Worth a read.

In the annals of judicial imperialism, we have arrived at a strange new chapter. A California court ruled this month that parents cannot “home school” their children without government certification. No teaching credential, no teaching. Parents “do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” wrote California appellate Justice Walter Croskey.

The 166,000 families in the state that now choose to educate their children at home must be stunned. But at least one political lobby likes the ruling. “We’re happy,” the California Teachers Association’s Lloyd Porter told the San Francisco Chronicle. He says the union believes all students should be taught only by “credentialed” teachers, who will in due course belong to unions.

…

That so many families turn to home schooling is a market solution to a market failure — namely the dismal performance of the local education monopoly.

That last sentence resonates with me.  My wife and I have three young children who will be school age quite soon (too soon!).  We’ve casually toyed with the notion of homeschooling, but as the time to decide draws nearer we’ve begun to more seriously discuss the options.

Despite being zoned to one of the best government run high schools in the state of Alabama, Grissom H.S. in Huntsville, neither of us can really get behind the idea of relying on the government to teach our children.  We just quite honestly feel that we can do better ourselves.  It’s not that the government schools lack quality teachers, but more a reaction to our own situation - my wife is a former high school social studies teacher and I’m an engineer - and the realities of today’s instructional dictates under the No Child Gets Ahead federal edict.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.