This is so lucrative that it became a great money maker for all sorts of scam artists. The worst abuser was a guy who set up an on-line educational service for home school. He ran it out of Trinity County, a small rural county and collected ADA for each of his students. He promised the parents a “free” computer, sent out some curricular materials and collected ADA for thousands of students. Supposedly nothing he did was illegal.

I also agree with somehedgehog. Schools do provide a safety net and we are often the first to diagnose a medical or educational problem a child may have. I am not sure what the supreme court ruling was today, but I hope it tightened up the rules somewhat.

They shouldn’t make every parent get a teaching license, but i’s probably a good idea that parents who want to home-school their kids should have some kind of oversight… having to pass the PRAXIS (standardized teaching) exams for pedagogy and the content areas required by the state would be a good start. Occasional observations would be fine, too.

From the parents’ stance, there’s probably a genuine concern that the state might want to approve home-school curricula, which gets into all kinds of church/state/privacy questions. (It always seems everyone believes in a right to privacy when it applies to them!)

My master’s (10 weeks from being done) is in ed. technology development, not learning and teaching, or policy, so my authority on this subject is limited. I can tell you, however, that it is the position of many educators of various stripes that schools provide a vital safety net for children’s services. It is through enrollment in school that many children receive health care, vaccinations, information on children’s and parents’ rights, after-school care, and food assistance. It is also through schools that children experiencing homelessness, disability, or abuse are often identified and given assistance, when their parents cannot or will not provide such assistance.

Certainly, the vast majority of home-schooling parents are not abusive and/or close-minded wackos and have only their children’s best interests at heart. But isolating, abusive parents who want to hide their neglect or abuse of children are likely to “homeschool” them and keep them out of the safety net whether they are credentialed or not.

Perhaps the extreme minority of abusive parents doesn’t warrant the banning of homeschooling. On the other hand, state has a legal and moral obligation to monitor the welfare of children – which is why public employees, like teachers and police officers, are legally required to report child abuse. Since it would be a gross violation of privacy to have officials come into family’s homes and monitor their parenting, requiring children to be enrolled in school outside the home seems like the best course of action to me.