A bunch of people have written in about In re Rachel L., a California Court of Appeal decision holding that there's no constitutional right to home-school your children. I read the case a couple of days ago, and checked out other caselaw on the subject. Here's what I've found:
1. It's pretty well-settled that the parental rights cases -- such as Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) -- don't secure a right to home-school. This is partly because Pierce seemed to expressly decline to raise such a right, saying, "No question is raised concerning the power of the state reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare."
Now perhaps this should just be taken literally to mean that the Court wasn't deciding this question. Or perhaps "require[ments] that all children of proper age attend some school" should -- as a constitutional matter -- be satisfied by a showing that the child is "attend[ing]" a home school that is allowing the child to perform at or beyond grade level. Or perhaps the means for regulating home schooling (such as tests that show a student's progress) are much more advanced now than they were then, and that regulated home schooling is a "less restrictive alternative" that would still accomplish the government interest in making sure children are adequately educated. But as best I can tell, all the appellate courts dealing with the subject have taken the view that bans on home schooling (or requirements that only people with suitable teaching credentials may home-school) are constitutional under Pierce. This has certainly been the constitutional rule recognized by California courts for 50 years; In re Rachel L. relies on a California appellate precedent from 1953.
2. Religious homeschooling is a different matter. Wisconsin v. Yoder held that the Amish could pull children out of school at age 14, and then vocationally train the children at home, notwithstanding a compulsory education law that generally required school attendance until 16. And Yoder survives the Court's decision in Employment Division v. Smith (which mostly holds that the Free Exercise Clause doesn't require religious exemptions from generally applicable laws, but which expressly preserves such claims in parental rights cases like Yoder). And in People v. DeJonge, 501 N.W.2d 127 (Mich. 1993), the Michigan Supreme Court generally held that there is a constitutional right to home-school, though with some regulations (not including a requirement that one parent be a certified teacher, which is the very requirement that the Michigan Supreme Court struck down).
The California Court of Appeal case concluded that the parents didn't introduce enough evidence that their motivation for home-schooling was religious, and it seemed more broadly hostile to this theory. Still, I think it would be possible for home-schooling parents in California who are home-schooling out of felt religious compulsion (or perhaps even felt religious motivation) to raise a Yoder claim, and perhaps to prevail on it.
3. I haven't done a precise head-count, but my sense is that home-schooling is legal in nearly all states -- but as a result of legislation, not constitutional litigation. It's quite possible that this case will trigger pro-home-schooling legislation in California.
4. As a policy matter, I think home-schooling -- with some regulation, for instance with mandatory testing of children to make sure they are learning well enough -- should indeed be legal.
5. As a constitutional matter, I'm not at all sure what the rule ought to be. On the one hand, I sympathize with parental rights claims, especially given the dangers of giving the government broad power to control children's upbringing, and given the American tradition of recognizing parental rights (though a tradition that has not been uniformly friendly to home-schooling).
But on the other hand, I think that whatever one thinks of the general unenumerated constitutional rights debates, a claimed right to control a third party -- however much the claimed rightsholder might generally love the third party, and however much that third party might need some control from someone -- strikes me as among the weakest sorts of claims for unenumerated rights. So I'm not confident about the right answer here; my post is primarily aimed at reporting on the controversy.
Related Posts (on one page):
- California Court Agrees to Rehear Decision That Found Home Schooling To Be Illegal:
- No Constitutional Right to Home-School:
(Any ban on home schooling would fail the heightened scrutiny of the sort that apply to fundamental rights, since there is no empirical evidence that home-schooled children are, on average, educationally deficient compared to their public-school peers).
In any event, the California Court of Appeal’s decision was also deeply skeptical of religious-freedom claims generally, in a way at odds with U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said that courts should not deny people religious exemptions to even laws of paramount national importance, like draft laws, if an individual claimant has a “sincere” religious objection, even if many other people raise insincere pretextual objections. (United States v. Seeger (1965)).
And the Supreme Court allowed an entire religion — the Amish — to obtain a constitutionally-based religious exemption to compulsory schooling laws for children beyond the eighth grade level. (Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972)).
Yet here, the Court of Appeal expressed skepticism about allowing individual religious-freedom objections to compulsory school attendance by home schoolers by fretting that such an objection is “too easily asserted by any parent who wishes to home school his child.”
It is odd for courts to express skepticism about religious exemptions to government schooling as being “too easily asserted,” even while permitting such exemptions to military service, given that self-interest is likely to produce a much greater number of fabricated religious objections to military service in a time of war, and given that national defense is much more of a core government function than the public schools are, since national defense is potentially tied to the very survival of a country (whereas education is not a government monopoly).
This is particularly true since this case involves not only religious freedom, but also parental rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment under Supreme Court rulings like Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which held that parents could send their children to private schools contrary to state laws requiring public school attendance, and Santosky v. Kramer (1982).
If objections really are commonly asserted to public schooling in California (there are apparently 166,000 home-schoolers there), maybe that is a reflection on the poor quality of the state’s schools, which produce worse educational outcomes for a higher cost than schools in other states in the region, like Washington State.
Even if that is the case, that is no excuse, under Supreme Court precedent, to summarily dismiss religious objections that are “sincerely” motivated by religious belief, much less to ignore or downplay parental rights.
The California Court of Appeal mentioned the California state constitution and education code (which mandate secular education) as if that somehow weighed against the parents’ desire to homeschool their children.
But that would be no excuse for brushing aside religious-freedom and parental-rights claims. State constitutional provisions cannot trump federal constitutional rights (such as the right to freedom of religion and parental rights). See Garnett v. Renton School District, 987 F.2d 641, 646 (9th Cir. 1993)(right of religious group to equal treatment by school under federal Equal Access Act override discriminatory requirements of Washington State’s establishment clause; “state[s] cannot abridge rights granted by federal law. . .State law must therefore yield”).
Wow. To me it's clear that the strongest case for unenumerated rights are natural laws enwoven into the basic fabric of virtually every society and seem embedded in the human genome. In virtually every society it is understood that it is the parents who are to raise their children, and if the Ninth Amendment guarantees anything at all, it means that government cannot decide to take children away from their parents and raise them and indoctrinate them in state run communes, which you would seem to feel they are constitutionally entitled to do.
California SB 1322
"Yes, that’s right. The headline is no exaggeration. California Democratic Sen. Alan Lowenthal has proposed an amendment to the Educational Code that will explicitly allow the promotion of Communism in schools, and also allow groups who want to violently overthrow the US government to meet on public school property."
When parents object to political indoctrination and sexually intrusive questions aimed at their children by public school officials, the courts insist that they have no right to object because they supposedly “voluntarily” sent their kids to the public schools, and parents’ constitutional rights to direct the upbringing of their children supposedly stop at the “threshold of the school door,” according to the Ninth Circuit in Fields v. Palmdale School District.
But when parents respond to such rulings by exercising their choice not to send their kids to a public school, but rather home-school them, the courts then switch arguments to claim that there really is no such choice, claiming that the State can prevent anyone who lacks State-approved teaching “credentials” from teaching children, and that “parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” according to the California Court of Appeal’s disturbing ruling in this case, In re Rachel L. (2008).
Taken literally, the claim that states can dictate that all those who teach have state "credentials" would allow a state to shutter the very private schools which the Supreme Court's Pierce decision intended to protect by requiring that their staff all possess credentials that operate as subtle cultural or political litmus tests. (The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has chronicled how schools of social work and to a lesser extend education schools apply ideological litmus tests to their students already).
Education school coursework is already full of useless psychobabble and political correctness that has nothing to do with academic mastery or teaching skills. Many intelligent young people who ponder teaching decide to pursue other careers when they are confronted with the depressing syllabi and course catalogs of America's education schools, or after suffering through a few mind-numbing education school classes that teach nothing of value. So much for the benefit of state "credentials."
The dicta in Pierce that might be read to allow states to impose teaching credentials -- such as its language about states being able to require teachers to exhibit "patriotic disposition" and "good citizenship" -- would be laughed at today by many of the big-government leftists who hate home-schooling, since they want to teach multiculturalism. not patriotism. They would insist that such requirements violate the First Amendment under subsequent rulings like Barnette and Keyishian.
Yet they insist on relying on that very language from Pierce (such as its dictum that a state can provide "that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare") to keep religious parents from home-schooling their children lest they end up with a different point of view.
Apparently, they view government viewpoint discrimination as acceptable, as long as it's to promote political correctness, rather than patriotism.
California SB 1322 "
Links embedded in prior post didn't show up, dunno why.
Here's the source article I saw
http://tinyurl.com/33aecd
And the bill itself
http://tinyurl.com/2pujhq
No state has proposed doing so.
It's interesting that the same people who will be the first to denigrate "unenumerated rights" as "judicial activism" nonetheless are able to read "home schooling" into the Constitution.
You would be amazed how strong the home schooling lobby is, and how aggressively they can fight against even the smallest restrictions. They don't want mandatory testing; some states don't even have notice requirements. Children can just disappear from regular school, no questions asked.
Professor Yuracko (Northwestern, visiting NYU) has been arguing that states have a positive obligation to impose minimum standards on homeschooling under State Constitutional provisions. She's been getting threats.
So any such right would have to be derived from state law, which cannot trump rights under federal law, like parents' constitutional rights. See Garnett v. Renton School District, 987 F.2d 641, 646 (9th Cir. 1993)(right of religious group to equal treatment by school under federal Equal Access Act override discriminatory requirements of Washington State’s establishment clause; “state[s] cannot abridge rights granted by federal law. . .State law must therefore yield”).
Moreover, there is indeed, for fit parents at least, a recognized constitutional right to the care and custody of their children, and to impart an education reflecting their values to their children, under cases stretching from Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) through Wisconsin v. Yoder, and Santosky v. Kramer (1982).
Try the California Constitution - it gives no indicatoin for OR AGAINST home schooling that I can see.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate
"ARTICLE 9 EDUCATION
SECTION 1. A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural
improvement.
"
For all I know, you might be right, but anyone who claims that "virtually every society" does X without having done a lot of cross-cultural research is talking out of their ass.
All too often, though, as Professor Kerr alludes to at the end of his post, legally-recognized-as-fit parents use the "right to the care and custody of their children" as a way to violate fundamental rights of those children, or to waive those children's rights. "Parental rights" claims generally amount to "right to make irrevocable decisions to the child's detriment" (see parental consent ¬ification laws as the prime example) - in other words, the assertion that the child has no rights.
Take "Professor Yuracko," cited in an above comment, who "has been arguing that states have a positive obligation to impose minimum standards on homeschooling under State Constitutional provisions," based on arguments that would get a lawyer sanctioned under Rule 11.
The Supreme Court settled in the DeShaney case that under the federal Constitution, states do not have "positive obligations" (even to stop one private individual from killing another -- in that case, a boy was killed by the person entrusted to care for him).
Yuracko claims that allowing home-schooling potentially violates the Constitution by permitting sex discriminatory values to be taught to students by their parents. Nonsense. The Constitution constrains the government, not parents or other private actors.
The Constitution bans only discrimination by the government ITSELF, and does not ban PRIVATE sex discrimination at all (and few home-schooling parents are bigots, anyway). That is what the Supreme Court has held ever since The Civil Rights Cases (1883).
Thus, in Moose Lodge v. Irvis (1974), the Supreme Court held that a state was not liable for discrimination by a private entity, even though the state enriched the private entity by giving it a scarce liquor license. The state had no duty to prevent the private discrimination, even though it knew about it.
The Supreme Court emphatically held in United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000) that (a) private discrimination -- in that case, sex discrimination (an alleged gang rape motivated by "gender-based animus") -- doesn't violate the Constitution, only government discrimination does; and (b) not only does the government not have an obligation to prevent private discrimination, but the federal government lacks the regulatory power even to regulate it under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment (states have the power, but not the duty, to ban most forms of private discrimination, while Congress can regulate private discrimination only if such discrimination relates to interstate commerce, badges or incidents of slavery, federal enclaves, or federal funds).
Yuracko seemingly is ignorant of all these cases. She doesn't like home-schooling, so she comes to the wishful conclusion that it is unconstitutional.
Or a conviction that the precedent needs to be overturned or amended out of existence, something that can be said for a great many people's attitudes towards a great many precedents (or wholesale legal doctrines).
no stronger than the teachers unions which aggressively fight against any sort of testing for teachers to ensure basic competency in the subjects they teach.
note this article is just from today. there have been numerous other examples.
ARTICLE BELOW FROM THE NYT
North Carolina's largest teachers' organization filed suit on Friday against the state school board, seeking to block a competency examination for teachers at the state's poorest-performing schools.
About 240 teachers at 15 schools across the state are scheduled to take the test on June 12. The teachers were singled out because students at their schools scored lowest on year-end standardized tests.
The lawsuit, a class action filed in Gaston County, west of Charlotte, says that low test scores are more a function of poverty than teacher performance and that requiring the teachers to take the competency test violates their constitutional rights.
Here is the paper, read for yourself.
California requires a person to be at least 17 years old to take the GED. But on the day he turns 17, any person who can convince a prospective employer to write a letter requesting them to take the GED is eligible to take it. So a student must only remain on the lam from truancy officers for about two years to avoid high school altogether.
Since many bright and well read elementary school students could pass the GED without breaking a sweat, this option is difficult only because of the state's age limitations.
I know a young lady who did precisely this by design, and who went on to graduate college with honors in less than 4 years. She spent her time on the lam from high school in South America, developing her parents' property and learning a few languages.
Yada, yada, yada, Warden! Come and get me! I'm in the jungle with the snakes and creepy crawlies, and they don't speak English here!
I'm trying to decide if this is sarcasm or not.
How many illiterates graduate from public high schools?
Spoken like someone who's knowledge of the nature of "teacher education" in the US is rather limited. Being forced to swallow and vomit back a bunch of commie garbage for 5 years to get your teaching credential (w/o necessarily being able to read) does not strike me as content neutral. Teacher training is highly content biased.
. You see a conflict here where non exists. Parents can be free to impart whatever values they want but that right is not impinged solely because a public school dares to expose the child to an idea the parents do not approve of.
Whit, that is indeed unfortunate. Malfeasance by the teachers, however, does not negate the abject crime of denying a child any exposure outside the cloistered and paranoid mind of helicopter parents.
On the other hand, the standard can't be that the state steps in whenever a parental decision is harmful to a child. Then we would have to have government supervision of children's diets to make sure they weren't getting obese and developing health problems; we would have to second-guess parental decisions about who their children's friends will be; we would have to forbid parents to take the children to churches that teach racism and that Noah's flood was a literal historical event.
I think that unless we are willing to give up any pretense of being a free society we just have to accept that some parents will make boneheaded decisions that hurt their kids, and that other than banning the worst of the worst (i.e., killing their kids, selling them as slaves and pimping them out as prostitutes), it's an unfortunate fact of life.
Some kids who are homeschooled with get a superlative education; others will barely be able to read and write. That's true of public school graduates as well.
Absolutely not! The problem is not that we are denying parents the right to teach their children as they see fit but rather parents the assert that ANY exposure to ideas that don't approve of somehow impinges on that right. That view - that their beliefs require not only the teaching of those beliefs but the complete exclusion of all other possibilities - is fundamentally untenable.
Yes, I'm sure we all would have benefitted from being exposed to real science and opposing viewpoints. These days I'm a confirmed atheist myself. But I haven't seen any evidence that children with insular upbringings can't be successful in life, and in fact many are.
I suppose the ones smart enough to become successful doctors, lawyers, and buisness people can overcome the insularity. But how about the kid who is not as intellectually gifted? Can he break through?
Then certainly the coercive state apparatus' claim of a "right to control the 3rd party" would be even weaker since it manifestly cares not at all for the "3rd party" and is upperly incompentent in caring for "it". Note that death rates of children in government custody are much higher than death rates of children in parental custody and you can forget comepletely about their intellectual and spiritual development.
I don't worry too much about the Constitutional basis of home schooling. 30 years ago it was illegal in all states and today its legal in all states (with some regulation in some states). Legalization was accomplished by a combination of civil disobediance and legislation.
Mostly, school districts got tired of beating up on parents who were the least neglectful of their children (wanting, after all, to care for them 24/7 365) when the beating up didn't work since parents could merely switch school districts if they got tired of the harrassment.
Also, since the 4th Amendment has been held to guarrantee that private homes are not subject to regulatory searches (Camara vs Municipal Ct 387 U.S. 523 (1967)), coercion proved difficult. If they can't enter the house, it's hard for the authorities to determine the existence of children without expending additional resources.
Then there's the fact that home schoolers used one of those clever legal arguments that is not supposed to work in real life - but sometimes does - by saying that, "We are not tutoring our children at home. They are attending a private school that happens to be in our home." This switched the argument from "neglect" to "private school regulation". And since religious schools and elite private schools had discouraged regulation of private schools in many states, home schoolers were able to benefit from that laxity.
And even when states like Nebraska tried to force private schools to use certified teachers they encountered civil disobedience. [When 1000 Baptist ministers descend upon you and a disabled Vietnam Vet who's become a minister cuts the padlock on the church door, even Nebraska had to yield.]
Since most home schoolers these days are members of religious organizations they also have access to resources both financial and physical to make life difficult for regulators. See, for example Dr. Dobson's daily broadcast tomorrow on the in re Rachel L case, In Defense of Home Schoolingg.
As with firearms regulation, strong views on the part of the regulated can pay off.
----
Some years ago, my daughter was asked by a woman in a shop why she wasn't in school. She gave the answer I had previously suggested, half in jest. "My daddy doesn't believe in your schools. He says they're controlled by the communists." Further deponent sayeth not.
my point is, both from personal experience and from what i've read - i've seen no evidence to convince me that the average teacher is any more effective than the average parent in teaching their children. from what i've read, homeschooled kids tend to outperform other kids.
but i have no problem with some sort of minimum competency test for homeschool teachers, as long as "real" teachers are forced to take the exact same test.
i do agree that it's possible that some parent could just totally neglect their child's education in homeschooling. but i also know that almost every charge that teacher's unions tried in trying to originally prevent homeschooling turned out to be baseless once homeschooling became popular.
ultimately, imo it comes down to parental rights.
As I look back on my childhood, I think my biggest regret is the enormous amount of time I wasted before I figured out that it was all bullshit. I started off in seminary with big plans to be another Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson myself. I'd like to have that time back. But if I hadn't wasted time on that, I probably would have wasted it on something else.
Second, state constitutions do not say that states have an affirmative duty to educate children. At most, they say that states have an affirmative duty to make education available, which is very different, even if she confuses the two.
/go Gators
I am equally skeptical of unenumerated rights and unenumerated powers.
Parental preferences regarding their children may or may not qualify as rights. The ability to force a third party into some particular institution, especially without some form of due process, definitely qualifies as power.
No kidding which is a great argument against government schools. It's trivial to establish that they are disasters.
You may not like home schooling. I may not like sodomy. So what. Get over it. Neither should be illegal.
And since home schoolers are part of the 10% of the population that owns 50% of the US' private firearms, home schooling is not likely to be seriously regulated.
There's nothing in the law that proscribes home-schooling, per se, only a requirement that every child be afforded a teacher with a minimal level of competency (a good requirement to apply to inner city schools, while we're at it).
I'm against all homeschooling, just for the record. I see no right (I believe Yoder was wrongly decided) to take children out of school for any reason, particularly the universally WORST reason for anything - religion.
Okay, so I'm a little sarcastic. Actually, we have a dearth of students graduating in the fields our country needs, such as science and math, and that will hurt our ability to compete against actual communist states such as China, or capitalist ones like India. Our country is already falling behind in many ways. Did you know that China graduates about 500,000 software engineers every year, compared to our 30,000?
Sorry to be a little crude about it, but I went through the public school system not that long ago, and even in good schools (Massachusetts, suburbs northwest of Boston), you see a lot of problems. People making mistakes but being entirely impossible to get to own up for it.
My personal favorite was an AP Physics teacher who was sure that the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as applied to position and velocity, was just a result of the observer effect. Not an unusual mistake, or a particularly damning one for a single AP Physics course, but a significant one: it completely unravels most of the important distinctions found through quantum mechanics. I'm not sure what the best analogy for modern law courses would be, but saying Dred Scott was an important ruling on eminent domain would be close. Both cases are almost, but not quite totally, completely unlike the truth.
Researching the right answer yourself, or being taught it by a third party, isn't too useful. Knowing you're correct won't get you twenty points on a quiz. Obviously, there are some pretty strong incentives to avoid trying to prove a teacher's marks incorrect.
Quantum mechanics is a popular place for this sort of issue to pop up -- it's not a well understood field even among those with a physics degree, nor one that really got much focus until recently, and as a result you see a lot of students coming out of high school or a sophomore college course certain that Schrodinger's cat was a useful model rather than a thought experiment demonstrating why a pre-existing model needed a lot of work -- but you see variation in most of the other sciences. History, political science, and literature classes have it worse; not a single one I sat through avoiding expounding on the teacher's personal beliefs, and that's not a place you are likely to encounter an accidental mistake, or can prove the teacher wrong.
Seeing that sort of situation, where a group set up by the very politically motivated instructors that you've gone out of your way to avoid is still capable of requiring you to teach a number of things which may well be false, really doesn't seem to be that effective an alternative to me.
Yes, it's interesting exactly how similar entirely unrelated arguments can be, especially when you either show ignorance or apathy regarding the actual substance of the arguments.
For those following along at home, the top "judicial activism" involves some situations claiming unenumerated rights that pretty clearly weren't the case in the Founding Father's vocabulary. Lawrence V. Texas would have been remarkably good legislature -- hence why you don't see even many of conservatives complaining about the results -- but finding it under the Constitution or first nine amendments was rather ridiculous, especially given that the people who wrote the damned text had no issue banning that specific form of private interaction, and banning it for merely reasons of 'ick'. Roe wasn't much better : while abortion was legal in many cases at the time of the Founders (at least before 'quickening') and wasn't really heavily banned in the United States until the mid 19th century, Roe relied on finding within the 14th amendment, a text proposed in 1866. That time was actually one of the strongest points of the anti-abortion movement, which had begun legislation in New York and the rest of the northeast in the 1820s. From the "judicial activism" viewpoint, Roe really would have been stronger decided by using the common law definition for the ninth amendment, or even the "penumbras" argument used in Griswold (which has its own issues).
You don't have to do any logical gymnastics to find a right to educational choice; it could actually exist without a government, was fairly common through all of our country's history and most of the history of our country's common law sources, and is consistent with other stated rights and texts.
That's not to say that I think the law is or is not Constitutional, nor to say that the 9th amendment is the strongest weapon to bring to the game against it (freedom of association for 500, anyone?), merely to say that there are some pretty significant differences between one situational and the next.
I've heard those numbers, before, and slightly larger ones. Given that the BLS only counts an entire ~760,000 software engineering jobs on the market, an average level of unemployment for software engineers, that like India's IT market a number of those graduated engineers are of questionable skill (approximately 30,000 Chinese MCE degrees come out per year, according to the IBM's 05 library, but finding one that you'd trust to make half-decent code is at best 50/50 over there), and notices that the China's population is four times that of America's, and that many of those individuals with software engineering degrees are providing call support... I think you're ignoring at least half of the important data, whether intentionally or not.
Using the same IBM 05 library, I see that the official number of IT-related jobs from China was 250,000 in 2001, and while that was supposed to increase by some pretty amazing jumps, that really does not sound like a good employee's market.
Here's a stupid question : what job do you actually need to believe in macroevolution to do well in?
The problem with Intelligent Design and Creationism in general is that it's entirely possible to work it in with all observed evidence; it's entirely untestable, and thus while it probably won't predict useful data, it's not going to force someone's head to blow up when they encounter anything.
The amount of doublethink required for a paleontologist would probably be capable of powering a pretty decent-sized electrical generator, of course, but it's still possible for that person's beliefs to wrap around the matter (and given the existing evidence, you'd honestly expect him or her to have begun to expect the Flying Spaghetti God to plant that evidence everywhere).
If both sides got serious about it, yes, I would.
The average bullet-proof vest is only rated to work against handgun bullets, and not even work well against the bigger or faster ones. Moreover, there are a lot of home schoolers, and not many police officers in LAPD SWAT. That combination is a good way to get a lot of people killed.
That ignores the political and social costs of bringing pseudo-military tactics against a non-violent, normal-looking 10% of the state.
Of course, given the tendency of sane people to leave California, I hope that won't be the case.
I think there are a lot of reasons that children should presumptively be raised about their parents and parents' decisions about how to raise their children should be generally be respected. But those reasons have to do with protecting the best interests of the child, the state's incompetence at micromanaging the details of child-rearing, and the fact that parents are in the best position to assess their child's interests because they have the best information. It's not because people have a right to take a small, vulnerable person and do whatever they want with them as long as they're not grossly incompetent.
Refers only to American jobs and the American market, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics is rather incapable of finding any useful information outside of United States borders.
Elliot Reed, if parents have no rights over or regarding their children, we'd be seeing human rights violations every few seconds. For that matter, many of the relatively right-fracturing capabilities that the public school system is capable of applying, such as searches that would otherwise invade privacy or limits that would otherwise stomp upon freedom of speech and freedom of association, primarily due to the concept of "in loco parentis", where the state or a guardian receives some of the rights normally held by the relevant parents.
It shouldn't be at question whether the parents have some rights over the destiny of their offspring. These rights probably don't meet very strict scrutiny, but wondering whether they exist at all flies rather far in the face of evidence.
i think you have it backwards. school takes children out of the home. school is the one with the burden to justify, not parents. and schools have done it because we view education (through high school) as a benefit to society so we PROVIDE it to those who DON'T choose to make other private arrangement. historically, those private arrangement have been conventional private schools. but that's just a matter of circumstance. they shouldn't have ot be the only choice.
the schools have no "right" to your child. you do. they are only there to provide what the state has deemed important enough to all children to offer to provide free (well, not free since we pay for it, but you get my point).
Parents have to have certain rights over their children, that's the very essence of the concept of "custody". But those rights cannot include taking a child out of school.
I'm sure we can all agree that homeschooling is a pretext for parents wanting to instill in their children some fringe belief either not taught in public schools or contradicted in public schools. Just because parents don't believe in evolution on religious grounds does not give those parents the right to deny their kid a proper, normal education so they can brainwash their children as they see fit. That's what homeschooling comes down to - the right to brainwash your children.
If it were up to me, society would not let parents even mention religion to their children until they turn 21. Minds under 21 are not mature and developed enough to handle or understand religion. It should be a felony to even mention jesus/allah/moses/etc to a child under 21. If society had to wait until kids turned 21 to begin religious education, well over 90% of the population would be atheists and the world would be a much better place. No mature mind would believe in religion - only when it can be brainwashed into your mind as a child does it remain through adulthood. I know this will never happen, nor would it be able to be enforced. But I can dream.
Homeschooling is just an excuse to brainwash children with religious gobbledegook hogwash. Children should not be isolated from other kids their age, and should be in school with other children. "Homeschooling" is a crime against children, and absolutely, positively NEVER in the best interest of any child.
Wisconsin v. Yoder is improperly decided and should be overruled insofar as it permits actions against the best interest of a child in the name of religion. Allowing people to use drugs in the name of religion makes infinitely more sense than allowing parents to pull their kids out of school and deny them a proper education in the name of religion.
Homeschooling is just an excuse for nutjob crazy parents or people who have kidnapped a child and raised him/her as their own and don't want to risk sending the stolen, missing child to a public school where they have lots of milk cartons.
In fact, we can't agree on that at all. (To quote a famous philosopher, "You know it's not just for scary religious people anymore.") Many homeschoolers do so out of religious motivation; many do so because public schools are not exactly admirable institutions. And they teach plenty of fringe beliefs -- e.g., that FDR's New Deal ended the Depression -- themselves.
Or people who want their children to learn, instead of being held back by the mediocrity and latest fads of the educrats.
I homeschool because my daughter has special needs that weren't being addressed by the public school. Despite the IEP that she was offered (which was as good as any government crafted plan) she was not able to get her needs met. She struggled in public school, but thrived homeschooling! She actually learned to read (Keep in mind, we're talking about gradeschool age here). In public school they weren't even trying to teach her anything. I had a state-certified teacher privately observe her in public school and found she was being left on her own to play by herself, not being interacted with by the teachers, support staff or other students.
And that was WITH an IEP and in a class that was DESIGNED for kids with disabilities!
>>> Children should not be isolated from other kids their age, >>>
On the other hand, children should not be forced to assciate only with other kids their age. Certainly those of us who are products of the public school remember the horrible social ramifications of a "senior" talking to a "freshman". I mean, after all, that three or four year age difference is so significant in the real world.
>>> "Homeschooling" is a crime against children, and absolutely, positively NEVER in the best interest of any child. >>>
I'm grateful for my daughter that she had more opportunity then your limited view would have provided her. >>>
>>> Homeschooling is just an excuse to brainwash children with religious gobbledegook hogwash. >>>
How do you answer those parents who homeschool for non-religious reasons then? Just curious...
On the contrary, the evidence from research suggests that they should be. Children being isolated in huge herds consisting almost entirely of other children of their own age is a HIGHLY artificial contrivance, contrary to most of our species' evolutionary history.
Children learn primarily from adults, because other children their own age for the most part know nothing to teach them. And childhood is a time for learning to be an adult. Perhaps they need some exposure to other children their age for proper socialization into the next generation's common culture, but all the evidence suggests they need not nearly as much as government schools provide, and would benefit from far less of it.
All of which is neither here nor there, save to demonstrate that the objective case for attacking home schooling is remarkably flawed. The usual standard for an unenumerated, 9th amendment based right, I assume, is whether it would universally have been regarded as a right at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted, and failed to be included only because it occurred to nobody that the government would ever try to violate it. Home schooling meets this test admirably, you'd be hard put to identify a better qualified candidate for an unenumerated right, short of the right to breath or eat.
I think it's time for the home schooling movement to flex that clout, and start working for a constitutional amendment.
Now we're getting down to it.
No, we can't agree on that at all. We're a secular homeschooling family that pulled our kids out of public school because they weren't learning anything. We homeschool for academic excellence, we teach evolution and I don't brainwash my children. They are getting a far superior education compared to what they were receiving in the public school. Secular homeschooling is booming and is the fastest growing segment of the homeschooling community.
I concede that there are plenty of fundy homeschoolers who are teaching their children ideas I find abhorent, but surely you realize they'd be doing this even if their kids went to public school?
I could agree with most everything else in your post as a matter of opinion, but this I disagree with. I have several reasons:
First, the "tests" that the homeschoolers have to come in for aren't that hard. We're talking about GED level stuff here. Homeschoolers are only being asked to show that they're doing as well as a crappy public school.
Second, schools prepare kids for jobs (or at least they're supposed to). Now if you want to teach your kids evolution is false, you can do that. I bet they could still pass the test after getting those answers wrong. Giving them testing just ensures that they'll be able (in a broad sense) to get some job. We just want to make sure that you're not keeping them at home and teaching them nothing. Or, worse, having them knit things that you sell at the farmer's market.
You said "If you're leaving the schools because of their political nature or inaccurate answers, you probably don't want to teach for tests that want politically correct but inaccurate answers or will require you to let them brainwash your kids."
I think this is overblown, and answered by my second point. I don't think the GED is all that "politically correct". How do you make the math section politically correct? Could you find a few 'objectionable' questions on the GED? Sure. It's only a few questions, deal with it. Overall, the test is pretty basic. These tests are normally drawn up by a state body with more professionals, not your AP Physics teacher.
These tests are not "conformity with liberal values" tests. They're "let's make sure your kids will be at least as educated as our dumbest public school students" tests.
I'm going to pile onto this garbage, too.
We don't homeschool, yet. But public school is failing my kid. So we're exploring the options. And we've found a local secular homeschooling support group.
While I'm sure BruceM would love it for me to sacrifice my child on the altar of the public schools, he's not the one who has to deal with the consequences.
Oh, how "Tolerant" of you! We can see that government schools taught you well.
Thankfully it doesn't matter whether or not you believe Yoder was wrongly decided. You will NOT dictate to me how to raise my children.
Neither will the Courts or the Government. You can stomp your feet and take a tantrum if you want, but you can't change the fact that you cannot dictate the educational choices that I make for my family.
Frankly, when the attitude that you have is adopted by the Courts or the Government, it makes me eternally grateful to the Supreme Lawgiver that we have the 2nd Amendment in this Country.
You really are a freak. Your blind hatred for religion seems to enhance your totalitarian desire to control others. Despite the fact that we have the right to the free expression of religion in this Country.
Frankly, your proposals are utterly unconstitutional and unAmerican. I submit that YOU and people like you are the dangerous wacko nutjobs who think that you will/can use governmental force to deny the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit.
You might be an Atheist/Skeptic libertine. More power to you, but you DO NOT have the right to force that Atheist/Skeptic libertine attitude onto the rest of the country via the power of the government.
Neither do you have a right to tell me and my family how we are going to school our children, What religion the Children are going to be raised in, and what moral principles they will be taught.
You might not like it, but you are going to have to learn to live with it.
they most definitely include that right.
"I'm sure we can all agree that homeschooling is a pretext for parents wanting to instill in their children some fringe belief either not taught in public schools or contradicted in public schools."
no i don't.
and one person's "fringe beliefs" is another person's truth. i love the way that for you it's the state that gets to decide those all important truths we teach to our children.
" Just because parents don't believe in evolution on religious grounds does not give those parents the right to deny their kid a proper, normal education so they can brainwash their children as they see fit. "
i think creationists are morons. but i respect their rights.
"That's what homeschooling comes down to - the right to brainwash your children. "
you could apply that equally to public schools.
"If it were up to me, society would not let parents even mention religion to their children until they turn 21. "
your hillary'esque "it takes a village" decrees make me itchy
"Minds under 21 are not mature and developed enough to handle or understand religion. It should be a felony to even mention jesus/allah/moses/etc to a child under 21. If society had to wait until kids turned 21 to begin religious education, well over 90% of the population would be atheists"
unsupported WAG (wild ass guess), that i doubt is true.
" and the world would be a much better place."
YES, because govt. imposed atheism (which is what you are trying to espouse) has SUCH a great record of civil rights in the last century (the first century where it basically existed).
yes, officially atheist regimes where people were saved from the evil of religion have SUCH a great record of peace and justice.
lol
just because john lennon wrote a song, doesn't mean he's correct.
the evidence strongly suggests the opposite.
" No mature mind would believe in religion - only when it can be brainwashed into your mind as a child does it remain through adulthood."
countless examples throughout history disprove your "opinion".
" I know this will never happen, nor would it be able to be enforced. But I can dream. "
yes. utopianists often do. unfortunately for the world, sometimes their dreams come true, and we have pogroms, killing fields, gulags, etc.
"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare," the judge wrote, quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue.
Training children in loyalty to the State! That kind of says it all.
Rich kids and kids whose parents can make the sacrifice get to the insanity of public schools. But the poor kids are screwed.
Got it.
I was just in China for a delegation of IT professionals, and those were the numbers we were told. They may not be accurate, and who knows the quality of the engineering programs, but the fact remains that China graduates far more engineers in just about every subject than the US does. We should be concerned.
"Here's a stupid question : what job do you actually need to believe in macroevolution to do well in? "
Most medial or biotech or biomed jobs require a good understanding. And those fields are growing and will be economic engines of our future.
"More power to you, but you DO NOT have the right to force that Atheist/Skeptic libertine attitude onto the rest of the country via the power of the government. "
He wasn't suggesting that atheism be forced onto students. He was merely saying taht any discussion of religion should be held off until a person is mature enough to understand it. I would disagree with the age of 21, believing that students can grasp the meaning of religion earlier than that.
My belief is that children should not be indoctrinated into any religion at all. Rather, they should be exposed to all religions, probably at some time in their teen years, and learn the various belief systems of each. Then, whenever they are mature, they can better choose which religion fits them. This has the added benefit of being better able to understand believers of other religions, such as muslims,buddhists, catholics, and so on. They might learn that adherents to other religions doesn't make one a spawn of Satan, as so many religions teach.
No one should have a problem with this. If your religion is the best one afterall, your children will of course choose it.
I don't know what the current tests are, and I'm not sure it's particularly relevant what the currently are. The issue at hand not that they could be difficult — I'd personally hope for home schoolers to be capable of taking significantly harder tests successfully than public schooled kids — but that the tests could well be incorrect, different for those home schooled, or abused in several other different ways.
You and Mr. Volokh may well only be talking about the modern GED, but that's not clearly stated in Mr. Volokh's original post, nor is it something that would be possible to keep.
I'd argue that point. A lot of schooling does very little to prepare anyone for a job : there are incredibly few places where the ability to analyze Shakespeare, and even physicists or chemists seldom really use a lot of the stuff taught in schools with any regularity.
There are exclusions. If you go into organic chemistry, you'll be using the stuff you learned in high school and undergraduate for eternity, although for every Grignard you learn you'll also try out banana flavoring synthesis that no one needs a chemist to do these days.
The point was originally to produce an individual capable of dealing with and understanding a variety of situations in and out of their careers — a well-rounded adult, if you will. Now, I dunno.
I think that's the issue at hand. There's no assurances the series of testing will be the GED, or any form of testing that emphasizes preparation for college or the job market, only that it'll be drawn up by some state group with a bunch of professionals in it. Whatcha want to bet that these experts will want to focus on the sorta stuff that home schoolers are supposed to be getting wrong?
There's nothing inherently wrong with testing home schooled kids. There's nothing inherently wrong with 'may-issue' CCW permits or similar statutes, and until the various statutes and Constitution changed, nothing inherently wrong with the concept of a poll test. That doesn't change that there would be a massive potential for abuse, and little to no real method to challenge that abuse.
Homeschooling aside, the rich and those with more resources already have far more choices when it comes to education. The best schools are in the best neighborhoods. Poor people don't have many opportunities to move into those areas. Actually homeschooling is a great option for poor people whose neighborhood schools are bad, and I do know a number of quite poor homeschoolers. But even if your statement were true, what do you suggest? Should everyone have to accept a mediocre education because not all have the option for something better?
I left out a word there, the sentence should have read "Rich kids and kids whose parents can make the sacrifice get to avoid the insanity of public schools."
I agree completely that the poor who live in terrible neighborhoods would benefit from homeschooling. But some idiots in California won't even let them try.
The teachers' unions have to go. They have a stranglehold on education and are killing it. As mentioned by another commenter, they won't allow testing teachers for competence, but they demand that homeschooling parents and students be tested.
I was a public school kid (all the way from K-12, state university, and now a state law school), and all the while my best and most influential teacher was always my father.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a convert to the pro-School Vouchers side.
I really, really regret that my wife and I didn't home school our kids (above and beyond what we did before they went off to school: teaching them to read, basic arithmetic, colors, shapes). For all this talk about exposing children to a wide range of viewpoints, in practice, where we lived in California, that "wide range of viewpoints" was basically drunkenness, pot smoking, magic mushrooms, extremely casual sex, and contempt for learning. And it got much worse in high school. (The joys of living in a place where Democrats ran everything.)
How many hours a day of home schooling does it take to educate as effectively as a public school does? Quite a bit less. Remember that a seven hour school day includes, on average, 1 1/2 hours of lunch and breaks, 30 minutes of pep rallies, political indoctrination, or in California, sexual indoctrination events that, because there was no advance notice to parents, were unlawful.
Remember that teachers are having to deal with some students that aren't interested in being in school, with predictable results. (My wife substituted in the school our kids attended, so she had a clear idea of how much time in elementary school was spent dealing with disciplinary problems.) An hour of instruction at school is probably equivalent to 20 minutes of home schooling.
Bigoted much? "Homeschooling is just for religious fanatics to brainwash their kids" is so thirty-years-ago. My extensive contact with the homeschooling community indicates that those who homeschool for primarily religious reasons are now in the minority. The explosion of homeschooling in the last decade or two has been a secular one, driven by the educational failure, 'zero-tolerance' nonsense, political correctness and and general disorder of many public school systems.
Many of the comments here (usually from the anti-homeschoolers, but not always) make me wonder how many of the said commenters really know anything about homeschooling, education or, for that matter, children.
The whole 'certification' thing is a red herring anyway; teaching a roomful of children may require specialized skills, but any person of reasonable intelligence with access to reference materials can tutor their own children. (My wife, who did the lion's share of homeschooling our two kids, dropped out of high school and later obtained a GED. The kids, however, have scored in the upper-90th percentiles on all the standardized tests they've taken and are now both straight-A students at major colleges. Oh, and we're 'secular' homeschoolers, too.) The educracy is hostile to any competition and will try to control what they can't stop or forbid.
I'm guessing you meant to type "[avoid] the insanity of public schools" or something like that. (Try "preview" - it works!)
Back atcha: Let ME get this straight. Rich kids and kids whose parents would CHOOSE TO make the sacrifice [to homeschool] should be forced to attend failing public schools in order to satisfy some twisted ideal of "fairness".
Got it.
PS- the only real "sacrifices" are giving up a 2nd income (and you can avoid that if you're self-employed, like my wife) and the time spent. Homeschooling is very inexpensive (compared to private school); without the 2nd income, you might have to give up an expensive vacation here or there, drive an older car for a few years, etc., but what is more important - lifestyle or education? As far as the time goes, who wouldn't want to spend more time with their kids?
Could a State mandate even one day a year for mandatory education of adults? Why does the government own my child? Why do I need to point to an affimative "right" to teach her; tell me why they own her?
Even if there were some kind of PC boogeyman questions on the test (which I doubt, but assume for argument's sake that there were), I could teach my kids to fake it.
He certainly did.
He was merely saying taht any discussion of religion should be held off until a person is mature enough to understand it. I would disagree with the age of 21, believing that students can grasp the meaning of religion earlier than that.
Unconstitutional suggestion.
My belief is that children should not be indoctrinated into any religion at all. Rather, they should be exposed to all religions, probably at some time in their teen years, and learn the various belief systems of each. Then, whenever they are mature, they can better choose which religion fits them. This has the added benefit of being better able to understand believers of other religions, such as muslims,buddhists, catholics, and so on. They might learn that adherents to other religions doesn't make one a spawn of Satan, as so many religions teach.
You do not have a right to prevent me from raising my children in the tenants of my religion.
No one should have a problem with this. If your religion is the best one afterall, your children will of course choose it.
Incorrect, Parents have a right raise their children in the religion that they see fit.
BTW: I am a Calvinist Christian, so I do not believe that anyone choices God. Rather the reverse is true.
My wife was asked to tutor a sixth grader in reading who was in public schools. He was reading at about a first grade level. This kid was in a special needs program--and my wife couldn't figure out why. In six weeks, she had him up to about a fourth grade reading level. She repeatedly called this kid's teacher, trying to find out why a kid of at least normal intelligence had been shunted into a program for the retarded--and could never get an answer.
Eventually, a friend of ours who taught in the district explained it to her: the district gets additional funding for special needs kids, and special needs teachers were paid a bit better. This kid was apparently misidentified as special needs early on--and the district and his teachers had an incentive to keep him there--and keep him from advancing. The parents weren't particularly educated, and consequently didn't challenge this misidentification.
Public school teacher unions are the enemy of education.
There may be a case that for some subjects, such as physics, or composition, or higher algebra, some people simply don't have the skills required to teach these subjects. For lab sciences, there is a significant investment in equipment that may make it impractical to teach these at home. But all of us had teachers somewhere along the way that were a reminder that everything isn't perfect in public schools, either.
I completely agree, which is why I don't think these tests should be a problem. The home-school lobby hates them.
To be blunt, some people home school their kids for the wrong reason. For example, "I don't think women should work, they should just be submissive to their husbands. Therefore, I will home school my daughter and not teach her."
People like that (who are only a small minority) will be stopped by testing home schoolers. Normally, the home school kids do get a better education and pass the tests with flying colors.
gattsuru: "There's nothing inherently wrong with testing home schooled kids. . . . That doesn't change that there would be a massive potential for abuse".
In case I wasn't clear, homeschool kids should get the same tests public school kids get. There are normally "gateway" tests every few years in public schools. Public school Timmy can't go from 5th grade to 6th without passing a test. The same test should be given to homeschool Molly who is a rising 6th grader by age. If HS Molly passes, she can stay in homeschool.
Making them take the same test severely reduces the possibility of abuse. Besides, as Dan says, most homeschool kids embarrass the public school kids when these tests are actually administered.
Since homeschool kids don't have gra