Homeschoolers are a varied bunch, yet there is about them, unfairly, too often a whiff of the dubiously unconventional. Just recently, here in D.C. and in California, homeschooling families have come under alarming pressure from the forces of bureaucratic orthodoxy.
That’s not so surprising, given the irritated suspicion with which homeschooling is still broadly regarded. (Speaking as a one-time at-home educator, believe me, I know about this.) What is surprising, and refreshing, is that a spirit of compromise seems so far to be prevailing in both places.
In Washington, edu-crats have felt compelled to take some sort of action ever since the appalling case came to light of Banita Jacks and the four daughters she “homeschooled” before apparently murdering them and stowing their moldering remains in her Southeast Washington town house.
Yet there is an intellectual ocean between a woman such as Jacks who is mentally sick and, say, an aesthete trying to give his daughter a classical education, a devout Christian seeking to inform his son’s reading of history with a biblical perspective, or a military wife who teaches the children at home because her husband gets transferred every two years.
These last three give a fairer picture of what homeschoolers look like — all three are people I happen to know — than the grisly face of Banita Jacks.
Still, the Jacks case has prompted the District of Columbia Board of Education to consider some oppressive proposals to govern homeschooling. One tragic-comical measure would require parents to teach every day during the same hours as D.C. public schools, those bastions of superior teaching whose students inexplicably rank at the very bottom in national assessments.
The ironies are so rich they practically taint the water. Here is D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee trying to introduce a measure of flexibility into public schooling, in part by getting rid of lousy teachers and superfluous administrators. Home schools have no administrators, they’re staffed by loving, dedicated teachers, and, unlike regular schools, are wonderfully free from iron school-day routine.
Peter Orvietti, a father of twins, is among the local parents who filed a statement opposing the proposed rules. He and his wife home school precisely because “child-focused home-based education is liberated from the six-hours-per-day, 180-days-per-year paradigm,” he wrote, adding, “We chose to settle inside the District to start a family so we would have access to some of the world’s greatest cultural, educational, and artistic resources, and we spend lots of time at galleries and museums with our sons.”
At a hearing last week, however, bristlingly defensive homeschoolers were relieved by the tone of discussion. “There is definitely going to be more regulation,” concludes Mary Sidall, a homeschooling mother of two, “but the school board seems earnest in its efforts to have a healthy discussion around what that regulation is.”
Meanwhile, homeschoolers in California are also breathing more easily after new assurances from the state educational authorities. Late last month, families were thrown into a panic after California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that parents could instruct at home only if they had teaching credentials.
Not surprisingly, the California teachers’ union smugly applauded the ruling: “We’re happy,” one official told the San Francisco Chronicle; “We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting.”
It’s odd, really, that “credentials” should engender this magical penumbra when, across the country, homeschoolers routinely trounce their public and private school counterparts in spelling bees, standardized tests and even college entry exams.
That same news story, however, yields an important clue to the resistance to homeschooling. Those who distrust families, seeing them as cauldrons of patriarchal or religious brainwashing, are often inclined to think homeschooling is a dangerous, regressive experiment that must be stopped.
Leslie Heimov, who runs the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles, told the Chronicle that the main issue is not the quality of children’s education, but their “being in a place daily where they would be observed by people who had a duty to ensure their ongoing safety.” Unlike, say, their parents.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
