Education Week posted several states’ legislative maneuvers trying to get out from under federal Common Core State Standards demands. Many homeschoolers are concerned with the children and parents’ data collection, for one.
Check out EdWeek‘s article – Exit Strategy: State Lawmakers Consider Dropping Common Core (more…)
Yesterday, Oklahoma Representative Tom Cole introduced H.R. 1850, the Home School Equity Act for Tax Relief. I wonder who was lobbying for this controversial bill.
Many homeschoolers are extremely wary of federal “home school” legislation. (more…)
Common Core State Standards have been adopted in forty-five states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education program. Many homeschool advocates and other concerned education activists have this troubling federal initiative on their radar and are spreading the word to others. If homeschoolers know anything else, they know “local” is the best approach to education.
The National Governors Association initiated Common Core in 2009 to create a new standardized scope and sequence. That is what national groups, organizations and associated governments tend to slide towards – comparing notes and becoming uniform. How this particular monied enterprise applies to the original purpose, such as education, tends to be a bit sketchy. (more…)
A Seattle article presents an appealing looking title for many [Homeschoolers exempt from bill lowering mandatory school age]. Except, over my years of observation, I’m apprehensive of any law’s existence that you must be exempt from, especially when “homeschool” is brought in. As laws go, “exempt” in can mean “exempt” out. Since it’s usually homeschool volunteers watching those bills and language fly by, better safe than sorry works well.
I’m also one of those oddballs thinking Washington State’s current compulsory attendance age starting at eight years of age is wonderful. HB 1283 proposes lowering that age to six. There are 15 sponsors and it’s sitting in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Education. From KOMO:
Rep. Marcie Maxwell, D-Renton, House Bill 1283′s sponsor, said her reason for introducing it is simple: Society has changed since the early 20th century, when the current rules were created, and our laws should reflect that.
“We know today how important early education is,” she said. “Kindergarten, first grade, second grade and beyond are a vital part of all students’ preparation.”
Our society has changed, but I would wager the previous societies (and parents) knew exactly how important education is for all. Off the top of my head – Hypatia, Nathaniel Bowditch, Abraham Lincoln, Leonardo da Vinci are some examples of autodidacts who loved to learn. All without the assumption involuntary seat time in a classroom is necessary for 13 years.
Washington homeschoolers must file papers declaring intent to homeschool. Because homeschooling families can be mighty lobbying bodies when government agencies could interfere with our lives, the writers of HB 1283 release homeschoolers from filing homeschooling intent until eight years of age. But there’s always something to worry about if there’s a search for more control. Here’s a KOMO article excerpt by Jonathan Kaminsky:
What, then, is to stop a parent who doesn’t want to enroll his or her 6- or 7-year old from claiming to be homeschooling? “I suppose you could do that,” Maxwell said. “I would hope that everybody is looking out for the best interest of the child. I’d like to give parents the benefit of the doubt.”
This is an unnecessary concern when the parent is looking out for the child’s best interests and feels they’re not ready for formal schooling. Besides a truant six or seven year old just seems wrong.
A long-time homeschooling advocate has legitimate concerns quoted in the article:
Despite the concession to homeschoolers, some remain unhappy with the measure.Emilie Fogle, chairwoman of the Washington Homeschool Organization, said that there is no evidence that kids starting school earlier helps them later in life. She fears that an exception made for homeschoolers could be ephemeral.”An exemption puts us as a second group, and it can be taken away,” she said.
From KOMO, regarding the substantial financial interest in public education’s expansion with this bill’s potential passage:
The measure has broad support, including from the state’s Board of Education, the Association of Washington School Principals and the Washington Education Association – the state’s largest teachers’ union.
“We are working toward all-day kindergarten, and yet we have this archaic law on the books that doesn’t require families to send their kids to school until age 8,” said Connie Fletcher, a member of the state’s Board of Education. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
An incredible kindergarten teacher I worked with was leery of moving to an all-day kindergarten class for 5 year olds. She thought it was too long and too much for the children. She was never asked her opinion as the school district moved to all-day kindergarten. The Washington homeschool group, WHO, is thinking ahead and following the edu-industry trends. This bill’s movement will be interesting in seeing who wins, the children and families or the well-funded lobby groups.
By Sage Ross (Flickr: Boston Wiki Meetup) via Wikimedia Commons
Aaron Swartz is dead. His memorial service was Tuesday at a synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois. I ran into the terrible news reading Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing. Besides working with Doctorow on Creative Commons, Aaron developed the RSS program, the popular news and information site – Reddit, along with Public.Resource.Org. He co-founded Demand Progress, and served as a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Those are a few of his contributions from his 26-year-old life.
The prosecutors, legislators, regulators, MIT leaders and other mucky mucks against him surely did not anticipate the fallout from his tragic death. In a time where there is little public honor in Aaron’s and my home state of Illinois, Aaron (and his family) have been acclaimed for his fight to open access for documents and information that should be freely available via the internet.
From the Chicago Tribune By John Keilman and Sally Ho:
“He grew up in an environment where those sort of things were held in high esteem, the notion of making the world a better place,” Robert Swartz said.
That outlook became clear at 13, when he gained national acclaim for creating a do-it-yourself online encyclopedia that predated the launch of Wikipedia. It was the height of the dot-com boom, yet his site, The Info Network, was bereft of advertising, subscription fees or any other way to generate money.
“That’s not what the Internet was made for,” he told the Tribune at the time. “It was based on open standards and freedom, not ads.”
After Aaron’s freshman year in a private school, he moved on to homeschooling, supplementing his education with Lake Forest College classes. The homeschool community can be proud of him, not just for his brilliance, but for the way he lived his life expressing that genius.
The above video How We Stopped SOPA is explanation of the political activism and creativity used against an invasive regulatory bill that would cause government censorship on the internet.
Homeschoolers passionately protect our educational autonomy by visiting our represesentatives in our state and nation’s capitol. We do this to guard against our children being shut down in their learning joys and life passions. Just as Robert and Susan Swartz allowed for their son. We can relate to Aaron’s conversation he shared with a United States Senator. When Swartz asked him about the hypocrisy of the SOPA bill stifling freedom of information, he saw fire develop in the representative’s eyes, along with a raised voice: “There’s got to be laws on the internet. It’s got to be under control.” The tyrannical attitude was defeated that time. Aaron went on to say that these invasive bills will “happen again. The fire in these politicians’ eyes hasn’t gone out.”
The internet really is out of control. [He said with a mischievous smile] But if we forget that. If we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t really make a difference. And we see this as someone else’s responsibility to do this work. And it’s our job to just go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well then next time they might just win.
Let’s not let that happen. ~ Aaron Swartz 1986-2013
Internet - 1 Congress – 0
From the New York Times By John Schwartz Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26
In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.
The government shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”
Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.
Aaron’s family created a website: Remember Aaron Swartz:
Aaron was a tireless supporter of the open internet and an old-school hacker. To honor his memory and his contributions to technical community, Aaron’s family and friends wanted to provide a way to share their memories that:
- uses free and open source software wherever possible
- licenses its content under the Creative Commons
- is open to the technical community to hack on and contribute to
- leverages tools that Aaron used and contributed to, like Markdown and RSS
The site itself is a work in progress; we can’t do everything ourselves. To that end, we’d like to invite other programmers to contribute to the improvement of the site on Github. Here are more features we’d like to add:
- make it easy for a broader community of contributors to share memories, perhaps via Github’s Javascript API and CORS
- allows for sharing and contribution to Reddit
- provide compatibility across a diverse set of web platforms
If you’d like to contribute, please fork the repo on Github and get hacking. Alternatively, you can email your memories to share them directly with Aaron’s family and friends, who will work to shift them onto the website as quickly as possible.
Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.
Tim Berners-Lee ~ eulogist at Aaron Swartz’s funeral and creater of the World Wide Web
After the Senate ratification of the United Nations Disabilities Treaty failed, media coverage of the failure to pass a two thirds Senate majority cited the homeschool lobby as a major factor.
Foreign Policy: Homeschoolers help torpedo disability rights treaty in Senate
International observers may be a little confused about why the U.S. Senate just rejected a treaty that has been ratified by 125 countries and is substantially based on U.S. law. They also might be forgiven for wondering what, exactly, this has to do with homechooling. In addition to groups like the Heritage Foundation — which opposes nearly any U.N. treaty on sovereignty grounds — and anti-abortion politicians like Rick Santorum who argue, inaccurately, that the law could lead to abortion being mandated for disabled children, the politically powerful, but usually under-the-radar U.S. homeschooling movement has been one of the most pivotal lobbies working against U.S. Senate ratification of the treaty.
Conservative News - Homeschoolers lobby, UN disabilities treaty fails
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ostensibly would have expanded access and opportunity for the disabled. But opponents, particularly those in homeschooling and faith-based organizations, argued that it redefined parental rights more narrowly while impinging on U.S. sovereignty.
In a floor speech Tuesday morning, Democratic Sen. Christopher Coons (Del.) acknowledged his office had been barraged with calls from homeschooled families in his district urging him to vote against the treaty, although he dismissed the calls as stemming from scare tactics and said he still planned a “yes” vote.
The Hill - Senate rejects United Nations treaty for disabled rights in a 61-38 vote
The treaty, backed by President Obama and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), fell five votes short of the two-thirds majority needed for confirmation as dozens of Senate Republicans objected that it would create new abortion rights and impede the ability of people to homeschool disabled children.
Lee told Senators on Tuesday that the treaty “threatens the right of parents to raise their children with the constant looming threat of state interference.”
“We all want to support the best interest of the the child, every child,” Lee said in a speech on the Senate floor. “But I and many of my constituents, including those who home school their children or send their children to private or religious schools, have justifiable doubts that a foreign U.N. body, a committee operating out of Geneva, Switzerland should decide what is in the best interest of the child at home with his or her parents in Utah or in any other state in our great union.”
The Washington Post- Senate rejects treaty to protect disabled around the world
He [Santorum] and other conservatives argued that the treaty could relinquish U.S. sovereignty to a U.N. committee charged with overseeing a ban on discrimination and determining how the disabled, including children, should be treated. They particularly worried that the committee could violate the rights of parents who choose to home school their disabled children.
The Daily Caller – A Bad Disabled Rights Treaty
The convention consists of a preamble and 50 (!) articles. Under Article 4 (1)(b), ratifying states pledge to “take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices that constitute discrimination against persons with disabilities,” and under 4 (1)(d), to “refrain from engaging in any act or practice that is inconsistent” with the convention. Who gets to define whether an existing law, regulation, custom, or practice “constitute[s] discrimination against” the deaf, blind, epileptic, diabetic, or paraplegic? Or — to name a few of the other groups currently deemed disabled — persons afflicted with psychosis, cancer, emotional dysfunction, narcolepsy, learning disability, past alcohol or drug abuse if in rehab, or serious contagious disease? Your guess is as good as the Post editorialists’, except that they seem to have spent no time guessing or so much as thinking about the matter.
Will states and localities have to change their laws, or just the federal government? Glad you asked: Article 4, Section 5 says “The provisions of the present Convention shall extend to all parts of federal states without any limitations or exceptions.”
Libertarians, along with all those concerned with the autonomy of the institutions of private civil life, please note: under Article 4, section 1, part (e), states must “take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination on the basis of disability by any person, organization or private enterprise.” (Yes, “any.”) The employment provisions of the current federal ADA apply to employers with more than 15 employees, but Article 27 (1)(a) would seem to prescribe doing away with any such threshold; it requires states to “Prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability with regard to all matters concerning all forms of employment.”
There is a Senate discussion on the floor now regarding a vote for the United Nations Treaty on Equal Rights for the Disabled.
Homeschooling concerns been brought up by Senators numerous times this morning.
In 2009, Larry and Susan Kaseman argued against treaty ratification here in the Home Education Magazine Taking Charge column. This article below is specifically about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but the argument of United States sovereign powers and parental oversight remain:
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Cause for Concern but Not Panic
If ratification of the convention becomes an issue, we will be better prepared to oppose it if we view it as part of larger issues and are aware of the factors that limit the changes the convention by itself would bring. Until it becomes an issue (if it ever does), we can strengthen our position on important issues by understanding and exercising our rights and responsibilities as families and working to prevent professionals and experts from taking over the roles of parents.
It is scheduled to be voted on today at noon eastern time. Senate contact information is here.
Update – This treaty ratification did not pass, as the vote require a 2/3 majority per Article 2-Section 2 of the Constitution. The vote was 61-38.
The New York Times put most homeschoolers into an undesirable, non-bid for fame. We’ve been profiled as a special interest group wanting something (money) from these “new Republicans.” I don’t know about many other homeschoolers, but I’d rather step out of this particular limelight of perceived hands held out. As an Illinois homeschooler, my husband and I have known we could use the Illinois Education Tax Credit for some years, but decided it wasn’t worth it for various reasons. We learned some time ago that our freedom is worth more than money.
In the NY Times’s Room for Debate, Susan Neuman, professor in educational studies and assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration had an interesting point of view. She started out with the notion that ‘conservatives’ are trying to destroy public education with homeschool tax credits.
I’d say that ‘conservatives’ like Chester Finn are trying to destroy homeschooling with his love of standardized tests. His thumbs up for homeschool tax credits came with the notion that “if they don’t pass those tests, either the subsidy vanishes or the kids must enroll in some sort of school with a decent academic track record.” As if those tests are a good synopsis of what children learn. As if enrolling kids who don’t do well on tests is reason to be in a school. We could turn that around to say that some public school students shouldn’t be in school because those tests look very bad for them. Most good teachers agree that teaching to standardized tests doesn’t help learning, even if their union insists on testing for homeschoolers. From the edu-industry end, Mr. Finn was invested as a Director of K12, Inc. until July of 2007 and is still a member of the Education Advisory Committee. Not surprisingly, Finn was promoting the virtual schools heavily in this non-reality based comparison of homeschooling and virtual schools: “From a policy perspective, however, there’s not much difference between teaching kids at home and enrolling them in any of hundreds of “virtual charter schools” or district- or state-run alternatives”.” His K12 company is lobbying hard in Illinois for more business than just the Chicago Virtual School. I wouldn’t want him speaking on behalf of the homeschooling community because dollar signs keep distorting his view. In The Educated Child, a book he co-authored with William Bennett, they stated that “homeschoolers should not have to do so [homeschool] because there are no good schools available”. What they don’t seem to understand is the homeschooling lifestyle enables the family to enjoy each other and their education and isn’t necessarily because of an indictment of schools. Families homeschool in communities with the best school districts too.
Rob Reich – notorious for his anti-homeschool freedom attitudes – sounds almost excited about federal tax credits. His piece is similar to Finn’s, except he wants homeschool registration, where Chester Finn likes the testing notion. I think Reich’s piece was the tamest of any of his previous articles demanding homeschoolers answer to the government. There’s cause for alarm. Reich senses promise in registering all homeschooled children with the use of tax credits.
Want a tax credit to home school? Accept a requirement to register your child as being home schooled and that the child take the same state tests as other public school students. Federal dollars come with strings attached, and these particular strings are in the best interests of children, anyway.
Luis Huerta of Columbia University had a piece with many similar points to a Daily Beast article.
The current efforts consist of a two-prong approach that involve resurrecting recently proposed legislation: First, the Family Education Freedom Act of 2009, sponsored and repeatedly introduced by Representative Ron Paul of Texas has proposed a tax credit of up to $5,000 for private school tuition and home schooling expenses. Second, the Parental Rights Amendment of 2009 sponsored by Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and written by Michael Farris, the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, would protect “the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children” as a fundamental right.
But I think his point below shows the HSLDA sponsored contradiction in promoting a Parental Rights Amendment, while chancing federal regulations of homeschooling with tax credits. I also don’t like the Parental Rights Amendment because we don’t need our rights enumerated. We already have them.
Dana Goldstein from The Beast says in her article How the Tea Party Will Destroy Education Reform that:
The organization [HSLDA] has powerful supporters—both veteran legislators and newcomers. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the caucus’ vice-chairwoman, support homeschool tax credits. John Kline, the incoming House Education Committee chairman, was the keynote speaker at last spring’s Home School Legal Defense Association conference, where he said he would work to “charge up Capitol Hill with the message of homeschool freedom.”
I’m all about a message of homeschool freedom, but we generally keep it to ourselves, unless ironically enough, legislators or school authorities start getting in our way.
Here’s some more “new Republican” names laid out from the Beast that want to ‘help’.
“Rubio and Paul ran for Senate supporting tax credits for homeschoolers, though they also describe themselves as deficit hawks committed to balancing the federal budget. Paul has been an especially vocal advocate for homeschooling, often speaking publicly about the prominent role homeschooling volunteers played in his Kentucky campaign. He spoke on June 25 to the Christian Homeschool Educators of Kentucky, whose mission is to “protect children from mental, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by secular humanists in a socialist society or governmental system.” On his campaign website, Paul’s staff regularly promoted homeschooling as an alternative to failing public schools, citing high academic achievement scores among homeschooled children (who also tend to come from more affluent families than their public school counterparts.)”
Cato Institute‘s Neil McCluskey seems to get it in his article: Unconstitutional Intrusion
The sentiment is right: Home schooling parents shouldn’t have to pay for schools they don’t use then pay again for education they do. But good intentions neither make a law constitutional, nor necessarily sound. Proof of home schooling could be defined as passing federally prescribed tests – just the sort of mandate many home schoolers despise. In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution gives the federal government specific powers, and the feds may do nothing beyond them. Included among them is nothing about education, so Washington may make no education policy. And no, the taxing power does not allow Washington to do whatever it wants as long as it is connected to taxes. Taxation may only be used in service of the enumerated powers.
McCluskey finishes with this thought:
Home schoolers deserve some breaks. At the national level, that means adhering to the Constitution and getting the federal government out of education, which would benefit not just home schoolers, but all taxpayers.
I don’t think most homeschoolers consider themselves deserving of a break. Except when legislators or public school authorities interfere with well or ill intentioned motivations. Rule number one for homeschoolers should be to not make any rules or laws or regulations for homeschooling families. If we’ve already determined it’s worth it to go against the societal mainstream of public schools, then we’re also pretty determined to create the best learning opportunities for each of our children in the coziness of our homes. In other words, no worries about us, as public schools already have plenty to do on their own.
Neumann concludes with a question.
This latest proposal is designed for the heart not the head. Home-schooling families are too smart and too savvy to buy into this half-baked plan. They know that tax credits are good for nothing but greater federal intrusion. Is this what the Tea Party had in mind?
If you’ve ever heard the story about The Wild and Free Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp, then you’ll understand homeschoolers don’t want to end up in the educational market’s pen. Many have walked away from the carrot.
NHELD’s Deborah Stevenson has an excellent piece about this tax credit issue.
Spunky has a piece, along with good comments on the issue.
Update – My thoughts, concerns, a bit of research and a lot of other good folks’ articles regarding the IL Education Tax Credit and its repercussions are posted here.
Submitted by Susan Ryan, who is happily and independently homeschooling in Illinois
The January 2 Chicago Tribune features an article titled African-Americans Choosing to Home-School:
Home-schooling experts say more African-American families are choosing to school their children at home, opting out of public schools, which critics say may be not only failing their children, but also in some cases shortchanging them of their history.
“That is the No. 1 reason … the black curriculum,” said Joyce Burgess, who with her husband founded the National Black Home Educators organization, based near Baton Rouge, La. “They’ve taken black history out. It wasn’t just Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth … and Harriet Tubman. It was also Condoleezza Rice, Shirley Chisholm; it was also Marian Anderson and the Tuskegee Airmen. They’re heroes, and our children need to learn about our heroes.”
Although numbers reflecting the trends and demographics of home-schooled children are hard to come by — for example, in Chicago, parents who choose to home-school are not required to inform the school district — experts and leaders in the field say there is no doubt that minority participation is growing.
It has taken ten years for fact to overcome perception but as of August two important issues for Homeschool Families have been clarified. This year’s revision of the “Federal Student Aid Handbook: Vol. 2010-2011″ can be accessed on line.
In the first volume, chapter one, home school students are stated as eligible for FSA funds provided their education at the secondary level was treated by their state law as a home or a private school. Learn more at the link above.
