An online friend from Texas sent the link to this article, and included a Texas-specific observation.

There’s no place like home: Learning to teach a challenge to parents, 10 September 2007, Greater Houston Weekly, Houston, Texas

Home education reaches back to the roots of the nation and the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison and Douglas Mac-Arthur. Here in Greater Houston, a new generation of homeschoolers hopes to follow in their footsteps.

Homeschooling has been legal in all 50 states for more than a decade. With their children now adults and on the far side of college, some Houston families aren’t surprised that statistics are affirming their choice to teach their children at home.

Overall, the article is positive, but my friend included a comment about the ‘legality’ aspect:

The reality is the homeschooling has never been illegal in any state, so it’s been much longer than a decade.

Here in TX the Leeper case affirmed the right to homeschool, it didn’t grant any new rights, in the decision it includes the fact that homeschooling has been legal since before statehood.

“At the beginning of this century the public school system of Texas was not well developed. No more than ten percent of school-age children attended public schools, according *434 to the uncontradicted evidence at trial, and as there were few private and parochial schools in the State, many children were taught at home.

Public school attendance was not mandatory in Texas until 1916.

<snip>

Enactment of the compulsory attendance law in 1915 did not end home schooling; some children continued to be educated at home just as they had before. The important fact, for purposes of analysis of the legal issues before us, is that some school-age children have been educated at home since before the compulsory attendance law was passed in 1915, and the State never attempted to prohibit or even restrict home schooling, or to allege a violation of the compulsory attendance law based solely on a child’s being taught at home, until 1981.

<snip>

We come now to the central issue in the case. Defendants acknowledge, contrary to their position from 1981-1986, that a home school can be a private school within the meaning of 21.033(a)(1).”

posted by Valerie

Illinois imposes no regulations, 19 September 2007, Pioneer Press Online, Glenview, Illinois

Start asking questions about home schoolers in Illinois and there’s one answer you won’t be able to find: How many there are.

Illinois is one of 10 states that leaves the increasingly popular option of home schooling unregulated.

But in Illinois there is no interaction with home schoolers. In many cases, the government doesn’t know they exist.

…

One of the most prominent is State Sen. Kimberly Lightford, D-4th, of Maywood. Lightford is the chair of the Senate’s Education Committee.

“I would have assumed to some degree that we had accountability over how many home schoolers there were, where they were located, and that they would be tested,” Lightford said.

She was so surprised that she said she is planning to delve deeper into the issue.

“We don’t know what homeschoolers are doing, but we want to find out” is a complaint from bureaucrats that I’ve heard for over a decade. I think this is what the courtroom judges on television call a ‘fishing expedition.’

My own first-person encounter was in Germany in a military community in 1995. The main subject of an article of the front page of the Herald-Post, a newspaper for the Heidelberg, Mannheim and Worms military communities, was the decentralization of the overseas DoD schools that serve the children of servicemembers.

[Georgia] Williams-Scaife [of DoDEA's former Panama school district] said research shows involving parents in decision making results in a more efficient school that serves its students better.

The point was that ‘local control’ in school was better than a long chain-of-command. The article about local control being a good thing ended with a non sequitur about how someone needed to regulate homeschoolers. The conclusion seemed to be that if parents help make decisions at school, that’s good, but if they do it themselves, that’s bad.

[Bartley] Lagomarsino [deputy director of the DOD Education Activity] said DODDS doesn’t have data on whether there are [homeschooled] children overseas who aren’t getting an education. With the regulation, officials can gather this information.

They didn’t know, but they wanted to find out.

The proposed regulation to control military homeschoolers overseas never saw the light of day for ‘international reasons’ (the U.S. has no jurisdiction outside the country — yes, slightly ironic at the moment), so DoDEA still “doesn’t have data” on homeschooled kids.

But back to Illinois.

“So you don’t even know your child’s aptitude or ability or where they are? At what level?” [State Sen. Kimberly Lightford] asked, still sounding astonished. “That’s scary.”

This reminds me of concern that breastfeeding mothers do not know how much milk their baby drinks at each feeding — other than ‘enough to satisfy the baby’s hunger.’ One solution was to weigh the baby before nursing, and then weigh the baby afterwards.

Most parents who pay attention to their children probably have a good idea of their child’s “aptitude or ability” even if they do not have test scores to demonstrate their children’s skill at taking tests. Of course there will be families at either end of the curve who need to ask the help of people who specialize in figuring out how to work with unaverage situations, but for average conditions, the skills and practices of garden-variety parents should be adequate.

Just as attentive parents know if a baby is trying to sit up, stand up, walk or talk, those same parents working together with their children will notice whether the child is picking up the meanings of words, numbers and concepts that pop up in daily life.

“Levels” are generalizations that are useful for mass-management of Other Peoples’ Kids, or for gathering statistics, but they are not universal truisms. Try pegging Christopher Robin as a ‘preschooler,’ Bartholomew Cubbins as a fifth grader, or Aladdin as a freshman or sophomore. Was Cinderella a senior? Sleeping Beauty was about fifteen or sixteen — can you imagine the story describing her as a sophomore or junior? Was the Prince a college man? Who was in a higher ‘grade,’ Dorothy when the “cyclone” took her to Oz, or Alice when she fell down a rabbit hole?

We do not think twice about characterizing our own children as ___[insert number]__-graders instead of by their age, or by their interests. The psychological pigeonholes we put them in when we refer to the children by a school grade do not reveal their oddness until we apply those same pigeonholes to archetypal characters or well-known literary characters. The limitations of ‘grade’ pigeonholes jumped right out at me.

The reporter continues the article with the observation that Illinois statutes contain no definition or constraints on mothers and fathers raising their daughters and sons educationally.

There is no specific mention of home schooling in state statutes. The only governing reference to the issue is a 1950 state Supreme Court ruling that places home schooling under the definition of “private schools.”

There is also no specific mention of education in the United States Constitution. Since 1787, 220 years ago, there has been no Constitutional permission for the federal government to run the education of Americans. In making this point, who does the reporter expect is going to gain? Is this situation supposed to strike fear in the reader’s breast? To gain a national perspective, I’ll paraphrase the writer: “The United States is one of few nations that leaves national education unregulated.” The unwritten conclusion of either statement in the context of the article is that the government needs to control all learning and growing.

I have not seen any Illinois reports of homeschoolers creating a public safety problem, or articles about homeschooled kids spray painting highway underpasses with pi, or the need for metal detectors in the front doors of homes. Perhaps the government should get in order the schools already under its control, and check back with us once that job is finished.

Blog comments:

• Corn and Oil: Illinois has no homeschool regulations
• Illinois Review: State senator contemplates oversight for IL home schoolers

posted by Valerie

Izzy Lyman, author of the book The Homeschooling Revolution, and the blog of the same name, has a piece on homeschooling at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website.

Homeschooling Comes of Age, 10 September 2007, Ludwig von Mises Institute

A teenage lawyer/budding author, however, wouldn’t surprise John Taylor Gatto, an outspoken critic of compulsory education laws and a former New York State Teacher of the Year. Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Gatto forthrightly argued that “genius is as common as dirt.”

Perhaps. But it’s also understandable that when everyday folks hear about the homeschooled Joeys and Caitlins and Micahs, they become a tad intimidated as if this educational choice were the exclusive domain of obsessive-compulsive moms and dads with money to burn, time to spare, and a brood of driven, Type-A offspring.

…

In a legal sense, homeschools serve as a glaring reminder of a complex issue that has become the stuff of landmark Supreme Court cases: does the state have the authority to coerce a youngster to attend school and sit at a desk for 12 years? Whether said child has the aptitude and maturity for such a long-term contract (or is it involuntary servitude?) remains an uncomfortable topic because, in the acceptable mantra of the day, “education is a right.”

Such a national conversation is long overdue, as there are plenty of signs costly remedial education and rising dropout rates, to name two to indicate that the status quo public school model isn’t kid-friendly.

…

It was 1969 when the late Dr. Raymond Moore initiated an inquiry into previously neglected areas of educational research. Two of the questions that Moore and a team of like-minded colleagues set out to answer were (1) Is institutionalizing young children a sound, educational trend? and (2) What is the best timing for school entrance?

The entire article is worth a read.

posted by Valerie

Sometimes the obvious isn’t always ‘the way it is.’

The Virginia Tech Tragedy: A Wake up Call to Every Parent’s Nightmare, 17 July 2007, Dr. Donna’s College Insider View

How does a parent handle this [insecurity]? Obviously, home schooling your child through graduate school is not an option and we can’t control every situation our kids will find themselves in.

For most of us (my family included), ‘homeschooling college’ isn’t the path the kids choose. But ‘homeschooling college’ past the teen years (or even during the teen years) isn’t an impossibility. One of the first books about homeschooling that I read was by Alexandra Swann.

• No Regrets: How Home Schooling Earned Me a Master’s Degree at Age 16 (1989)

Our family didn’t follow the same homeschooling path as the Swann family, but Alexandra’s book about her education was helpful.

I’m not encouraging (or discouraging) people from following Ms. Swann’s example, only ‘reacting’ to the item above that caught my eye in a Google alert.

Other articles about Alexandra Swann are:

• Joyce Swann’s Homeschool Tips, 1994
• Not home alone – success of homeschooling movement, National Review, Sept 14, 1998
• The socialization question, enterstageright.com, October 30, 2000
• I Was an Accelerated Child (use Ctrl+F to search for “Swann”)

College-at-home articles are at:

• Homeschooling College, too?

Other college articles are:

• The Homeschooler In College – The Big Project
• An Early Dip into College Life

posted by Valerie

The author of this piece bends the reader forwards and backwards with all the objectivity.

Keep ‘Em Home, 20 June 2007, Boise Weekly, Boise, Idaho

Homeschooling, that oft-misunderstood anomaly of Idaho education, has a good friend in the governor’s office for the first time in a long while.

…

Otter described homeschooling as a fair extension of what President George Washington meant when he discussed, in his first inaugural address, the “sacred fire of liberty” that was “staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

…

In April, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that Idaho was in the bottom five for per-pupil spending, about $6,028 per student. Only Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi spent similar amounts.

…

One reason Luna might want more students in the state’s public schools is that Idaho doesn’t really have a clue as to what sort of education students are getting in their homes. Luna said the state of Idaho doesn’t have any methods for tracking students individually, much less those students who aren’t enrolled in public education programs.

…

But gaining the freedom that Idaho homeschooling advocates have was a hard-fought battle, one that some advocates say they’re probably going to have to fight, in some form, every year.

…

Sherri Wood of the Idaho Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, said her organization does not oppose homeschooling per se, but she questions the ability of all parents to take over a child’s education.

…

“They’re pretty isolated,” Wood said. “They don’t have any of those socialization skills. Employers want students who aren’t just skilled in academics. They want them to get along well with other people.”

…

For now, homeschoolers in Idaho remain defiant, but perhaps more comforted knowing that Idaho’s chief executive is such a fan.

One of the commenters at the site said, “I was surprised that Boise Weekly would post such a positive article on homeschooling,” but the feeling I got from the article, was Boing! Boing! Boing! back and forth like one of those punching-bag toys.

A counter-point to this type of article that pits homeschooling against the Professionals is at YouTube: Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society on The Pinky Show (hat tips to Mary and Jen).

Scary School Nightmare

[The schools] school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed — the more “treatment” there is, the better are the results. Or, “escalation” leads to success. The pupil is thereby schooled to confuse teaching with learning, schooled to confuse grade advancement with education, schooled to confuse a diploma with competence. His imagination is schooled to accept service in place of value.

Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work is mistaken for the improvement of community life, police protection is mistaken for safety, military poise is mistaken for national security, the rat race is mistaken for productive work.

Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools and other agencies in question.

…

I wanted to find out where the idea came from that all over the world people have to be assembled in specific groups of not less than 15, otherwise it’s not a class. Not more than 40, otherwise they are underprivileged. For yearly, not less than 800 hours, otherwise they don’t get enough. Not more than 1100 hours, otherwise it’s considered a prison. For four-year periods, by somebody else who has undergone this for a longer time.

How did it come about tht such a crazy process like schooling would become necessary?

Then I realized that it was something like engineering people. That our society doesn’t only produce artifact things, but artifact people. And it doesn’t do that by the content of the curriculum, but by getting them through this ritual, which makes them believe that learning happens as a result of being taught.

posted by Valerie

The following article is a pleasant enough bread & butter article about homeschooling in New York state. The one incongruous note is almost a historical footnote, ‘who started what kind of homeschooling, and when.’

Home schooling on the rise locally, 15 June 2007, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York

Those reasons offer a glimpse into why close to 1,700 students are home schooled in Monroe County — and why the practice is growing both locally and nationally.

…

Home schooling was the norm when the United States was founded but died out when public schools were founded and lawmakers made at least some formal education a requirement, said Ian Slatter, director of media relations for the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association. The practice began to re-emerge in the 1960s with the rise of the hippie movement and continued to gain momentum as prayer in public schools was challenged.

“This sparked the evangelicals,” Slatter said, and by the 1980s, more and more people were trying home schooling.

School prayer may have sparked part of the boom in homeschooling, but that isn’t the full story. A less pleasant part was the Supreme Court removal of tax-exempt status from schools that refused entry to black children.

The Burger Court 1969 – 1986, History of the Court, The Supreme Court Historical Society

When the Internal Revenue Service declared in 1970 that private schools discriminating against blacks could no longer claim tax-exempt status, the action went largely unnoticed by the public. In 1983, it became prime-time news when two religious schools having admission policies based on race sought to regain tax-favored status and the case reached the Supreme Court.

Counsel for Bob Jones University and Goldsboro Christian School argued that their policies were based on sincerely held religious beliefs. But the Court ruled that the First Amendment did not prevent denial of tax-favored status. Eliminating racial discrimination in education substantially outweighed any burden placed on the free exercise of religion, according to the eight-to-one majority.

Christian Fundamentalism in the United States, page 469, Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family and Education

While Christian schools were allowed to ignore questions of cultural pluralism in their curriculum, they were not allowed to avoid integration and still maintain their tax-exempt status. … In May 1983, the Supreme Court upheld the denial of tax-exempt status to segregationist schools. The decision based on the case of Bob Jones University … struck a blow to the evangelical right.

With the loss of tax-exempt status underscored by the Supreme Court, it is probable that many schools had to raise their tuition rates. It is also possible that they went out of business if they chose not to integrate. For parents who could not afford the tuition rate increase, did not want their children in an integrated setting, or whose schools closed, the educational choice was between public school and homeschooling.

A Brief History of American Homeschooling, Excerpted from Homeschoolers’ Success Stories: 15 Adults and 12 Young People Share the Impact That Homeschooling Has Made on Their Lives by Linda Dobson

In the 1980s, changes in the tax regulations for Christian schools forced the smaller among them to close down by the hundreds. Suddenly, the parents of the students attending these schools were faced with a choice between government school attendance and homeschooling. For many, this really wasn’t a choice at all, and these Christian families became part of a large second wave of homeschooling, joining earlier homeschoolers and boosting the numbers to record highs. Christian curriculum providers, already well-established businesses that had just lost a large chunk of their original market, followed the money and easily courted the new market of homeschooling parents.

Many apparently chose homeschooling.

posted by Valerie

Ned Vare, a homeschool activist in Connecticut, used to post eye-opening messages on NHEN’s former discussion list, NHEN-Legislative. That list … faded …, but my memories of Ned’s posts (still ‘living’ here — just search for “Vare”) haven’t.

Freak Power: Ned Vare reflects on a special time in American politics and culture, 8 May 2007, Clinton Recorder, Guilford, Connecticut

Though it cast a big shadow, Aspen was a small town in the 1970s. The resort town in the Colorado Rockies also was a haven for free spirits, including the late Hunter S. Thompson, the “gonzo journalist” who ran for sheriff on the so-called “Freak Power” ticket. On that same party ticket was a young man named Ned Vare. …

Thompson and Vare shared an office and became friends when Thompson (who was eventually immortalized as “Uncle Duke” – the character in the Doonesbury cartoon) played volleyball one Sunday afternoon at Woody Creek. Vare said Thompson’s banter – and Denver Bronco games – opened his eyes about conventional wisdom. “These people didn’t believe anybody,” he said. “They helped to peel away all the bull. I got to meet a lot of people (in Aspen) and I read the paper and meet the people doing things,” Vare said.

I’m saddened to see that Ned is ill, and I hope ‘modern medicine’ is doing its best for him.

He wrote his first two books on golf 10 years ago, but his main passion is children and how the public schools and formal education aren’t doing the job. A deadly pulmonary disease has kept him from the links recently, but he still travels to homeschooling affirs where he and his wife, Luz Shosie speak. He has appeared 20 times on public access television on the subject and writes books, magazine articels and newspaper columns.

Pulmonary fibrosis, which led to Marlon Brando’s death at 80, makes Vare’s days short.

“I’m not getting any better, baby,” he said. “This thing just kills people.”

1970s-era photo is at The Great Thompson Hunt.

Thanks for all your old NHEN-Leg posts, Ned.

posted by Valerie

Chicago Defender, Chicago, Illinois, 13 April 2007, Cheryl Fields-Smith is conducting a study of African-American homeschooling families in Georgia

The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” is finding new application among African-American parents who are opting to educate their children at home.

… Cheryl Fields-Smith is conducting a two-year study into black homeschooling in the southern states. She was in Chicago on Thursday to talk about the study and called the homeschooling movement among African-Americans “an extreme form of parental involvement.”

I had to look up Cheryl Fields-Smith. At the College of Education at the University of Georgia’s web site, her C.V. gives her title as, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education. That may explain her view of parents assuming their natural educational role as “extreme.”

Parents of black children are teaching them at home for various reasons, Fields-Smith found. Reasons included infusing black history and perspective into education, countering negative images of black children, demanding higher expectations from their children and sheltering them from bad influences in public schools.

I wouldn’t think that those goals are extreme.

One area, though, could lead to a feeling of conflict.

Others have the mentality that African-Americans have worked so hard for public school integration, it seems counterintuitive to pull their children out of school, she added.

Jennifer James, the director of the National African-American Homeschooler Alliance countered that idea.

African-American parents who want their children to receive an exceptional education are facing unequal resources in the schools, overt and subtle racism at times in the schools and an achievement gap that doesn’t look to be narrowing,” she said.

It is good to see that homeschooling is growing for kids who need it. Still, the idea of black parents homeschooling their children is not new. In the early 1990s, I used to buy some of our homeschooling materials from Donna Nichols-White’s catalog/magazine, The Drinking Gourd. I was sad when it went out of business, but I’m glad I had to opportunity to buy from it as Donna had collected unique science materials.

posted by Valerie

One never knows when home education will pop up. While ‘off duty’ and zoning out in front of the tube with a movie-of-opportunity, I was surprised to hear that Honey Ryder, Ursula Andress’s character in the 1962 flick of Ian Fleming’s story, Dr. No, apparently was homeschooled.

In the movie, Honey arose from the sea, and (not surprisingly) captured the attention of 007. When Bond (James Bond) asked her about her childhood, Honey said her father raised her wherever there were shells (her dad’s research specialty) — places such as the Philippines and Bali. James asked Honey about her schooling and she said she didn’t need to go to school because her father had an encyclopedia. Honey said she started reading at A when she was eight and (by the time James was talking to her) she had made it up to T.

Honey’s autodidacticism seems to have upstaged John Holt concerning unschooling. The first of his books, How Children Fail, wasn’t published until 1964.

Now that I’ve got that homeschool tidbit of cinematic trivia out of my system, back to the movie.

posted by Valerie

Tulsa World, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 12 March 2007, Home Sweet Home: Home school well-protected by Oklahoma ConstitutionMany states have the same kind of provisions in statutory laws, but not in their constitutions, according to Martin H. Belsky, professor of law at the University of Tulsa.

Section 4, Article 13 of the Oklahoma Constitution states that, “The Legislature shall provide for the compulsory attendance at some public or other school, unless other means of education are provided, of all the children in the State who are sound in mind and body, between the ages of eight and sixteen years, for at least three months in each year.”

It is the clause “unless other means of education are provided” that means so much to home-schoolers in the state.

posted by Valerie