Greater Cincinnati’s Business Courier shared news of a huge homeschool convention. This weekend is predicted to bring 15,000 homeschoolers and interested parties to Cincinnati. Some of that pull might also come from the libertarian attraction of former Texas Representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul. The tickets for Ron Paul’s keynote speech will be sold separately from the Convention admission price.
Florida’s House Speaker is not only the country’s youngest Speaker, but he was homeschooled until his sophomore year in high school.
House Speaker Will Weatherford’s fast rise started from humble beginnings By Michael Van Sickler Miami Herald
Weatherford is the second oldest of nine children but the oldest of seven boys. Their father, Bill, was Southern Methodist University’s quarterback from 1969-71. His father played in the 1940s. Brother Drew played quarterback for Florida State University.
Football for the Weatherfords comes easy. The family story is more complex.
For most of Weatherford’s childhood, the family lived a payday away from economic ruin. They moved from Texas to Florida when he was 7. It was difficult finding landlords willing to lease to such a large family, and for the next seven years, the Weatherfords moved several more times before settling in Odessa in Pasco County.
Old enough to know the family was poor, Weatherford grew conscious of how his family was perceived. The biggest difference was that the parents homeschooled their kids.
As in all politics, Will Weatherford is somewhat controversial, also laid out in this FlaglerLive Editorial. With a powerful father-in-law’s help, Weatherford moved quickly from State Representative to Florida’s Speaker of the House. He definitely has an interesting background and a promising future in the world of politics.
In this first of three posts, titled Compelled to Attend, HEM’s Road Less Travelled columnist, Linda Dobson, is revisiting her first book, The Art of Education: Reclaiming Your Family, Community and Self, published by Home Education Press in 1995. An excerpt:
And if colleges and universities ignore the true meaning of education and accept indoctrination as their function in society, what then is the purpose of all the years of schooling that lead up to college, starting at the tender age of five or, in many cases today, even younger?
Continue reading at the link above.
Holly Craw, the Phoenix, Arizona Homeschooling Examiner, asks a question we’re hearing more and more often these days in her article Arizona loses out on Race to the Top Funds: Is this a new opportunity to strengthen homeschooling? A couple of excerpts:
The Arizona homeschool community may need to gear up for an increase in its ranks. When U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, announced yesterday the winners in the Race to the Top competition for billions of dollars in federal assistance for state education funding, Arizona had missed a $250 million windfall by 5.3 points.
This examiner predicts that there will be an upsurge in families deciding to homeschool because of the issues that are being exacerbated in the public schools.
If you are having second thoughts about your local public school, and the programs and staff that it no longer has, you may want to consider the pros and cons of homeschooling.
CBS News’ Political Hotsheet has an article about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child:
31 GOP Senators Oppose U.N. Children’s Rights Convention
by Brian Montopoli – 36 commentsThirty-one Republican senators are cosponsoring a resolution opposing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, according to the conservative group ParentalRights.org, which is pushing the resolution.
The resolution, which you can read here, states that the convention “undermines traditional principles” of U.S. law and calls efforts to sign on to the treaty “contrary to principles of self-government and federalism.” It says the convention should not be put before the Senate for a vote.
As Mother Jones reports, the legally-binding U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child was issued in 1989 to establish rights across country lines for citizens under the age of 18. The only members of the U.N. not to have signed on are the U.S. and Somalia, though the latter plans to ratify it this year.
American conservatives have long opposed ratification out of fear that it will impinge on their right to raise their children as they see fit. Among the complaints on the ParentalRights.org website, which is led by homeschooling advocate Michael Farris, is that under the treaty parents “would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings” to their kids.
Continue reading this article at the link above, and note the lengthy and informative comments at the end of the article.
Susan Ryan at Corn and Oil cautions: “I want to point out again…that the Regional Offices of Education are systematically pushing for daytime curfews in Illinois communities to rein in homeschoolers. It’s all over the state, but quite a few southern Illinois communities in a couple of Regional Offices of Education areas with anti-homeschool agendas have passed curfews in the last few months.” Click on Susan’s link to read much more.
The Charlotte Conservative News article Sharron Angle’s political activism started in the Home School movement once again uses her background to move her story up the search engine searches, playing off a George Will commentary in the Washington Post about her homeschooling her son which appeared July 4: Candidate nobody is not to be underestimated:
“Her campaign began, in a sense, three decades ago, when a judge annoyed her.
“When her son was depressed about having to repeat kindergarten — “He was a 6-year-old dropout” — she decided on home schooling, which Nevada law permitted. But a judge construed the law to require that parents who home-school must live at least 50 miles from a public school.
“She and many kindred spirits descended on Carson City to get the Legislature to correct this. One legislator, irritated by such grass-roots impertinence, said, “If I’d known there would be 500 people here instead of 50 and it would take five hours instead of 30 minutes, I would have thrown it [the legislation] in my drawer, and it would never have seen the light of day.” Angle asked a cowboy standing next to her, “Can he do that?” The cowboy said yep. She has been politically incandescent ever since.”
Psychology Today blogger and author Laura Brodie poses a thorny question: Should Homeschooling Parents Have College Degrees? The subtitle: You’ve got a GED. Are you ready to homeschool? An excerpt:
“To me, the idea that parents with GEDs could, if they desired, turn around and teach high school to their children is setting the bar very low. More problematic is the fact that several states have almost no homeschooling regulations…”
To her credit, Brodie – author of the book Love in a Time of Homeschooling – invites reader feedback, stating:
“In my next post, I’ll share more of my own, constantly evolving, thoughts on the subject. But before I offer my opinions, I invite anyone who cares about this topic to voice their own:
How much education should a homeschooling parent be required to have? A high school diploma? A two-year associate’s degree? A four year college degree? A teaching certificate?”
Read the entire post at the link above.
Susan Ryan writes at Corn and Oil:
“I wonder if bureaucracies fail -and homeschoolers prevail- with the continuation of poor fiscal governmental affairs.
“I like how that sounds. Not our sorry Illinois affairs, but that our bureaucracies are breaking down. Something does have to give, rather than constantly getting. Even as many of the involved government employees – real people with real lives and families – must suffer many days of dread and discomfort, I can’t say I’m disturbed to see that some of the Illinois public school bureaucracies are hitting hard times.”
Titled Sorry State Financial Affairs Cause Bureaucratic Breakdown, it’s an interesting and thought-provoking post – as most of Susan’s are. Read it at the link above.
In an article for the July 8th issue of Education Week titled Conservative Candidates Take Aim at Federal K-12 Role, Alyson Klein writes:
The conservative currents roiling the 2010 midterm election season bring with them a new group of Republican congressional candidates who are outspoken about their desire for a limited federal role in education policy and funding.
For many, the prime target is the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus program passed by Congress in February 2009, which provided some $100 billion for public education.
And in some cases, candidates have taken a page from a decades-old conservative playbook, pushing policies that would strengthen the rights of parents to homeschool their children—and even urging the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education, a position once favored by President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
Read the entire article at the link above.