March 11, 2008

Making Home-Schooling... Illegal?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 7:00PM

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California's Second District Court of Appeals issued a ruling last week that declared thousands of parents who currently home school their children to be in violation of the law. The ruling represented a stunning reversal of a growing trend in American education, as the number of children being home schooled has grown steadily to a total of over 1.1 million children last year.

The ruling received immediate criticism from key policy makers in California, including the state's chief of schools Jack O'Connell and from the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is almost certain to be appealed to the California Supreme Court on a fast track.

What were the grounds for the decision? To begin with, the ruling all stemmed from an isolated incident in which two parents who had been homeschooling their children were suspected of child-abuse. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) then sought relief from a juvenile court, asking the court to send the children back to a public school where they would be safer and where teachers could spot signs of physical abuse. The juvenile court judge ruled, however, that the parents had a right to homeschool their children. Last week, however, the LA-based 2nd District Court of Appeals ruled that no such right existed in the state constitution and that consequently, only parents who have credentials from the state department of education to teach in a public school should be eligible to home school their children.

Forget the glaring irony of the ruling, which is that the state is now requiring home-schooling parents to have a teaching credential that tens of thousands of state-paid public school teachers are themselves lacking. The question we should ask about this decision is whether, in the end, it helps or hurts children. Will students have more access to quality educational opportunity if parents are forced to get a teaching certifiicate in order to home-school, or less access?

In my estimation, they will have less access to quality educational opportunities if the Appeals Court decision is affirmed by the state Supreme Court. But I believe this for a different reason that you might think. Educational opportunity will, I believe, not suffer principally because home-schooling parents do a better job than the public schools. It will suffer because of the implicit foundation of the court's ruling: that somehow, going through the process of getting a teaching certificate makes a person a better teacher than they were before.

How long will it be before policy makers, educators, and judges recognize that a piece of paper, a "teaching certificate" earned through taking an arbitrary number of fluffy, un-rigorous, and un-proven education classes does not make someone a good teacher?

There are many homeschooling parents who do a better job of educating their children than their public school counterparts today who are not credentialed, and plenty of credentialed teachers who are worse than teachers in the next room over who are teaching on emergency certificates. Until education starts hiring, retaining, and rewarding teachers based on the quality of their outputs--that is, student learning--and not on the quality of their inputs--a fancy piece of cardstock issued by state bureaucrats--precious little gains will be had for our students, in California classrooms, kitchens, and anywhere in between.