Right to Teach?

On February 28, 2008, the Los Angeles Country Court of Appeal published a ruling, which says that parents do not have a Constitutional right to home school their children (See the ruling, In re Rachel L., here).

If you’d like to do something, you could sign HSLDA’s petition to “depublish” the ruling, which would mean it can’t be used by other California courts.

This is my summary of the case, as I’ve understood it. Thoughts on its ideology to follow.

California law requires that minority children be enrolled and attend a public full-time day school unless (1) the child is enrolled in a private full-time day school and actually attends that private school (this rules out the protective nature of ISPs for home schoolers); (2) the child is tutored by a person holding a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught; or (3) one of the other few statutory exemptions.

The primary case they reference is Turner v. People of the State of California (1954), which rejected the argument that depriving parents of the right to determine how and where their children should be educated is unconstitutional, because the statue permits alternative means to public schooling. It also addressed the question many people have brought up in reference to the current case: Why aren’t private school teachers required to be accredited?

According to Turner, while it would be unreasonably difficult and expensive to supervise parents who instruct their children in their homes, private school teachers would be supervised by school administrators, who “would have an interest in maintaining the required standard of instruction by competent teachers so that the schools would continue to qualify for the private full-time day school exemption.”

But what if homeschool education is better than public school education? Turner says, “home education, regardless of its worth, is not the legal equivalent of attendance in school in the absence of instruction by qualified private tutors.” States have the power to insist that private schools (1) provide minimum hours of instruction, (2) employ teachers of specified training, and (3) cover prescribed subjects of instruction.

Standardized tests (home schoolers frequently score higher than average on these) do not qualify parents to an exemption, because regardless of their scores, the children are taught by a non-credentialed person (and, it’s implied, unstandardized curriculum).

But what if you home school because of religious belief? The parents in the case citedWisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which created an educational exemption for Amish kids after eight grade. This was because the “Amish traditional way of life does not rest on personal preferences but rather on ‘deep religious conviction, shared by an organized group, and intimately related to daily living…and the Amish religious beliefs and style of living are centuries old.” Unfortunately, most of us don’t qualify, according to the LA Court of Appeal:

“Even if the parents’ declaration had been signed under penalty of perjury, which it was not, those assertions are not the quality of evidence that permits us to say that application of California’s compulsory public school education law to them violates their First Amendment rights. Their statements are conclusional, not factually specific. Moreover, such sparse representations are too easily asserted by any parent who wishes to home school his or her child.”

So now what?
Right now, the court has ordered the parents to comply with the Education Code. Any parents who fail to comply with the Education Code “may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fine or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program.”