An article in the National Review Online titled All about Sharron Angle, subtitled The background of the woman who’s taking on Harry Reid, explains the basics about who she is and why homeschoolers should be interested: “Angle, Nevada’s GOP Senate nominee, plans to topple the Senate majority leader [Sen. Harry Reid] come November.” Reading on, she talks about when her young son “failed kindergarten.” She explains further:

“After he failed kindergarten, I put him back in for that second year and he was completely demoralized,” Angle explains. “What I had was a six-year-old dropout. I knew that I needed to do something different for this kid, to kind of put him back on his wheels and get him started again. I decided to homeschool him.” As a trained teacher, Angle thought she could provide her son with a better environment, one where he wasn’t called a “flunker” or “too slow” by his classmates at the local public school. So Angle, a Southern Baptist, started what she calls an “exempt Christian school” for likeminded families, a homeschool group for parents in Winnemucca, Nev.

When friends of Sharron’s ran afoul of the law her point of view changed:

“A judge said, ‘I know it’s the law that you can homeschool in Nevada, but the law should be that you can’t, unless you live more than 50 miles away from the nearest school,’” Angle says, shaking her head at the memory. “At that point, I realized that the government had interfered with my family. It was kind of like a mother bear and her cubs: Don’t get between me and my cubs, or you’ve got trouble.”

Sharron worked for a new homeschooling law in Nevada, spent ten years raising and homeschooling her sons, served on her county school board and then was elected assemblywoman, spending most of her four terms on the education committee.

Just before leaving the state legislature in 2007, Angle submitted various drafts of homeschool-freedom laws. Out of office, she paid a small fee to be a citizen lobbyist and helped shepherd one to passage. For her, it was a crowning career achievement, making it easier for parents to choose to homeschool while eliminating the requirement for homeschoolers to provide “equivalent instruction” to that in the public schools. It also boosted the privacy rights of homeschooling parents.

Now Sharron Angle’s story from the National Review Online has been picked up by The Atlantic: She’s running for Reid’s Senate seat, and one of her policy positions is that she wants to do away with the Department of Education:

“I’ve seen government from many sides,” Angle says, smiling. “Legislator, school board, citizen in the initiative process. I have a multifaceted background in education. I’ve done public-school teaching, private school, homeschooling, and tutoring for juvenile justice. I’ve taught adults at community college.” So when she says that she wants to dump the entire Department of Education, she comes across as a warm grandma who’s fought the beast, knows it, and detests it, not as some anti-government demagogue. “Look, the Department of Education is a policy machine that sends down one-size-fits-all rules that fit no one,” Angle says. “Education works best when you have all of the stakeholders involved and working toward the same commitment. That happens best at the local level.”

Robert Kunzman is an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education, and the author of Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling. He maintains a web site focused on homeschooling research and scholarship, and in an essay for the June 14 edition of Religion Dispatches titled Conservative Christian Teenagers Prepare for Politics, he describes how Generation Joshua, a program run by homeschooling advocates, aims to get young people working to “help America return to her Judeo-Christian foundations.”

For most of the essay Kunzman simply outlines the basics, but then he delves deeper: “…as a training ground for future citizens and leaders, GenJ seems to be missing something vital. Rather than framing democratic citizenship as a shared endeavor among a diverse people, where compromise and accommodation are not only necessary but often desirable, GenJ promotes a vision of adversarial political engagement informed by narrow ideological boundaries.”

It’s a thoughtful look at a subset of homeschoolers whose self-proclaimed leaders are often in the news, but, as Kunzman observes, they are “…not the centerpiece of conservative Christian homeschooling more generally. On the whole, parents seem far more concerned with raising and educating their children ‘in the nurture and admonition of the Lord’ than creating foot soldiers for a theocratic takeover of government.”

Wow, unschooling hasn’t gotten this much attention – maybe ever.

After over 30 years, thousands and thousands of families from almost every walk of life and across multiple generations, I do not see that unschooling needs any need defending. In fact, unschooling has a more proven track record than say, 1994 Educate America Act, Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind. These reforms have come and gone, or are their way out with a new round of reform to take their place.

Yet, after a tightly edited 5 or 6 minute segment on GMA we now have expert critics on the subject:

Careful, don’t ‘unschool’ your kids

I often advocate that parents “trust their instincts.” But if you are one of the small but growing number of parents “unschooling” their kids — I think you should start doubting!

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Is Unschooling the Worst Idea Ever?

Enter unschooling, a new movement that takes kids out of school and let’s them do whatever they want at home.

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Unschooling: The Ultimate in Lazy Parenting

The popularity of homeschooling has been skyrocketing. As most people know, teaching your kid at home isn’t easy; it takes time and patience. Maybe that’s why a small faction of renegade parents have turned to “unschooling” their kids. It’s easy enough: All you have to do is … well, nothing actually.

Here is a review of the journalism behind the original GMA piece:

Unschooling and Unjournalism.

My primary job is that of a homeschooling father. But my other job -– the one that I actually get paid for –- is in media analysis. Both of these sides of myself were deeply troubled by a feature on ABC’s “Good Morning America” earlier this week that set itself up to be a news report on radical unschooling. It featured the close-knit, intelligent family of Phil Biegler and Christine Yablonski and their teenage children. But rather than offer a fair and detailed portrait of these individuals, the ABC story was a hatchet job from the start.

Frankly the GMA piece is a throw-away. It was run for ratings and the news/entertainment cycle will move on to the next big outrage or oddity. A few people will be convinced one way or other but mostly positions will just be hardened – pro or con.

My bigger concern is the division within the homeschool community. Over the years a tremendous amount of virtural blood has been spilled and ill will has been generated for political ambition and ideological purity, and, those divisions were reflected in comments and on email lists over the last few days. We had better figure out how to reject the leadership that fueled these divisions and start working together or homeschooling – as fits your family – will be swallowed up in the next round of reform.

We first witnessed this dynamic in homeschooling back in the 80′s. Now we see a self identified ‘Christian conservationist’, Liza Field, write about the politics of coalition building. Field shows how homeschooling families were used:

“Issues in Education,” a Christian radio homeschooling broadcast I sometimes hear, warns parents that climate change — a “heresy” — is being taught in schools. It also urges listeners to lobby for oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and home-school kids with textbooks that praise deregulation and depict climate change as a hoax.

Who underwrites these messages? Various industries with little interest in Christianity. It’s called “coalition-building.”

Digging deeper by tracking Ralph Reed’s move from the Christian Coalition to Century Strategies:

That list [Christian Coalition] allowed him to mobilize Christian groups not only for political clients (like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell), but corporate giants Enron, Koch, Microsoft, and various oil, coal, energy, big auto and timber interests.

These clients hire Reed to turn public opinion against regulatory policy, including climate action, EPA standards and the Endangered Species Act. Hence, disdain for environmental protection becomes a new Christian Value.

It’s preached not only through certain Christian Broadcasters and ministries, but Reed’s longtime friends Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity — whose persistent, widely-aired efforts to wed Jesus to materialism have ironically made them the loudest representatives of “Christianity” on the planet.

It’s an effective, values-added product to offer special interests — media coverage, a ready-to-go lobby, a real “pulpit.” But does it have hidden costs?

However you worship or feel about conservation, the dynamics is the same. Political power is bled from local and state networks and individuals to be wielded as a “values-added product to offer special interests.” This threatens our religious freedom as surely as it threatens our freedom to homeschool.

I strongly suggest you read and consider the political dynamics outlined in
A ‘Christian conservationist’s’ view at Easter.

For a homeschool specific take see: Homeschooling Freedoms At Risk.

Two sophomores, writing for the Columbia Daily Spectator sum up the politics of education:

Once again, politics has been successful in doing one thing really efficiently—creating controversy. In the midst of all this talk about the health care bill, the slowly recovering economy, and the ever-expanding war on terror, the Texas State Board of Education recently approved changes to the state’s curriculum. The changes that were approved by the board have included things like the questioning of the theory of evolution, removing Thomas Jefferson as a world thinker from history curricula, and questioning the secularity of the Founding Fathers. It was approved based on party lines, with the conservative Republicans winning with a vote of 10-5.

After ‘contrasting’ TX school Boards action with the current administration’s embrace of the National Governors’ Common Core Standards they conclude:

What is taking place is that one party is forcefully imposing its point of view on another party about what is to be taught in schools. Instead of offering new perspectives to be taught, one ideology is replacing another due to the passive-aggressive manner in which the conservative Republicans imposed their will. Political involvement in education doesn’t allow for free thought and instead mandates that into which children will be indoctrinated.

What do these two Columbia students suggest we can do?

An alternative to being forced into a state-sponsored education can be found in homeschooling… This provides an opportunity for those who don’t necessarily agree with the state education system to teach whatever values or lessons they feel are best for their children.

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In the end, when the government is involved in the education process, the rights of students are diminished, even taken away, because they have no ability to learn what they want to make themselves truly successful.

While the article supports homeschooling, what encourages me most is the realization that true change is generational. Read Why obey when we can choose?.