That sucking sound you hear is freedom draining away from home schools in California.
Apparently California has discovered that home schools represent a big potential market, or loss, for the state. In a new assault on the ever-growing home school movement, California has set up a system to seduce home schoolers back into government schools. They call this affrontery the Orange County Community Home Education Program, a public school system for home schoolers(?!!).
Home schoolers everywhere are already exercising the maximum amount of educational freedom that states allow. But California is one of a number of states that have begun to harass (legally operating) home schoolers through threats of legal action or inspection, and to prey on parents’ natural fears about the quality of education they are delivering to their children.
The people who endorse this perverse seduction/coercion as pro-educational freedom deeply, truly, and sincerely don’t “get it.” Witness the recent and aggressive moves toward state oversight in the Milwaukee voucher program.
Opportunists making the “right sounds” toward home schoolers will undoubtedly lure some away from the freedoms they enjoy, and the quality they deliver, back into the mediocre custody of the state of California.
By contrast, the New York Times reports today that more students are leaving New York public schools, despite the fact that New York state has some of the most restrictive home school laws in the country. It almost makes you want to admire the out-and-out statists for their honesty in education policy
