 | |||
 | |||
 | | | |
| | |
GWS 32 continued from previous page. This is page 10 of 13.
Go back a page — Go forward a page
[JH:] News clippings tell us that the county attorney does not plan to appeal; that the superintendent of the district says that the result will affect 17 or 18 students being educated at home in the district, and may cost the district $23,000+ in state aid and possibly a teacher in the schools; and that a similar case in another county was decided against the parents.
Sometimes, as here, these cases win; sometimes they lose. News clips and letters sent from around the country have given me the (perhaps false) impression that they lose more than they win. In the last year or so I wrote the Christian Liberty Academy, asking roughly how many cases they were winning and how many losing, but received no reply. Ray Moore says that in the First Amendment cases with which he has been associated the parents have won most of the cases. I am trying to persuade him to send me, or publish in his own newsletter, a list of cases won and lost. It would be extremely valuable information to home schoolers; the longer the list of successful cases that we can show school districts, the greater the chance that they will decide against prosecution. But, what with moving his home and office, and with all his other work, he has not yet had time to make such a list. We must keep after this. The same goes for all GWS readers - please let us know about any home school court cases you hear about, whether the parents win or lose. Send news clips if you can; if possible, send the date of the ruling, the name of the court, name of judge, etc. Meanwhile, lacking hard evidence to the contrary, I tend to continue to believe that this basic First Amendment argument is not strong enough and, though it may win when it meets a friendly judge like Judge Lee, it loses more often than it should.
In any event, this argument has to my knowledge lost twice in state Supreme Courts (Nebraska and Iowa) and has not yet won at that level. In the Nebraska case, as a result of which a Christian minister running a private school has been sent to jail, the court said in effect that people couldn't get out of obeying laws they didn't like just by saying that it went against their religious beliefs. If such a case reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, and one (from Kentucky) seems headed in that direction, that court will almost certainly say the same thing. Like many others, Judge Lee seems to have read into Yoder a meaning almost the exact opposite of what the Supreme Court intended. His quote of the remark about people replacing educational requirements with their own idiosyncratic views is particularly ironic. These words come from the concurring opinion of Justice White, who of all the Justices is perhaps the most hard-nosed and unyielding supporter of compulsory public schools for everyone, and the surest to vote against home schoolers in any case that may come up.
I would like to know more about why the county decided not to appeal. It may have been a wise decision; it is not always a good idea, and indeed is often a bad idea, to appeal a lost case to a higher court, because you can not add anything to your original argument. It may often be better to prepare a stronger case the next time. The news clips, and the ruling itself, give the impression that the schools thought they had an easy win in this case and did not work very hard preparing it. They may well be looking for a more favorable case, perhaps one in which the children are not testing very well on achievement tests. Or perhaps they are waiting until they can lobby through the legislature laws which will make it easier to prosecute home schoolers.
Another question in my mind. According to one news story, the Tollefsruds offered to show the effectiveness of their home education by comparing their children's standardized test results with those of children in the district, but the school "belittled the test." Might it not have been possible for the Tollefsruds and their attorney to use what is called the "discovery" process to compel the district to reveal the test scores of students within its schools? In the discovery part of a trial, each party to the dispute can submit to the other a list of questions which the other must answer. Whether this process is available in all states, in what sorts of trials it can and can not be used, and what kinds of questions can or can not be asked, is something we need to know more about. We'll be very grateful for any information that any of our readers who may be lawyers can give us.
If we are interested, as we should be, in making a friendly and cooperative working relationship with the schools, instead of just trying to run them out of business, we have to take seriously the concern of Superintendent Lewis in the Tollefsrud case, and many others like him, that home schooling might cost school districts so much in state aid that they might have to fire one or more teachers, or cut out some programs, and (the corollary argument) that this loss of teachers and programs in already crowded school systems might make the schools worse for many more children than whatever number was being helped by home schooling.
We should meet and answer this argument, not just because it has merit on its own and in any case may carry much weight with many legislators and other people whose support we need, but most of all because we really do have an answer for the problem. In our legislative proposal (GWS #30), we suggested that the schools continue to register home schooled pupils, list them (which nothing in the law forbids) as being part of a Special Independent Study Program, and continue to collect for them (which, again, nothing in the law forbids) whatever state and other aid they get for their "regular" pupils.
In fact, when families first begin to discuss home schooling with their local schools, they would probably be wise to say: "We know that you are concerned that this may cost you badly needed state aid, but we feel certain that with your support we can work out together a way of doing home education that will not cost you any state aid," this being the procedure named above.
No doubt some superintendents will continue to oppose home schooling for other reasons. In this case, as we have said before, we should begin immediately to talk, or better yet write, to the school board itself, saying as we did to the Superintendent that we do not want our home schooling to worsen the already difficult financial position of the schools, and that we are convinced that with the schools' support there is a way to avoid this. If the idea of collecting aid for students not physically present in the building makes the school people nervous, we could consider such possible remedies as having the family actually fill out school attendance slips, or whatever else may seem to help deal with the problem. If we keep making this offer to the Superintendent and the School Board, though here and there some diehards will continue to oppose us no matter what, we should be able to win over a much larger number for whom, except for money, home schooling does not seem to present a problem. And we can offer still another strong reason for schools to carry home schooled children on their rolls - not only will they continue to collect state aid for them, but they can improve their schools' test scores by averaging in the (in most cases much higher) scores of the home schooled students. - JH
DAMAGE SUITS BAD IDEA
A number of home schooling families have either filed or are getting ready to file damage suits in the Federal courts against their local school superintendents and other education and law enforcement officials. They are claiming that these officials have acted to deprive them of their constitutional rights by refusing to allow them to home-school their children, and they are asking for monetary compensation. Furthermore, several people active and prominent in the home schooling movement are urging home schoolers all over the country to file such suits whenever school authorities take them to court for violating truancy laws.
I feel I now have to say publicly what I have for some time been saying to some of these people privately, namely, that I am strongly opposed to these suits and strongly advise families against filing them, no matter how much trouble the schools may be making for them, and that I will not support such suits in any way.
Simply stated, my reasons are these: I don't think the families can win such suits; even if they did win, I don't think it would bring the desired results; and win or lose, I think these suits will make it much harder to do what we must eventually do, and the sooner the better - persuade the schools to support and cooperate with home schoolers.
More specifically, my arguments are these:
1) The families are not going to be able to make a convincing argument in court. The one family whose case has been much discussed in other publications certainly has not done so unless the opposing school officials hire a fool for a lawyer, they will easily demolish the family's argument. Since most of these damage suit cases are likely to be modeled after this first one, the same thing is likely to be true for all of them.
2) Even if the families are lucky enough to find themselves opposed by incompetent lawyers, the courts are unlikely to award damages against the schools, for the reasons that they have already several times refused to do so: they fear it would cripple the schools, and would flood the courts with similar cases.
3) In the (to me) very unlikely event that a court did award damages against a school system, it seems unlikely that the damages would be enough to have the deterrent effect sought by the home schoolers. The school business, as we can't too often remind ourselves, is a 100-billion dollar a year operation. If, as some claim, the managers of this business are for malicious and unprincipled reasons determined to use the threat of prosecution to frighten people out of exercising their legal right to teach their own children, then they will not be deterred from this by the kinds of damages courts are likely to award, if indeed they award any. To put this a little differently, if the managers of this giant business really believe that the home schooling movement is so great a threat to their very existence that they must in self-defense use the law as a weapon against it, they will cheerfully pay, as a kind of insurance, whatever occasional damages the courts may award against them, just as large industrial firms find it easier and cheaper to pay whatever fines they must pay for dumping their poisons into our rivers than to find some other way of disposing of them.
4) In the (to me) extremely unlikely event that a lower court did award damages really large enough to hurt and worry the schools, they would surely appeal this all the way to the Supreme Court, which for reasons discussed elsewhere in this issue, is virtually certain to rule in their favor.
5) In the enormously improbable event that the Supreme Court did let stand lower court rulings awarding heavy damages against school systems, the schools across the country would soon find effective countermeasures against this danger. Without spending much time on it, I have already thought of four.
This talk about damage suits has much of the same unreal quality as a lot of the talk we hear about the arms race - as if all we had to do was find some new legal super-weapon in order to bring the schools to their knees. In the early '70s the book said, and for a while I helped spread this idea, that all you had to do to get your children out of public school was to say that you were going to send them to private school - and then not send them. It didn't take the public schools long to find an answer for that. Then all we had to do was enroll our children in a distant school and call our homes a branch of that school; or in many states, simply declare our own home a school. After a while the public schools began to find their answer to that. Now people talk as if some legal equivalent of the MX missile or the Trident submarine or whatever would finally stop the schools in their tracks. It's a dream; as long as the schools feel they are in a fight for their lives, for every legal weapon we invent they are going to invent a counter weapon - and they have vastly greater resources to spend on this than we do. It makes no sense for us to continue escalating this battle.
Of course, it will not be easy to persuade the schools as a whole to work with home schoolers, and of course, if in the meanwhile we are forced into court, we must make the strongest defense we can. But our principal task must be not to think of newer and better legal weapons but to find ways to end the war. In terms of this task these damage suits - even if now and then they win - seem to me a big step backwards - JH
ADULT LEARNS TO READ
Nancy Plent (NJ) wrote in the Unschoolers Network #14:
... I heard a touching story from a family that came to one of our meetings here. The father never learned to read. School was a traumatic experience for him, and he's determined that his 8-month-old son won't go. So he's started from scratch with his son's baby books. He reads to his son every day. His wife says he often has tears in his eyes when he finds that he doesn't know a word in one of these books. She reassures him that their son doesn't know the difference right now if he misses a word, and that he'll learn it all as he goes along ...
From a long article by Jeannette DeWyze in the San Diego Reader, 10/7/82, about John Boston teaching his son Sean at home:
... The two began by sitting down at the family's dining table first thing every morning to work on such subjects as spelling, mathematics, and reading.
... [John Bostonl had thought the secret of enticing Sean into reading would be simple: he would give Sean books that weren't boring. From the bookstore he brought home piles of Hardy Boys and other adventure stories; at the library he searched for entertaining reading material pertaining to flying, one of Sean's interests. But he was soon forced to ask himself, "What if Sean dislikes the act of reading itself?" As the weeks rolled by, Boston watched his son more and more reluctantly sit down to the table, and then stare out the window, his attention wandering. When Boston tried to review material he had covered with Sean only days before, he found "it was as if he had never seen it in the first place." Gradually he and Sean began shortening or skipping the sessions altogether.
... Boston changed tactics. Even as a preschooler, Sean's obvious forte was mechanics. "He was interested in machinery and bulldozers and windshield wipers and anything you can name. Machines and I don't get along at all," says the father, "but with Sean it's different. He makes machines talk." Since school hadn't destroyed that interest, Boston decided to let Sean turn his full attention to machines and to anything else that interested the lad. If the father no longer was taking an active role teaching, he saw a new role for himself in constantly being alert for things and people with which Sean might want to be in contact in order to learn.
... When Sean acquired a small Honda motorcycle and began tinkering with it, his father asked if the boy would like a service manual for it, to which Sean eagerly assented.
..He has become a regular reader of a few aviation magazines such as Model Aviation and Bicycling, which are devoted to some of his Hobbies. In fact, his father says this year he administered to Sean a "quick assessment" reading test Boston obtained from a San Diego reading specialist. Boston says it indicated that Sean has improved to where he's now reading at roughly a seventh-grade level, about the same as other children his age.
"But does he ever simply read for pleasure?" I asked Boston the first time we talked.
"Not really. They really turned him off and I don't know how to turn him back on again," Boston replied sadly. But then he remembered something that had momentarily slipped his mind. A few weeks before, Sean had discovered an adventure story series in which the reader has a choice of reading a number of different endings for the various dramas. "That was the first time in two and a half years he ever asked me to buy him something to read," Boston amended himself. Later, when I asked Sean himself if he thought that he would ever return to reading, I didn't tell him what his father had told me about the book, and the boy answered my question with a note of pride. "I already do read." He went and pulled out the volume, THE CURSE OF THE SUNKEN TREASURE by R.C. Austin, and explained how the stories work. "It's a series," he told me. "I'd like to get all of them..."
Susan Richman wrote in the Winter '83 Western Pa. Homeschoolers:
... I remember wondering, while pregnant with my second child, how I, ever be able to read to my older Jesse with a new baby around. I figured the early few months might go all right, as I could read while nursing the baby, but I really worried about what would happen as our little one began grabbing books from us - would he eat or rip them, or generally make a muddle of our good sharing times? Would the children be too far apart in age to ever enjoy the same stories at the same time?
I've been delighted with what's actually happened. The early months were very easy for reading aloud to Jesse. We'd all snuggle in bed together with a book, lots of nursing, and we'd all feel relaxed. I think my "reading voice" was lulling to Jacob in the same way as a crooning singing voice! I was often amazed to find both boys would drift off to sleep at the same time after our readings.
As Jacob grew, he began to open his eyes a bit as I'd read, pupils dilating with delight while Jesse and I would laugh over some delicious passage. Jacob began laughing with us over favorite parts just to share in our fun, began peeking away from the breast to see the pictures, began patting pages. We weren't reading to him, or for him; we weren't trying to give our baby a "boost" in reading ability by exposing him, to print at a properly early age. It's just that as a part of our family, Jacob was always there, and took part as best he could at every stage. He did at times make very loud noises while we read, he did sometimes throw our books on the floor, but generally that just meant the timing was wrong, not that Jacob was destroying our reading time.
... By a year, he'd fallen in love with GOODNIGHT MOON, laughing as we'd touch the "hot" fire, pointing ecstatically to the real moon outside. We somehow passed over most of the cardboard baby books - Jacob seemed to be catching on so quickly to gentle handling of books since they were always about everywhere, and obviously treasured. He also seemed to prefer real stories to mere "point it out" books. We found our reading choices move towards Jacob's new favorites - we must have read and pored over the "Angus" and "Ask Mr. Bear" books by Marjorie Flack a thousand times the month Jacob was 15 months old. It was our delight to rediscover Jesse's old treasures and share them anew with Jacob. Jesse seemed to enjoy these simplest tales immensely, too ... It wasn't a boring experience for him to hear THREE BILLY GOATS GRUFF a hundred times - he loved acting it out with his little brother and also would see these timeless stories from his new older perspective ... I remember Jesse musing "Well, I think they should have sent the Big Billy Goat Gruff over the bridge first, then the littlest one wouldn't have had to be so scared by the troll, the big one could have gotten rid of that troll right away.
This is page 10 of 13. Go back a page — Go forward a page Back to beginning of GWS 32. | ||
| | |