Got this emailed to me… Any truth to it???
CALIFORNIA HOME SCHOOLED COULD BE TRUANT
School officials in California are warning parents they cannot educate their children at home unless they obtain professional teaching credentials, according to The Washington Times.
Without the proper credentials, parents no longer can file required paperwork that would authorize them to home school their children, states a memo issued by the state Department of Education. As a result, those children not attending public schools would be considered “truant” by local school districts.
“In California, ‘home schooling’ where non-credentialed parents teach their own children exclusively at home, whether using correspondence courses or other types of courses, is not an authorized exemption from mandatory public school attendance,” says Deputy Superintendent Joanne Mendoza in a memo to all school employees.
Advocates of home-based education say the memo is another ploy to frighten home school parents into sending their children to public schools.
Part of it has to do with money, they say, as the state’s education department is dealing with a $23 billion deficit and school districts only get funding if a child attends a public school.
— Should the state be able to require professional teaching credentials for home schooling?
— Since home schooling has become more popular, do you think states will make it more difficult because of the loss of revenue?
Re: CA homeschool alert!
I live in California and know a lot of people here who homeschool. I don’t think that information is accurate.
I am not up on this latest issue, but I believe it is either a scam or a scare tactic. A couple of facts:
(1) Most of the framers of the Constitution were homeschooled. They had to be. They lived on large estates, many miles away from any other literate families. Even if there were common schools in the village, these did not teach the Latin and Greek literature necessary for university entrance at the time. Some went to boarding school later for what would now be junior high and/or high school, and some went straight from home tutoring (“privately educated”) to college Look at the biographies of famous men up to the middle of the twentieth century. (look at a McGuffey’s fifth or sixth reader for many pocket biographies and count the “educated privately” or four years of high school only rate) So the writers of the constitutions of the US and the states were not going to outlaw what they themselves did as a matter of course.
(2) Consider the level of education provided by the public schools of your area. A few do a noble job and educate most of their students fairly well. A few are disaster areas and students would be better out of them. The majority do a half-hearted job, giving a far to middling education to the top third of the students, a weak education to the middle third, and barely effective caretaking and minimal literacy to the bottom third. The administrators of these schools and of the state system are running scared: any challenge to their activities will show up some notable failures. So no state has ever defined a minimum level of education that must be provided, because there are going to be thousands of cases where the state itself does not meet its own standards. They won’t set themselves up as targets for lawsuits.
(3) Every state has some sort of loophole that allows it to hire teachers who lack some of the details needed for certification, in case of need. Since certification has very little to do with real knowledge or skill, some of these can be very good teachers, although of course some can be bad too. Then, many private schools do not require state certification, just because it doesn’t necessarily help. If the state makes it absolutely illegal for anyone anywhere to teach any child without a certificate, they are either going to have to start handing out a lot of certificates to people who lack the paper qualifications, in which case you should be able to get one too (if necessary through a virtual private school), or else they are going to set themselves up as a target for a lot of lawsuits.
Check out wrightslaw on the web; this is a resource for educational law and will give you the actual facts.