Senate Bill 291 aims to impose new regulations and standards on parents who choose to school their children at home. It's a bad bill, one the Montana Legislature should dispense with quickly. The bill is useful, however, as an illustration of the topsy-turvy way in which too many people view the state's role in education.
This particular bill - leading a long list of proposals to regulate home schooling - would set qualifications for parents who home school, impose standards for what they teach and require home-schooled students to take standardized tests as public-school students do. All of this may be well-intended. But it's completely misguided.
The state exists to serve the people, not the other way around. The people created the state, and they created the public school system. The responsibility for raising children, which includes their education, begins and ends with parents. Most parents see definite advantages to delegating some of their schooling responsibilities to professional educators. And many people understand there are definite advantages to contributing to the general education of other people's kids. But parents are the ones who are directly responsible for their own children.
SB291 reflects the perverse view that the state is in charge. It starts by asserting the authority to decide whether a parent may home school his or her child. Only those parents who are licensed teachers, have a four-year college degree or submit to monitoring by a licensed teacher would be allowed to school their children at home.
The boss has the right to dictate qualifications for his employees; the employees don't get to set the qualifications for the boss. The public school system is the employee in this case. Understand that and you'll see the whole idea of regulating home schools is preposterous.
The notion of imposing standardized testing requirements is misguided for the same reasons. Requiring standardized testing in public schools makes it possible for parents (the bosses) to assess the performance of the schools (their employees). Home-schooling parents may well look to tests to gauge their effectiveness and their children's progress. But while public schools must be accountable to the public, parents aren't accountable to the public schools. Imposing testing requirements is wrong.
A major challenge facing the 2005 Legislature is to make sure Montana's public school system measures up to its many obligations - constitutional and other. The state and the public school system must do a good job with the children with whom they are entrusted. The state and school system needn't concern themselves with the education of children whose parents choose to attend to the schooling themselves, instead of delegating the work to hired help.
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