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Why Public Schools Hate Home-Schooling Parents
By Joel Turtel
Home-schooling is a great success. That’s why many public-school authorities hate home-schooling parents.
Home-schoolers are a direct challenge to the public-school monopoly. This monopoly makes it almost impossible to fire tenured public-school teachers or principals. As a result, tenure gives most teachers life-time guaranteed jobs. They get this incredible benefit only because public schools have a lock on our children’s education.
If public-school employees had to work for private schools and compete for their jobs in the real world, they would lose their security-blanket tenure. That’s why school authorities view home-schooling parents who challenge their monopoly as a serious threat.
Many school officials also can’t stand the fact that average parents who never went to college give their kids a better education than so-called public-school experts. Successful home-schooling parents therefore humiliate the failed public schools by comparison.
Home-schooling parents also humiliate school authorities who claim that only certified or licensed teachers are qualified to teach children. Most home-schooling parents thankfully never stepped foot inside a so-called teacher college or university department of education. Yet these parents give their children a superior education compared to public-school educated kids.
Also, many public-school officials resent home-schoolers because the typical public school loses about $7500 a year in tax money for each child that leaves the system. Tax money is the life blood of the public-school system. Tax money pays for public-school employees’ generous salaries, benefits, and pensions. Is it any wonder why school authorities don’t want to lose their gravy train?
For these reasons, until fairly recently, most state legislatures either outlawed homeschooling or tried to strangle it to death with regulations. In 1980, only Utah, Ohio, and Nevada officially recognized parents’ rights to homeschool their children. In most other states, legislators continually harassed or prosecuted home-schoolers under criminal truancy laws and educational neglect charges.
By 2004, however, pressure from parents, Christian home-schooling organizations, and recent court rulings pushed all fifty states to enact statutes that allow home-schooling, as long as certain requirements are met. These requirements vary for each state.
In spite of these statutes, many states and school authorities still harass home-schooling parents. That is because the Supreme Court slapped parents in the face when they gave local governments the right to regulate home-schooling. As a result, many home-schooling parents are still harassed by local school officials.
If you are a homeschooling parent, you must know how to protect your legal rights. To do this, you should seriously consider joining the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). Founded in 1983, HSDLA provides its members with legal representation against local school officials who might harass you, demand to supervise your home-schooling, or demand to periodically test your home-schooled children. You can join at their web site, http://www.hslda.org.
The Rutherford Institute is another well-known organization dedicated to protecting parents’ rights and providing legal help to home-schooling parents. Their website is http://www.rutherford.org
Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.
About the Author
Joel Turtel is an education policy analyst, and author of “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children." Contact Information: Website: http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com Email: lbooksusa@aol.com, Phone: 718-447-7348.
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