Americans Warned: Home Schoolers Stripped of Rights (carry, Maine, permit)
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That's a good question. Parents who don't believe in medical treatment have tried to deny medical treatment to their kids, and when their children have died, they have been charged with manslaughter and sentenced to prison.
Children are in the custody of parents, and I don't believe custody is ownership. Custody can be lost.
Parents who enrolled into FICA ceased to absolutely own their children. And enrolling the children into FICA makes them wards of the State.
That is why a court can grant custody.
For proof of "the old rules" read "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," and note how impotent the town fathers are with respect to Huckleberry Finn, truant, and the son of the town drunkard. Only after the father died, did they have any authority over Huck Finn.
1. I never mentioned income. Economic stability =/= rich.
2. from an abstract of the study referenced in your link:All homeschoolers do NOT out perform public schooled students
Hardly a definitive study, and one with limited applicability to students being educated in the US.3. The above link compares homeschooled students to the average public schooled student, which is an unfair comparison. The public school counterparts were not disaggregated by parent involvement and economic stability, two major factors that contribute to the success of home schooled students. If the sample had been disaggregated to account for those two factors, there would not have been a 30-plus percentile difference.
4. Please point out where I have argued against homeschooling.
They know that, just like they know an apples to apples comparison proves home schoolers do worse than public schooled kids. When you control the comparison so that you look at the test scores between white middle class public school kids and white middle class home schooled kids then the home schoolers do poorly compared to the public schooled kids. They know this and that's why they insist on continuing to lie and attempt to create false comparisons which include poor black and hispanic kids. They know that thus their lies and obfuscations.
I would never disadvantage my children in such a permanent and harmful way especially since most of them are motivated by nothing more than religious zealotry and hatred of others. They're absolutely harming their children's future and that's sad.
Well, I know that the question was not directed at me but I'll answer it anyways. Both my wife and I are pretty smart people, went to college, all that sort of thing. I tested out in the range of 155 IQ -- not a super-genius but well above the average. Frankly, I spend the entirety of K-12 bored for the most part. We kept learning things that I already knew. Wife's experience was much the same.
Still, we thought much as you probably do. How could amateurs who are just winging it do a better job of educating their children than trained professionals who are specialists in their subject matters? Right?
But we both knew that either of us could have learned a lot more and at a much faster pace. So we're floundering around trying to come up with a gameplan -- private school? Private tutors? Could we even afford those options? Could we afford not to try anyways? Then we spent our oldest kid's 2nd year trying our level best to teach him everything we possibly can just like any good parents would do. Now at age 2, the kid is already learned everything that preschool and kindergarten are supposed to be teaching kids. He's reading and writing and knows all the colors, numbers, shapes, etc. And we did that without any real plan, system or curriculum.
So it wasn't too surprising to learn recently that homeschool kids are on average better than their public school peers in every subject. What we weren't expecting was that they are also better off socially. That really surprised us both. I always figured that kids would develop better in their social skills in public schools, but every study I've seen on the matter has found the opposite to be true.
So why get passionate about home school? Because it is the best way to educate your children. Because it nets better results across the board. Because it gives me a chance to really challenge my kids rather than subjecting them to my own experience of tediously listening to things I already knew. And it is beyond insane that the government is so keen to target a system of education that outperforms public schools by a sizable margin. And yet it actually makes a ton of sense politically. Democrats and unions are great pals. The largest unions in the USA are the teachers unions, and those unions want nothing to do with a program that jeopardises the jobs of their members. But that's just idiotic, right? Shouldn't the number one goal be the best outcome for the children? All other concerns should be a distant second to that.
It sounds like you and your wife could do a good job educating your children, but what about the parents who lack your intelligence or your education? Don't you believe that every child deserves the best, and since that is not going to happen in MOST homes; we should improve our public schools? Instead of letting them fail, we need to make them better. The two systems cannot be compared because the statistics are skewed. How do you figure in the students that CANNOT perform, but must be provided an education. In the public schools the test scores of children with an IQ of 78 are figured in with those of an IQ of 150. The only way to fairly compare the two is to compare a set of children with comparable income, parental involvement, and intelligence.
I am fortunate enough to be sufficiently intelligent to realize most of the stuff my parents tried to teach me was unadulterated foolishness. Actually it was racist, bigoted pure crap. The one thing they did teach me that was useful was to never trust authority because authority has its own agenda and your good is not on it.
Most homeschoolers, like most parents, are not very intelligent well schooled sane adults like the previous poster. They are of average intelligence and much more authoritarian. Their main, if never stated, reason to home school their children is to pass on their dysfunctional view of reality and to guarantee the kids will take care of them when they become elderly. Teaching the kids the knowledge of the humanities, sciences and mathematics is near the bottom of their agenda. Teaching them to be independent thinkers distrusting revealed truth is not even on the list. Teaching them to bow down to some god or another seems to be just below bowing down to Daddy as the only true authority.
IMHO – Even a relatively underfunded public school teacher children how to live and prosper in modern society far better than the majority of homeschoolers. Only highly funded and selective private schools do better.
I think that mnay home school now because of what so many public schools have become.Its no different than why so mnay pay addtional to send their kids to private school. Pulbic schools are more and more not even safe places to send kids in mnay insatnces. Just the fact that pernts often check the schools before buyig a home as first prority shows that.
50+ years ago the slum school in Albany, NY was not exactly safe either. Neither was the "respectable" school in the exurb of Guilderland, NY. There were plenty of bullies in both places. That will never change.
It sounds like you and your wife could do a good job educating your children, but what about the parents who lack your intelligence or your education? Don't you believe that every child deserves the best, and since that is not going to happen in MOST homes; we should improve our public schools? Instead of letting them fail, we need to make them better. The two systems cannot be compared because the statistics are skewed. How do you figure in the students that CANNOT perform, but must be provided an education. In the public schools the test scores of children with an IQ of 78 are figured in with those of an IQ of 150. The only way to fairly compare the two is to compare a set of children with comparable income, parental involvement, and intelligence.
The public schools are under siege and suffocating under the massive bureaucratic machine that was supposedly created to help them. There is so much oversight, so many rules and so much complexity that the teachers that actually want to teach (that's most of them) struggle. And because the teacher's unions have their fingers in every part of the bureaucracy, they've made it extremely difficult to fire incompetent teachers. And the bureaucracy tends to be so frustrating that many good teachers gradually become cynical and eventually stop caring, but keep teaching because they don't want to give up the paycheck. So when you send your kids to public school, it's a total crap-shoot. Your kid might get lucky and get a great teacher or they might get unlucky and get a terrible teacher. Worse yet, the school itself might be great or it might be terrible. There is massive inequality built into the system with far too many schools utterly failing their students. Inner-city schools have become notorious for this and it ain't right!
One excellent solution already exists. Charter schools. Take one of the most successful charter school models and copy it across the board and we'd be in great shape. The teachers unions and bureaucrats hate charter schools because they can't control them. They will spin things, question the statistics of success, demonize, offer any excuse to make America doubt -- whatever it takes to stay in control. (So essentially they play exactly the same game as they do against homeschooling.) Yet the best charter school systems have a ridiculous rate of success educating students even in the worst inner-city neighborhoods. They are exactly the solution you're thinking of to enable the parents who don't have the time or the skills to homeschool to still get an excellent education for their kids. The teachers unions and the bureaucrats would rather keep failing schools open and keep ruining the lives of the kids that go there than accept any solution where they lose the ability to control everything. It's very sad. Think of the parents opting for homeschool as the proverbial rats leaving the sinking ship cuz that's exactly what it is.
The public schools are under siege and suffocating under the massive bureaucratic machine that was supposedly created to help them. There is so much oversight, so many rules and so much complexity that the teachers that actually want to teach (that's most of them) struggle. And because the teacher's unions have their fingers in every part of the bureaucracy, they've made it extremely difficult to fire incompetent teachers. And the bureaucracy tends to be so frustrating that many good teachers gradually become cynical and eventually stop caring, but keep teaching because they don't want to give up the paycheck. So when you send your kids to public school, it's a total crap-shoot. Your kid might get lucky and get a great teacher or they might get unlucky and get a terrible teacher. Worse yet, the school itself might be great or it might be terrible. There is massive inequality built into the system with far too many schools utterly failing their students. Inner-city schools have become notorious for this and it ain't right!
One excellent solution already exists. Charter schools. Take one of the most successful charter school models and copy it across the board and we'd be in great shape. The teachers unions and bureaucrats hate charter schools because they can't control them. They will spin things, question the statistics of success, demonize, offer any excuse to make America doubt -- whatever it takes to stay in control. (So essentially they play exactly the same game as they do against homeschooling.) Yet the best charter school systems have a ridiculous rate of success educating students even in the worst inner-city neighborhoods. They are exactly the solution you're thinking of to enable the parents who don't have the time or the skills to homeschool to still get an excellent education for their kids. The teachers unions and the bureaucrats would rather keep failing schools open and keep ruining the lives of the kids that go there than accept any solution where they lose the ability to control everything. It's very sad. Think of the parents opting for homeschool as the proverbial rats leaving the sinking ship cuz that's exactly what it is.
Charter schools are the biggest scams to come out of the Republican anti-public school propaganda machinery (George W Bush's "No Child Left Behind" BS mandate to destroy public schools). Charter schools are backed by lies in every regard. For example, they reject bad students, getting rid of "bad" or "problem" students as the year goes on, so their numbers appear and are kept that way artificially high.
The biggest study of charters was done by Standford University, which looked at more than 2400 charter schools in 15 states (2/3 of charter students) and compared them to public school students. Charters are doing worse than public schools.
There is one small charter school study which is very popular with charter schools proponents is that of Caroline Hosby (also of Standford), which was unusual in that it gave charters fabulous results. However, when asked to replicate the study, it would not replicate, it gave different (bad) results. It's believed that this is the case because her studies use very small amounts of data rather than large amounts of data.
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3. The above link compares homeschooled students to the average public schooled student, which is an unfair comparison. The public school counterparts were not disaggregated by parent involvement and economic stability, two major factors that contribute to the success of home schooled students. If the sample had been disaggregated to account for those two factors, there would not have been a 30-plus percentile difference. 
