A lot of parents who educate their own children at their own expense (i.e., without the aid of Education Freedom Accounts) are upset about HB1610, which — as it’s currently written — would require their kids to take the same state assessments as kids in public schools.
Although it allows parents of public school children to exempt their children from the assessments, it does not — as currently written — provide for similar exemptions for home-educated students.
That is, on its face, the bill appears to be a blatant attempt to subject home-educated students to the kind of micro- and mismanagement that prompted their parents to keep them out of schools in the first place.
This interpretation can’t be dismissed out of hand. I have personally witnessed supporters of public schools (who are not, it is always important to keep in mind, supporters of student academic achievement) formulating plans to collect copies of the birth certificates of all the children born in New Hampshire in order to keep tabs on all the children who aren’t ‘in the system.’
But I think a simpler interpretation is that the authors of the bill (like Hope Damon) are themselves products of the public schools that they are trying to prop up and, therefore, haven’t learned to write clear declarative sentences that require things like commas, subordinate clauses, and agreement among parallel structures.
For example, the title of the bill clearly states that it is about Education Freedom Accounts. So, the simplest way to clear up any misunderstanding would be to replace the phrase ‘Home educated students’ with the more appropriate phrase ‘Home educated students who are participating in Education Freedom Accounts’.
Similarly, the bill should refer not to private schools but to students in private schools who are using EFAs to attend. Otherwise, simply allowing any student with an EFA into a private school would require all students at the school to participate in the assessments.
The underlying principle seems straightforward: If you’re taking money from taxpayers, they have an interest in seeing that they’re getting something for their money. We might call this the If We Pay, We Get a Say principle.
So if you’re participating in the EFA program, the people whose money you’re spending would like to know that it’s not being wasted. And they shouldn’t just have to take your word for it.
Conversely, if you’re not participating in the EFA program, well — they don’t pay, so they have no say.
Having said that, if the purpose of the bill is to implement some other principles — for example, the ‘principle’ that we have to ‘keep a closer eye on home-educated students’ — then it is incumbent on the sponsors of the bill to articulate those clearly and completely in a preamble. Otherwise, the bill is a ‘solution’ to a ‘problem’ that hasn’t even been identified yet.
All of this suggests that the whole statute ought just to say something like:
Any student whose education is being funded by taxes must take the statewide assessments under penalty of losing access to that funding.
Note that phrasing everything in terms of districts and schools and ‘learning environments’ ensures the creation of loopholes and other unintended consequences.
Note also that phrasing the statute so that it directly implements the Pay/Say principle would say to parents of public school students: If you don’t want your kids to take the assessments, that’s fine, but they can’t keep attending tax-funded schools for free, so you’ll have to make other arrangements (like paying tuition) for them.
So that’s what the statute should say. But let’s suppose that it passes as written. How bad would that be for home-educated students?
First, like many RSAs, especially those dealing with education, the bill specifies no penalty for non-compliance. If you’re accepting EFA money, the state might be able to cut you off, but it doesn’t appear that there is any punishment for other home educators who simply ignore the statute.
(In fact, the current statute says that ‘A school district shall not penalize any exempted student nor shall the department of education or the state board of education penalize any school district for a lower participation rate.’ So universal participation is clearly not anticipated or even intended.)
Second, the term ‘learning environment’ is so vague as to be meaningless. If I use EFA funds for jiu-jitsu classes or piano lessons, that clearly takes place in a ‘learning environment.’ If I use EFA funds to buy a computer so my kid can use Kahn Academy, that’s clearly a ‘learning environment.’ Does this mean that the gym, the piano teacher, the Kahn Academy, and even the manufacturer of the computer would be required to administer the statewide assessments? It’s ludicrous on its face.
Third, the requirements are expressed in terms of ‘grades’ and not ages. If your kid just stays in ‘first grade’ forever — maybe because he has special needs, maybe because you think grades (which are essentially pedagogical implementations of astrological principles) are meaningless — then he never has to take the assessments.
So there’s bad news and good news. The bad news is that there are a lot of legislators who are so scared that home-educated students might escape their propaganda mills that they are willing to write bills like this.
But the good news is that those legislators are often some pretty dim bulbs, whose inability to accurately translate their desires into prose renders their bills toothless.
Anyway, the best thing to do with this bill would be to just kill it, on the grounds that it creates new problems without solving any old ones.
Okay, that would be second best. The actual best thing to do would be to amend it so that it replaces the existing statute with one that directly implements the Pay/Say principle and focuses on students rather than on districts, schools, and other ‘learning environments’.
But your last resort, as a home educator, is to simply ignore the bill even if it is enacted as written, and make sure your kid never gets beyond ‘first grade’, even if he’s reading War and Peace in the original Russian.
