Home-school battle heats up in California

I have been told that Texas passed a law that the homeschoolers love.

Let’s remember we are talking about California here.

You know the LEFT coast.

Where all of the NEA loving, we want bigger government, let’s mold those little minds to love Che and hate big business liberals hang out.

You know the place where Spielberge and his lesser millionaire Hollywood buddies give big bucks to DemocRats to destroy property rights and write gun grabber legislation.

I don’t think our home-schooler friends want to take any chances with the legislature who gave us Electric Deregulation and the Assault Weapons Ban.

"I guess if we were to take a political stance and interpret that it's OK to do home-schooling, we would get as much flak from the California Teachers Association as we get now from the home-school associations," Andreoli said of his office. "So we're kind of in between. It's a politically loaded question."

Ah. Pitting the unions against the families. California is a state that is at war with its citizens.

Andreoli said, however, that, in his view, the state's concern is that home-schools operating as private schools lack oversight to ensure that children are safe.

If children are not safe in their own homes, then where are they safe? I guess we'll have to erect metal detectors in our front doors and post guards in the foyer.

"She asks the Legislature to consider state authorization, 'conditions' to be placed upon the 'quality of education being offered in a home school' and delineating of 'qualifications or resources that a parent needs' to home-school his child," Smith wrote in a brief last week.

Here's one measure of the "of education being offered in a home school" the state can use: the number of national educations contests won by home-schooled students vs. public-schooled students.

-PJ

1. Tex. Educ. Code Ann. § 25.086(a)(1). "Any child in attendance upon a private or parochial school which shall include in its course a study of good citizenship" is exempt from the requirements of compulsory attendance. Since this law does not specifically mention home schooling, the Texas Education Agency announced that home schooling was illegal in 1985. After over 80 innocent home school families were criminally prosecuted for truancy, HSLDA joined with other home school plaintiffs to file a class action suit against every school district in Texas (over 1,000). The class action suit, Leeper v. Arlington Indep. School Dist., No. 17-88761-85 Tarrant County 17th Judicial Ct. Apr. 13, 1987), resulted in a trial level decision in favor of home schooling. The court ruled that:

a. Home schools can legally operate as private schools in Texas;

b. Article 7, section 2 of the Texas Constitution only authorizes the legislature to establish and maintain public education, not private or parochial education (Leeper, Slip Op. At 10);

c. Home schools must be conducted in a bona fide manner, using a written curriculum consisting of reading, spelling, grammar, math and a course in good citizenship. No other requirements apply.

d. The court ruled that the interpretation of the law cannot be left to each criminal prosecution. "If arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement is to be prevented, laws must provide explicit standards for those who apply them." Slip Op. at 9. Therefore, the court interpreted the law in an explicit way based on the historical treatment of home schooling. "The evidence establishes that from the inception of the first compulsory attendance law in Texas in 1915, it was understood that a school-age child who was being educated in or through the child's home, and in a bona fide manner by the parents … was considered a private school…." The dictionary in use in Texas at the time of the passage of the first compulsory attendance law contained definitions of the words "private" and "school" which encompassed children being taught at "home."

Looks pretty good to me. I believe the Texas law was passed as a result of some educrats declaring homeschooling illegal.

Texas laws from HSLDA

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