What? Public schools now encourage homeschooling?

With a few notable exceptions, government schools have had an antagonistic relationship with homeschoolers, which is why a move by Indiana public educators to promote parental instruction has drawn attention.

It turns out, however, that Indiana school districts have been pushing underperforming and troublemaking students into homeschooling in an apparent attempt to improve the schools’ statistical performance marks.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, the world’s premiere advocate for homeschoolers, caught wind of the development and expressed opposition at a meeting of the Indiana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights regarding homeschooling.

T.J. Schmidt, an HSLDA staff attorney, explained in a report that the advisory committee was discussing policies and practices that “push public schoolchildren out of classrooms and into the courts and on to prison.”

“Those concerned about this ‘pipeline’ typically identified two different types of students as being most vulnerable: 1) students whose lack of interest in school head them toward becoming dropouts or being expelled because of bad behavior, and 2) low-performing students who are pushed out in a perverse attempt by some school officials to boost their school’s overall test scores.”

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

Those scenarios only rarely have any direct connection to homeschooling, he said.

“True, we do regularly talk to and help plenty of fed-up parents who are trying to get their children out [of] a troubled situation in the public school. Many other parents we talk to are frustrated by the apparent inability of local school officials to address the specific needs of their children who struggle academically and make only minimal progress each year,” he said.

But Schmidt said homeschooling became part of the discussion in Indiana for a different reason.

“Some school corporations in Indiana appear to be actively pushing parents of troubled teens or underperforming students into homeschooling,” he explained.

“This allows the school corporation to treat these students as transfers instead of dropouts, thereby improving their graduation rates and lowering their dropout rates. Some schools even encouraged those they have expelled to begin homeschooling,” said Schmidt.

“Most school officials are not doing this to help these students but simply get them out of their system,” he said.

The problem was noticed by alert members of the Indiana Association of Home Educators, said Schmidt, who brought the issue to HSLDA.

As a result, the international organization was able to take part in a discussion of the issue.

Critics of homeschooling have contended “homeschooling needs increased government oversight.”

“Not surprisingly, when homeschooling was discussed at the civil rights advisory committee meeting, members heard a very inaccurate description of parents’ responsibilities for educating a child in Indiana,” Schmidt wrote. “In fact, the testimony referred to the status of homeschooling in Indiana as the ‘wild west’ and implied that homeschool students were destined to be lost without any chance of being educated.”

He submitted testimony explaining that Indiana law has treated homeschool parents the same as it treats most nonpublic schools for roughly 100 years.

“I informed the committee that state law requires parents operating a nonpublic (home) school program to provide ‘instruction equivalent to that given in the public schools.’”

He explained to the committee that homeschool parents in the U.S. spend more than $1 billion a year educating their children at home. And almost without exception, they are required to provide an education equivalent to that in public schools.

“Homeschooling is a fundamental right that is protected by the Indiana laws and the U.S. Constitution,” he told the committee. “The purpose of compulsory attendance laws in Indiana is to ensure that children be educationed, not that they should be educated in any particular way. The courts, the Constitution, and the Indiana statutes all indicate that parents have the right to control their children’s education, including the right to provide an education for them at home.”

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

HSLDA, which works with more than 2,300 families in Indiana, said the bottom line is that parents are required to provide a satisfactory education to their children, and there are ordinary procedures available to authorities to address the rare abuses.

Schmidt said HSLDA will monitor the committee’s report when it becomes available later this year.

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