooling family was get them the information about registering the children as homeschooled,which involved an instruction plan written by the parents,progress reports written by the parents and an annual assessment by standardized test and which had the added benefit that should a neighbor report them again (and it probably happened- the reason this family home schooled was specifically to keep their children away from the others in the neighborhood, and the parents made no secret of their wish not to associate with their neighbors and the reason why) the investigation would end upon showing the approval letter as quickly as it would end by showing the child was enrolled in school. And that’s an issue I never see addressed by people who advocate no oversight at all.CPS will always investigate reports of children not attending school, because in many areas, most of those children are not being homeschooled. If there are multiple reports over the course of the children’s schooling, those multiple investigations will be far more of a burden on the parents than annual standardized tests.
I don’t actually see it as homeschooling parents getting different oversight than non-homeschooling parents . I see it as parent-educators getting the same oversight as other non-public education providers get. My kids go to private school. Nobody from the government sits in the classrooms and observes.But the school is required to follow the state curriculum for each grade and to administer state-required standardized tests and the teachers have to meet state standards.
I agree that current CPS caseworkers are not trained in this area. I’m not sure about the “can’t be” part though. IMHO CPS should be an organization of EXTREMELY highly-trained individuals. They have an extremely delicate job to do, and they should have the expertiese necessary to do it well in a myriad of circumstances. **
An “Intent Form”, which I said I would possibly be in favor of(depending on what it’s used for) could certainly be filed with the local government and CPS could check to see if the family in question was a homeschooling family before going out to the home. I really don’t see cause for repeat visits, or indeed a first visit if an intent form has been filed. Certainly not for a simple truancy report. Abuse reports would still trigger an investigation, but not truancy reports.
If CPS has investigated a report of truant children which turned out to be a homeschooling family, surely that could be noted, and if subsequent reports were recieved the reporter could be informed the parents were homeschooling without the need for a second investigation. **
Thus the need for more training that I mentioned earlier. I still don’t see this as an impossiblility. Perhaps CPS should have some full-time child psychologists who could be consulted on certain cases before action is taken? They could be consulted on tons of different scenarios so they’re not like the homeschool oversight committee mentioned earlier. They’re just professionals qualified to evaluate such cases, thier jobs/budget would not be linked to finding and taking action on such cases.**
Under my proposal there would be someone who worked for CPS who you could consult, and who could evaluate the child fairly. **
I advocate no active oversight, but a intent form should certainly be adequate to head off investigations on grounds of truancy. Filing an intent form is far less intrusive into a family’s lives than repeated investigations OR annual standardized tests.**
Is it though? I recall a teacher in High School. He taught Chemistry, a fairly difficult subject, and he taught it on a college level. His failure rate(as assessed by the student body gossip, no definitive statistics were available to me) was near 50%. I failed his class myself one six weeks(out of three, I only took him for one semester) and I was near the top of my class. Judging by the fail rate numbers, this teacher was not imparting knowledge to the students. Last time I checked, he was still teaching. His students were not taken from him and placed with another teacher.
If homeschooled children fail the standardized tests, at a rate anything like this teacher’s students failed should they be taken and placed in public school? Why, or why not? Are standardized tests fair for students with non-standard cirriculum? Do we feel capable of designing a cirriculum so amazingly comprehensive, and comprehensible, that we can have confidence mandating it for every child in the state, regardless of thier individual learning styles, interests, or parent’s judgement/wishes?
This is quite a feat IMHO and I’ve not seen the cirriculum which meets this definition. As such I would not be comfortable mandating a certain cirriculum for home, public, and privately-educated children alike. With the difference in cirriculum, is a standardized test an accurate measuring rod? Do you agree there are valid criticisms of standardized tests? If so, why would objections based upon these criticisms, coupled with a custom cirriculum which may have had different focus areas than the test designers expected, not be adequate to exempt a homeschooling family from state-standardized tests?
I personally wouldn’t be concerned about most homeschooled children being able to pass the tests, the studies show they often excel. Still once someone starts saying these tests should be mandated my concern shifts to the minority of homeschoolers who will not recieve fair evaluation under this system and might have thier children placed in public school against their wishes and, ultimately, without need.
Because no one person can be an expert in everything. As a CPS worker, except in the most obvious cases, I didn’t determine whether an injury could have happened in the way the parents said. I relied on medical opinions. I wasn’t able to determine whether my homeschooling families schooling was adequate, so I relied on the board of education’s approval of their planned curriculum. And I don’t see the advantage in having people trained to evaluate the quality of education in CPS rather than in the education department.
Maybe in some places, but in my state, unfounded reports are expunged. And people do move.
Because in my state (and I suspect all of them), every allegation that would be abuse or neglect if true must be investigated including at least one home visit within 48 hours of the report being received.And simple truancy isn’t reportable until it rises to the level of educational neglect.
High school is an entirely different issue than the lower grades.At least around here, two high school students attending the same school are unlikely to have gotten precisely the same education, what with one taking the minimum two years of math and another going on to AP calculus, or one taking chemistry while the other takes physics.
But back to my point- If my children’s non-public school had fifty percent of its students failing standardized tests the school would lose its accreditation. Individual children who fail specific tests (I believe it’s the 4th and 8th grade math and reading tests) cannot be promoted until they pass, even in a non-public school.
I’m not sure what exactly would be so hard about creating a basic curriculum for grade schoolers, or exactly where learning styles, interests or parent judgements come in. It doesn’t need to be comprehensive , just minimum standards such as by the end of the first year of school the child will be able to add and subtract two digit numbers and have started reading and be able to write a sentence or two and requiring more mastery as time goes on with adjustments, of course, for the learning disabled. Are there homeschooling parents, those who are really homeschooling who don’t include reading and math and basic science and history in their curriculum? You’ll really have to give me an example of a non-standard curriculum that would cause difficulty with a standardized test.
If children fail to reach the minimum standards in a public school, what happens? They are not forced out of the public schools, why should a child be forced out of homeschooling? Maybe he or she just needs more time to reach that level. How can you tell the difference from a bit slow from improperly educated?
Did your state require any of these things of homeschoolers? There are numerous cases of child protective service workers imposing requirements on homeschooling parents that are not authorized by state law, but simply because the caseworker thinks they’re appropriate, and the parents have no choice but to comply because caseworkers are virtual gods who have the power to rip children away from their parents for any noncompliance with the requirements set down by the caseworker. Caseworkers do not have the right to make up new rules for parents to follow just because some busybody decided to make trouble and report them.
This sort of abuse of authority (something which is no stranger to child protective services workers) was such a problem in Illinois that the Illinois General Assembly eventually stripped DCFS of the authority to investigate educational neglect. It is because of this history of abuse of authority that I am very reluctant to permit any government intervention into homeschooling: history has proven that the government cannot, and should not, be trusted to exercise that power of intervention responsibly.
When I was a freshman in public high school, I realized that I was not going to get the education I wanted, and my family could not afford private school…so…I did home school. In New Hampshire, the only way to get your diploma through home school is if you are part of the Christian Coalition, or to follow the public curriculum and go into the public high school 2 times a week to have your work looked over and to be tested. I was not, and did not want to participate in either of these options. I home schooled for 2 years straight through the summers. I ended up fighting with the state for 2 years trying to get my diploma, and ended up having to take my g.e.d test. Thankfully Keene State College had seen kids go through this problem before so they admitted me without my diploma when I was 16.
Basically i’m not sure if the system needs to be more rigid with rules so that you can get your diploma if you deserve it, or less rigid for the same reason. Either way they need to change something. Although my experience was about 6 years ago, so maybe it has changed.
I didn’t make up any rules. I was probably one of the few caseworkers who had ever heard of homeschooling, and got them the information about registering with the Board of Education.And in fact, if caseworkers with no educational background are prone to making up their own rules, that’s all the more reason to keep any oversight in departments of education which will know what is legally required.
doreen, actually, the local boards of education cannot be trusted, either. There are numerous reports in Illinois of local boards of education demanding, under threat of prosecution for truancy, all sorts of documentation not required by law from parents with homeschooled children. (One of the common documents demanded is proof of vaccination. This is not required in Illinois for homeschooled children.) The homeschooling advocacy site which was mentioned earlier in this thread has several such references to that sort of thing happening.
If the boards of education know the law ( and I’m sure they do know it- whether they follow it or not ), I can’t see why they would want to make people jump through hoops that are not required by law. I am absolutely certain that my local board of ed is more than willing to drop students from their rolls upon meeting what the state requires and no more. Of course, my certainty is due in large part to the fact that the public schools here are terribly overcrowded.
I was unable to find the link you referred to, but I believe you earlier said that Illinois has no requirements for homeschooling, not even registration and that DCFS was stripped of the power to investigate educational neglect. How does (or can) the state of Illinois distinguish between parents who are homeschooling and those who don’t send them to school, but also don’t home school (which, minority though they may be, do exist)? It seems to me that if homeschooling has no requirements at all, I am perfectly free to sit my kids in front of Nickoldeon and claim to be homeschooling.
doreen, far too many local government officials are in the jobs they’re in for the power. These people will make other people jump through hoops because they can. It’s a power trip thing for them. They also do things like that in order to harass minorities or to encourage families deemed “undesirable” to leave town.
In addition, especially in smaller communities, the school system has an interest in increasing the total student count because many forms of state and federal funding are indexed to the number of students. This may be true even if the schools are overcrowded because a sufficiently increased student count will increase pressure for new school construction, which would give the superintendent more opportunities for kickbacks or other influence peddling with local contractors. (The town gets a new school building at taxpayer expense, the super gets a new kitchen, at taxpayer expense, and the current board gets $25,000 each in their campaign funds next time elections roll around.)
The state of Illinois does have minimal requirements for homeschoolers, but these are very minimal as a result of a consistent practice of abuse by local school boards, DCFS, and county prosecutors. The only legal action that can be taken in Illinois against parents who does not send their children to school is a criminal prosecution for having a truant student.
I’m far more willing to trust parents to look after their children properly than I am to trust the government to do the same thing. Parents tend to have fewer competing interests.