The Homeschooling Connection

Here's an article on FLDS and homeschooling. While there isn't actually a connection between homeschooling and the FLDS sect, this accusation was bound to come sooner or later. The headline of this article is strangely at odds with the content of the article. [that story has moved, but the same story can be found here]

Headline:

Texas officials went easy on FLDS when it came to kids' education

Since when is abiding by the law 'going easy' on the rest of us?

About two years ago, the Schleicher County sheriff and the local school superintendent met with a leader from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints about the kind of education youngsters might be getting at the church's Yearning for Zion Ranch.
Local officials got a letter specifying that the children would be privately schooled, and that the curriculum included the basics, according to the state.
That's all it took. In fact, by meeting with officials without a formal complaint of truancy being filed and by specifying that the private school curriculum would cover basics such as reading, the church leader appears to have gone beyond what's strictly required in Texas education law.

They also left a packet of curriculum materials with officials, which is vastly more than they were required to do.

"People are usually stunned when I tell them we don't have any oversight at all over private schools or home schools. They just assume that there are certain requirements they have to teach, or materials they have to use, and there's not," Ratcliffe said.

Ratcliffe is the spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, and I think she clearly doesn't talk to people from a wide range of diverse political and socio-economic viewpoints.

Soon after the removal of more than 400 children from the breakaway Mormon sect's ranch near Eldorado - following allegations that children were abused or were at risk of abuse - home-school proponents voiced concern the situation might be used to taint their education efforts.
"A local law enforcement officer was quoted as saying that authorities were not able to 'get at' these families earlier because they were home schooling," Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition, said in a news release. He said in an interview that the comment was made on a broadcast interview.
"When these kind of tragedies happen, people say, 'If we regulated home schooling, this wouldn't happen,' " Lambert said. "My argument is always, this is an abuse case, not an education issue."

Once upon a time people questioned homeschooling on the basis of academics. And the homeschoolers proved that they were well able to meet or beat the public schools on academic grounds.
Then, of course, came the infamous 'S' word, amusing homeschoolers everywhere who remember being shushed by teachers in class and told, "School is not for socializing." And we recognized the focus on the S question for what it was, a tacit admission that school apparently wasn't about academics anymore.

Now we have a new tacit admission- in at least some people's minds, schools are not about academics or socialization, but about policing parents, all parents, not just those who have shown probable cause for concern, but all of us.

And for some people, it's clearly about power and control:

David C. Berliner, a regents' professor at the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University whose research interests include school vouchers and classroom teaching, said it's wrong for the state to be hands-off.
"My take on it all is that children are not the personal property of parents," Berliner said by e-mail.
"As minors, the state has an abiding interest in checking on their welfare and their education. When the state doesn't do that, it is abandoning its responsibility to take care of those we define as not able to make decisions on their own.
"Walking away from such responsibility is cowardly. Texans should be ashamed of their lack of oversight," he said.

How very authoritarian of him.