The New York Times put most homeschoolers into an undesirable, non-bid for fame.  We’ve been profiled as a special interest group wanting something (money) from these “new Republicans.”   I don’t know about many other homeschoolers, but I’d rather step out of this particular limelight of perceived hands held out. As an Illinois homeschooler, my husband and I have known we could use the Illinois Education Tax Credit for some years, but decided it wasn’t worth it for various reasons. We learned some time ago that our freedom is worth more than money.

In the NY Times’s Room for Debate, Susan Neuman, professor in educational studies and assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration had an interesting point of view.  She started out with the notion that ‘conservatives’ are trying to destroy public education with homeschool tax credits.

I’d say that ‘conservatives’ like Chester Finn are trying to destroy homeschooling with his love of standardized tests.  His thumbs up for homeschool tax credits came with the notion that “if they don’t pass those tests, either the subsidy vanishes or the kids must enroll in some sort of school with a decent academic track record.”  As if those tests are a good synopsis of what children learn.  As if enrolling kids who don’t do well on tests is reason to be in a school.  We could turn that around to say that some public school students shouldn’t be in school because those tests look very bad for them.  Most good teachers agree that teaching to standardized tests doesn’t help learning, even if their union insists on testing for homeschoolers.   From the edu-industry end, Mr. Finn was invested as a Director of K12, Inc. until July of 2007 and is still a member of the Education Advisory Committee.  Not surprisingly, Finn was promoting the virtual schools heavily in this non-reality based comparison of homeschooling and virtual schools:  “From a policy perspective, however, there’s not much difference between teaching kids at home and enrolling them in any of hundreds of “virtual charter schools” or district- or state-run alternatives”.”    His K12 company is lobbying hard in Illinois for more business than just the Chicago Virtual School.  I wouldn’t want him speaking on behalf of the homeschooling community because dollar signs keep distorting his view.  In The Educated Child, a book he co-authored with William Bennett, they stated that “homeschoolers should not have to do so [homeschool]  because there are no good schools available”.  What they don’t seem to understand is the homeschooling lifestyle enables the family to enjoy each other and their education and isn’t necessarily because of an indictment of schools.  Families homeschool in communities with the best school districts too.

Rob Reich – notorious for his anti-homeschool freedom attitudes – sounds almost excited about federal tax credits.  His piece is similar to Finn’s, except he wants homeschool registration, where Chester Finn likes the testing notion.   I think Reich’s piece was the tamest of any of his previous articles demanding homeschoolers answer to the government. There’s cause for alarm.  Reich senses promise in registering all homeschooled children with the use of tax credits.

Want a tax credit to home school? Accept a requirement to register your child as being home schooled and that the child take the same state tests as other public school students. Federal dollars come with strings attached, and these particular strings are in the best interests of children, anyway.

Luis Huerta of Columbia University had a piece with many similar points to a Daily Beast article.

The current efforts consist of a two-prong approach that involve resurrecting recently proposed legislation: First, the Family Education Freedom Act of 2009, sponsored and repeatedly introduced by Representative Ron Paul of Texas has proposed a tax credit of up to $5,000 for private school tuition and home schooling expenses. Second, the Parental Rights Amendment of 2009 sponsored by Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and written by Michael Farris, the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, would protect “the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children” as a fundamental right.

But I think his point below shows the HSLDA sponsored contradiction in promoting a Parental Rights Amendment, while chancing federal regulations of homeschooling with tax credits.  I also don’t like the Parental Rights Amendment because we don’t need our rights enumerated.  We already have them.

Dana Goldstein from The Beast says in her article How the Tea Party Will Destroy Education Reform that:

The organization [HSLDA] has powerful supporters—both veteran legislators and newcomers. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the caucus’ vice-chairwoman, support homeschool tax credits. John Kline, the incoming House Education Committee chairman, was the keynote speaker at last spring’s Home School Legal Defense Association conference, where he said he would work to “charge up Capitol Hill with the message of homeschool freedom.”

I’m all about a message of homeschool freedom, but we generally keep it to ourselves, unless ironically enough, legislators or school authorities start getting in our way.

Here’s some more “new Republican” names laid out from the Beast that want to ‘help’.

“Rubio and Paul ran for Senate supporting tax credits for homeschoolers, though they also describe themselves as deficit hawks committed to balancing the federal budget. Paul has been an especially vocal advocate for homeschooling, often speaking publicly about the prominent role homeschooling volunteers played in his Kentucky campaign. He spoke on June 25 to the Christian Homeschool Educators of Kentucky, whose mission is to “protect children from mental, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by secular humanists in a socialist society or governmental system.” On his campaign website, Paul’s staff regularly promoted homeschooling as an alternative to failing public schools, citing high academic achievement scores among homeschooled children (who also tend to come from more affluent families than their public school counterparts.)”

Cato Institute‘s Neil McCluskey seems to get it in his article: Unconstitutional Intrusion

The sentiment is right: Home schooling parents shouldn’t have to pay for schools they don’t use then pay again for education they do. But good intentions neither make a law constitutional, nor necessarily sound. Proof of home schooling could be defined as passing federally prescribed tests – just the sort of mandate many home schoolers despise. In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution gives the federal government specific powers, and the feds may do nothing beyond them. Included among them is nothing about education, so Washington may make no education policy. And no, the taxing power does not allow Washington to do whatever it wants as long as it is connected to taxes. Taxation may only be used in service of the enumerated powers.

McCluskey finishes with this thought:

Home schoolers deserve some breaks. At the national level, that means adhering to the Constitution and getting the federal government out of education, which would benefit not just home schoolers, but all taxpayers.

I don’t think most homeschoolers consider themselves deserving of a break.  Except when legislators or public school authorities interfere with well or ill intentioned motivations.  Rule number one for homeschoolers should be to not make any rules or laws or regulations for homeschooling families.  If we’ve already determined it’s worth it to go against the societal mainstream of public schools, then we’re also pretty determined to create the best learning opportunities for each of our children in the coziness of our homes.  In other words, no worries about us, as public schools already have plenty to do on their own.

Neumann concludes with a question.

This latest proposal is designed for the heart not the head. Home-schooling families are too smart and too savvy to buy into this half-baked plan. They know that tax credits are good for nothing but greater federal intrusion. Is this what the Tea Party had in mind?

If you’ve ever heard the story about The Wild and Free Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp, then you’ll understand homeschoolers don’t want to end up in the educational market’s pen.  Many have walked away from the carrot.

NHELD’s Deborah Stevenson has an excellent piece about this tax credit issue.

Spunky has a piece, along with good comments on the issue.

Update – My thoughts, concerns,  a bit of research and a lot of other good folks’ articles regarding the IL Education Tax Credit and its repercussions are posted here.

Submitted by Susan Ryan, who is happily and independently homeschooling in Illinois

Refusing the Carrot – The Tax Credit Issue

The New York Times opinion pages for January 5 includes arguments for and against the idea of state tax credits for homeschoolers, which is being promoted as a priority as the the newest Republicans in Congress seek to challenge the federal role in American public education, with an eye toward turning more power over to the states. The collected debates are presented under the banner title Do Homeschoolers Deserve a Tax Break?

HEM political analysts and homeschooling parents Larry and Susan Kaseman have written extensively about this topic, including in the current January-February issue of Home Education Magazine: Beware of Privatization of Education: It Reduces Our Homeschooling Freedoms:

“Homeschoolers can’t assume that as long as they as individuals refuse to accept government money or favors, they won’t be required to comply with state regulations written for homeschoolers who do accept them. Legislators and state regulators are highly unlikely to develop and expect public officials to enforce two separate sets of regulations for homeschoolers, one for those who accept tax credits or tax deductions or reimbursements for educational expenses or who play on public school sports teams or participate in other public school activities and the other for homeschoolers who don’t. If legislation is passed or regulations are developed to hold homeschoolers accountable because some homeschoolers are receiving government money, those statutes or regulations will no doubt apply to all homeschoolers, not just those getting the money.”

Further analysis and information can be found in this 1999 article by homeschooling mother and long-time advocate for homeschooling, Peggy Daly-Masternak: So What About That Free Lunch?

“With little strain, we can all think of many examples where the state is attempting to solve the problems presented by a few with far-reaching blanket laws to cover a worst case scenario. Think curfews. Think proficiency tests. Think greater restrictions on parents rights.

“My dear friends in homeschooling, there is no free lunch. If one currently exists, it won’t last forever. The piper always gets paid.”

State Tax Credits

Thirty-five visionary educators were asked:

What was your schooling like? When did you realize that there is a need for an alternative approach? What have you done since to help realize that vision? What are you doing now?

Turning Points: 35 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories, edited by Jerry Mintz & Carlo Ricci, and with a foreword by Alfie Kohn, is an anthology of their responses, a peek into the lives and journeys of these pioneering individuals who have—and are—transforming what it means to be a teacher, a student, and a life-long learner. Among the contributors are several names familiar to the homeschooling community, including Helen Hegener, co-publisher of Home Education Magazine; John Taylor Gatto, Matt Hern, Herbert Kohl, Grace Llewellyn, Pat Montgomery, Wendy Priesnitz and many others.

Turning Points

In No Magic Bullet for Education the Los Angeles Times takes a look at teacher evaluations, education reform, Race to the Top grants, standardized tests and more:

The “unschooling” movement of the 1970s featured open classrooms, in which children studied what they were most interested in, when they felt ready. That was followed by today’s back-to-basics, early-start model, in which students complete math worksheets in kindergarten and are supposed to take algebra by eighth grade at the latest. Under the “whole language” philosophy of the 1980s, children were expected to learn to read by having books read to them. By the late 1990s, reading lessons were dominated by phonics, with little time spent on the joys of what reading is all about — unlocking the world of stories and information.

No Magic Bullet

Education Week has an article on the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] report on reading for grades 4 and 8:

Little Progress Seen in Student Results on Reading NAEP – Catherine Gewertz

“What NAEP shows us over the past two decades is that in reading there have been only slight gains and no sustained trend of improvement,” Steven L. Paine, West Virginia’s commissioner of education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, said at a news conference to announce the results. He called the findings “disappointing” given the “considerable amount of effort” devoted to improving reading. Even the 1-point 8th grade gain, while statistically significant, “is not sufficient,” he said.

Building reading skills has been one of the main focuses for states for more than a decade as they have set up accountability systems aimed at raising achievement.

At the federal level, the Reading Excellence Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, brought attention to the need for improved reading instruction. The National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, which called for better approaches to teaching reading, was a key source in crafting the $6 billion Reading First program launched by President George W. Bush as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, signed in 2002.

More than a decade, all those billions and:

The lack of improvement in 4th grade reading between 2007 and 2009 is “especially disappointing,” Mr. Paine said, because it parallels the latest NAEP math results at that grade level. Those results, however, showed far more growth over time in students’ progress than the new report shows in their reading progress.

One reason for the difference, he said, could be that learning math is largely confined to math classrooms, and the subject is taught with cohesive, sequential curricula reflecting standards adopted by national math groups and echoed in textbooks. Reading comprehension, by contrast, is acquired across all courses, with “no similar cohesion or emphasis” on a clear reading curriculum, he said.

Over the years, stories from homeschooling family’s about how their kids learned to be readers are filled with everything but “‘similar cohesion or emphasis’ on a clear reading curriculum.”

As taxpayers (where those billions come from) we deserve to know our money is spent wisely and that those spending, and receiving, are accountable. In the context of public schooling this means there will be testing, which makes kids accountable for the system’s ‘success,’ and, ‘solutions’ will continue to double down on what has not been working:

Some officials saw the NAEP results as a call to arms. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urged support for putting the administration’s key education reforms, such as higher, common standards and better assessments, into practice.

Read the article here.

Little Progress on Reading NAEP

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.

~~~
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?.