The New York Times today has an amazing headline to this story.
Lack of Supervision Noted in Deaths of Home-Schooled
Read the story and see if there is any sign that these kids were home schooled. The animosity of the left wing to home schooling is just amazing. Here is the real beef the Times has:
Once against the law in all but five states, home schooling is now legal throughout the country and highly regulated in just six states, New York among them. About 1.1 million of the 50 million school age children were home schooled in 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics says.
What do you think the murder rate among home schoolers is ? Just think, 1.1 million kids escaping the clutches of the teachers unions. This statistic is probably what has them worried:
There was no significant difference between minority and white homeschooled students. For example, in grades K-12, both white and minority students scored, on the average, in the 87th percentile. In math, whites scored in the 82nd percentile while minorities scored in the 77th percentile. In the public schools, however, there is a sharp contrast. White public school eighth grade students, nationally scored the 58th percentile in math and the 57th percentile in reading. Black eighth grade students, on the other hand, scored on the average at the 24th percentile in math and the 28th percentile in reading. Hispanics scored at the 29th percentile in math and the 28th percentile in reading.
The entire article is an attack on home schooling while the actual case is clearly NOT about home schooling. It is about mental illness and the failure of school social workers, except one whose pleas were ignored, to care about truancy.
Yet another disingenuous, manipulative spew of gas from the NYT.
I began homeschooling 20 years ago and joined Klicka’s Homeschooling Legal Defense group along with other parents in this new movement of home education. And there was indeed a fear of keeping one’s children out of public school because we knew that at any moment officials could come knocking at the door, take our kids away, and pop us in the pokey for being committed parents willing to educate those we were responsible for and not hand the job over to the state.
The bottom line is that there are big bucks being lost for every child kept at home and that infuriates the ‘experts’, the NEA and teachers’ unions. This article is not about homeschooling, nor even about mental illness. Its an underhanded usery and a very ugly one at that – leeching onto an horrific tragedy to promote an anti-family agenda and to insuate that parents do not know best for their children but rather the state does.
The greatest irony is that these ‘experts’ are simply unable to refute the hard cold statistics that bely the truth – most home educated students thrive and have more success than those not home educated so they grasp at straws – no matter how distasteful.
And this makes them nuts.
The homeschool kids I know, and I know many, are nearly all well adjusted, smart, well read, well learned, polite and courteous. The public school kids I know, and I know many, are nearly never any of those things. Private school kids are almost always like the homeschool kids.
Especially in PG County, in Maryland, if you can escape the public school, RUN!!! When I attended, decades ago, it was awful. It has only gotten worse.
at home schooling…
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