By CHRIS POWELL
In principle there’s nothing wrong with the basics of the home-schooling legislation that got a public hearing before the General Assembly this week. The bill would require people to notify local officials in person when they withdraw their children from public school to home-school them, to bring their home-schooled children to some sort of wellness inspection once a year, and to provide evidence that the children are learning.
But the legislation should prompt howls of ironic laughter.
Greens would cripple democracy in guise of making state cleaner
Students visiting state Capitol insist money equals education
Just another week in Hartford as state legislators look away
The legislation has arisen out of the case of an abused girl who was murdered by her family after her abuse and murder were concealed by a claim of home-schooling that fooled the state Department of Children and Families. It’s fair to worry that claims of home-schooling can conceal child abuse or worse.
Unfortunately the howling has to start when one notices that child neglect and abuse in Connecticut are almost infinitely more frequent among children being public-schooled, children about whom state and municipal governments seldom do anything.
Thousands of public school students in the state — almost 20% of them — are chronically absent from school, but there are no longer any penalties for them or their parents, so the problem endures. In cities the chronic absenteeism rate is closer to 25%. When those children are absent it’s not because they are being home-schooled but because their parents are negligent.
A few weeks ago it was reported that Hartford’s schools have changed their policy and now accept young children who are not toilet-trained. School staffers were instructed to clean and re-diaper them. This change of policy indicates wholesale child neglect in the city, but no one advocating the new accountability requirements for home-schooling has taken note of it. Nor have the state Education Department and the Department of Children and Families.
Requiring parents of home-schooled kids to produce evidence of learning may be the biggest howler. For Connecticut’s public schools have no such requirement for their own students. Social promotion is policy throughout the state, with advancement from grade to grade and graduation achieved without having to learn anything except how to stash your cell phone in a Yondr pouch.
Two years ago Hartford’s school system was exposed for having graduated a young woman who was illiterate. She is unlikely to have been the only such graduate in Hartford or the rest of the state that year. The city’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations but no explanation was produced and no state legislator has ever demanded one.
Indeed, while the failures of public education in Connecticut practically scream for investigation, the General Assembly is deaf to the problem.
Why?
First, it’s because the people who most deserve reprimanding — neglectful parents — are among the legislators’ own constituents. There are many in nearly every legislator’s district. The law should hold them to account. But standards are falling throughout society, and politics in Connecticut lacks the courage to restore them.
And second, legislators overlook the failures of public education because an examination would discomfort teachers and their unions. Teachers aren’t to blame for child neglect and abuse and chronic absenteeism; they see Connecticut’s social disintegration most intimately and must play the hands they are dealt. But teachers are to blame for much of public education’s unaccountability — binding arbitration of union contracts, the secrecy of teacher evaluations, the impossibility of firing inadequate teachers, and hostility to competition in education.
That hostility to competition in education may be the bigger part of the legislative campaign against home-schooling. Legislators know that if they make trouble for home-schooling parents, they will win political points, endorsements, and contributions from teachers and their unions, Connecticut’s most influential special interest.
So instead legislators scapegoat the home-schoolers, who probably get far better results with their students than the public schools do. Some proficiency testing could settle the matter but Connecticut practically forbids proficiency testing in public schools, especially at graduation, presumably because the results would be terrifying. Taxpayers mustn’t know the results but instead just keep throwing money.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 