Utterly Meaningless

Another story about a kid known to be in trouble to school, with no follow through until after the kids are pulled from the schools, when the problem gets blamed on homeschooling. I’m finding it had to believe that school teachers and staff aren’t mandatory reporters in CA. When I was a mandatory reporter, a parent refusing to attend to a visual problem would have had me reporting educational neglect at the least. There’s not enough info for me to say about the other allegations.

That anecdote is a pretty big stretch as well. “Apparently” and “without going into details” wonderfully imply problems with homeschooling, don’t offer back up. If the kids were already doing poorly in school as reported, what comparison was made? To where they were or the “grade level?” Maybe it was all that horrible – there’s not enough in the story to go on.

I feel for the kids, but once again, this isn’t a story that starts with homeschooling. The system failed these kids while they were in its purview.. Their supervision didn’t stop the later problems at home. It didn’t stop the problems while they were in the system.

I’ll be a lot more likely to listen to calls for regulating homeschooling when the vast majority of the small number of cases being bandied about stop demonstrating how people who the writers want to put in charge have already failed the kids in their poster cases.

Home visits are NOT light regulation either.

Home visits? That’s only light regulation in George Orwell’s world.
I can offer anecdotal evidence myself of children who were emotionally and sometimes physically abused in school environments. However, those cases are treated as isolated incidents, not as endemic to the school system as a whole. Maybe we should keep social workers in all schoolyards and classrooms to make sure that this doesn’t happen. And when abuse does emerge, the entire school should be shut down while the state “investigates”. Only after the school passes rigorous standards to ensure that the abuse and/or neglect doesn’t continue can it be re-opened.