Again, homeschooling is ‘a choice,’ not part of NCLB’s ‘school choice’

SC families deserve more school choices, 8 October 2008, Hilton Head Island Packet, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

Pessimists blame the standards, and say we cannot do better. It is time for parents, educators and lawmakers to rethink traditional public schools.

“Public education” needs to encompass a dynamic range of classrooms, suitable to the diverse learning needs and ambitions of the children. This means freedom for parents to choose among all types of schooling: public, charter, magnet, independent, homeschooling and private.

Parents already have the freedom to choose. What they don’t all have is the cash to pay twice for a service, ie, taxes for public schools plus ready cash for a private choice. But then, people without kids pay once for nothing … nothing more than a legally enforced public good. But what the writer seems to want — government administered funds for each child’s education — would only come with restrictions.

Communicating the Strengths of Homeschooling, March-April 1997, Home Education Magazine

Vouchers: Vouchers for education have the potential to cause serious problems from homeschoolers. At first glance, vouchers look like a very good idea to some of us, that is, having the government give us some of the money that we ourselves paid as taxes and that the government would have spent on our children if we had chosen to send them to public school. …

However, The basic features of vouchers means that they would cost us homeschoolers a significant part of our educational freedoms. The key principles of taxation in a democratic society is that the government needs to account for the tax money that it spends. For example, we don’t want the government just giving our tax money to road contractors and hoping that they will build safe, long-lasting roads. Unfortunately but inevitably, this principle also has to be applied to us when we are on the receiving end of tax money. If the government were to give us homeschoolers money to homeschool (in the form of vouchers or in any other way), the government would have to devise a way to ensure that we were spending the money to educate our children, which would mean, of course, that we would have to meet government standards that require students to develop specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes at specific times and in specific ways.

Homeschooling becoming part of public education’s choice of schools (via funding) would put children back in the same kind of boxes they were in before homeschooling was widely known.

Tags: home education, homeschooling

This entry was posted on October 17, 2008 at 1:35 pm and is filed under News-Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.