Connecticut’s most neglected children are public-schooled, not home-schooled

By Chris Powell

Connecticut has just seen another case, this time in Waterbury, of what appears to have been the horrific abuse of a child who had been withdrawn from school, supposedly to be educated at home, but who wasn’t being educated at all, just abused.

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Past cases of child abuse that were concealed by false claims of home schooling got some attention from the General Assembly a few years ago but no action. The state Department of Children and Families is said to have looked into the Waterbury child’s situation twice at his home many years ago but not to have found any abuse, and no one in authority checked on the boy again. Last month, having turned 32 and weighing only 68 pounds, the young man sought attention by setting a fire in his room and was rescued by firefighters. 

His stepmother faces serious criminal charges.

The House chairman of the legislature’s Committee on Children, state Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, says the Waterbury case shows the need to make sure “no child falls off the radar.” Paris wants to gather the state agencies involved with child protection to consider what must be done to prevent claims of home schooling from concealing neglect and abuse.

It is a compelling issue, since child neglect and abuse cause the nation’s worst social problems — generational poverty, educational failure, alienation, and physical and mental illness.

But of course the problem isn’t home schooling itself but government’s failure to ensure that children who are not attending public school are really being educated and raised properly. 

Remedying that problem wouldn’t be complicated. Parents home-schooling their children could be required to register with the state and to present their children every year to take an academic proficiency test. Such parents also could be required to accept a visit at home from child protection workers every year or two. Those workers could intervene against neglect or abuse.

Such accountability might be resented by home-schooling parents, and it might be expensive, since as many as 20,000 Connecticut families may be educating their children at home. The potential resentment and expense are probably why the legislature has not yet pressed the issue. But as child neglect and abuse proliferate, there may be no other way of checking on children who don’t attend school.

Resentment of such a system by home-schooling parents would be fair, for they would find themselves being held accountable by a government that grossly neglects tens of thousands of children in its own schools but never holds itself accountable for educational failure. Indeed, neglect of children in public schools is far more common than neglect of home-schooled children.

Last September Hartford was found to have graduated from high school a girl who could not read or write. For the six months since then city school administrators and the state Education Department have just shrugged it off. But following disclosure of the Hartford graduate’s illiteracy, current and former teachers throughout the state admitted confidentially that advancement from grade to grade and graduation of grossly uneducated students are common in Connecticut, especially in the cities, since the state’s only firm policy of public education is social promotion and since a quarter to half of city students lack parenting and are chronically absent.

If a law is enacted to regulate home-schooling, presumably home-schooled children would have to meet a certain achievement standard on state proficiency tests. But state government and municipal governments don’t dare to enforce any proficiency test standards with public school students. The results of the few proficiency tests Connecticut requires to be given in its public schools suggest that if any proficiency standards were enforced, more than half the students would have to be held back every year until word got around that social promotion was over and henceforth learning would be required for advancement and graduation.

This is the spectacular irony of the home-schooling issue: Children in public school are far more neglected than children schooled at home, yet no one in authority will consider doing anything about it.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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