An article from today's (FRIDAY 9/24/99) Washington Times
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2,000 home schoolers to lobby Congress to 'leave them alone'
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By Andrea Billups
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
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About 2,000 home-school students and their families from around the nation are visiting Washington this week to lobby policy-makers for their rights to educational freedom and to hear speeches from several GOP presidential candidates, who will address a large gathering Friday.
The three-day "Proclaim Liberty" conference, which began Thursday and continues through Saturday, is sponsored by the Home School Legal Defense Association.
The Senate last week honored the efforts of the nation's 1.5 million home-schooled students and their parents by passing a resolution declaring Sept. 19-25 as National Home Education Week.
"We really want to deliver a message to Congress to leave us alone," said HSLDA founder and president Mike Farris, who organized the conference. "Most people who come to Washington to have an event and to lobby come seeking federal aid, more programs or more regulations. We don't want any of that stuff. We just want to be left alone."
Several Republican presidential candidates including Texas Gov. George W. Bush are scheduled to speak Friday at an all-day event held at Constitution Hall. Democratic candidates including Vice President Al Gore and Bill Bradley were also invited but declined the HSLDA's invitation to participate, Mr. Farris said. Rep. Dick Armey, Texas Republican and House majority leader, will be honored Friday with the group's "Legislator of the Decade" award for his efforts in 1994 to defeat a proposed measure that would have threatened home schooling nationwide.
"It's the biggest thing that has ever happened for the home school movement in Congress," Mr. Farris said.
The roster of speakers at Friday's gathering gives evidence of the home school movement's growing clout. Republican presidential candidates Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, and Sen. Robert C. Smith, New Hampshire independent, are scheduled to address the group.
Other speakers include Rep. David M. McIntosh, Indiana Republican; Rep. Steve Largent, Oklahoma Republican; Randy Tate, executive director of the Christian Coalition; Phillip E. Johnson, professor of law at the University of California; and John Lenczowski, president of the Institute for World Politics.
This is the first large-scale lobbying event and conference in Washington the HSLDA has sponsored, but it has been well received by politicians on both sides of the issues, Mr. Farris said.
"We aren't endorsing candidates here," Mr. Farris said of the conference's focus. The presidential candidates have been given 20-minute blocks to speak, and have been encouraged to talk not only about their views on home schooling, but to address other issues they think are relevant, he said.
Mr. Bauer, who was undersecretary of education and chief domestic policy adviser for President Reagan, praised home school families as "good people," who are "on the cutting edge of education issues."
"I think the home schooling movement gains legitimacy every day," Mr. Bauer said. "Home school students are winning spelling and geography bees. They are often testing two, three, even four grades ahead of other students at the same age. Certainly the fact that presidential candidates are going to be at the conference adds to the view that this is a legitimate and positive educational development in America."
"We want to get home-school students excited about working to preserve freedom," said Mr. Farris, a lawyer and father of 10 home-schooled children.
The conference should also serve to give students a sense of the history of the home school movement, he added.
"We want to make sure these kids understand what their parents' generation fought for in terms of home school
freedom," he said. "It was a scary thing to be home schooling in the early '80s. You still get hassled from time to time
but it wouldn't be fair to call it scary anymore."
Finally, something happening in Washington DC that doesn't turn-my-stomach. Public education has imploded. Their high-level "teaching fads", mentor programs, charter schools, etc. is nothing more than marketing with NO substance behind it. Now that we can no longer define what a "good teacher" is, we'll rarely ever find one and none of the programs will work without good teaching. Homeschool has grown inn the void the public schools left behind as they soared forward to....... polically correct mob control.
Good Teacher = Good Parent and vice-versa (in today's corrupt educational economy)
Anyone who is interested in homeschooling can find lots of info here...
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R) Mich is taking the Sec. of Ed. to task now on C-SPAN!!!
Good, I was going to mention this to you for that collection of homeschool links... but I guess I don't need to now ;-)
Bump... if anyone catches the speeches at the homeschool event, it would be cool if they could recap the highlights here...
Homeschooling is about more than "good teaching" or even good discipline - it's about keeping bureaucrats from molesting your child, whether mentally by brainwashing him on behalf of the nuclear freeze (as the NEA advocated in 1983) or whether sexually as happened in East Stroudsburg (see Alamance Independent).
to call "public" schools anything but socialist indoctrination centers ,gives disservice to the proper use of language.
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