In Champaign, Illinois, black parents were angered by a decision by the local school board to post armed officers in the local high school. Some of the parents want to boycott the schools, using homeschooling among other strategies, to continue schooling the children.

• The Daily Illini, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, 20 April 2006, Armed cops will monitor area schools

  One night after a packed house watched the Champaign school board approve the agreement, the city council drew its largest crowd of the year, many of them parents angrily protesting the idea of having officers with guns in Champaign’s public schools.

• The News-Gazette, Champaign/Urbana, Illinois, 20 April 2006, Black parents urge boycott after school board action

  Causley and her sister, Natalie Freeman, say they will take their children out of the Champaign school district in protest of the decision to put armed police officers in the schools. They are asking other parents to do the same.

• The Daily Illini, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, 25 April 2006, Parents consider boycotting schools: Vote raises issues about child safety

  Marci Dodds, a city council member who voted against the school resource officers, has mixed feelings about the issue. She supports a strong police presence, but worries that just one policeman is not enough for such a complicated problem. She does not think a boycott would be an acceptable solution, however. … “As far as a boycott goes, I can’t think of an idea that would do less to build bridges or create a sense of community,” she said.

Why is it that when one group of people feel that they have no say in a situation, and work to rectify the imbalance from their own point of view by dissociating themselves from another group of people, that they are the ones who are seen as not building the bridges? How long are they expected to go along with the status quo? How do those who feel the imbalance stick up for themselves?

Responses to the articles (some better than another) are at:

• Corn and Oil: A Letter to the Editor
• IlliniPundit: Would a School Boycott Be An Effective Means of Protest?
• Champaign-American: A boycott of School? Oh, brother …

The claim to exemption from the compulsory school attendance requirement in Virginia because of religious beliefs was the subject of three recent articles in the Virginia newspaper, The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg.

• 16 April 2006,  Is state or family responsible for ensuring a child’s education?
• 17 April 2006, Parents at odds over children’s schooling
• 18 April 2006, Is it time for exemption law to be revisited?

By itself, the religious exemption apparently doesn’t equate to ‘homeschooling’ because the exemption relieves the parents from answering to the state, something Virginia homeschoolers are required to do.

The two articles also deal with separate issues, one being a difference of opinion between ex-husband and ex-wife concerning the schooling of their children after the divorce, and the other a dual discussion of whether the religious exemption law should remain on the books, and whether some families ought to use the exemption in order to homeschool.  The issue is slightly muddled as all the people in the articles who are using the religious exemption are also homeschooling.

Other information and discussions (not as many as I expected) concerning the Virginia religious exemption are at:

• Commonwealth Educational Policy Institute: Religion and the Public Schools
• VAHomeschoolers: Religious Exemption from Compulsory Schooling
• O’Donnell Web, 18 Apr 06: More on Virginia’s Religious Exemption
• HomeschoolBuzz.com, 18 Apr 06:  Virginia homeschool exemption law to be revisited

The problems public schools have both with statistical numbers concerning how many dropouts each school or district accumulates, and with low-testing populations under the No Child Left Behind act, prompts some schools to either ‘encourage’ students with poor academic records to ‘homeschool,’ or even to reclassify dropouts as homeschoolers.  Articles about these problems, and the pushing out of such students, are not new.

• Union Leader, Manchester, New Hampshire, 27 February 2004, Report puts drop out rate at 25 percent 
• Gotham Gazette, New York, New York, August 2003, High School Push Outs
• The Public Advocate for the City of New York, 21 November 2002, Pushing Out At-Risk Students:  An Analysis of High School Discharge Figures

Some schools, though, are using the change from public school to homeschooling as a cover for their drop-out rates:

• Columbia Daily Tribune, Columbia, Missouri, 6 April 2006, State auditor finds schools skewing dataBut not all Missouri school districts are keeping accurate graduation records, according to the recent audit. Auditors discovered 19,000 students who started ninth grade in 2001 and did not graduate but disappeared from school records.   …

  In one school district reviewed in the audit, if a student missed more than 10 days, officials sent a letter to the parents saying, “We assume you have decided to home school.”

Reclassifying children not attending school from one bean-counting category to another one, is not a new trick, although the homeschooling wrinkle seems to be a recent addition.  In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Texas version was the “Texas Miracle.“  The bloggers at Corn and Oil have heard of the practice in Illinois.

I’m saddened by the effect of NCLB on schools and the subsequent effect on children.  I know that some school administrators don’t like homeschooling because they believe it draws away intelligent children, and lessens federal funding for the school because of decreased enrollment — just as private schooling does.  But just because homeschooling is a handy pigeonhole, and a pigeonhole not affected (yet) by federal bean-counting, don’t use it as your get-some-funding-free card for covering up losses because of drop-outs.

This article is a good, all-rounder with a minimum of Da Rules, and some good words from the local assistant superintendent.

• Andover Townsman, Andover, Massachusetts, , 6 April 2006, Home schooling: Participants say it gives kids freedom to pursue interests
  
  O’Neil, the assistant superintendent, said Andover is “very supportive of home schoolers.” O’Neil approves each home schooling plan submitted by parents and oversees the plan to ensure educational goals are met. She says the variety of home schoolers in town run the gamut from those families who travel to Europe for several months out of the year to those who have home schooled from the beginning.

  “Ultimately, you want children in an environment that is the most conducive to learning,” O’Neil said.

The one glitch in the article concerned Da Rules:

• Home schoolers are not required to take the MCAS. But they are required to take the SATs.

According to a Massachusetts homeschooler, the reality is that homeschoolers do not take the MCAS, and tests such as the SAT are left to the discretion of the family.  In Massachusetts, homeschooling is not an area where the state makes the rules.

• Massachusetts Home Learning Association

  Approval and oversight of home education is a local, rather than a state function in Massachusetts. Therefore, the Department of Education (DOE) is not involved in setting policy, overseeing school district practices, or otherwise enforcing the Commonwealth’s home education law.

 

hat tip to the HSWatch list

Illinois is usually rated as one of the ‘better’ states in which to homeschool, if ‘better’ equates to less regulation.  I’m sure many Illinois residents would say that it’s the best state in which to homeschool, but in the past few years a combination of events are making even the local residents uneasy.

• Mental health concerns from the Corn and Oil blog.
• Homeschooling freedom at the Illinois Review.

In the following article, I wonder why the sixteen years of homeschooling seven kids doesn’t give Mrs. White’s status at least the same weight as a teacher freshly graduated from a 4-year college?  Surely sixteen years of being an educational chief cook and bottle washer should amount to some sort of accomplishment. Still, that may be a stylistic quibble on my part, but one which could have been pointed out by the writer.

• Daily Press, Newport News, Virginia, 14 March 2006, Va. law would lift degree requirement

  After 16 years of home schooling her seven children, ages 5 to 19, Betsy White knows how to get them to read, to understand arithmetic and to research anything she doesn’t know.

  But public school teachers have something White doesn’t have – a college degree.

There’s also the slight inaccuracy of Virginia being credited as the ‘only’ state to require a college degree.

• Virginia is the only state that has a degree requirement for parents who home-school. Ten states require a high school diploma. The rest set no education requirements for parents.

North Dakota includes a college degree or teacher certification in its requirements, as does Tennessee.  Michigan likes bachelor’s degrees, and Minnestoa has a fondness for teaching licenses.  Washington state wants 45 college quarter credit hours, and it’s hard to tell with Iowa.

Still, despite that research bobble, the writer gathered opinions from many homeschool advocates, as well as the de rigueur comments from public school officials.  (someday I’d like to see the same favor granted to homeschool advocates in articles about public school legislation)

Good luck to the Virginians, and cheers to Governor Warner during his review of the bill.

Ohio homeschoolers should prepare for advertising to appear in their mailboxes.

• Vindy.com, The Vindicator, Youngstown, Ohio, 10 March 2006, Is cyber school in district’s future?  The district would receive a fee for each pupil it can recruit for the cyber school.

  [Superintendent] Heuer said Austintown would get a fee for every student enrolled in the charter school. That number isn’t final yet, but Heuer said the district is looking at between $1,000 and $1,200 per pupil.

  …

  Northeast Ohio has an estimated 40,000 children being home-schooled, a large potential cyber school market, Heuer added. If you have a computer, you can be anywhere. You don’t have to be in a classroom, he said.

  Persuading just one-tenth of that number and Austintown’s current virtual school pupils to enroll in the Virtual Community School of Ohio could earn the district nearly $500,000 in fees, Heuer said.

  That would help offset the projected $800,000 loss in state subsidy revenue Austintown expects this year, Heuer said, pointing out the 270 Austintown children were lost to other school districts this year through open enrollment. Those children chose to attend classes outside the district, and state subsidies follow the students.

In Ohio, the change from homeschooling to public school enrollment via a virtual school brings with it a return to compulsory attendance.

• Students who have been excused from the compulsory attendance law for the purpose of home education as defined by the Administrative Code shall no longer be excused for that purpose upon their enrollment in a community school.

The fine print is at the bottom of the page.

A proposed testing requirement for extra-curricular participation by homeschooled children in public school programs in Pennsylvania has been dropped, partly in reaction to a threatened lawsuit by HSLDA.

• The Morning Call, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 7 March 2006, Bethlehem Area drops homeschooler testing plan

  The Home School Legal Defense Association, in Purcellville, Va., threatened to sue the district if the policy was enacted because the group alleged that the policy discriminated against homeschoolers by creating a new set of guidelines for a particular group, and Pennsylvania law does not permit districts to create separate eligibility requirements for homeschoolers.”The intent was never to discriminate,” Director Margaret Williams said.

  …

  ”The sense of the board was we just wanted to level the playing field,” said Board President Craig T. Haytmanek. ”But if it flies in the face of the law, we’ll back off.”

Despite writing, “Several hundred home school students entered the public school ranks through a [sic] online school,” the reporter later seems to include public-school-at-home in the category of homeschooling. 

The grammar could use a little work, too.

• The Worldlink.com, The World, Coos Bay, Oregon, 28 February 2006, Local school enrollment, funding drop
  
  Home schooling up   

  Home schooling, private and charter schools take students out of the public schools, either by regulating the way they can be counted for funding, or by enrolling in schools or education options outside of the public school system.

  Several hundred home school students entered the public school ranks through a online school now offered by Scio School District, just outside of Salem. While the online school, Connections Academy, allows home schooling students to remain enrolled in the public system and has expanded options for students learning at home, it doesn’t help local school districts much, Evans said.

  The Scio School District enrollment increased by 88 percent in the last year, from 696 to 1,314. According to Evans, students who enrolled in Communications Academy, the online school for home schooling, aren’t counted in hometown school districts.

  “Some people are going to private school, and many people are going to home schooling,” he said, “and with the online academy, more people are thinking about home schooling.”

The Virginia Parent Teacher Association says homeschooled children will be ill-served if bills in the Virginia legislature, HB 1340/SB 499, are signed into law, and change one of the categories under which Virginia parents may homeschool. The first homeschool option under Virginia law is to allow homeschooling for a parent who has earned a “baccalaureate degree from an accredited institution of higher learning.” Under the proposed law change, this would change to requiring only a high school diploma, an option that already is available to Virginia homeschooling parents.

• Yes, Virginia, you CAN homeschool without a college degree!

Despite the change is wording only, the Virginia Parent Teacher Association opposes the change.

• W*USA 9 News, Washington, DC, 2 March 2006, Virginia Debates Home Schooling RequirementsBut the Virginia Parent Teacher Association is worried. They say it may put home schooled children at a disadvantage by allowing their teachers to have lower qualifications than their counterparts in the public schools.

Click on the “related video” to hear the televised report.

Although the requirement of a college degree for teaching, there is no statistical evidence that parents having earned a degree makes a difference in the quality of home education.

• Education Now, Summer 1999, A nationwide study of home education: early indications and wider implicationsIn many cases, teacher-parents said that teacher training made them realise that parents could teach. While some teacher-parents found their teaching experience a hindrance, others found it an asset.

We parents without college degrees have not been living in a time capsule so that our mental faculties are frozen at the high school level. We’ve negotiated whatever life circumstance has brought children into our lives, and we’ve raised those children, learning as we go. We have read books, magazines and newspapers. We’ve listened to political debates on television and voted in elections. We’ve gone to work, earned money, bought cars and licensed them, and bought homes and possibly improved them. After earning all that money we’ve managed budgets and filed taxes. Sometimes we’ve even traveled. And though it all, we’ve performed, participated and plowed through all the myriad tasks of adult life in the (Gregorian calendar’s) 21st century.

I was never taught ‘computers’ in my 1960s-era high school, but here I am, online. Ditto for my husband, and yet now he fixes computers for a living. It’s his fourth career field after having retired from two other systems. Are those examples anecdotal? Yes. But if you collect enough anecdotes and sort and file them appropriately, pretty soon you’ve got a statistic.

Additionally, although to some people keeping score it won’t matter much, we learn as we go in homeschooling. If something works, we keep doing it. If it doesn’t work, we stop doing it. With apologies to all the fine teachers in schools, we homeschooling parents are not salaried workers marching through another year to retirement, teaching the same material One More Time, almost by rote when ‘teacher-proofed’ materials are used. We high-school-diploma homeschooling parents are as actively engaged as our college-degreed colleagues. We care as much, we work as hard. Concerning what we do with our kids, we sift, we sort, we choose. It doesn’t take a college degree to be able to see what is or is not working educationally for our children, and we make our own adjustments.

Teacher-proofing schoolrooms is bad policy, and so is parent-proofing homeschooling.