Parents who lack a teaching credential have no right to teach their children at home, an appellate court has ruled.
“Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” Justice H. Walter Croskey wrote in a Feb. 28 opinion for the 2nd District Court of Appeals.
Noncompliance could lead to criminal complaints against the parents, Croskey said.
If the ruling stands, California will go from one of the most liberal states in allowing homeschooling to the most restrictive.
The case involved children enrolled in Sunland Christian School, an accredited private school set up to support homeschooling parents. That was a “ruse,” the judge said, because most of their teaching is done by their uncredentialed mother.
. . . “keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where (1) they could interact with people outside the family, (2) there are people who could provide help if something is amiss in the children’s lives, and (3) they could develop emotionally in a broader world than the parents’ ‘cloistered’ setting.”
Private, charter and district-run schools designed to support homeschoolers are increasingly common. A San Diego homeschoolers’ charter is profiled by Voice of San Diego.
Kids meet with a teacher twice weekly to go over assignments, then complete their work at home, guided by a parent. Parents attend regular meetings with credentialed teachers, who coach them in how to conquer tough subjects, and consult them on their child’s progress. Together, teachers and parents design individual plans, mapping out what students will learn, and how. Some kids opt to learn one subject at a time; others balance multiple classes. Each child’s education is completely different, depending on what parents and students want.
The charter offers elective classes, such as art and biology lab, and gives students a chance to participate in student council, robotics teams and prom.
I suspect the ruling will be overturned on appeal to the California Supreme Court — or by the state Legislature. Homeschooling is now accepted in our culture in a way that it was not five or 10 years ago. If there’s a public interest in making children attend school in an uncloistered setting, it has nothing to do with whether Mom has a teaching credential. There is no public interest in forcing homeschooling families underground.
Update: Eugene Volokh has more on the legal issues.
Ace of Spades thinks the ruling only applies to children enrolled in schools that don’t require daily attendance, but I think he’s wrong. All the home-schooling groups believe the ruling is much broader than that.
The Mercury News story features homeschooling blogger Henry Cate and his wife, who teach their three children at home.
The credentialing matter is ridiculous. A teaching credential does nothing to address any of the three areas cited in your second block quote.
Besides, given how many schools have non-credentialed teachers working for them…
There is much more to this story. The family has had numerous legal entanglements involving child abuse. Two of the children are suing the parents for the right to attend public school. I doubt if this case is going to have any broad implications outside allegations of abuse.
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:-gfLatRwHh8J:www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/B192601.DOC+JD00773&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
That’s what you get for relying on WorldNetDaily for your news.
The two younger children have a court-appointed attorney — whom one them tried unsuccessfully to fire — who’s sued to require the parents to send the children to a full-time public or private school. The kids are siding with their parents. The teen-age child, Rachel, was attending public school after running away from her parents and going into foster care, but has run away again and, apparently, hasn’t been found.
The court didn’t merely rule that the children have to attend school for abuse-monitoring purposes because of the family’s involvement with Child Protective Services; it ruled they have to attend because their mother isn’t a credentialed teacher. That affects all homeschooling families.
It’s just plain wrong to homeschool kids. How else are diversity mongers and other leftists going to sink their claws into kids if we “cloister” them from their beneficent wisdom?
Whenever I hear that my wife and I should be credentialed (the second most often heard counter to our right to homeschool our kids, second to the whole socialization crap), I think back to one of the education classes I took when I thought I wanted to be an elementary school teacher. It was a 3-credit, semester-length course on teaching methods.
The day I came home with a 12-in diameter construction-paper penny, my wife laughed and laughed and laughed.
Of course there was the day I learned how to teach kids to count using M&Ms. That day at least had some sugary benefits.
But to think of the money I spent on that required course…(as if I couldnt’ learn any of those methods in a book).
The homeschooling advocates upset about this ruling don’t have a particular fondness for the family involved.
But as a result of this ruling, none of the maybe 65,000 homeschooled kids in California are in compliance with the compulsory schooling laws. The court says that all of those kids, whose parents previously believed they were homeschooling legally, are now truant. The local authorities could now go after any homeschooling family in California.
Under the previous interpretation of the law, there were two common ways that California families homeschooled. One way was the parents filing a Private School Affidavit asserting that they were operating a (tiny, exclusive) private school. Parents who wanted more structure and oversight could instead sign up with an Independent Study Program (ISP), either through their local public school or through a private school. The ISP would, legally, oversee the children’s education, but the primary teachers of the children would still be the parents. For well over a decade, homeschooling parents in California have been using those methods to satisfy the law.
The new ruling says that neither of those commonly-used methods of homeschooling satisfies the compulsory schooling law. Suddenly, tens of thousands of kids have been deemed truant.
The estimate I’ve seen is 166,000 officially homeschooled children in California; nobody knows how many unreported homeschoolers there are.
“…none of the maybe 65,000 homeschooled kids in California are in compliance with the compulsory schooling laws…”
Uh, no. Just those in the 2nd appellate district. This opinion isn’t binding in the rest of the state. Given the disparate effect, I’d expect a stay pending the further appeal.
“The court says that all of those kids, whose parents previously believed they were homeschooling legally, are now truant.”
Given that the state of California runs a website that allows us to register that way, I’d suggest that up until this court ruling the state also believed we were homeschooling legally. The state certainly behaved that way
Somehow I just don’t think we’re going to see very many homeschooling families changing what they are doing. Certainly not in the short term.
Depending on how this turns out (and I suspect it will be either overturned on appeal or ‘fixed’ by the legislature), I can also see a pro-homeschooling PAC forming. With a fair amount of money for lobbying.
‘Twill be interesting.
-Mark Roulo
Oops, Dave J is right– only the families in the 2nd Appellate District are legally bound by this ruling. But still, it throws the entire homeschooling situation into chaos in California.
I agree with Mark Ruolo that in the short term, most homeschooling families won’t change what they’re doing. The California homeschooling organizations are advising their members to sit tight and continue homeschooling as before.
However, it certainly looks like the California homeschooling regulations will be changing. I’m betting the legislature will step in.
I’m betting the legislature will step in.
Given the dominance of the state legislature by leftists, that will almost certainly result in all kinds of cumbersome regulations being heaped upon us.
Silly Old Mom,
If the legislature takes up homeschooling, you will be surprised to see how many leftists come out in support of minimal regulation.
Sincerely yours,
A Leftist Homeschooler
The socialists in the Appellate are drawing battle lines whether they intend to or not. The statement Croskey made about parents having no constitutional right to homeschool their children has just guaranteed that this issue will become an election issue beginning with this cycle. This will be one of the litmus tests for acceptability of candidates to represent our interests. If they’re not willing to work to overturn this sort of backwards thinking, then we will find candidates who will.
Croskey drew his line in the sand and dared us to step over it. Big mistake.
Looks to me like Croskey is in the wrong on this one. Article I, Section 24, Paragraph 3 of the CA Constitution contains the following language based on the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution:
This declaration of rights may not be construed to impair or deny
others retained by the people.
Additionally, there’s no language in Article IX, which covers education, that would indicate that a parent’s right to control a child’s education is not retained by the people.
I know that, in reality, the Ninth Amendment has had more holes shot in it than a bullseye at Camp Pendleton, but by the plain language of the CA Constitution, Croskey’s got no ground to stand on.
Besides, as a resident of California who had several fresh-out-of-ed-school teachers, I can say that all but one was woefully unqualified to teach *anything*. Unless things have improved in the last few years, the idea that the teacher training offered in CA makes one qualified to teach is beyond nuts.
Also, when watching the local news tonight, I saw a poobah from the California Teachers Association celebrating this as “a tremendous victory”. Anything to strengthen their extortion program…
Quincy – the states routinely use a similar clause in the US Constitution to prevent the federal government from accumulating too much power, so it seems there’s a good deal of hypocrisy there.
The whole socialization “requirement” is a crock, currently all it does is expose children to drugs, sex, and violence in what has become an unsupervised environment. I love how homeschooling opponents portray homeschoolers as families of hermits, when the correct time for “socialization” is not during school but after.
Credentialing – as long as theirs some sort of oversight over the homeschooling by the host district or state and the students don’t seem to be falling behind, credentialing shouldn’t be an issue. Here again we see educrats focusing more on bureaucracy than actual education.
The right of parents to educate their children is rooted in natural law and not in some explicit provision of some state of federal constitution.
The legitimacy and binding force of the Constitution itself is grounded in the same natural law.
The state has a duty to intervene when parents fail to educate their children but such intervention could never be justified on the grounds that the parents lack a credential or fail to send their children to a particular school.
Odd, no one’s brought up all the private schools in the state–which also are not required to have credentialed teachers.
Good point, Darren. I’m an uncredentialed teacher at a private Christian school in CA who plans to homeschool her own future children, though I’m hoping to live outside CA by then.
Several years ago I was working at a university and considered getting my teaching credentia–mostly to convince people that I was prepared to homeschool. When I looked at the course of study, I discovered that I had taken every content course (and then some!) required of a credentialed teacher for my BS in Business Administration with an emphasis in accounting. The only courses I was lacking were those on child development, teaching methodology, student teaching, etc. I decided this was pointless for me as a future homeschooler, because homeschooling is small group or individual tutoring, not crowd control like a classroom!
The estimate I’ve seen is 166,000 officially homeschooled children in California;
There isn’t really such a thing as “officially homeschooled” in California. There is nowhere that homeschoolers have to register as homeschoolers. Some homeschoolers file as private schools, and some register with public or private Independent Study Programs– but those programs also include many students who are not homeschoolers. Thus, estimating the number of homeschoolers is difficult. Any estimate presented should be viewed with skepticism.
In the 2006-2007 school year, there were about 6,200,000 students in California public K-12 schools (according to the Department of Education website). Add another 10% in traditional private schools and that comes to some 6,800,000 K-12 students in California. If there were 166,000 homeschoolers, that would mean 2.3% of California students were homeschooled, or roughly one in 44. That strikes me as high.
I was estimating something closer to one in 100, for some 66,000 homeschoolers in California. But, as I said, all estimates should be viewed with skepticism. We can agree that there are a lot of homeschooled students in California.
If this site is correct:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/257230.php
This is a non-issue.
I hope so.
-Mark R.
Mark,
Ace of Spades says this is a non-issue. All four of the main homeschooling organizations active in California (HSC, CHEA, CHN, and the vile HSLDA) have lawyers looking at the case, and all four organizations agree that it’s a serious issue. I’d like to agree with Ace, but I can’t.
While the details of the case, as Mark points out, display that the parents failed to take legal measures that would have supported the homeschooling, it looks as if the court went beyond the case itself in its ruling.
The justices did not simply rule that the parents did not adequately meet the standards of California’s educational law, but that there is right to homeschool – all students can be compelled to attend school. This could be used later to challenge the private school exception that many homeschooling parents use.
I wonder what the response would be if the State of California required all professors at its public universities to have a teacher certification? Maybe we should suggest it — then California’s university system might finally be as sought-after as its K-12 public schools!
Why do so many people believe that more credentials make better teachers?
The parents in the case did do what homeschooling parents believe was taking legal measures to support their homeschooling. They enrolled in an umbrella school, Sunland Christian School, which was supposed to supervise their homeschooling. According to the court, that education was insufficient, but there was no evidence in the case that Sunland told the parents it was insufficient.
The court called enrolling in an umbrella school a “ruse,” but it’s a method that thousands of California families are using in the belief that it makes their homeschools comply with the law.
SuperSub, you’ve confused the Ninth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment. There is no logical state-law analog to the Tenth Amendment because the federal government is a government of enumerated powers while the states possess the police power, i.e., the feds can do what they’re authorized to do, while the states can do anything they’re not FORBIDDEN from doing.
Cardinal Fang,
I’m not worried about fellow homeschoolers like you who are leftists. I know I can count on homeschoolers of all stripes to band together to preserve the freedom we have.
BUT I am worried about the leftists that dominate the state legislature — the ones bought and paid for by the teacher’s unions; the ones that not only don’t homeschool, they don’t know anyone who does. They are almost as ignorant and biased as the knucklehead who wrote this court opinion. I don’t trust them to craft an amendment to current law that will do anything but radically curb our freedoms, intentionally or not.
The law as it stands is just fine by me — I file an R-4 online. Painless. Imagine all the ways that could change once our elected officials start falling all over themselves to “fix” it. It’ll be like trying to do brain surgery with a mallet. We’ll be worse off than if we lived in Pennsylvania.
What truly frosts me is the judge’s contention that the quality of the education being received at home doesn’t matter. In his eyes, if you homeschool for any reason, you are DEPRIVING your child of a “legal” education. It’s all process, not results.
Silly,
I understand your concern about the state legislature. I file an R-4 too. The situation as it is now is working perfectly for California homeschoolers. When issues come up with homeschooling families, usually the problem is not the homeschooling but child abuse and child neglect, which are already illegal and should be investigated. In the current case, there are credible allegations about family issues other than homeschooling.
But I’m dubious about the claim that the leftists in the legislature wouldn’t know anyone who homeschooled. In the leftist blog world I frequent when I’m not here, I sometimes encounter people who disparage homeschooling and don’t know any homeschoolers, but those people are usually young and single. They don’t know homeschoolers because they don’t know any parents at all. The people in the legislature are typically older; they have more experience of the world. Homeschooling is mainstream now.
And if the legislators don’t know any homeschoolers– well, that will change as soon as they take up rewriting homeschooling laws!
If the legislature does get involved, which I hope doesn’t happen, maybe they can regularize the situation for older homeschoolers who want to attend community college as high schoolers, or who want to apply to state colleges and universities. Right now, homeschoolers who want to attend California public colleges face a complex maze.
Cardinal,
I sincerely hope I’m wrong about the homeschooling knowledge/ignorance ratio of our state legislators. I hope they do know some homeschoolers, especially those who aren’t of the headline-grabbing variety. But if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a candidate trumpet his children’s enrollment in public school as evidence of his faith in the system and his undying support for teacher’s unions… well, let’s just say it doesn’t give me confidence.
A badly written statute, crafted by someone with the best of intentions, is subject to the law of unintended consequences. Like you, I hope the law stays the way it is.
I don’t have older students, but I’ve heard stories about the hoops some people need to jump through to enroll their kids in JCs. Santa Monica College comes to mind as one that’s particularly troublesome. On the other hand, some colleges are quite homeschool-friendly, although they tend to be Christian schools. One of the best things groups like HSLDA could do is to work with the colleges to help smooth the road for homeschoolers to enter college. A non-legislative option would be my first choice, in general.