Utterly Meaningless

She’s not the usual education reporter whom I spoke with just last week. She was looking for a story but I told her summer wasn’t the time to connect with homeschoolers and she seemed to agree that waiting until fall was a better idea. Apparently, someone disagreed.

The Tennessean has adopted this policy of begging readers for tips and comments in order to fill the paper. They probably think they’re doing cutting edge stuff as they compete with the City Paper’s active online forums.

I’ve got a call in to Lindsey and will let you know what comes of it.

I sent here the following:

Planning a hit piece on homeschooling, are we? Thanks for the warning.

If she was planning a hit piece, she might re-think the premise.

OK, here’s the scoop. It is as I thought, a misunderstanding of the status of ‘homeschoolers’. According to the reporter some lawyers at the state got phone calls from parents who didn’t have ‘certified diplomas from the state’ and discovered that was a problem when registering for college.

For years I’ve been telling people that they must know their status else problems like this arise.

People register for college, check ‘homeschooler’ when they’re actually private schoolers. The college looks for their records with the LEA (because legally a ‘homeschoolers’ in high school should be reported to the LEA by the church-related school they’re registered with). The records don’t exist because not all registrants with a CRS have to be reported to the LEA. The college balks and trouble ensues. All of it could have been avoided if the parent had checked ‘private school’ instead.

We’ll see what actually gets printed.