The Homeschooling
“Equivalency” Bill
Studies have shown that some alternatives to public
schooling – private schooling, Catholic schooling, charter schooling, and
homeschooling – provide their graduates with superior educations. The Amistad Academy in Connecticut, Connecticut Commentary noted, was such an
institution.
Nationally, some public education facilities have been
failing for quite some time to provide an adequate education, most especially
in urban environments or in suburban poverty pockets, where the traditional
family structure – mom, dad and children – has eroded over the years. All four
alternative educational facilities have been viewed for decades as pedagogical
replacement centers for parents dissatisfied with the quality of education
provided by public schools. Were this not the case, the number of alternative
education facilities would have diminished rather than increased during the
past three decades.
Much to the dismay of public education union leaders, such
alternatives to failing public schools have been viewed for decades escape
mechanisms that allow parents a freedom of choice not available to them in the
public school sandbox. We’ve known for some time that urban public schools,
public school administrators, and vote hungry politicians do not appreciate
such competition.
In the private marketplace, dollars follow successful
ventures. Among neo-progressive legislators, Connecticut’s political landscape
is littered with “concerned” legislators interested in shuttling tax money,
lots of it, to failing pedagogical enterprises.
All of us know that you will get more of whatever it is you choose to
finance with public funds. Public tax dollars support both failing and
successful public schools. While, purchasers decide the longevity of products
and services in the public marketplace, the survival of goods and services in
the political marketplace is decided, theoretically, by “the people” but in fact
by Connecticut’s dominant Democratic Party.
Connecticut’s General Assembly is now in the process of
considering a new and, the state’s drowsy media tells us, “controversial”
bill that, if adopted, will enforce
“equity” in pedagogical matters between
all educational institutions – if not now, then in the near future. The bill makes the state an equity-enforcer
that, sooner or later, will spread about the state a pedagogy that will
aggressively eradicate any differences between public and market driven non-public
schools. That is what “equity” means in the minds of neo-progressive levelers.
The “ask” by neo-progressives is on the face of it absurd.
Equity cannot be applied to alternative means of education without destroying
the efficacy of competing institutions. The thousands of homeschooling advocates, many of
them parents, who showed up at the state Capitol to protest the equity bill
understood perfectly the serpentine ways of the unitary state. Indeed,
dissatisfied with the quality of public school indoctrination, they had been
fleeing the beast for years, finally finding in alternative educational
institutions a safe harbor that would afford them a creative -- and different –
product. It is best to think of homeschoolers as refugees fleeing an
unsuccessful and unwanted Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, both the title of a book written by Paulo Freire, the third most cited
book in the social sciences widely used in teacher training and certification
courses.
The political lesson we should all draw from the state’s
Democrat hegemony is that numbers determine policy, good or bad. Once
bipartisan politics has been thoroughly vanquished – such is the case in “the
land of steady habits” – a restoration of true representative democracy becomes
more and more remote. Political habits are determinative.
Democracy, if the word means anything at all, indicates
participation of the demos in the political life of the state. This creative
participation is advanced by any state that modestly knows its own bounds,
constitutional, moral and historic. Equity always mows down essential
differences – in order to rule by power alone rather than to represent the
people, the demos, honestly and fairly.
In a one party state in which 43 percent of the Republican
population can find no representation in the General Assembly – precisely the
case in Connecticut – neither small “d” democracy nor small “r” republican
government is well served. Such a government must be arrogant, unheeding and
destructive.
Power and force are the opposite of both democracy and
representative governance. We have been well warned on this score by Edmund
Burke: “Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any
kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly
abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they
will never look to anything but power for their relief.”
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