Wednesday, June 18th, 2003
By David Limbaugh
www.townhall.com
Given
the poor academic track record of public education in many areas of
this country, you would think the government and education
establishment would be a little less arrogant about superimposing their
will on homeschooling families who prefer to opt out of their system.
But you would be wrong.
The
establishment’s assault against the homeschooling movement continues.
In Waltham, Mass., local authorities are so adamant about imposing
their mandatory standardized testing that they sent social workers and
policemen to the home of George and Kim Bryant at 7:45 a.m. last
Thursday demanding their two teenagers take the tests.
According
to Worldnetdaily.com, the Department of Social Services (DSS) actually
threatened to take the Bryant’s children away from them over this issue
-- if other issues were involved, the article didn’t say so. But the
Bryants refused to let their children go, believing they have a right
to determine their children’s educational choices.
The
Waltham Public School’s homeschooling policy mandates that parents
develop a grading system and file educational plans for homeschooled
children, but the Bryants have steadfastly resisted the government
controls.
It’s
not that homeschooling families are afraid of competing with their
public school counterparts. Homeschoolers have continually done well on
academic tests and contests.
In
2000, the top three winners in the Scripps-Howard News Service’s
National Spelling Bee were all home-schooled. This is all the more
remarkable when you consider that only 11 percent of the contestants
were homeschoolers. That same year, homeschoolers placed first and
second in the National Geography Bee.
There’s
more. According to official reports for the American College Testing
Program (ACT), homeschoolers have scored higher on average than
students in public and private schools. In 2000, the average composite
ACT score for high school students was 21, while homeschool students
scored 22.8.
Dr.
Lawrence M. Rudner, an expert in quantitative analysis and one who has
studied the performance of homeschoolers, once remarked that this move
to make homeschoolers meet public school standards was "odd" given the
superior academic performance of homeschoolers.
Rudner
conducted a study in 1998 that included 20,760 students in 11,930
familes. He found that in every subject and at every grade level
(K-12), "home school students scored significantly higher than their
public and private school counterparts." Some 25 percent of all home
school students at that time were enrolled at a grade level or more
beyond that dictated by their age. According to the study, the average
eighth grade homeschooler was performing four grade levels above the
national average.
Nevertheless,
some homeschooling families are still reluctant to submit to
standardized testing because it would be an indirect method for the
state to gain control over the curriculum. If homeschoolers were
required to pass standardized tests geared to public school curricula,
is it not inevitable that their families would have to alter their
curricula to teach to those tests?
Don’t
just assume the Bryants are being stubborn and unreasonable. This is a
freedom issue. Why shouldn’t the Bryants or any other parents be free
to make their own curricular choices? We’ve seen the extent to which
the educational establishment influences public school curricula, often
in directions that many parents -- not just homeschooling ones -- would
consider repugnant.
Most
homeschool parents -- at least Christian ones -- understand what the
education establishment has known for a long time but won’t often
admit: that there is no such thing as values-free education. With the
banning of Christian values and their replacement with humanistic ones
in the public school system, we have witnessed the adoption of bizarre
ideas having little to do with academics and everything to do with
social engineering, directly resulting, ultimately, in the corruption
of educational quality.
As
more parents opt for homeschooling, public schools will grow
increasingly nervous. Homeschooling’s financial impact on public
schools can be significant. If thousands of students are homeschooling
in a school district, it stands to lose millions of dollars in revenue.
And with every additional homeschooled student, the public education
monopoly is eroded a little further, and control over children’s
academic and social development shifts away from the state and back to
the family unit.
So despite homeschooling’s outstanding
academic track record, we can expect persistent opposition from the
establishment, sometimes reaching the point of policemen and social
workers at homeschoolers’ homes threatening to snatch away their
children.
But
we can also be sure that homeschooling families will continue to resist
this oppression. They deserve our support, because they are fighting
over the most fundamental rights of a free society: the right to raise
and educate children as they see fit. They are carrying the banner of
liberty for all of us.
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
