Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter
There is no categorical difference between state “oversight” and state “regulation.” As the night follows the day, regulation follows oversight. State legislators who want greater oversight of homeschooling fully intend to regulate homeschooling. And in the future they will move on to the regulation of all forms of schooling that lie outside of public education. State Democrat progressive leaders – most of them beholding to state employee unions -- have been itching for years to control all forms of education that fall outside unionized public school education.
Parents of school aged children, on the other hand, have been scouring the countryside in search of alternative means of education. Broadly speaking, parents of school aged children have availed themselves of (four) alternatives to public education: private schools, religions institutions, charter schools, and homeschooling. If public school education were up to par, the sometimes desperate search for alternative modes of education would be unnecessary.
Public education, most experts not intimately associated with public schools might agree, has fallen on hard times. One failed public school student is now suing the state for pedagogical malpractice. The student had advanced on a ladder of illiteracy; she could not read, yet public education had passed her along from grade to grade through college.
She is the exception that proves the rule. A slim majority of public school inmates are able to read at a fourth grade level. Even so, data, as understood by disappointed parents, suggests that public education is failing children in Connecticut and across the nation.
Most failings of public education may be traced to two causes: 1) the outsized influence of public education union leaders – not necessarily teachers -- on both pedagogy and progressive politicians, some of whom have elected to escape the mess they have caused by sending their children to private, religious and charter schools, all of them under constant fire from progressive legislators who equate money spent on public education with successful educational outcomes; and 2) a decades old deterioration of what some educators call the classic curriculum.
Weeks after the progress of a bill proposing to oversee home schooling was rudely interrupted at a hearing featuring the public testimony of the usual pedagogical “experts” by hordes of homeschooling parents and children, the bill “overseeing” home schooling was hastily withdrawn. “Homeschool families,” the Hartford Courant told us, “showed up in droves to the event and joined Republican legislators in criticizing the joint hearing, with both groups decrying implied connections between homeschooling and the recent case of a Waterbury man which prompted the hearing. The 32-year-old man recently freed from a Waterbury home was reportedly found malnourished after being withdrawn from school at age 11 and then reportedly held captive for decades. The homeschooling community, which had staged consistent protests at the Capitol have said that legislators are using the case as an opportunity to restrict their freedom to teach their children.”
Present at the hearing testifying in favor of the oversight bill were, the Courant tells us, “state experts Department of Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker, Department of Children and Families Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly, Office of the Child Advocate’s Acting Child Advocate Christina Ghio and Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents Executive Director Fran Rabinowitz.”
The captive had liberated himself from his stepmother and his 21 year ordeal by setting a small fire in his house. Happily, Connecticut’s oversight community did not arrest the victim for arson. He became the precipitant cause célèbre of the withdrawn – for now – bill overseeing and later regulating the growing homeschooling movement. The cruel stepmother, we all remember, is a stock figure in many Grimm’s fairy tales: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and Snow White.
Wait a minute, homeschooling parents at the hearing of “experts” protested, even stepparents in Connecticut do not as a matter of course hold their malnourished stepchildren prisoners in their homes for two decades while avoiding “overseers” such as the state’s Department of Children & Families (DCF) who apparently in this case had fallen asleep at the wheel – for 21 years.
Senate Republicans, neutered by the sheer number of neo-progressives in the state’s General Assembly, issued a statement: “Homeschoolers have nothing to do with the tragic situation in Waterbury. Instead of focusing on DCF and the Waterbury public school system on how and why that child fell through the cracks of the system, Democrats targeted the thousands of homeschoolers in our state who do an amazing job of educating their students outside of Connecticut’s education system. Thanks to the strong voices of CT Republicans and passionate homeschooling families and advocates, the proposed legislation imposing new mandates on homeschoolers will not move forward this session. This is a major victory for parental rights and educational freedom in our state!”
The respite, we may be sure, is only temporary. Supporters of the state’s powerful public education lobby will be at the same stand next year attempting to throttle alternative means of public education because the lobby does not like competition that interferes with its lock-hold on education.
Catholic schools are on the wane, the last Catholic elementary school in Hartford, Connecticut’s Capitol City, having closed several years ago. Successful charter schools such as the Amistad Academy servicing New Haven’s educationally undernourished children were underfinanced by the public education union controlled General Assembly from the get-go.
In a recent column, Chris Powell, a voice crying in the pedagogical wilderness, wrote, “So let’s pretend that the public’s interest in Norwalk’s school system is exactly the same as the interest of the school employee unions: Accountability for staff, disclosure of teacher evaluations, performance-based pay, and efficiency, as well as accountability for students and parents so that promotion from grade to grade and graduation from high school are based on learning rather than aging out. Of course the public interest and the union interest in schools are almost exact opposites.”
Of course they are; pity so few have noticed.
CT has the WORST public schools- the teachers have been militantly indoctrinated, and most cannot see what’s happened. It is an effectively, “dumbed down” society. Congratulations China, you successfully purchased our politicians, and injected your own, to upend our culture, right under our noses. And, it continues….