If home-schooling counts, make it accountable

Dallas Morning News | Josh Benton:

“Under Texas law, home-schooling is essentially unregulated. Once a parent tells a school district a child will be home-schooled, the district's jurisdiction ends. State regulations say that parents should teach basic literacy, math and citizenship – but that's it. And state officials don't even have the authority to check whether those minimal requirements are being met.”

This is a difficult situation. On the one hand, everyone wants to put a stop to child abuse, whether it's physical beatings or child pornography or failure to provide basics like food, clothing, shelter, or in this case, education.

On the other hand, home-schoolers are unwilling to trust the welfare of their children to state agencies. If they don't trust public schools, they won't warmly receive child welfare agents inspecting and regulating the home school environment and program. Attempts to identify and address cases of abuse will be met with resistance, non-compliance and obstruction, even when no abuse is occurring. No good will come from that for the child whose parents are already providing a good education. Meanwhile, cases like Roger's 13-year-old granddaughter who is following rock bands up and down the West Coast with her mother, probably won't be tracked down and found anyway.

A reasonable compromise would be to handle home schooling abuses like we handle other kinds of child neglect. Parents are not required to report how they care for their children, but if the state receives a report of child neglect, the state has the power to investigate and take action. But, as the Home School Legal Defense Fund appears to resist any regulatory oversight at all because it opens the door to further regulation, even this reasonable compromise probably is unachievable. Home school parents, in their efforts to keep at bay unwanted state involvement in their own child's welfare, end up preventing the state from aiding children who truly are in need of help. How ironic and sad.