There is no categorical difference between state “oversight” and state “regulation.” As the night follows the day, regulation follows oversight. State legislators who want greater oversight of homeschooling fully intend to regulate homeschooling. And in the future they will move on to the regulation of all forms of schooling that lie outside of public education. State Democrat progressive leaders – most of them beholding to state employee unions -- have been itching for years to control all forms of education that fall outside unionized public school education.
Parents of school aged children, on the other hand, have
been scouring the countryside in search of alternative means of education.
Broadly speaking, parents of school aged children have availed themselves of
(four) alternatives to public education: private schools, religions
institutions, charter schools, and homeschooling. If public school education
were up to par, the sometimes desperate search for alternative modes of
education would be unnecessary.
Public education, most experts not intimately associated
with public schools might agree, has fallen on hard times. One failed public
school student is now suing the state for pedagogical malpractice. The student
had advanced on a ladder of illiteracy; she could not read, yet public
education had passed her along from grade to grade through college.
She is the exception that proves the rule. A slim majority
of public school inmates are able to read at a fourth grade level. Even so, data,
as understood by disappointed parents, suggests that public education is
failing children in Connecticut and across the nation.
Most failings of public education may be traced to two
causes: 1) the outsized influence of public education union leaders – not
necessarily teachers -- on both pedagogy and progressive politicians, some of
whom have elected to escape the mess they have caused by sending their children
to private, religious and charter schools, all of them under constant fire from
progressive legislators who equate money spent on public education with
successful educational outcomes; and 2) a decades old deterioration of what
some educators call the classic curriculum.
Weeks after the progress of a bill proposing to oversee home
schooling was rudely interrupted at a hearing featuring the public testimony of
the usual pedagogical “experts” by hordes of homeschooling parents and
children, the bill “overseeing” home schooling was hastily withdrawn.
“Homeschool families,” the Hartford Courant told us, “showed
up in droves to the event and joined Republican legislators in criticizing the
joint hearing, with both groups decrying implied connections between
homeschooling and the recent case of a Waterbury man which prompted the
hearing. The 32-year-old man recently freed from a Waterbury home was
reportedly found malnourished after being withdrawn from school at age 11 and
then reportedly held captive for decades. The homeschooling community, which
had staged consistent protests at the Capitol have said that legislators are
using the case as an opportunity to restrict their freedom to teach their
children.”
Present at the hearing testifying in favor of the oversight
bill were, the Courant tells us, “state experts Department of Education
Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker, Department of Children and Families
Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly, Office of the Child Advocate’s Acting Child
Advocate Christina Ghio and Connecticut Association of Public School
Superintendents Executive Director Fran Rabinowitz.”
The captive had liberated himself from his stepmother and
his 21 year ordeal by setting a small fire in his house. Happily, Connecticut’s
oversight community did not arrest the victim for arson. He became the
precipitant cause célèbre of the withdrawn – for now
– bill overseeing and later regulating the growing homeschooling movement. The
cruel stepmother, we all remember, is a stock figure in many Grimm’s fairy
tales: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and Snow White.
Wait a minute, homeschooling parents at the hearing of “experts”
protested, even stepparents in Connecticut do not as a matter of course hold
their malnourished stepchildren prisoners in their homes for two decades while
avoiding “overseers” such as the state’s Department of Children & Families (DCF)
who apparently in this case had fallen asleep at the wheel – for 21 years.
Senate Republicans, neutered by the sheer number of
neo-progressives in the state’s General Assembly, issued a statement:
“Homeschoolers have nothing to do with the tragic situation in Waterbury.
Instead of focusing on DCF and the Waterbury public school system on how and
why that child fell through the cracks of the system, Democrats targeted the
thousands of homeschoolers in our state who do an amazing job of educating
their students outside of Connecticut’s education system. Thanks to the strong
voices of CT Republicans and passionate homeschooling families and advocates,
the proposed legislation imposing new mandates on homeschoolers will not move
forward this session. This is a major victory for parental rights and
educational freedom in our state!”
The respite, we may be sure, is only temporary. Supporters
of the state’s powerful public education lobby will be at the same stand next
year attempting to throttle alternative means of public education because the
lobby does not like competition that interferes with its lock-hold on education.
Catholic schools are on the wane, the last Catholic
elementary school in Hartford, Connecticut’s Capitol City, having closed
several years ago. Successful charter schools such as the Amistad Academy servicing New Haven’s educationally undernourished children were
underfinanced by the public education union controlled General Assembly from
the get-go.
In a recent column, Chris Powell, a
voice crying in the pedagogical wilderness, wrote, “So let’s pretend that the
public’s interest in Norwalk’s school system is exactly the same as the
interest of the school employee unions: Accountability for staff, disclosure of
teacher evaluations, performance-based pay, and efficiency, as well as
accountability for students and parents so that promotion from grade to grade
and graduation from high school are based on learning rather than aging out. Of
course the public interest and the union interest in schools are almost exact
opposites.”
Of course they are; pity so few have noticed.
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