Sadly, that's not really the main reason. Clearly, the NEA isn't terribly concerned whether children are educated or not. Their top priority has been, and always shall be, revenue. Home-schooled children "deprive" schools of precious dollars. State and federal funds are distributed by head-count-per-school. It is just that simple. The NEA is a union, and is driven to always seek more money, period. Everything else is secondary.
(Another point supporting the NEA-$-uber-alles argument: the proliferation of "special-needs" children is NOT because there are more kids needing help... it is because schools get about 30% more funding per labelled child, therefore they label anyone and everyone who can even marginally be said to exhibit a symptom or two... and if you've seen the symptoms list for most ailments, you'd know that most kids can be labelled with something. The staff approaches a worried parent, suggests testing and extra help for their child, and few argue to the contrary. Most school are hiring more specialists than new staff, because they can always cram 2-3 more kids per classroom. Non-scientific supporting fact: My school increased in population by 12% in 4 years, from 1600 to 1800, and we added 1 teaching position... and 8 specialists. The extra 200 kids were just scattered among the existing classrooms, increasing the average class size from 25 to 28. Those numbers aren't scary-looking in a report, so why bother hiring new staff? I can't wait until they go from 28 to 31. *sigh*)
the state still gets the money and results in a net gain, not a net loss. If you lose lunch money and after school
program funding, you have only lost a portion of the total net. In MN for example, we have a complex formula to calculate this. Complex in order to confuse.Call your school
board admins some time and try to get an answer or printed info on what this per student amount is. You'd have a better
chance getting Rather to quit.If the school was spending $12K/year per student(as MPLS does here)and that student goes to homeschool next year, it doesn't "cost" the public school $12K in lost revenue) If it cost them $6k, they're still coming out ahead...