We had a small concern going on around here in NH where the Democratic (highly leveraged Teacher Union support) with an encircle and envelope strategy. Well put by Consent of the Governed:
The Live Free Or Die State wants to regulate homeschooling curriculum. So much for "living free"
This week, on March 13, the New Hampshire State Senate will be voting on a bill that will require homeschoolers to submit curriculum plans at the beginning of each school year for each homeschooled child. It might be interesting to note that this very requirement was removed from their statutes a few years ago. Apparently, they are looking to put it back in place because the educrats have determined that homeschooled kids who enroll in public school are not prepared.
…Isn’t the curriculum already offered by the state in public schools one of the reasons many people opt to homeschool in the first place? People choosing to homeschool want to follow their own curriculum for a million different reasons. If the state is dictating what you do at home – you might as well just go to school… right?? Otherwise it’s just doing public school at home … and believe me if you are going to replicate what is done in the public school model at home then it isn’t really worth one’s time to homeschool at all. Maybe that’s what the state is trying to acheive here…
You know, the thought should occur to everyone that we have public schools that are totally managed and controlled by the state government; they set their own standards, they control their own curriculum, they dictate how everything is done – and yet they have mediocre results at best – that’s a fact that the news reminds us of almost on a daily basis. And yet, the state and their mediocre schools are the same people that want to oversee and control homeschooling!
And then you have the decision of a California appellate Court that basically made homeschooling illegal:
A state appellate court ruling that says parents must have a teaching credential to home school their children has rocked home schoolers throughout the Golden State…
And now, this from Tennesee and our friend Ken over at Blue Collar Muse:
Recently, the Tennessee State Board of Education ruled diplomas issued to home-schooled students from religious based schools were invalid as proof of the successful completion of High School should it be presented for employment purposes for a job for which state law requires a diploma. You read that right. According to the State Board of Education, all diplomas are equal but some diplomas are more equal than others.
According to Tennessee ConserVOLiance blogger Red Hat Rob,
… anyone from a public school (or a private accredited school) who presents a diploma in order to be hired as a daycare worker, police officer, fireman (or any other position which state law requires a high school diploma for) will be automatically accepted. Anyone who presents a homeschool diploma will be automatically rejected.
So, we have a state ratcheting up the edu-bar favoring "the professionals", a state favoring "the professionals, and another state (well gee whilikers!) favoring "the professionals"!
Any one else see a pattern here: parents cannot be trusted? Yet, read on for the good part….
The Board of Education’s rationale is since they had no input over the curricula which resulted in the diploma, they won’t recognize the diploma since they don’t know what it represents. For instance, the diploma could mean only that the student had 12 years of school yet cannot read well enough to complete an employment application and will need remedial classes for his first year of college.
But there’s a problem. It’s nicely pointed out by Red Hat Rob.
I have some news for the Department of Education officials. When a public school graduate presents a diploma, no one has any way to tell what it represents either. Did the ertswhile young graduate have an A average or a D- average? There is no minimum GPA requirement for graduation from a public high school in Tennessee.
[snip].
Red Hat Rob refers us to the ACT itself, which reports in ACT News, that in 2007, the national average score on the ACT was 21.2. The average score for High School grads in Tennessee was 20.7. That makes Tennessee students just a little less than average as a group. While that figure is a composite of home educated, privately educated and governmentally educated students who took the test, it generally may be taken to mean that Tennessee’s Board of Education is willing to accept as satisfactory a diploma that represents a slightly less than average education.
What would be really interesting is examining data that broke down the different groups based on performance. How do government schools compare to home schools, for example? Fortunately we have just such a comparison available. Red Hat Rob refers us to a report from the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), an official site of the United States Department of Education, which has such numbers from 1998.
An ERIC digest titled ‘The Scholastic Achievement of Home Schooled Students’ from September of 1999 found the following:
Almost 25% of home school students were enrolled one or more grades above their age-level peers in public and private schools.
Home school student achievement test scores were exceptionally high. The median scores for every subtest at every grade (typically in the 70th to 80th percentile) were well above those of public and Catholic/Private school students.
On average, home school students in grades 1 to 4 performed one grade level above their age-level public/private school peers on achievement tests.
Students who had been home schooled their entire academic life had higher scholastic achievement test scores than students who had also attended other educational programs.
It further found,
Even with a conservative analysis of the data, the achievement levels of the home school students in the study were exceptional. Within each grade level and each skill area, the median scores for home school students fell between the 70th and 80th percentile of students nationwide and between the 60th and 70th percentile of Catholic/Private school students. For younger students, this is a one year lead. By the time home school students are in 8th grade, they are four years ahead of their public/private school counterparts.
The results are consistent with previous studies of the achievement of home school students.
What was the ACT composite score for Tennessee students for 1998? In the year homeschoolers averaged 22.8 and the national average was 21.0, Tennessee’s students scored just 19.8, a full 3 points below home schoolers. This put Tennessee ahead of only North and South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Washington DC. The composite home school score places them FIRST among the 51 jurisdictions represented in the study.
So, presented with just one metric (and others are available), we see government favoring, well, government. Never underestimate the power of the Teacher Unions to once again, like all other unions, attempt to squash true competition.
Individual teachers may, and are, attempting to do the right thing. The problem is that unions are out to protect their turf and that means eliminating and diminishing anything or body that stands a chance to compete effectively against them.
Homeschoolers – one way to compete. And succeed.
After all, they don’t participate in this stuff under the guise of Mom or Dad !
Fort Hard Knox has more on the ideology that may be below the radar, but why parents are deciding that they know best when it comes to their kids:
“Curriculum” (see some popular definitions, here) does not refer to the traditional three “R’s” (Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic), being taught in the schools. It applies to a systematic learning program. It refers to the overall framework and ideology in which all of the learning content is presented to the students. Social activists in the public school system can easily indoctrinate the state’s children with their ideas in a state-sponsored “curriculum.” They cannot, do this, in a home, where the parents are choosing the so-called “curriculum,” and usually incorporating their family’s values into the courses being taught and learned there.
