 June 13, 2000Volume 1, Number 4
>>> Texas Homeschooling Follies <<<
"...there's always a purpose to nonsense.
Don't bother to examine a folly -- ask yourself only what it accomplishes."
SPOKEN BY ELLSWORTH TOOHEY, ARCH VILLIAN IN THE NOVEL "THE FOUNTAINHEAD", BY AYN RAND
What has been accomplished by ignoring the applicability of the Texas Education Code?
|
---------> Nothing good.
And I have grown mighty weary of hearing the
very same people who have ignored this
applicability trying to convince me otherwise.
As for what this folly has accomplished:
Many Texas homeschooling families falsely believe that sections of a state code specifically designed for and applicable to the regulation of 'public free' state tax funded schools can apply to their homes as well.
Though no compulsory attendance statute is found anywhere but inside of that code, some or many Texas homeschooling families believe that compulsory attendance somehow applies to their non tax funded homes.
Though the Texas Constitution enumerates NO power to any branch of the state government to regulate privately funded education, a cult-ish (and very much statist) political lobbying effort has grown around the false idea that the Texas Legislature may, on a whim, regulate our privately funded home-rearing of our own children.
State personnel, ignoring statute law, tried to intimidate and prosecute hsing families around Texas in the early half of the 1980's. They used the argument that home schools were not private schools and were therefore illegal. The hsers could have won this round by producing the readily available evidence that Texas law only allows the Legislature, and thus the Texas Education Agency created by that same legislature, to regulate the 'public free' or state-tax-funded schools. The homeschoolers ignored the law here as well. Result: the persecution continued.
The 1980's situation came to a head when attorney Shelby Sharpe (also ignoring the law) "carefully selected a representative group of home-schooling families, curriculum suppliers, and umbrella schools to act as plaintiffs on behalf of all homeschoolers in the state and all those entities who supply curricula to Texas homeschoolers" and filed a suit which "asked the (Tarrant County) district court for a judgement declaring that a home school is a private school under Texas law..."
(unnecessary -- homes were already not considered to be state tax funded educational institutions)
(unconstitutional -- state had no such authority for ruling on privately funded schools)
"...or, alternatively, if Texas law were found to exclude home schooling, then a finding that the law violates the parents rights of free exercise of religion, family privacy, due process of law, equal protection, and freedom of speech"
(ridiculous -- home schooling was not excluded, it just was not under state jurisdiction in the first place and therefore could not be included).
What did the folly accomplish in this case? Oh, my... where to begin? The dangerous accomplishment here consists mainly of the creation of a false perception (among hsers and others) of the legalities of choosing to raise your own children in Texas. "Leeper" was not the boon to hsing it is touted to be. In fact, it was a boon only to those lawyers, politicians, curriculum vendors, umbrella schools and others having a ve$ted intere$t in the outcome of the case.
Most unfortunately, the Texas Homeschooling Follies are
certain to be continued...
(Quotations are from the 1994 H.O.P.E. for Texas Handbook.)
|
|
|
HomeSchooling TEXAS, est. 1995
ubi libertas habitat, ibi nostra patria est
WHERE LIBERTY DWELLS, THERE IS MY COUNTRY
|
|