Welcome
Political lesson of the week — don’t mess with home school families.
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CommenTerry
The Division of Non-Public Education (NC DNPE) is the state agency responsible for ensuring that home school families meet statutory requirements. In North Carolina, those requirements are minimal. Home school families must file a Notice of Intent to Operate a Home School, operate on a regular schedule, maintain immunization documentation, keep attendance records, and administer a standardized achievement test.
Most of the estimated 53,000+ families that choose to home school their children like it this way. It is one, among many, reasons why there has been a 70 percent increase in home school attendance over the last decade. Indeed, NC DNPE reported that nearly 88,000 children attended a home school last year, the highest number since the North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the right to home school in Delconte v. North Carolina (1985).
Homeschoolers also know that the system that has served them so well and produced unprecedented growth also requires vigilance. Occasionally, a politician or bureaucrat will devise a plan to "improve" home school oversight or operation. I believe that some of them mean well and are simply misguided. Others dislike homeschooling and seek to use government power to undermine it.
Indeed, one can understand why home school families worry about those who want to tinker with home school laws. After all, home schooling is still illegal in a number of industrialized nations. (Read about the Wunderlich family in Germany for a sobering look at the treatment of homeschool families abroad.) Parents who dare defy their government to educate their children at home are harassed, persecuted, and/or jailed. It was not so long ago that home school families in North Carolina encountered similar treatment.
As a result of these kinds of concerns, the home school community has become a formidable political force, both in North Carolina and nationally. But they are also a unique political force. With only a few exceptions, such as passage of a 2013 bill that amended North Carolina’s home school law, they spend much of their time working to thwart proposals to increase government regulation of home schools. And it has been effective. To use a football cliche, defense wins championships.
With this context in mind, it is no wonder that home school families and their allies successfully nixed a proposal by the new director of the Division of Non-Public Education to resume the long abandoned practice of home monitoring visits. For most home school families, the potential cost of additional regulations and restrictions clearly outweighed the benefits of the occasional home visit by the NC DNPE.
Doug Clark from the News & Record, presumably a backer of home visits, responded, "Why wouldn’t home school parents agree to a visit, anyway? What’s to hide?" (Cue Patriot Act debate.) He worries that parents choose to home school to conceal their shenanigans or worse. But he assumes that a site visit, or threat of one, from a government official would deter parents from using the home school law as a cover for some nefarious activity. That’s unlikely. And you can’t regulate or legislate evil out of existence.
One last thing. The Division of Non-Public Education is under the McCrory administration, which means that his administration is ultimately responsible for the now abandoned home visitation plan. Even Democratic administrations acknowledged that it is a bad idea to mess with home school families. It did not take long for our Republican governor to learn that lesson.
Facts and Stats
North Carolina Home Schools and Students, 2002-2013
|
School Year |
Number of Schools |
Number of Students |
|
2012-13 |
53,347 |
87,978 |
|
2011-12 |
47,977 |
79,693 |
|
2010-11 |
45,524 |
83,609 |
|
2009-10 |
43,316 |
81,509 |
|
2008-09 |
41,042 |
77,065 |
|
2007-08 |
38,367 |
71,566 |
|
2006-07 |
36,068 |
68,707 |
|
2005-06 |
33,690 |
64,387 |
|
2004-05 |
31,530 |
58,780 |
|
2003-04 |
28,746 |
54,501 |
|
2002-03 |
26,422 |
51,571 |
Source: NC Division of Non-Public Education
Education Acronym of the Week
DNPE — Division of Non-Public Education
Quote of the Week
The upshot of this historical review is that we find nothing in the evolution of our compulsory school attendance laws to support a conclusion that the word "school," when used by the legislature in statutes bearing on compulsory attendance, evidences a legislative purpose to refer to a particular kind of instructional setting. The legislature has historically insisted only that the instructional setting, whatever it may be, meet certain standards which can be objectively determined and which require no subjective or philosophical analysis of what is or is not a "school."
– Larry Delconte v. State of North Carolina (PDF), p. 15.
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