The California ruling is a shocking new development. But what amazed me is to see so many people on the internet disingenuously claiming that all sorts of dire consequences from homeschooling are the norm.
Some of the claims made: learning disabled children without adequate skills, children who have a lack of social skills, kids who graduate without adequate academic skills to get into college. The school systems in our nation, particularly in poor, rural or inner city schools routinely turn out kids with all these problems and many more. It is these results that have driven the exponential rise in homeschooling.
I taught in the public schools for years before I had my own children. In a "good school system." When my own children became of school age I chose to home school them. I am Christian, but not right wing (I am an Episcopalian and avid DKos fan).
I do keep my kids away from a lot of typical American culture. They do go to some movies, dress normally, my son plays on a baseball league team with public school kids. But, we also are out learning in our community with a diverse age/gender/race/religious population every week. We regularly visit a senior citizen day care program. My children are compassionate, poised and conversational with the people we visit even though they are sometimes sitting with sometimes drooling or over-loud seniors. They are quite socially adept BECAUSE they spend their days in a much more diverse world than most institutionally based children.
Now, because I was a certified teacher some would say that of course I can teach my own, but I tell you that my public school teaching was actually a hindrance to teaching my own children. I had to "deschool" myself in order to have the creativity and flexibility to maximize my children's learning. To a degree I never had as a public school teacher, dealing with all the problems that walk through their classroom doors on a daily basis, I found myself free to stop limiting my children by trying to do "school at home" and instead embrace the world as our classroom. I started out with a classroom with desks and a chalkboard and bulletin board in the basement that first year. I laugh when I think of that now. Once I opened myself up to the possibilities, then we became home schoolers and we all began to blossom as learners and as close knit family members. Something many public school families lament is hard to accomplish in today's culture.
Let's talk oversight now. You can't make blanket statements about whether or not there is adequate oversight of home schooling, because each state Board of Education makes their own rules. In my state, you can be reviewed by the local school district where you live twice yearly. You take in a portfolio and a public school teacher discusses and reviews your program and looks at work samples from each subject. You pass or you receive advice and a timeline to show compliance. Or alternatively you can sign up with an "umbrella school" that has been certified and approved by the State Board of Education. There is a list of 40 or so of these schools or academies in our state. We belong to one of these. Why? Because the one I belong to is run by current and former long time home schoolers whose advice and knowledge I value tremendously. I turn in monthly progress reports/quarterly report cards and will have my end of year review next month with one of the staff reviewers. Additionally, our umbrella offers extras like chorus, band, orchestra, drama that can be harder to locate as a home schooler. When you reach middle and high school they offer classes in courses a parent may feel inadequate teaching. Being a humanities/arts gal myself--when we get to calculus you can bet my kids will be taking that course from someone who did better than the D I got until I dropped that course in high school. Additionally they have much higher behavioral standards and expectations that are agreed to by all parents who join than any public school can enforce today.
There are over 17,000 home schooled children in the state I live in and all are reviewed in one of these two ways. Slipping through the cracks is no more or less likely than the way an average kid with a marginal or high risk family slips through educational cracks or may be suffering undiscovered abuse in the home at public school. Other states have more stringent requirements than mine, but some have less. I do not find the oversight I have to be overly burdensome and it feels about right in terms of letting me be the one deciding what my children's educational needs are.
Home schooling families are far more likely to be overly conscientious and incredibly focused on their children's well being than not. There are numerous studies documenting their higher scores on assessments, higher rates of secondary education, colleges actively seeking out the enrollment of home schooled children, and higher rates of involvement as adults in civic and political activism, higher rates of satisfaction as adults...
Yes, there will be bad home schooling parents(I have not met many, but do know a few), but I have yet to see a single study showing that it happens in any greater proportion to the lousy parenting/ educational neglect you see in the wider non-home schooling family population. So until that has been proven, all comments to the contrary are simply uninformed and/or biased.
Lastly, as far as the claims of abuse. It is a common technique for those who disapprove of home schooling to throw out when they want the children ordered back to school. Disgruntled neighbors, angry grandparents, pediatricians or over zealous CPS workers with anti-home school bias have been known to do it. I once had a neighbor threaten to call CPS about my kids "truancy" and the IRS about my small home business(which I actually report every penny on thank you very much) on me over a parking issue. Even though I knew I was doing nothing wrong, I lived in fear until that woman moved out of the community a year later.
I know one large Christian family that seems similiar to this CA family. They had an older teen child who was getting into trouble and she made a claim of abuse against them to get out from under their supervision. A non-home schooling neighbor took these claims at face value, helped the girl run away, get CPS involved, marginalized the whole family and isolated her from her siblings. In the end, she was not found to be abused, she was sliding into severe mental illness. Her medical condition deteriorated dramatically as well meaning, but uninformed people kept the family from getting her the help she needed for too long, leading to the addition of illegal drug addiction on top of her mental illness problems. And now that the diagnosis has been made clear (schizophrenia), do you think any of these do-gooders (individual or institutional) are involved now? No! Now that the family has been put through the ringer, gotten the girl back home and found out why she was struggling, "help" has dried up and society is perfectly willing to leave all the care up to the family-she has aged out of CPS's jurisdiction. No one wants to rescue the "poor home schooled child" anymore.
We can't know from the media coverage so far what, if any, validity there was to the claims of abuse. And why that automatically led to removing the right of all Californians to home school is completely unclear to me. It seems to be a huge judicial overreach that will hopefully be corrected either upon appeal or through legislation.
That one none-too-clearly-proved case in California might jeopardize all 200,000 home schooled children in that state and the hundred thousands more in the country (who hasn't heard the adage "as California goes so goes the nation?") is a travesty. This may be the only time that I, as a progressive mama who generally abhors the conservative tilt of the Supreme Court currently, may for once actually end up grateful for them. Because if this case gets there-- and we home schoolers will fight that far if we have to-- I will be indebted to a court that is likely to hold up the rights of parents to choose how to educate their children over the blanket interference of the state in these decisions.