Homeschool News & Views

Issue 79, July 27, 2008

From Homeschool Helpers

In association with Pass It On Ministries

By Dan L. White

Listen to this article.

Homeschooling is bringing the family back together.

There are forces out there which keep trying to rip the family apart.

The U.S. House of Representatives has two bills that would give the government unprecedented control over the way parents raise their children.

One is called the Education Begins At Home Act.

That sounds friendly enough, doesn’t it?

This liberal bill will provide funds for government workers to go into homes and screen babies for emotional and developmental problems, including what they call socio-emotional screening. Socio-emotional screening is totally subjective, at the whim of the will of the social worker. It is estimated that this act will cost $190 million dollars to pay workers for these in home visits, and an additional amount for workers to visit parents while they are still in hospital at the births of their children.

Another act is is called Providing Resources Early for Kids.

Again, quite a positive name,

This would provide $500 million a year for government workers to go after parents in the hospital at the births of their babies to promote government pre-kindergarten education programs. The purpose of the liberals is to get the children indoctrinated as early as possible in the liberal life view.

Liberals try to expand government education, because that’s how liberals are made. Barack Obama wants to expand government education.

Back in February, though, he said that he might support a limited voucher program in education. Concerning vouchers for low income inner city kids, he said then, "If there was any argument for vouchers, it was 'Alright, let's see if this experiment works,' and if it does, then whatever my preconceptions, my attitude is you do what works for the kids. I will not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn. We're losing several generations of kids and something has to be done."

However, now Obama is speaking from the script of the teachers’ union. He recently said, "We don't have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools."

Obama does not send his kids to public schools. Like most wealthy liberals, he sends them to private schools.

John McCain is said to have been a long time supporter of education reform, at least for low income families. In a debate he said, "Choice and competition is the key to success in education in America. That means charter schools, that means home schooling, it means vouchers, it means rewarding good teachers and finding bad teachers another line of work."

Of course, charter schools are just another form of public schools, keeping the liberals in charge. McCain did mention home schooling, though, as a competitive option.

And home schooling is what California judges declared unconstitutional. That case has now taken another turn. After a huge uproar, that appeals court backed up and put the case under review. They heard more information in June, and are now making their decision. However, the family court which originally brought action against the one family involved has now dropped the case.

Focus on the Family said, "Apparently the state decided it either didn't want to pursue the parents or the court decided that they couldn't pursue the parents. And so, essentially, there is no case left, no parties left for the appellate court to actually apply their decision to."

The case is now moot. Logically the appeals court should just drop it, since there are now no people being charged, but that is California. There is still great uncertainty for homeschoolers in California, because their laws have never really dealt with the homeschooling movement. The legislature is hard core liberal, though, so that is not likely to change now.

Meanwhile, California, which criminalized homeschooling, has refigured their high school dropout rate. They have long been reporting a dropout rate of from 3 to 13 percent, which gave them one of the lowest rates nationally. That made their public schools look good. Now it has been said that they just weren’t calculating it correctly.

I don’t really understand how they could calculate it incorrectly for so long, but that did seem to be a self serving mistake by the California Department of Education. That makes their public schools look bad. Possibly some cheating involved there.

Now it is said that the high school dropout rate for California is 25%, about the same as the rest of the country.

In California and the rest of the country, about one in four students drops out of high school. In California, that’s not counting those who have chosen to homeschool, because they are mostly accounted for.

A spokesman for the Pacific Research Institute said, "They don't get adequate preparation for their high school studies by the time they go through elementary and middle school. The seeds of the dropout problem are sewn in earlier grades." He points out that if children are not properly taught reading, arithmetic, and other "core" material by high school age, their chances of dropping out increase because "they can't handle the material."

When we homeschooled, we taught all five of our kids to read beginning at age two. By the time they were six and began other subjects, they could read fairly well. That worked out well, because they did not have to learn to read while they were trying to learn the other subject, too. Years later, on the language section of their GED, they all five scored right at the top of the scale.

But, of course, it would be illegal for someone to do that in California.

Speaking of cheating --

A school district in Rochester, New York had a required test for seventh and eighth graders in English, math, science and social studies. In order for the students to do well on the test, the district gave the students the questions and answers ahead of time.

Let me repeat that, slowly.

To help the students do well on the required tests which are supposed to show learning skills, the Rochester school district gave the students the questions and answers ahead of time.

Years ago I commuted to a small college near my home in West Virginia. The college had kind of a family atmosphere, and some of the students had jobs as assistants to the professors. Guess what? Sometimes those students who worked for the teachers would get copies of the tests the professors were planning to give. Then before the test was given, those tests would be passed around to the students. That was just a copy of the questions, not the answers, but that was certainly enough. Those students were bright enough to look up the answers to those few questions and memorize them.

No, I did not get copies of those tests for myself. I didn’t need to. And that was cheating. I didn’t want to cheat. Those college students who did that knew it was cheating. They knew if they got caught they would be in trouble.

The Rochester school district did better than the college students I attended with, because they supplied both the questions and the answers. But the educational bureaucrats don’t think that’s cheating. The district supervisor told a local newspaper that she didn’t think that was wrong, although she said it was, “probably not in the best judgment.” She defended their actions by saying, "I'm not concerned that it's a cheat. What we were doing is giving kids a better sense of the knowledge that they needed for the test."

Bruce Shortt, author of books opposing the public schools, says that her comment is typical, and that public schools are more focused on making money than on educating students.

"And so there's this tremendous emphasis on preserving the optics that the system is primarily about educating children. But the fact of the matter is, there's very little education going on. Our children are falling farther and farther behind people in other industrialized countries. They're on a trajectory to become the hewers of wood and the drawers of water of the twenty-first century," Shortt warned.

That is reference to the Gibeonites who tricked Joshua into making a covenant with them, when Joshua was supposed to eliminate them. Joshua had to be true to his covenant not to kill them, but he put them in a state of servitude, as hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Shortt says that the public schools are failing to actually educate the youth of America, while crippling families through high property taxes, and indoctrinating the young with leftist ideology.

One other thing.

When those students at the college in West Virginia got the copies of the tests beforehand, they aced those tests. I had to ace the tests without cheating, just to stay even. In the Rochester, New York, public schools, when the schools gave the students the questions and the answers ahead of time –

Half the students still failed the tests.

The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice is asking the residents of different states their opinions of different kinds of schools. They are going through the states, one by one, doing this.

Milt Friedman was the Nobel economist who advocated free market economies. He is the one who said, “The public schools don’t work because socialism doesn’t work.” If you remember any statement about the public schools, remember that one.

He is gone now, but his foundation has been working for freedom of education in America, and now they are in a big project to discover the feelings of American parents on educational choices. Parents are given a multiple choice question. (They are not given the answers ahead of time.) They are asked which they prefer: public schools, private schools, charter schools, or home schools.

Four states have been surveyed so far. The latest is Idaho. In Idaho, 39% prefer private schools; 25% chose charter schools, a variation of public schools; 21% chose home schooling; and 12% chose the public schools. Only one out of eight Idahoans prefer their normal public schools.

In other states, those who prefer the public schools are 11% in Nevada, 15% in Tennessee, and a whopping 19% in Illinois. That liberal bastion is the state which elected Obama to the Senate over Alan Keyes, you know.

The foundation says that those percentages are from parents who overwhelmingly send their children to the public schools, because of a lack of schooling alternatives or the cost.

I will say that there are alternatives. Any American parent can homeschool. If you live in crazy California, you can move. Almost every town of any size in the US has a Christian school. There are alternatives.

But, like everything worthwhile, they do have a cost. And there is America’s great problem -- getting, greed, and gluttony. Only about one in seven American parents thinks the public schools are good, yet nine out of ten send their kids there. Why? Money. They are willing to sacrifice their children on the liberal altar of education because they will not pay the price to get them out.

“Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom; pride, fullness of bread and abundance of idleness.”