Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?
No, of course not. Is being helpless comforting to you? How often does anyone actually fix a serious problem with an institution? Sure it happens sometimes, but the best almost everyone can hope for it to muddle through being subjected to the problems.
The impulse to put homeschooling under the thumb of government officials is not comforting, because it would remove the agency of parents to respond to problems they experience or fear in the school system.
In this child = cardboard box analogy, I guess home-school would be equivalent to transporting the box in your own car. In this case, the box would also be subject to scrutiny, for example at border crossings.
And I can't argue with your position on how often things are fixed. It wouldn't matter what evidence I found, the goal post would just move a little bit farther. Sure, "it happens sometimes," but never enough to satisfy.
But I can counter with, how often can you fix broken homeschooling that has no auditing or oversight?
Never. Not even sometimes.
It's astounding. I don't know if that's just because that particular state doesn't have very strict rules around homeschooling, or if that's standard; I just haven't done the research.
Presumably the students are also applying with ACT/SAT scores in hand, which do have an established meaning.
Are you saying things written on a fancy letterhead with a stamp can't be unquestionably trusted?
And ACT/SAT has become optional since covid for most institutions.
There are "accredited" homeschool programs, and the "accreditation" means probably about as much as it does for "accredited" private schools, many of whom don't even bother.
Elsewhere in the comments I mentioned the Baltimore public school system, where clearly whatever "accreditation" it has is completely and utterly worthless.
Heck, even my ABET accredited university, although overall of high quality, had a few teachers that taught me nothing at all and who had no checks on their failure to teach.
So they should go back to requiring it. Seems pretty easy.
Except...
>More Than 80% Of Four-Year Colleges Won’t Require Standardized Tests For Fall 2023 Admissions
>An additional 85 schools will be test-blind or score-free, meaning that applicants’ standardized exam results are not considered even if they are submitted. Included in that number is the entire California public university system....
>[And] at least 1,450 colleges and universities have made their test-optional and test-blind policies permanent.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/11/15/more...
One of the other reasons for this is because students completely unprepared for college from public schools are an increasing problem. This is also why they now all offer remedial classes under varying names and programs, and why first-year university programs are much easier than they were in say, 1940.
For instance - to use your example - which student is more likely to be given your advice: the one from an affluent family attending a well-funded school, or the (let's posit much smarter) one from a family of non-college attendees living in an under-funded district? When the SAT was a formal requirement they'd be more likely to be judged on an actually level playing field.
Many of the school districts in my area have consolidated, and it's not even possible to verify attendance of students from the small schools that no longer exist.
To my knowledge, there is no "accreditation" that matters for public high schools - there are only thresholds for which state funding is available.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-suspends-graduation...
Oh please. No one's going to jail for this.
That said, I don't think home schooling is an option for all either. Covid showed how difficult it could be for many families.
Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd conveniently ignores the reasons those regulations were created in the first place.
And society should also care whether government-run public schools are doing this--not to mention whether they are indoctrinating children with values that many parents disagree with.
School boards are elected, but I don't think "broad democractic oversight" is a fair description.
In any case, none of the things you mention prevented the US public school system from being explicitly set up to indoctrinate children, as explicitly described by the people who set it up. So to the extent that society in the US cares about educating children, it cares about educating them according to a particular political agenda that many people do not agree with. That is a major reason why homeschooling continues to increase in popularity.
Not all homeschoolers are like this. There are plenty of other good reasons for parents not to want their kids to go to public schools.
> society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated
Yes, but for whose definition of "educated"? In the US, at least, the government was not supposed to decide that. Individual families and communities were. And, as I have posted elsewhere in this thread, the people who set up the US system of widespread, compulsory public education were quite explicit about what they meant by "educated", and that included plenty of things that any reasonable person would consider to be indoctrination, not education--and that was on purpose.
Saying that the cost of giving persecuted minorities an out is "then we might not be able to persecute the minorities that I've decided actually deserve it" just feels fundamentally unconvincing.
It sounds ideal.
But we might want at least some oversight and regulation to, for example, make sure kids aren't being homeschooled on how to build rockets and kill some group of people.
Bad apples will fall from any tree. A poisoned tree will mostly produce bad apples.
Nor are homeschooled kids.
Lmao, yes they are. You couldn't be more wrong, kids who attend public school make better military recruits. Public schools teach kids how to conform to institutional systems and follow orders. These are essential skills for effective killers.
Btw, since you're so scared of kids learning how to build rockets.. I learned how to build rockets in public school through a program called TARC. The same design principles I learned for model rockets could be applied to homemade weaponized rockets. Does that frighten you? Do you think that makes me Hamas or something? (Hamas is who you're thinking of right? America doesn't have a domestic rocket attack problem, I'm sure you know that.) You should know that most people in the MIC went through public school. If you're actually afraid of people learning these sort of skills, shouldn't you be advocating for kids receiving a bible-only education that renders them incapable of engineering, and therefore weapon design, and unfit for military recruitment?
Maybe modeling the child rocket program[1] on [whatever it is that public high schools are doing] would save us?
[1] https://estesrockets.com/collections/stem-products