If you get all your information from television, you may be only distantly aware that home schooling is a viable alternative to public schools, and that there are ideas in the works to make public schools more competitive with each other and with private schools.  Worse yet, if you watch too much television, perhaps you think that home schooling is strictly for hillbillies or Branch Davidians.  On the contrary, home schools are more popular than ever, and compared to public schools, they produce better educated students at a fraction of the cost per student.

The Editor of this web site, and Mrs. Editor, have had personal experience with both public education and home schooling, some of which is described in a subsection at the bottom of this page.

Home schools teach:
   Civics
   Ethics
   Christian principles
   Geography
   Grammar
   Penmanship, or at least legible handwriting
   American History and the reasons for America's superiority
   Math (without a calculator)
   Spelling (without a spell-checker)
   Reading, inference and comprehension
   Resistance to propaganda
   The benefits of capitalism and the proven dangers of communism
   Logical deduction and rational thinking
   Self-reliance and independence

The public schools teach:
   The answers to the next STAR test
   How to line up and march in single file (just like in prison)
   How to depend on the government for at least two meals a day
   How to count on your fingers and knuckles
   How to depend on a calculator for the simplest arithmetic
   How to watch television (instead of paying attention to a teacher)
   How to cheat on a test using a cell phone
   How to walk the halls in packs to avoid thugs who also walk the halls in packs
   How to throw the ball, catch the ball, kick the ball, and worship anyone who plays sports for a living
   How to save the earth from coal, oil and styrofoam
   101 ways to benefit from government handouts

If you place any value on your children's education, moral standards, personal safety, polite behavior, and eternal salvation, then you must get them out of the public school system.  Private schools are expensive, and home schooling is a lot of work, if you do it right, but the rewards are well worth the ivestments.

When you're finished here, read about the teachers' labor unions and the socialist ideas they support.

Note:  Items related to a 2008 court ruling in California are now located here

1 in 3 [will be] Homeschooled by 2030 as 16 Million Flee Public School, Forecast Finds.  With the ongoing exodus from government schools continuing to gather momentum, a new forecast by education researchers predicts that almost one third of school-age children will be homeschooled by the year 2030.  Just half of the student population will remain in government education by then, the analysts found.  The organization behind the predictions, a research institute known as The Learning Counsel, considered a wide array of factors in developing its forecasts of looming "significant shifts in the landscape and structures of education by 2030."  Major elements include new "choice" programs and growing resistance to union demands by governors.  According to The Learning Counsel's predictions, only 50.26 percent of American students will remain enrolled in public schools (including government charters and "virtual" schools) six years from now.

We Have Already Passed Peak Public School.  As back-to-school week wheezes into gear for the nation's 54 million or so children between the ages of five and 17, a startling, post-COVID reality is becoming more apparent, even if the implications are still too big to process.  It is this:  Though the U.S. population continues to grow, the number of kids attending public K-12 schools will likely never again reach its 2019 peak.  The rise of homeschooling — from around 2.8 percent of the school-aged population pre-pandemic to around 5.8 percent now (reliable statistics are hard to come by) — is a chief contributor to that decline, along with ever-decreasing birth rates.  Between fall of 2019 and fall of 2030, the National Center for Public Education Statistics (NCES) projected this past February, public school enrollment will decrease by 7 percent, from 50.8 million to 47.3 million.  So surely government spending on those schools, which typically amounts to around 20 percent of state/local budgets, will decrease too, right?  Ha ha, no.

What School Shooters Have in Common:  It's the schools.  [Scroll down]  What I really see as the way to end all school shootings is this: get rid of all schools.  And that's not a joke.  By "all schools" I mean public schools, the kind run by governments that overtax you and give money to totally incompetent people who have teachers' unions to protect them.  We should all be aware by now that kids learn very little in these schools, and what little they learn is likely to be wrong.  Thanks to the taxing power of school districts the schools and resulting "education" are hugely expensive and ineffective.  The reasons for school shootings are manifold, but one big one is that students are forced to go to the school in their area.  By high school, the districts are larger and there are often thousands of students who have to be there.  They are legally required to go to that specific school.  The term "sitting duck" was almost invented for them.  Out of those thousands of students, there is bound to be at least one who is unhappy and considers himself treated badly.

Report: More than 100,000 students withdraw from public schools to be home-schooled.  More than 100,000 students combined were withdrawn from public schools in 2022 and 2023 to be home-schooled, according to new report from the Texas Home School Coalition.  According to the THSC's latest analysis of Texas Education Agency and school district data, more than 50,000 students were pulled from public schools each year in 2022 and in 2023 in order to be home-schooled.  The numbers only relate to student withdrawals as they pertain to being home-schooled and exclude those withdrawn to be enrolled in private school.  The numbers also exclude families who never enrolled their children in public school and only home-schooled them.  The coalition notes that because of this, "total new home-school enrollment each year could be much higher."

Over 3 Million Students Are Homeschooled.  As millions of students across the country prepare to go back to traditional public school, some estimates are that over three million K-12 students will soon begin their semesters at home for various reasons.  Brian D. Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) — a non-profit group that collects data regarding homeschooling — shared with Chalkboard News that his "best estimate" is that there are "slightly more" kids learning at home in 2022-2023 than 2021-2022.  He cautioned that while his estimates for 2022-23 were not yet finalized, the initial estimates for the total number of homeschooled K-12 students "might have barely moved up to 3.2 million."

Homeschooling Grows as Families Escape Failing Schools.  North Carolina is one of the few states to keep detailed statistics on homeschoolers — who are famously resistant to scrutiny, and for good reason — and officials in the state recorded an interesting development this year.  After dipping from a pandemic-era high when public schools were closed or generally making a poor job of remote learning, the ranks of homeschoolers have again begun to rise.  With census figures showing similar growth elsewhere, we have further evidence that DIY education is here to stay.

'Scientific' Mag. Declares War on Homeschooling, Calls for Fed.  Regulations.  Scientific American magazine urged the federal government to regulate homeschooling and suggested that parents of homeschooled children should "undergo a background check."  The opinion was expressed in a June 17, 2024, newsletter, first citing the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) which shows that nearly three percent of American children — 1.5 million — were homeschooled in 2019, Breitbart News reported.  The leftists admitted in the newsletter that homeschooled children have excelled academically, using Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who was homeschooled by his mother, as an example.  Nevertheless, they still think that homeschooling is bad for children.

Michigan State Board Members Warn State Homeschool Registration List is a Precursor to "Unwarranted Home Entry".  The government loves putting people on "lists."  They want a list of the vaccinated.  A list of gun-owners.  A list of individuals who make purchases involving the terms "MAGA" and "Trump".  And now, in Michigan, legislators and the attorney general are pushing for a list of parents who homeschool their children.  But even more Orwellian, the dog-whistle is the possibility of "warrantless searches" for those who decide to homeschool their children in the Great Lakes State, according to one State Board of Education member.  On February 13th, the Michigan State Board of Education met for their monthly meeting.  Towards the end of the meeting, prior to closing, Board Member Tom McMillin of Oakland Township added his comments regarding a push to require registration requirements for homeschooling.

Warning: State Take Over of Private, Religious and Home-Schools if HB1610 Becomes Law!  This bill requires all students to participate in standardized statewide assessments.  Make no mistake about this one: if this legislation is passed, it essentially allows the GOVT/STATE to control our private, religious, and home schools.  How?  By making the children who receive EFA funds take the STATE Standardized Test.  The Education Freedom Account (EFA) is one of the current school choice programs in NEW Hampshire.  It would mean that children who use the school choice (EFA) money to go to a private, religious, or home school would be forced to take the STATE Standardized test.  THIS IS A THREAT TO EVERY PRIVATE, RELIGIOUS, and HOME-SCHOOL family in New Hampshire!!  It MUST be STOPPED!  Currently, students who participate in the school choice program (EFA) can take the standardized test offered at their private, religious, or home school.  This legislation would change that.  All of these EFA students would have to take the STATE standardized test, which is COMMON CORE ALIGNED. In Indiana and Ohio, when children used their vouchers to attend private and religious schools and were forced to take the STATE standardized test, those schools began aligning their curriculum to Common Core.  This is a de facto takeover of our private and religious schools!

Michigan State Officials Call for Registry of Homeschooled Children.  Michigan officials are calling upon state lawmakers to enact a mandatory state registry of all homeschooled children in Michigan.  Since December 2023, Michigan state officials — including Attorney General Dana Nessel, the state House and Senate Education Committee chairs, the State Board of Education, and State Superintendent Michael Rice — have criticized homeschooling and called for stricter government regulation and oversight over homeschooled students and their parents.  The motivation for these attacks was the arrest in December of two couples in Clinton County for "allegedly abusing and financially profiting from foster and adopted children."  However, instead of focusing on the crime itself — or on the high levels of abuse in government schools — these officials are broadly attacking homeschooling and parents seeking alternatives to government schools.  For example, Attorney General Nessel alleged that homeschooling had contributed to the couples' actions.

[A] Homeschooling revolution [is] reshaping American education.  In the ever-evolving landscape of American education, a quiet revolution is taking place.  Over the past six years, home schooling has surged by 51%, in stark contrast to the 7% rise in private school enrollment, and a 4% dip in public schools over the same period, according to an in-depth look by the Washington Post at thousands of school districts spanning 32 states which provide accurate data.  Once limited to the peripheries of mainstream education, home schooling is rapidly emerging as a force to be reckoned with. [...] The pandemic, with its sweeping disruptions to conventional schooling, undoubtedly served as a catalyst for this seismic shift.  Schools across the country shuttered, forcing millions of families to grapple with remote learning and rethink the entire educational paradigm.  Yet, as the pandemic wanes and schools reopen, shedding many of their COVID-19 constraints, the surge in home schooling has not only persisted but flourished.

Public School Refuseniks.  According to one estimate I have seen, in 1973 there were only about 13,000 children being homeschooled.  Today the number is over 5 million — and may be much higher, as many states do not track the numbers very carefully.  The Washington Post has noticed, and you can tell they are worried about it.  (The left has always hated homeschooling, and the teachers unions rightly understand what a threat homeschooling is to their gravy train, as most public schools derive their revenue by how many students are enrolled.)

Biden Admin to Deport Christian Homeschool Family.  The Biden Administration has ordered a German homeschool family, who came to America legally, to leave the country.  The move comes as the White House has turned a blind eye to millions of illegals invading the southern border.  The Romeike family was forced to flee Germany in 2008 after they were persecuted by the government for homeschooling their children.  The Germans levied fines against the family and threatened to take away their children.  I documented the plight of the family for years when I was working at Fox News.  Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their five children eventually settled in eastern Tennessee and were granted indefinite deferred action status.  The evangelical Christians were allowed to live, work, and remain safely in the United States without fear of deportation.

Not All Refugees Are Welcome.  As the border crisis spirals out of control, the Biden Regime responds by granting legal status to 470,000 illegal aliens from the socialist basket case Venezuela, encouraging Third World hordes to invade in still greater numbers so as to displace the American population, transforming the country forever.  The border is wide open, and it seems that once in the country, anyone from anywhere can avoid deportation by claiming refugee status.  But there are exceptions:  ["]Uwe Romeike and his wife Hannah moved their seven children to the U.S. in 2008 to avoid religious persecution in their native land, where the parents had pulled their children from public schools to teach them at home.["]  They were heavily fined, and armed police dragged their kids off to public school, which is presumably no more suitable for Christians in Germany than it is in the USA, where at least it isn't mandatory.

The Great Untethering.  [Scroll down]  Consider that up until now, the schooling of most children has meant sending them through a predictable thirteen-year program at the local public school.  And since a family's only way to control the quality of that program was to buy or rent a residence in the most affluent zip code it could afford, the parents had to accept considerable restrictions of their own.  These limits included living in a certain kind of community, becoming slave to a high mortgage and property taxes, missing out on career and investment opportunities in less-developed areas, and associating with neighbors who are resigned to making the same compromises.  School choice clearly enables parents to pick the kind of schooling best suited to their child's needs and personality.  But it also liberates the parents themselves to live anywhere they wish — to start a small business, to get an advanced degree, to help a favored charity, or simply to enjoy a different culture — all without having to sacrifice the quality of their kids' educations.

Homeschooling will revolutionize education and society.  Imagine a kid with a smart, dedicated, private, full-time tutor who dearly loves him, never goes on strike, and conducts classes within walking distance at a place that is physically and emotionally safe.  It's called "homeschooling."  Homeschooling used to be illegal.  Children were required to attend organized schools even if they were physically assaulted, as I was, or were shaken down for their lunch money daily, as I was.  (Other than the physical assaults and thievery and emotional torment and a few other things, I have very fond memories of public school.)  Later, homeschooling became slightly more common but was still an offbeat thing.  It was mainly something for oddball religious sects.  Never mind that the kids "victimized" by it tended to be very knowledgeable and well-adjusted and won all the spelling bees.  They were considered weirdos because their parents were considered weirdos.  COVID changed that.  Politicians and the teachers' unions that owned them, looking as always for more money and less work, shut down the schools.

Educating For Today.  Someone defined education as "that which is done to prepare a child for life."  If that is truly the definition, then our schools are doing a terrible job.  Many kids graduate from school believing somehow that the world owes them a living; that they have a right to a good income, whether they happen to work or not. [...] One result of the COVID-19 lockdowns is that it forced parents to see what their children were experiencing in school.  Many were upset enough they decided to make the sacrifice and home-school their children.  They were surprised that it really was not much of a sacrifice and that their children did so well it caused them to wonder why they had not started teaching them sooner. [...] Parents who home-school have discovered that teaching is fairly simple.  One of the joys they have experienced is seeing their children excel in achievement.  In fact, children want to learn, and will do so if we do not discourage them.  Our schools have known for a hundred years that the best way to teach reading is a system of phonics, yet they continue to use a look-say method in one form or another.  With that system the child memorizes certain words, and so it is limited by how many words he can memorize.  With phonics the child learns the meaning and pronunciation of every letter, and knowing that, he can read almost any word.  Children can learn to read at age three or four; they can read words that are beyond their understanding, but they can pronounce them.

Why Families Are More Important Than Ever.  Your favorite politicians, journalists, teachers, and even celebrities are uninterested in truth and instead are interested in pushing a specific agenda (whatever that agenda happens to be). Every news organization out there has a specific slant they consistently maintained, pushing out independent minded journalists in favor of people willing to submit to whatever narrative is currently popular amongst readers.  State funded schools, unsurprisingly, favor statist policies.  Regardless of whether your children are in public schools, private schools, or in home schooling, you have the power to dispel some of this propaganda.  You can spend time teaching your kids about your values and philosophies and why they're important to you.  You can help point out some of the flaws and shortcomings in the lessons they've learned elsewhere.  But most importantly, you can spend time teaching them the power of critical thinking, so they can reliably assess the accuracy and veracity of the information they encounter in the future.

Why suburban women are flocking to the GOP: As simple as A,B,C.  [Scroll down] Even in 2020, The Atlantic reported that parents in New York, worried about crime and bad schools, were taking over the education of their kids.  Since then, as schools did a worse and worse job, more and more parents decided to educate their own kids.  Many kept it up post-pandemic.  As the Associated Press reported: "In 18 states that shared data through the current school year, the number of homeschooling students increased by 63% in the 2020-2021 school year, then fell by only 17%" the next year.  (It's not just white suburban women.  Black families, too, as The New Yorker recently reported, are increasingly homeschooling their kids.)

Lenin is Educating Your Children.  About 46 million students attend traditional Public Schools and another 3.5 million attend Public Charter Schools.  Also, about 4 million are homeschooled while another 5 million are in private schools.  The number of children abandoning traditional public schools is on the rise.  Government leaders don't want to talk about either the megatrends affecting enrollment or when offered a choice, how many parents vote with their feet.  Traditional education leaders are frantic to change the subject when challenged and offer bogus excuses for their failure to deliver a good academic education.

How Can Teachers Expect to Regain Support from Parents?  The politicization of the education system has destroyed parent-teacher relations.  Instead of encouraging healthy communication among parents, teachers, and administrators, public school officials have continued undermining parental rights and implementing their own political ideologies into coursework.  Teachers unions work to vilify concerned parents and label them as "extremists" for showing up and trying to be involved in their children's educational process.  Sixty-eight percent of parents surveyed by The Learning Heroes expressed concerns about politicians making curriculum decisions.  Eighty-two percent of parents recently admitted in a Harris Poll that they are willing to change their political affiliation over educational policies.  Trust in the public education system has dropped to a second all-time low, and conservative and moderate teachers recognize this.  They are leaving left-leaning in favor of private schools, microschools, and homeschooling options.  I have been homeschooling my children for over 10 years now.

Texas School District Brands Homeschooling as 'Dangerous' to Intimidate Parents.  This is a rather odd way to try to prevent parents from homeschooling their children.  A North Texas school district was recently exposed for making a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate parents who are pulling their children out of school.  Madison Bratcher, the mother of a girl who was enrolled in the Bridgeport Independent School District (BISD), received an odd reaction from her daughter's school after withdrawing her.  "Her daughter was bullied, exposed to inappropriate sexual talk by other students, and mistreated in classes and on the bus.  Bratcher said she raised these issues with her daughter's school, but they were not addressed," according to a report from The Texan.  "All of these incidents show that Bridgeport doesn't have the best interest of students at heart," Bratcher told the news outlet.  Bratcher and her husband made the decision to homeschool McKinley, their daughter, who is in the sixth grade.

The Editor says...
This is why you need to learn your rights before homeschooling.  The school district will lie to you, and to everybody else, because the school district is paid in proportion to the number of students enrolled.  Homeschooling laws differ from one state to another, but HSLDA is a good source of helpful information.

And then they wonder why parents are pulling their kids out.  We see it all around us.  I meet more and more parents who are homeschooling or doing whatever it takes to take their kids out of public schools.  In California, for example, 250,000 have dropped out.  Well, one thousand here, one thousand there, and pretty soon a lot of kids are not attending their local public schools.

Private schools [and] homeschoolers [are] booming as parents exit public schools.  Eleanor Jones started homeschooling her learning-disabled son in the fall of 2020 when Maryland's public schools were virtual — and she's had no desire to send him back since they've reopened.  Now 10, her son was born with severe hearing loss due to a congenital inner ear anomaly.  He wears cochlear implants to hear, suffers from a processing disorder and reads lips to understand others at his home in Westminster, 36 miles northwest of Baltimore.  "He didn't handle masks well," Ms. Jones said Friday.  "We decided to continue homeschooling this year as things still don't seem to be completely settled regarding COVID mandates, particularly in school settings."

NYT: Say, where have all the public-school students gone?  Over one million students have evaporated from public school rolls over the last two years, the New York Times reported late yesterday.  "No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off," writes reporter Shawn Hubler.  Really? [...] Did anything unusual happen in the last two years?  To be fair to Hubler, she offers at least two obvious explanations, but seems more concerned about the impact on public schools from them rather than the students.

Public schools are feeling the fallout from the COVID lockdowns.  Vladimir Lenin allegedly said, "Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted."  America's leftists have taken those words to heart and, since the 1930s, have assiduously winnowed their way into America's education system.  The COVID lockdown, for all its destruction, may have ended up performing a huge service by exposing to parents just how bad the leftist toxin has grown in the last ten to fifteen years.  The sea change in parental attitudes toward education is shown in the fact that, across America, public school enrollment is collapsing.

Maryland Legislature Kills Bill to Collect Home-Schoolers Information.  After pressure from Maryland parents, Democrat Delegate Sheila Ruth (Baltimore) has announced that she will not longer push the bill she initially sponsored to collect information on households homeschooling their children.

Maryland Legislature Considers Creating 'Advisory Council' to Collect Data on Homeschoolers.  If we have learned anything about left-wing cultural revolutionaries over the past few years and decades, it's that they insist that all conform to their view of "diversity."  All are welcome, except for those who disagree.  That's why it's so troubling to see government authorities rope in, and attempt to control, people attempting to maintain their independence.  Maryland Delegate Sheila Ruth, a Baltimore County Democrat, recently proposed legislation in the Maryland House of Delegates that would create a deeply worrisome "advisory council" to watch over and gather data on homeschool families.  The 16-seat council would be staffed by four political appointees, four government officials, and eight members of the homeschool community.  It would "gather information on the needs of homeschool parents and homeschool umbrella schools," and would effectively sweep homeschool parents under the wing of a government agency.

100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids.  From fostering creativity and freedom to providing impressive educational outcomes, homeschooling is an increasingly appealing option.

Leftists are using our children as pawns for all their policies.  One of the most obvious things leftists have done is to destroy the school systems' ability to teach anything meaningful, replacing real knowledge with "correct think" drivel that denies everything from history to mathematics to science in favor of inclusion, diversity, LGBTQ "training," and such.  Leftists believe that, if this continues, they'll have a malleable and manageable bunch of kids who grow up to become shills for their point of view.  What leftists miss is that we have a goodly number of intelligent children — the rebels, questioners, and readers — willing to go beyond the leftist soft porn now replacing reality in the school library and ferret out truth for themselves.  Many kids in this group have parents still awake enough not to be woke, who are willing to go to the mat to preserve our republic, and willing and able to counteract what their kids are force-fed with lessons in reality.  Many have become homeschoolers to avoid kowtowing to the system.

We've Only Just Begun To See The Benefits Of The New Surge In Homeschooling.  Parents across America were caught unprepared for the mass closure of government schools in 2020.  Soon after, however, many decided they and their children had had enough of the status quo.  Now at a crossroads, will they choose reform or repudiation?  The wave of ill-advised school shutdowns last year compelled tens of thousands of parents to rethink their children's education.  When the classroom was virtually forced into their homes via Zoom, parents realized just how abysmal the curricula and tutelage were.  Statistics on families fleeing to homeschooling must be worrying the education establishment.  From 2012 to 2019, the homeschooling rate hovered around 3.3 percent of K-12 US students.  That figure rose to 5.4 percent in spring 2020.  By the following fall, that figure had more than doubled to 11.1 percent.  Among black families, the increase was particularly noteworthy considering only 3.3 percent of black children were homeschooled in spring 2020 versus 16.1 percent in the fall.

Is there a wholly unexpected benefit from the left's COVID madness?  Thanks to the lockdowns and school closures, parents have been home to witness their children's distance learning.  They've seen, up close and personal, the Critical Race Theory, LGBTQ propaganda, and general anti-Americanism inundating their children.  And many parents, having seen it, haven't liked it.  And at long last, I'm ready to get to the two items I saw today that suggest the possibility of a Black Swan that leftists didn't see coming when they weaponized COVID to achieve the short-term goal of ridding themselves of Trump and the long-term goal of striking a blow at America's political, economic, and social infrastructures.  The first story is that, in Washington State, 55,000 students have withdrawn from the public school system.  Many withdrew for the reasons mentioned above, as well as the fact that public schools are failing at their core mission, which is to teach children basic skills, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.

US Surge in Homeschooling Sparked by More Than Pandemic.  Because of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, there's been a surge in homeschooling in the United States.  The U.S. Census Bureau conducted what it calls its "experimental Household Pulse Survey," described on the bureau's website as "the first data source to offer both a national and state-level look at the impact of COVID-19 on homeschooling rates."  The survey shows "a substantial increase" in homeschooling from spring 2020 to the start of the school year the following fall.  These dates coincide with the start of the pandemic.  But the surge didn't end there.  In March, the agency reported that the number of households with at least one homeschooled child more than doubled to 11.1 percent from 5.4 percent.

Mom gets standing ovation after calling for 'mass exodus' from public schools.  Florida mom Quisha King called for a "mass exodus" from the public school system, arguing that school officials left parents with no other choice for fighting left-wing ideas.  Her comments came during the Family Research Council's annual Pray Vote Stand Summit during a Thursday panel on "Fighting Indoctrination on a National Scale."  "I really think at this point the only thing to do is have a mass exodus from the public school system — that's it," King said.  In response, she received prolonged applause, and many in the audience rose to their feet at the Leesburg, Virginia, event.

Homeschooling [is] Growing by Leaps and Bounds.  Homeschooling numbers have increased over 300% in the last two years, according to federal government Census data.  This spike does not include Americans engaged in virtual learning through a public or private school program due to COVID protocols.  These are full-time homeschoolers.  The United States Census Bureau has been tasked with collecting data through nationwide surveys for over 80 years.  The data are intended for use by other government agencies and elected officials for policy decisions.  This is the first time the Census Bureau has sought to identify the total number of homeschoolers in America.  Previous surveys only marked children who were un-enrolled in public or private school.  That rate usually hovered around 3.3% and was as high as 5.4% in 2019.  Homeschool families have been traditionally seen as a small minority and have been largely ignored by elected representatives.

A Deserved 'Moment of Truth' for Public Schools as a Record Number of Parents Opt Out.  The public school system in America is in crisis — the worst crisis since the forced bussing and integration issues of the 1970s.  Simply put, parents and students have lost faith in the school system to educate.  They doubt whether the schools have the best interests of their students at heart.  This poisonous doubt is having a tangible effect on enrollment.  Despite the fact that public education is free, parents are sending their children to private schools with more reliable, more predictable policies.  Enrollment in public schools nationwide declined by 3 percent last year.  But it was the numbers for kindergarten enrollment that should chill the blood of teachers' unions and school district officials.  Kindergarten enrollment tanked by 13 percent last year, and it's only expected to get worse this year.

As thousands of teachers endorse critical race theory, home schooling surges.  In the past few months state legislatures across the country have passed resolutions that ban schools from teaching the Marxist and bigoted program dubbed Critical Race Theory (CRT).  Not surprisingly, the leftists who dominate our school systems have fought back.  The very leftist Zinn Education Project immediately created a petition calling for teachers to defy such laws and to continue to teach CRT, which teaches children to hate whites and to give minorities privileged status.  In the two months this petition has been on line almost 6,000 teachers have signed it, with many adding comments of defiance.

Classroom Cameras Won't Stop Big Education.  During my forty-plus years of teaching — both inside the classroom and outside as a tutor — public education has morphed into Big Education, and it is as protective of itself as are Big Tech and Big Media.  Big Education is no longer largely populated by people who believe in teaching critical thinking and knowledge, people who encourage innovation and creativity by modeling those qualities in their own classrooms.  Rather, it is populated with generations of teachers and "educators" who worship at the altar of the latest "approved" pedagogy, methodology, and ideology, and who work hard to keep everyone in line.  Big Education, again like Big Tech and Big Media, is particularly adept at repelling foreign invaders and is willing to repel them with great ferocity. [...] Big Education has convinced parents that they have no other option than sending their children to their local public school because (and here is the Big Lie) no one can be a teacher without a state certificate in teaching.

Famous Investor:  The Homeschooling Boom Is Just Beginning.  Speculation abounds over whether or not the pandemic-induced growth in homeschooling is temporary.  While there are several signs indicating that parents won't be sending their children back to public schools this fall, and homeschooling continues to be a popular choice, the question remains:  for how long and to what extent?  According to remarks by one prominent investor, this is just the beginning of a widespread shift away from conventional schooling models toward disruptive innovation in education — with homeschooling leading the way.  "It certainly feels like we're on the front end of a pretty dramatic homeschooling boom," said Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the original Mosaic web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and co-founder and general partner of the leading venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.

Homeschooling Skyrocketed In 2020, As Much As 700 Percent In Some States.  Between May and October 2020, homeschooling more than doubled among U.S. households with school-age children, from 5.4 percent that spring to 11.1 percent that fall, according to new Census Bureau data.  Black and Hispanic Americans were the most likely to switch to homeschooling, while white and Asian Americans were the least likely.  This could be due to the fact that African-American children are the most likely to be financially locked into poor-quality school districts, or that black Americans have been the most likely to exhibit COVID caution, or some combination.

Homeschool Your Children.  Plain and simple.  If a Christian is true to their faith, by putting their faith in God and Only God through Christ, then God will lead them to do what is right, and the right thing to do is to Homeschool.  In 99% of the World, the government's education system is anti-Christian.  So why are you sending your child to be indoctrinated against you and your GOD?  I specifically blame pastors who fail to educate the flock as to the importance of homeschooling. [...] Homeschooling does NOT need to be a difficult, nor cumbersome task.  Put faith in GOD, and I promise that He will be faithful to those who are truly faithful to Him.

Rethinking American Education.  Public K-12 education in this country suffers from a lack of effective competition that prevents market forces from working the way they should.  What would happen if there was school choice in America today?  Parents who are dissatisfied with the educational product their public schools provide could vote with their feet and take their tax dollars and their children to schools that offer better value.  Opposition to school choice is highly regressive because the wealthiest families have the ability to pay twice for their children's education, first through taxes and second through private school tuition.  This is not an option for lower-income households.  The benefits of school choice are substantial. [...] The teachers' unions oppose school choice precisely because it would force public schools across the country to actually compete on the merits or perish the way any underperforming enterprise should.

A Tsunami of Hate.  [Scroll down]  To be fair, there are two main areas of systemic racism in America today, but both are supported and enforced by the Democrat Party, which is why they exist.  The first is the systemic racism that traps inner city children — mainly ethnic minorities — in inferior schools that for fifty years and more have failed to provide 80 percent of them with the skills that are necessary to succeed.  Every year 40% of inner city children drop out of school without graduating, and 40% of those who do, are functionally illiterate.  The Democrat teacher unions — the same which went on strike during the pandemic with full pay at the expense of children who could not afford to miss school — exert absolute control over these school systems and have stifled all attempts at reforms.  They are unalterably opposed to every alternative to their racist policies, from charter schools to vouchers that give inner city kids the same privilege as their middle-class counterparts, to allow their parents to enroll them in schools that will teach them.

8 Education Choice Wins in 2020.  This year, the coronavirus pandemic presented new hurdles for 55.1 million students and their families after 124,000 public and private schools closed nationwide.  Despite these unprecedented challenges, policymakers and families responded quickly with innovative solutions, which helped to advance education choice in 2020.  Here are eight examples of education choice wins from this year: [...] [#4] Learning Pods Explode in Popularity:  Learning pods entered the education foray as parents — dissatisfied with the crisis virtual options implemented by many district schools — collaborated to create small education environments that emphasize in-person schooling to small student groups.  As civil society's response to the education crisis caused by the pandemic, learning pods gained widespread popularity.  According to a nationally representative EdChoice poll, 35% of parents claimed to participate in a learning pod, and nearly 20% of respondents indicated they were looking for a learning pod to join.  The popularity of learning pods was not limited to students and their families, as approximately 70% of surveyed teachers expressed interest in teaching or tutoring a learning pod.

The Editor says...
As I may have mentioned before, the idea of "learning pods" has been around for a long time.  In homeschool circles, they are often called "homeschool co-ops."  Not every homeschooling parent has a math degree (like Mrs. Editor) or is a state-certified teacher (like Mrs. Editor), but many homeschooling parents have skills that can be shared with a dozen other families once a week, usually in a church classroom.

Why John Saxon Is the Brightest Star in Math Education.  Homeschooling parents unerringly find the most efficient textbooks.  This is only natural if you have to spend all day at a kitchen table teaching children.  A decade back, I was startled to find homeschoolers almost unanimous in praising the legendary John Saxon (1923-1996).  What was his secret?  Saxon, with three advanced degrees in mathematical subjects, flew jet planes in the Air Force, first as a bomber pilot and then as a test pilot.  Reaching retirement age, he wasn't certain what to do next.  A counselor suggested he teach math at a community college.  He liked the idea but was dismayed to find that his students knew almost no math.  Now he had found his destiny.  He would fix this problem.  How could he possibly do that?  By creating better textbooks.  He ended up creating a publishing empire that was sold for roughly $100,000,000 in 2004.  Saxon had a big heart, an exceptional mind, and a precise vision of how children can most quickly learn arithmetic.

Black Education Matters.  Most Americans would probably be shocked and angry if they knew all the dirty tricks used to sabotage charter schools that are successfully educating low-income minority children.  This is not "systemic racism."  It is plain old selfishness on the part of traditional public school officials and teachers unions protecting their own vested interests.  Most of us might see charter schools that succeed where traditional public schools have failed as welcome news, especially in minority communities where there is so much bad news.  But, when there are a million public school students on waiting lists to get into charter schools nationwide, that amounts to many billions of dollars a year that traditional public schools would lose, if all those students could actually transfer.  That would represent a lot of jobs lost in traditional public schools.  It would also represent a lot of union dues lost, because most charter school teachers do not belong to a union.  The success of many charter schools is definitely unwelcome news to both traditional public school officials and teachers unions.

The Truth Is Out.  We Don't Need The Public School System.  A recent article in The Atlantic tells us that the pandemic has families leaving the public school system in droves and embracing homeschooling.  This shift, we are told, may be permanent.  From the article:  "Homeschooling families, which included roughly 3 percent of school-age children in the United States in 2016, have lots of different reasons for wanting to educate their own kids.  But they're united in a common assessment:  They want out of the traditional system.  The question is whether COVID-19 will cause a temporary bump in homeschooling as parents piece together their days during the pandemic or mark a permanent inflection point in education that continues long after the virus has been controlled.  Some families may find that they want to exit the system for good."

Gallup Poll:  Homeschooling Rate Doubles as School Satisfaction Plummets.  Results of a new Gallup poll released this week may give us the sharpest look yet at how the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted American education and what may lie ahead.  According to the poll, parents' overall satisfaction with their child's education dropped 10 percent over last year, while at the same time the number of parents saying they will choose homeschooling doubled in 2020 to 10 percent.  Throughout the summer, parents have expressed their frustration with back-to-school plans, including disappointment over continued remote learning and strict social distancing requirements.  Homeschooling registrations soared across the country, and many families began to spontaneously organize "pandemic pods" to offer small group learning and social interaction for their children.  Opting out of conventional schooling this fall for homeschooling or "podding" has become not only acceptable but widely embraced.

A.G. Barr on 'Public Education:' 'That's a Racist System Maintained by the Democratic Party and the Teachers Union'.  If you want to find "systemic racism" in America, then look no further than the public schooling system, which is "maintained by the Democratic Party and the teachers' unions," said Attorney General William P. Barr.  The entire system keeps "inner-city kids in failing schools," he added.  "And people talk about implicit racism or systemic racism," said Barr during an Aug. 13 interview on Hannity.  "The racism in this country, look no further than our public education system."  "That's a racist system, maintained by the Democratic Party and the teachers union," he said, "keeping inner-city kids in failing schools, instead of putting the resources in the hands of the parents to choose the schools to send their kids to."  "That's empowering kids," said Barr.  "That's giving them a future."

Profs to white parents:  Keep your kids in public schools to show you're not racist.  A pair of Minnesota professors say one of the ways in which white parents can demonstrate a commitment to "anti-racism" is to keep their children in public schools.  The University of Minnesota's Abby Rombalski and Carleton College's Anita Chikkatur, both professors of education, write in MinnPost.com that (white) parents who transfer their kids to private or charter schools end up putting funding for public schools "at serious risk."

Maryland Gov. Hogan clashes with officials over county mandate for private schools to go virtual.  Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and officials in the state are at odds over a county's decision to mandate private schools to begin virtual-only learning this fall amid the coronavirus pandemic.  Health officials in Montgomery County last week made the decision to keep private and parochial schools closed through October for in-person learning, arguing that having students in the classroom would present a danger to pupils and teachers as the state grapples with COVID-19.

'Pandemic Pods' Are Fundamentally Reshaping K-12 Education.  The practice of organizing "pandemic pods," in which parents team up with other families in their neighborhoods or social circles to hire teachers for their children, is getting more and more popular by the minute.  With many school districts around the country planning not to reopen classrooms this fall — or, at best, planning to offer some combination of virtual and in-class instruction — families are clamoring to secure education consistency for their children as the school year quickly approaches.  So what, exactly, do these pods look like?  Families work together to recruit teachers that they pay out-of-pocket to teach small groups — "pods" — of children.  It's a way for clusters of students to receive professional instruction for several hours each day.

The Editor says...
This system has been around for decades.  It's called a Home School Co-op.  Classes meet once or twice a week, usually at a church, and competent teachers instruct the kids on technical subjects, for a nominal fee.

More parents consider homeschooling as permanent option during coronavirus pandemic.  Jacklynn Walters has homeschooled her oldest child for the last 6 years.  When schools closed early this year to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, this mom of four says she didn't have to worry about her children's education.  "I had a number of parents concerned about their child getting behind because they weren't finishing that last little bit of their school semesters," she said.  "It wasn't something in my mind.  I didn't have to worry about my child getting behind or even in the future."  Walters volunteers as the media director for the homeschooling organization Midwest Parent Educators.  She says more parents are inquiring about homeschooling.

9 Radical Ideas in the Biden-Sanders 'Unity' Platform.  Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released the policy recommendations of their "unity task force" on Wednesday [7/8/2020]. [...] Here are nine of the most radical proposals in the "unity" document: [...] [#7] "Oppose private school vouchers."  There is growing support for school vouchers that allow students to escape failing public schools in their local districts by choosing alternative schools — including private and religious schools.  Vouchers are especially popular with minority families, who are desperate to escape the failing system in which the teachers' unions have trapped their children.  Democrats also want to restrict the expansion of charter schools, too.

Enemies Of Homeschooling Are Scared.  Here's Why.  Nearly every family with kids has gotten a taste of homeschooling over the past two months.  In an attempt to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, at least 124,000 schools have closed for over 55 million children in the U.S. At the same time, opponents of homeschooling launched several unfounded attacks on the practice.  For example, The Washington Post ran an opinion piece claiming "homeschooling during the coronavirus will set back a generation of children," and a Salon article said that "homeschooling as a result of the pandemic will likely worsen education for students and pose serious problems to the economy and nation's social well-being."  The most relentless attacks on homeschooling, however, have come from publications affiliated with Harvard University.  Harvard Magazine initially released an article on "The Risks of Homeschooling," highlighting the work of Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who calls for a presumptive ban on the practice because she believes it "violates children's right to a 'meaningful education' and their right to be protected from potential child abuse."

Homeschooling Thrives in the Face of Coronavirus.  The government has closed most schools.  So, more parents are teaching kids at home. [...] Debbie Dabin, a mom in Utah, is one of many parents who started home schooling this spring and now is "definitely considering home schooling" next year.  Dabin bought teaching materials over the internet from a company called "The Good and the Beautiful."  Her son likes the lessons better than what he got in school.  "It's great," Dabin says.  "He likes the activities; he wants to do them."  Before the pandemic, he'd told his mom he hated school.  I hated school, too.  Classes were boring.  Listening to lectures is a poor way to learn, and unnecessary today.  In addition to home-school teaching programs, there are also free internet games that teach things like math, reading, and writing, while customizing the speed of lessons to each learner's needs.

Kommissar Bartholet of Harvard Casts Her Jaundiced Eye on Homeschooling.  Not unsurprisingly, a Harvard law professor has recommended banning homeschooling.  Elizabeth Bartholet recently called for a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden of justifying this method of education resting on the parents, who would have to obtain the permission of the state.  She says homeschooling gives parents absolute power over their children, which is against state laws and the Constitution and violates children's human rights.  What is fascinating is how she attacks the right of parents to raise their children in accordance with their beliefs, savages conservative Christians who have refused to kowtow to liberal shibboleths that these parents wish to protect their children from, and disparages the quality of education the children receive.

'It Was Just Too Much': How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents.  Daniel Levin's son, Linus, 7, was supposed to be doing math.  Instead, he pretended to take a shower in the living room, rubbing a dry eraser under his arms like a bar of soap, which upset his 5-year-old sister, distracting her from her coloring.  As much as he tried, Mr. Levin, who lives in Brooklyn, could not get Linus to finish the math.  His hopes for the reading assignment were not high, either.  "He's supposed to map out a whole character trait sheet today," Mr. Levin said one day last week.  "Honestly, if he writes the name and the age of the character, I'll consider that a victory."

The Editor says...
Home schooling is difficult, and the task is especially hard because of the pressure on little kids to learn advanced material in the earliest grades.  Ridiculous standards like Common Core don't help matters, either.

Harvard vs. the Family.  This June, pandemic conditions permitting, Harvard University will host a conference — not open to the public — to discuss the purported dangers of homeschooling and strategies for legal reform.  The co-organizer, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, believes that homeschooling should be banned, as it is "a realm of near-absolute parental power. ... inconsistent with a proper understanding of the human rights of children." [...] Harvard [magazine] claims, based on a Bartholet law review article, that as many as 90 percent of homeschoolers are "driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture."  But Bartholet's research falls short of supporting this observation.  In fact, we know strikingly little about homeschooling families.  A 2013 review of the academic literature noted that, while academics assume that conservative Christians make up the largest subset of homeschoolers, "whether this percentage is two-thirds, one-half, or less is a matter of speculation."

Harvard to Host Pro-Homeschoolers in Response to 'Disinformation Campaign Against Homeschooling'.  Harvard stirred controversy earlier this month when they announced a June invitation-only summit to discuss increased regulations and a presumptive ban on homeschooling.  The event, dubbed, "Homeschooling Summit:  Problems, Politics, and Prospects for Reform," is set to feature a who's-who of academics, lawyers, and activists who have been outspoken in their belief that parents should not legally be allowed to educate their children at home.

Harvard Professor Doesn't Want You to Be Alone with Your Children.  [H]er name is Elizabeth Bartholet.  She's a law professor at Harvard.  Not only is she a law professor at Harvard, she is the faculty director of Harvard's child advocacy program.  And she is not happy. [...] She is worried about your children being homeschooled by you, the parents.  She is worried about your children being forced into lockdown with their parents, with you all day, every day.  This is unacceptable to Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard's child advocacy program.  This is a huge, huge problem that parents have this kind of access to their children and thus have this kind of access to their education.  Professor Bartholet says that the question is whether parents should have 24/7 essentially authoritarian control over their children from age 0 to 18.

Elites go to war on homeschooling — just when everyone's doing it.  Schools have closed for more than 55 million students nationwide, and at least 34 states have shuttered schools for the rest of the academic year.  Just in time, our media and academic elites are coming out swinging against homeschooling.  The Washington Post and Salon have raised questions about the practice lately.  More alarming, Harvard Magazine this week unleashed a thoroughly unfounded attack on homeschooling, drawing on the work of Harvard University law professor Elizabeth Bartholet.  The article cited Bartholet's call for "a presumptive ban," because homeschooling supposedly "violates children's right to a 'meaningful education' and their right to be protected from potential child abuse."

Harvard Professor Wants A 'Presumptive Ban' On Homeschooling, Claims It Promotes White Supremacy.  In a shocking essay for Harvard Magazine, a professor of law and director of Harvard Law School's child advocacy legal clinic, claims homeschooling is a threat to children's rights, a method of promoting white supremacy, and a drain on democratic society — and even goes so far as to suggest a national "presumptive ban" on the practice.  Harvard is playing host to a "homeschooling summit," slated to take place (at least digitally) June 18-19, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.  But Harvard's concern isn't so much whether homeschooling is a viable, cost-effective, and comfortable method of education for many Americans, but rather whether homeschooling is (and homeschooled children are) a ticking time bomb.  The summit brings together a number of "experts" from across the spectrum to discuss the "problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling, in a legal environment of minimal or no oversight."

The Welcome Rise of Homeschooling.  New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced public schools will be closed for the rest of the academic year due to the new coronavirus.  More mayors and governors will likely make similar announcements, if they have not already done so.  Rather than look upon this as a negative, I suspect some parents are enjoying new relationships with their children that full-time work and day care did not allow.  This new bonding experience could lead some to continue the practice of educating their children at home once this crisis has passed and public schools reopen.

Coronavirus: Perfect Time to Rescue Children From Public School.  Amid nationwide school closures due to the Wuhan virus (also known as coronavirus and COVID-19), advocates of real education through homeschooling and private Christian schools are pointing to a silver lining:  Millions of American children at home, safe from the increasingly extreme indoctrination, sexualization and dumbing down taking place in government schools.  As school closures were announced, proponents of homeschooling were quick to step in and offer support for the affected families.  Online alternatives also jumped in with offers of support, including free classes.

Welcome to Homeschooling, America!  Here in Georgia, the mass hysteria about the coronavirus has caused the governor to declare a "public health state of emergency."  He has advised public schools and daycare centers to close for two weeks in order to curb the opportunities for the virus to spread.  It's unclear which is causing more panic in the hearts of Georgia citizens — the coronavirus, the toilet paper shortage, or the fact that parents will have to be home with their children nonstop for two weeks straight.  Many other states are also closing schools, so millions of our nation's families are suddenly experiencing a little of what it's like to homeschool.

Record numbers homeschooling — Study shows interest from parents at 'all-time high'.  The percentage of American parents who want to homeschool their children is at an all-time high, and they're citing violence, drugs and bullying in public schools as the main reason why.  The 2019 Schooling In America survey, conducted by the school choice nonprofit EdChoice over the summer, details several interesting trends in education, including insight into what's driving the explosive growth in homeschooling in recent years.

Virginia case could test reach of homeschooling laws.  A legal fight in Virginia is drawing national attention over a county government demanding homeschooling families produce documents not required by an already-stringent state law.  The state's supreme court heard oral arguments Oct. 15 on behalf of the Sosebee family.  The family is appealing after a circuit court agreed with Franklin County schools late last year that state law allows flexibility not just for cafeteria meals and disciplinary rules, but also gives the public school district the legal right to request a birth certificate and a proof of residency.  The possible legal scope of such a ruling grabbed the attention of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association since the ruling on behalf of Franklin County could mean Virginia's 95 counties and 33 cities could create ad hoc rules for homeschoolers.

Parents Must Get Children Out of Public School.  Citing indoctrination and sexualization of children in government schools, along with other concerns, a number of top conservative and Christian voices across America have urged parents to remove their kids from public schools in recent days.  Among the leaders who have joined the growing nationwide chorus were talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh, evangelist Franklin Graham, Christian leader David Lane, and Catholic talk-show host Mother Miriam.  And this may be just the start.  Speaking on his radio show, which estimates suggest is heard by over 15 million Americans, Limbaugh blamed government education for the sorry state of affairs in America.  And for the first time ever, he brazenly urged parents to pull their children out and homeschool them.

Homeschooling Produces Better-Educated, More-Tolerant Kids.  Politicians Hate That.  There's no better sign of success than an escalation in attacks by your enemies.  Based on such evidence, homeschooling is enjoying a boom, as growing numbers of families with diverse backgrounds, philosophies, and approaches abandon government-controlled schools in favor of taking responsibility for their own children's education.  As they do so, they're coming under assault from officials panicking over the number of people slipping from their grasp.  There's little doubt that homeschooling is an increasingly popular option.  "From 1999 to 2012, the percentage of students who were homeschooled doubled, from an estimated 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent," reports the National Center for Education Statistics.  While the government agency suggests that growth has leveled off since then, other researchers say data is hard to come by, since many states simply don't count people who homeschool.

The German Government Forcibly Removed These Children From Their Parents Over Homeschooling.  The Wunderlich family wanted to do what thousands of families in America do with no questions asked:  educate their children at home.  But homeschooling is not allowed in Germany, and the state has relentlessly pursued the Wunderlichs and even seized their children.  One morning in August 2013, 33 police officers and seven social workers showed up at their front door, threatening to open it with a battering ram.  The parents cried as their children were carried screaming out of their home.  The children were later returned, but ordered to attend public school.  Since then, the Wunderlichs have continued their fight in court, ultimately reaching the European Court of Human Rights.

Homeschooling Skyrockets as Parents Wake Up to Left-Wing Social Engineering.  More parents are reportedly pulling their children out of government schools and opting to teach them at home due to the increasing levels of Left-wing counter-culture social engineering.  It's not just left-wing programming though, many parents in the US saw the recent school shooting at Parkland, Fla. as the 'last straw.'  The Washington Times noted, "the phones started ringing at the Texas Home School Coalition, and they haven't stopped yet."

Co-Founder of Group Opposed to School Choice Sends Her Kids To Charter School.  Remember when Obama, whose daughters attended the prestigious Sidwell Friends School, tried to destroy the school voucher program in DC, which had given an opportunity for minority kids to attend better schools?

School choice opponent sends her kids to charter school.  Sharon Kirsch, co-founder of Save Our Schools in Arizona (a group that vehemently opposes school choice) was recently outed for sending her children to a charter school.  Buried in an AZ Central article about a number of topics relating to school choice and education in Arizona, it's reported that "...Kirsch, who sends her children to a charter school, agreed with Robinson.  She said she's fortunate to be able to drive her children 25 miles to school each day, but knows that wouldn't be an option for many families."

Toxic Humanism.  By the time our youngest child got to middle school, the intensifying toxic indoctrination of false humanism made it hard for her and other pubescent children to accept their richer heritage and deeper moral orientation.  Routine exposure to a worldview that contradicts home training regarding basics of right and wrong, replacing Judeo-Christian morality with do what you want ("situation ethics," which in reality is no ethics), is a hazard to the mental and emotional development of a child.  The problem has led many to homeschool their children and many to fight the culture wars.

Homeschool attorneys ride to the rescue in WV.  West Virginia legislators updated and modernized the state's homeschooling laws in 2016 but a letter sent to parents failed to follow those new guidelines about notifications and testing, says attorney Mike Donnelly of the Home School Legal Defense Association.  Donnelly tells OneNewsNow that uncooperative school officials in Wirt County sent an outdated, error-filled letter to homeschoolers.  Wirt County has a population of approximately 5,800, the smallest county in the state.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Education:  The Homeschooling Option.  Americans have lost faith in the public school system.  Only 36 percent of U.S. parents have a "great deal" of support for public schools, according to a 2017 study by Gallup.  But despite this dismal reality, more than 90 percent of American children remain enrolled in public schools.  There is, however, a growing contingent of parents who are rejecting government schools and instead choosing to educate their own children at home.  Although homeschoolers only currently make up about 3.4 percent of the total student population, homeschooling is a shining example of what education freedom can deliver.  When it comes to standardized testing and other educational benchmarks, there is no denying that homeschoolers fare much better than their public school counterparts.

Why There's an Increased Interest in Homeschooling.  There's a lot to dislike about many public schools — and right now, student safety is at the top of the list.  "After a gunman opened fire on students in Parkland, Florida," a new Washington Times feature explains, "the phones started ringing at the Texas Home School Coalition, and they haven't stopped yet."  Like so many state organizations, the Texas organization was used to a certain number of inquiries about homeschooling.  President Tim Lambert says they usually averaged about 600 calls a month — a number he watched double over the past several weeks.  "When the Parkland shooting happened, our phone calls and emails exploded.  And they're not alone.

Homeschooling Rates Skyrocket As Parents Are Waking Up To Liberal Social Engineering & Violence.  These are only a few reasons for homeschooling your children, but the main reason should be because you honor God by doing so (Deut. 6) and your children get a far better education than they will in the public indoctrination centers we call public schools.  Don't think you can do it?  Don't think you can afford it?  If my wife and I can do it with 10 kids on one income, you can do it too!

Homeschooling surges as parents seek safer option for children.  After a gunman opened fire on students in Parkland, Florida, the phones started ringing at the Texas Home School Coalition, and they haven't stopped yet.  The Lubbock-based organization has been swamped with inquiries for months from parents seeking safer options for their kids in the aftermath of this year's deadly school massacres, first in Parkland and then in Santa Fe, Texas.  "When the Parkland shooting happened, our phone calls and emails exploded," said coalition president Tim Lambert.  "In the last couple of months, our numbers have doubled.  We're dealing with probably between 1,200 and 1,400 calls and emails per month, and prior to that it was 600 to 700."  Demands to restrict firearms and beef up school security have dominated the debate following the shootings, but flying under the radar is the surge of interest in homeschooling as parents lose faith in the ability of public schools to protect students from harm.

Here are 1,366 well sourced examples of Barack Obama's lies, lawbreaking, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, waste, etc..  [#176] In Germany in 1938, Adolf Hitler outlawed homeschooling.  He said "Give me a child when he's seven and he's mine forever."  Hitler's ban on homeschooling is still in effect today.  In 2006, Katharina Plett was arrested for homeschooling her own children.  Her husband and their children fled the country.  In 2008, Juergen and Rosemary Dudek were sentenced to 90 days in jail for homeschooling their own children.  Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their homeschooled children fled Germany after the police showed up at their house to enforce Germany's ban on homeschooling.  They came to the United States in 2010 and were granted political asylum, which gave them legal permission to live in the U.S. as political refugees.  However, in March 2013, the Obama administration argued in federal court in favor of deporting them and sending them back to Germany.  This means that Obama does not consider them to be political refugees, and that he does not consider Germany's policy of jailing homeschooling parents to be a form of persecution

How Homeschoolers Defeated California's Push to Take Power From Parents.  They came by the hundreds, one newspaper said — "perhaps thousands."  Some traveled hours, others waited hours, all for the opportunity to protest one of the most outrageous homeschooling bills ever introduced:  California's AB 2756.  Spilling out into crammed hallways and overflow rooms, families poured into the Statehouse just for the opportunity to spend a few minutes speaking out on a measure that would give the government more power over parents who educate at home.  Initially, the bill tried to mandate fire inspections of all homeschooling families (which, not surprisingly, firefighters rejected).  Then the proposal was amended — this time to force homeschooling families to give out private information about the names and address of homeschooling families.

California's crazy-intrusive politicians can't keep their hands off anything — Next up?  Homeschoolers!  [Scroll down]  The recently introduced Assembly Bills 2756 and 2926 are cases in point.  This first, AB 2756, requires fire marshals to perform in-home inspections of home-schoolers every year, implying that somehow home-educators are less fire-safe than other individuals.  This is, of course, egregiously discriminatory on its face.  But wait.  The second one is even worse!  With AB 2926, Assembly Member Susan Eggman proposes forming an appointed committee to "investigate" homeschooling.  The "instruction" committee would subsequently share its findings so that the California legislature might consider how best to regulate those families.  Because there isn't anything a bureaucrat loves more than a new regulation!  And these particular bureaucrats are already doing such a fine job of regulating our public schools that roughly half of California public school students surveyed reported experiencing bullying.

Sen. Ted Cruz says Democrats hate homeschoolers.  Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is furious after a provision that would have expanded 529 savings accounts to cover homeschool expenses was removed from the Republicans' tax reform plan.  Cruz joined the Todd Starnes Radio Show on Wednesday and blamed Democrats for having the homeschool component of the amendment removed from the bill.  Under the Cruz plan, homeschool families would've been able to deduct the cost of homeschooling their kids.  A provision allowing parents to save for private or religious schools remained in the bill.

Senate Democrats Target Homeschool Families in Last-Minute Tax Reform Tantrum.  As the Republican Party edged closer to passing historic tax reform, Democrats in the U.S. Senate used a last-minute procedural protest to attack homeschool families.  Their petty complaint struck the short title of the tax reform bill, one provision of the endowment tax, and the extension of college savings plans to homeschool expenses.  The homeschool attack proved particularly revealing.  The Republican tax bill would extend the use of 529 tax-advantaged saving plans — originally intended to foster saving for college tuition — to K-12 public and private schools, as well as homeschooling.  Rather than complaining that 529s should only be for college, the Democrats struck the homeschool provision, leaving the K-12 school extension in place.  Make no mistake:  this was a disgusting attack on the families of approximately 1.5 million American children who are educated at home, perhaps in an attempt to privilege teacher's unions.

How Much Money Each State Saves Thanks to Homeschooling.  Compared to public school students, studies suggest that homeschoolers perform up to 30 percentile points better on standardized tests, have higher college GPAs and completion rates, and may even be better adjusted socially.  Judging from these numbers, it would seem that homeschooling definitely benefits the individual student.  But what about the nation as a whole?  Are there any immediate benefits which homeschoolers offer to their communities?

Charter School Rejects Common Core and Ranks #1.  Teaching phonics is crucial to teaching reading when dealing with a phonetic writing system such as the one used in the English language.  Memorizing so-called "sight words," by contrast, is mental poison, or Thalidomide for the brain as my friend and colleague Dr. Sam Blumenfeld used to say.  As if more evidence was needed of this, the recent Florida Standards Assessments results from Collier County, Florida, make it perfectly clear.  One school, known as the Mason Classical Academy, shines bright in the district.  It scored number one in English Language Arts (ELA) in the county, with 90 percent of its third graders scoring proficient.  By contrast, just 58 percent of third graders in the county were proficient, even using Common Core's dumbed-down metrics.

Home Schooling: Here's The Main Reason Liberals Hate It.  Because it's hard to brainwash independent thinkers with a working knowledge of the Constitution and a grounding in history.

There are many reasons to home school your children.
How to Short-Circuit a Child's Thinking:  Radical education reformers have made a point of removing context from children's education, and to squash their natural curiosity, undermining their capacity to think.  They have done this in five ways:  1) by withholding the basic tools and codes of learning, such as suppressing phonics for reading, as well as clarity in standard arithmetic; 2) by withholding the content knowledge necessary to connect dots in understanding history and civics; 3) by withholding and demeaning literature that reveals universal human experiences and shared understanding, such as the classics and Shakespeare; 4) by de-stabilizing a child's sense of self and identity.  This is a natural byproduct of de-sexing every child, which happens through mandates to teach kids about transgenderism; and 5) by promoting relational aggression against any child or parent who might resist this totalitarian program.  Radical education reform encourages schools and communities to single out those who disagree with this coercive program as misfits, bigots, or religious nuts.  All of the above would subvert anybody's ability to think clearly.

Dad sent to prison for homeschooling his kids.  A homeschooling father who sought to give his children the best education available, by pulling them out of the politicized state schools in Cuba and teaching them at home, has been ordered to spend a year under house arrest.  The sentence was announced by a Cuban court for pastor Ramón Rigal and his wife, Adya, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association.  In a report by HSLDA Director of Global Outreach Mike Donnelly, Rigas said authorities used his three-hour trial this week as a platform for denouncing alternatives to government-controlled education.

After school Satan clubs coming to public elementary schools.  An organization that calls itself the Satanic Temple has been very active in promoting its overlord.  It conducted a Black Mass and agitated, but failed, to build a 7-ft tall statue of Satan next to a 10 Commandments monument in Oklahoma City; actually erected the statue in Detroit; and wants prayer in school to the Devil.  Now, in the name of religious parity, the Satanic Temple is bringing After School Satan Clubs to America's public elementary schools.  Another reason to home school your children.

Ed Secretary John King:  Homeschooling deprives kids.  Decades of positive results from homeschool families still haven't stopped their critics from repeating outdated, debunked myths.  Education Secretary John King recently told an audience he worries that most homeschool students aren't "getting the range of options that are good for all kids." [...] King must not have seen the recent report by the National Home Education Research Institute showing that homeschool students outperform their peers by an average of 40 percent on the SAT.  If he had, he probably wouldn't have joined the countless politicians, bureaucrats, teacher unions, and lobbyists who insist that the government knows how to educate children better than their own parents.  Despite government's best efforts to drive it out of existence, homeschooling is more popular than ever as generations of success stories prove the benefits of tailoring education to a child's needs.

Homeschooling and Other Education Alternatives on the Rise.  Horace Mann, the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, speaking a few years before the Civil War, declared that public schools constituted "the greatest discovery ever made by man." [...] Such utopian sentiments provoke laughter today, especially when one considers that a large part of the exodus from the public schools into private schools and homeschooling is because of the unsafe environment in many of America's public schools.  About 1.8 million children in the country are now homeschooled, with the numbers growing each year.  This is double the number of homeschoolers as recently as 1999.  Today, the number of children schooled at home represents 3.4 percent of U.S. students between the ages of five and 17.  Twenty-five percent of parents surveyed have said that the environment of the public schools — including such issues as safety, drugs, and peer pressure — is the most important reason for either pulling their kids out, or not ever placing them there to begin with.

Why homeschooling is an issue that affects every conservative whether they do it or not.  There's a voting block that has received nearly zero attention this election year from the Presidential candidates. [...] It's an issue that doesn't directly affect many Americans because such a small percentage in this country take advantage of this crucial educational option.  What people need to realize is that it's a core issue that indirectly affects all Americans, conservatives in particular.  It's one of the last bastions of defense for those of us who believe that the government should watch our backs and essentially leave us alone otherwise.  When the government tells us how we're allowed to educate our children, the dominoes start falling.

Who Knows How Best to Raise Your Kids:  You or the Government?  Was this a warning shot?  Or just a misinformed opinion?  Homeschooling parents want to know.  Recently, U.S. Secretary of Education John King, while speaking at a press conference, remarked that although some homeschool situations are just fine, in general, "Students who are homeschooled are not getting kind of the rapid instructional experience they would get in school."  King also said that part of the school experience is learning how to deal with and build relationships with peers and teachers — implying that homeschoolers don't get this kind of experience.

Home schooling ripped by Obama education chief.  With nearly 2 million students and even a Virginia college dedicated to their higher education, parents and kids who homeschool ought to be getting some respect in Washington.  Instead, President Obama's education chief is expressing concerns that the growing practice is robbing children of educational and life experiences.  "I worry that in a lot of cases students who are homeschooled are not getting the kind of the breadth of instruction experience they would get in school, they're also not getting the opportunity to build relationships with peers unless their parents are very intentional about it," said Education Secretary John B. King Jr.

They're Legally Snooping On Parents:  Creepy.  [Scroll down]  We lived on a small farm.  We homeschooled.  We worked at home, we brought them to church, we taught them morals, we loved them, we disciplined them.  In short, we tried our best to raise daughters who would someday become upstanding, productive adults contributing to society.  As far as we're concerned, it worked.  They are now young women to be proud of.  But in the eyes of CPS or busybodies like the twit who accosted me, that's not good enough.  If we didn't do things "their" way, we were wrong.  There are as many ways to parent children as there are parents; and for everything a parent does, there is an "expert" who won't hesitate to tell us our parenting style will lead to grave but unspecified harm.

Another motive for homeschooling:
Mom: Son Was Attacked, Injured by Classmates and School Never Told Me.  A mother says that her 13-year-old son was left cross-eyed after being attacked by fellow students, and she's questioning how school officials handled the situation.  Amanda Anderson, whose son Dustin Johnson is a seventh-grader at Livingston Junior High in Livingston, Texas, told Fox 26 that Dustin woke up on March 29 seeing double and with blurred vision.  After questioning what happened to her son, Anderson says school officials eventually showed her video of Dustin being attacked by several classmates.

First-Grade Teachers In Durham Enroll Kids In Black Lives Matter March.  Central Park School for Children in Durham, North Carolina has enrolled grade-school students in a "Black Lives March and Rally" scheduled for March 17, 2016.  The teachers can opt-in or opt-out their classes, but parents have not been given a choice.  Stef Bernal-Martinez, a teacher of 6-year-old children, signed up all the children in her class for a "Black Lives March and Rally" to take place during the school day, at the city's downtown Central Park and Farmer's Market.  Ms. Bernal-Martinez describes herself as a "Radical Queer Progressive Educator" and "white-passing Xicana."

The Editor says...
If you find out that your 6-year-old child's teacher is a "radical queer progressive," that's an excellent reason to start homeschooling.  If you don't, you will probably spend a lot of time every evening un-teaching all the junk the poor kid was taught at school that day.  You might as well do the teaching yourself.  It can be done.

Ten Lawful Acts of Political Resistance for Liberty Guerillas.  [#4]  Reject the Public School System.  How you feel about this says volumes about whether or not you understand the concept of taking steps to being a free person, or whether or not you remain a victim of "Stockholm Syndrome".  Challenging the status quo and "settled social norms" especially with respect to state constitutionally mandated "public schools" is difficult.  I know — I used to be one of those people who viewed families who chose the Homeschooling option with skeptical eyes.  However, once you complete even some cursory investigation into the history and purpose of "mandatory schooling", seeking out alternatives becomes a matter of urgency.  There are lots of options beyond the model of children being instructed inside the home by a parent — many communities now have thriving, creative "homeschooling co-ops" which balance the positives of homeschooling with the negatives, such as isolation, lack of similar-age peer interaction, and evaluation by impartial instructors.  This is probably one of the most important steps any parent can take, and should take, while it is still legal to do so!

Popularity of Homeschooling Grows, Parents Flock to Homeschooling Conventions.  The popularity of homeschooling continues to grow nationwide as more parents choose to withdraw their children from government schools and take a more active role in their children's education.  Current estimates of the popularity of homeschooling suggest there are over two million homeschooled students in the United States.  There are just over 50 million students in government school systems today, meaning homeschoolers now constitute just over 4 percent of all school-aged children in the United States.

DC Homeschooling Rises by One-Third in Just Two Years.  Home-based education is gaining traction in the nation's capital; the number of families choosing to homeschool their kids in the Washington, DC area has grown by roughly one-third over the past two years.  Ethan Reedy, president of the DC Home Educators Association, says there are several reasons for the growth of homeschooling.  "The first is a demographic change," Reedy said.  "More young families are moving into the city.  They are tired of commuting and spending a large part of every day on the road.  They want more time with their families."  Reedy says more young parents are enthusiastic about the idea of trying homeschooling because they aren't satisfied with the performance of the public schools.

Team Obama wins fight to have Christian home-school family deported.  Uwe and Hannelore Romeike came to the United States in 2008 seeking political asylum.  They fled their German homeland in the face of religious persecution for homeschooling their children.  They wanted to live in a country where they could raise their children in accordance with their Christian beliefs.  The Romeikes were initially given asylum, but the Obama administration objected — claiming that German laws that outlaw homeschooling do not constitute persecution.

Homeschool parents sue New Jersey, allege 'unlawful, unconstitutional home intrusion'.  Nothing really changed after a New Jersey state social worker banged on Christopher and Nicole Zimmer's front door, and yet everything was different.  Over the next two hours, the social worker quizzed their 15-year-old son, Chris, including questions on whether his parents fought or did drugs.  She wanted to see his homeschool curriculum.  She wanted to inspect their firearms.  She told the Zimmers to sign papers agreeing to turn over their son's medical records.  And then she left, and the Zimmers never saw her again.  But they can't let it go.  They can't erase the memory of what it felt like when they thought the state might take away their son.

Why Home Schooling?  In 1970, there were only 10,000 home-schooled children.  In 2012, according to recently released data from the National Center for Education Statistics, there were about 1.77 million children who were being home-schooled.  Parents give a number of reasons for home schooling.  Many want a safer environment for their children — away from violence, alcohol and other drugs, psychological abuse, and improper and unhealthy sexual indoctrination found in public schools.  Some want to teach and impart a particular set of values and beliefs to their children.  In terms of academic achievement, home-schoolers beat out their public school counterparts.  In reading, language, math, science and social studies, the average home-schooler scores somewhere near the 80th percentile.  The average public school student taking these standardized tests scores at the 50th percentile in each subject area.  Home-schoolers also tend to score higher than their public school counterparts on college admittance tests, such as the ACT and SAT.

As Left Celebrates, Right Preps For All-Out Anti-Religious Assault.  [Scroll down]  With the gay flag flying high atop government installations and the rainbow projected onto the exterior of the White House, why wouldn't the new Godgovernment wage an all-out crusade on the idolaters who refuse to acknowledge its rule?  And that crusade won't stop with private schools or churches.  It will extend to homeschooling.  When parents decide that they don't want to send their children to a school forced to propagandize on the morality of homosexuality, they will begin homeschooling in larger numbers.  The left will suggest that all homeschooling programs must be accredited, too, and accreditation will be rejected for programs that fail to comply with Justice Kennedy's New New Testament. [...] Then, when parents refuse to comply, parents will be accused of participating in truancy, or worse, propagation of anti-gay bullying.  It's a convenient way of utilizing government-approved education as a proxy for shutting down religious parenting.

NEA union mandates new government restrictions for homeschoolers.  What a bunch of arrogant fascists.  Directly insulting parents, claiming that only the public school system is capable of educating their children...  demanding that they have to have some random certification to teach their own children.  That is farcical.  We homeschooled our children and they turned out fine.  In fact, most homeschoolers turn out far better than public school students and are educated to a far superior degree as well.  Testing proves it time and again.  If I still had kids in school, no way would they be in the public school system where global climate change, Marxism, gender theories and other perversions are being forced upon students of all ages now.  The NEA can stuff it.

Time to pull your kids out of public school?  If there were an exodus from public schools by people who are sick of political correctness, not to mention the government school system's inability to bring students up to the levels of other nations, perhaps the politicians and those responsible for these propaganda camps might wake up and offer parents school choice.  As long as parents willingly put their children in a school system that not only undermines their values, but in many cases openly opposes them, and then makes children who hold to a different worldview feel odd, even bigoted and behind the times, public schools will continue to do so.  This is what happens when standards are abandoned and truth becomes subjective.

U.S. Department of Education: Higher Educated Parents More Likely to Homeschool.  According to information from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the number of homeschooled students between the ages of 5 and 17 has increased dramatically over the last decade, soaring 61.8 percent.  The data also indicates that the more educated the parents, the more likely they are to homeschool their children.

New Jersey Interrogates Homeschoolers, Lawsuit Follows.  [T]he woman wasn't only interested in the child's education.  She wanted to know if there were guns in the house, if the kid was vaccinated and she demanded signed privacy waivers granting her access to the kid's medical records and to do background checks on the parents.  Note that there was no probable cause to assume the kid was being abused or any crime had been committed.  Apparently choosing not to subject your children to substandard public school indoctrination is crime enough in the all seeing eyes of the State.

Obama While Trying to Kill School Choice in D.C.: We Need to Make Sure 'All Children' Get 'Great Education'.  After having presented a budget to Congress that would phase out a school-choice program that allows a limited number of children to escape Washington, D.C.'s public schools, President Barack Obama delivered a weekly address today that said all Americans have a responsibility to make sure all children — not just their own — get a great education.  Obama's two daughters go to Sidwell Friends, one of the most expensive private schools in Washington, D.C.

New Michigan Bill Keeps Tab on Homeschoolers.  On April 17th a new bill was introduced in Michigan that would keep tabs on homeschoolers.  An incredibly sick woman had her two children in a freezer for 2 years and nobody knew it because when they were noticibly gone from activities the mom told everyone they were being homeschooled.  Michigan does not currently require homeschoolers to register with their school district; one of 11 states that does not have that requirement.  Politicians took this opportunity to jump on the thousands of homeschool families in Michigan with more strict provisions.  Punishing the lawful for the barbarous acts of one woman.

Slate: Sending Kids to Private School Makes You a 'Bad Person'.  The single greatest cultural barrier to the preservation and advancement of liberty is our reverence for sacrifice.  We use the word in reference to things which are actually profitable transactions, like choosing to study for a test instead rather than go drinking.  The true meaning of sacrifice is exhibited by an author at Slate who think you should give up what's best for your kids for the sake of an "eventual common good."

The Editor says...
Mr. and Mrs. Obama send their kids to a private school.

Obama's Little Shop of Horrors.  [Scroll down]  The United States Department of Education, allowing government to take over the Education system in the US, was implemented under Jimmy Carter and continues to weigh down our education system.  The Obama administration along with our Justice Department and Eric Holder sued many states to stop the use of educational vouchers, which allows taxpayers to choose to attend charter schools instead of their own failing public schools.  Although Obama and Democrats claim to support the education of minorities, they have sued states and demanded taxpayer choices be taken away.

Virginia Senate OKs home-schoolers for public varsity teams.  After getting sacked for years by the Virginia legislature, the state Senate on Tuesday passed a version of the so-called "Tebow bill" to allow home-schooled children to participate in public school interscholastic sports, likely putting the issue before Gov. Terry McAuliffe.  The Senate approved a House-passed measure on a 22-13 vote after amending it to allow for a local "opt-in" provision so local school boards wouldn't be forced to recognize the policy.

Thousands of School Choice Advocates Rally at Texas Capitol.  Supporters of school choice gathered at the Texas Capitol on Friday [1/30/2015] to send a message to Legislators:  they want education reform, and they want it now.  A bustling, diverse crowd of students, parents, teachers, elected officials and other reform advocates — and even a marching band — enjoyed a festive atmosphere as they listened to speeches, sang and danced, and then lined up to enter the Capitol to take their message directly to their elected representatives.

A New York Times article clearly in opposition to homeschooling:
Home Schooling: More Pupils, Less Regulation.  Unlike so much of education in this country, teaching at home is broadly unregulated.  Along with steady growth in home schooling has come a spirited debate and lobbying war over how much oversight such education requires.

"Class Dismissed": New Film Promotes Homeschooling.  Class Dismissed, a new full-length documentary film about homeschooling, was screened in the Boston area on December 1, having already been seen by sold out audiences in November on the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland).  It explores the rapidly growing homeschool movement — its challenges and great successes.  I was informed about it by my old friend and "unschooling" pioneer Pat Farenga, who appears briefly in the film.

Social workers now assessing home education?  The latest case of alleged government intrusion into the home comes out of Savannah, Georgia, where homeschooling parents were reported to a state agency by a social worker for the "educational neglect" of their 12-year-old daughter — who they have successfully and legally taught at their home for some time.

Opposition to Common Core spurs jump in homeschooling.  The home-schooling boom is getting a new push due to opposition to Common Core, the controversial national education standard that some parents claim is using their children's public school lessons to push a political agenda, according to critics of the Washington-backed curriculum.  North Carolina, already a home-schooling hotbed, saw a 14 percent rise last year in the number of students being educated at home, according to a report from Heartlander Magazine. Similar increases have been seen in Virginia, California and New York, according to education activists.

Homeschooling Parents Pepper Sprayed and Tasered Because Home School Was 'Messy'.  A family that home schools their children were attacked by government thugs with a home invasion where the parents were tasered, pepper sprayed and handcuffed and all this in front of their kids.  And why was this done?  Because the government thought the home school environment was "messy."  This is the sort of stuff that you should expect from our thuggish governments.  They really, really hate homeschoolers not only because they are usually conservative and religious but because it takes children out of the hands of government propagandists who want to indoctrinate kids.

Vindictive Officials Seize Homeschool Family's Assets.  More than a year ago, police in Germany obtained court permission to use "force" and arm themselves with a battering ram to take custody of four homeschooled children, only to see the parents resume homeschooling, and regain custody later.  But that ultimate defeat for the government apparently isn't going to be the end, according to the father in the case, Dirk Wunderlich.  In an online interview from his German residence, he told WND that a local school board attorney since then has begun issuing "notices of enforcement" that come with penalties of 1,000 euros, or about $1,350.

SWAT Team Tasers, Pepper-Sprays Homeschoolers.  A Missouri homeschooling family is suing a sheriff and another officer who forcibly entered their home without a warrant, Tasered the father, pepper-sprayed the mother and put their children in the custody of social service workers.  A court already has ruled that the actions of Sheriff Darren White and Capt. David Glidden of Nodaway County, Missouri, violated the U.S. Constitution, resulting in the dismissal of charges of child endangerment and resisting arrest against the couple, Jason and Laura Hagan, of New Hampton.

Students are Fleeing Common Core's Sinking Ship.  [Scroll down]  In fact, parents do have an escape hatch, and one that they are increasingly eager to use:  the option to homeschool their children.  In North Carolina, homeschoolers now outnumber children enrolled in private school.  Today, more than 150,000 North Carolinians are being educated at home.  Compare this to a private school enrollment of about 96,000 and the fact that the largest public school district in the state has 143,000 students, and this is a pretty impressive statistic.  It's also shown significant growth of 14 percent over last year.

Why our family believes in homeschooling.  The Common Core curriculum, which is now being forced upon teachers and students in schools across the country, is using students as guinea pigs.  We choose to not participate.  Many good teachers and many thoughtful parents I have spoken with agree firmly that the standardized tests have been a disaster.  It has forced schools to teach to the tests, to the great detriment of students' overall education.  Schools are dropping untested subjects such as art and music.  After all, why provide art and music classes?  They aren't tested.  Yet, it's self-evident that art and music are necessary to become a well-rounded person, and they complement science and math, as many a scientist will testify.  Schools are no longer emphasizing creativity and critical thinking (to the extent that they ever did).  Why not?  Because such things are not tested.

More about Common Core.

They Are Coming for Your Children.  Home-schoolers represent the only authentically radical social movement in the United States (Occupy Wall Street was a fashion statement) and so they must be suppressed, as a malevolent committee of leftist academics and union bosses under the direction of Governor Dannel Malloy is preparing to do in Connecticut, using the Sandy Hook massacre as a pretext.  The ghouls invariably rush to the podium after every school massacre, issuing their insipid press releases before the bodies have even cooled, and normally they're after your guns.  But the Malloy gang is after your children.

Connecticut Targets Homeschoolers.  In Connecticut, Governor Dannel P. Malloy's Sandy Hook Advisory Commission has returned a curious and controversial draft recommendation:  the state should increase its oversight of homeschooled children with emotional or behavioral challenges.  The proposal has outraged the state's homeschoolers, who, like homeschoolers everywhere, are keenly aware of their sometimes conditional freedoms.  In Connecticut, as elsewhere, the law allows parents to homeschool if they choose.  But the practice has always been viewed as threatening by left-wing academics, social architects, and teachers' unions — all well represented on Malloy's 16-member panel.  Sadly, this is only the most recent assault on the rights of Connecticut homeschoolers.

Home schooling rate accelerates in North Carolina.  "If you're dissatisfied with public education, you really have two routes," said Kevin McClain, president of North Carolinians For Home Education, a statewide support group.  "You can send your child to a private school — which is really expensive — or you can home-school.  The economy means that, for many people, you home-school."  Home schooling has steadily risen in North Carolina since it was legalized in 1985 by the state Supreme Court.  Twenty-five years ago, there were about 2,300 home-schooled students in North Carolina.  But concerns about school violence, lack of a religious focus and the large size of public schools have helped fuel home-school growth.  And home-school growth in North Carolina has surged the past two school years.

Homeschool Family Sends Seven Kids to College — All by Age 12!  A family from Alabama is inspiring the nation with its amazing homeschool success story.  In fact, Kip and Mona Lisa Harding, from Montgomery, have been so successful in educating their 10 children at home that seven have gone on to college — by the age of 12!  It all began when the Harding's oldest child, Hannah, was in third grade, enrolled in public school.  A friend suggested that the couple try homeschooling their daughter, something they conceded wasn't even on their radar.  But they ended up giving it a try and soon decided that they could do a better job educating their children than the local school district could.

Company rescinds Ohio man's job offer after learning he was home schooled.  Home school advocates are outraged by an energy company's decision to rescind an Ohio man's job offer after learning he had been home schooled.  Michael Donnelly, an attorney for Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), told FoxNews.com that the young man was offered a competitive job by the NiSource energy company.  The man, whose name has not been made public, had a home-schooled high school diploma and three years of relevant experience when he applied for the job, according to his attorney, who also noted he had completed seven college-level courses.  Donnelly claimed the energy company offered him the job and then changed its decision upon hearing he did not have an official high school diploma, which the company requires.

U.S. Supreme Court declines German home-school case.  To the disappointment of many home-schooling supporters, the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday [3/3/2014] it would not consider the case of a German family seeking asylum in the U.S. because they cannot teach their children at home in Germany.  The leader of a home-school advocacy group said that while "normal" legal battles are exhausted, he and others would seek other avenues to support Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their six children.

DHS allows German home-schooling family to stay in US.  A German home-schooling family facing deportation following the Supreme Court's refusal to hear their appeal is being allowed to stay in the U.S.  The Department of Homeland Security has granted the family "indefinite deferred status," their attorney confirmed to Fox News.

Why school choice opens a door to the American Dream.  In America, a good education is the great equalizer, something that gives our children the chance to fulfill their potential no matter how they fared in the lottery of life.  That's why the more we can do to empower parents to pick and choose the schools that best meet their kids' needs, the better.  It's one way for us to live up to our billing as the "Land of Opportunity."

Don't Destroy This Family.  The Romeike family was granted asylum in the United States because the German government was intent on wresting away the children and putting the parents in cages for the crime of homeschooling their children, which is verboten in Germany, a legacy of the country's totalitarian past.  The Obama administration, which in other notable areas of immigration law has enacted a policy of "discretion" regarding deportations, took the Romeike family to court to have its asylum protections revoked, and succeeded in doing so.  The family has appealed to the Supreme Court, which has ordered the Obama administration to respond to the Romeikes' petition, but the administration has so far refused to do so.

Consider Alternative Schooling.  Even when they work well, public schools introduce all sorts of costs and rigidities into everyday life.  That's not surprising.  Public schools were designed to be rigid.  Back in the 19th century, when Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary Horace Mann toured Europe looking for models of public education to import to America, the one he chose came from Prussia.  Inflexibility and uniformity were Prussian specialties, and when Mann brought Prussian-style education to America, those characteristics were seen not as a bug but as a feature.  School was practice for working in the factory.  Thus, the traditional public school:  like a factory, it runs by the bell.

Why I Sent My Children to a School of Another Faith.  Although my husband and I deliberately moved where our children could attend high-performing public schools, the school board arbitrarily rezoned us, forcing our children into a middle school that experienced violence daily.  This was unacceptable.  Finding a private school that fit without forcing us into bankruptcy was daunting.  It was easy to find schools in the yellow pages, and every school welcomed me when I visited.  However, no school seemed like the right fit.

Supreme Court orders White House to respond to Romeike petition.  The Supreme Court has ordered the White House to respond to an asylum petition that appeared on Whitehouse.gov on behalf of Uwe and Hannelore Romeike.  The Romeike family fled Germany in 2008 when they were fined and threatened with jail-time for homeschooling their children.  They were denied asylum in 2012, and a lower court ruled against them when they appealed.  They have appealed to the Supreme Court, which has not decided to hear their case.  However, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which represents the family, has announced that the Supreme Court has ordered the Obama administration to issue an official response to the WhiteHouse.gov petition asking for "full and permanent legal status" for the Romeikes.

Supreme Court Orders DOJ to Respond to German Homeschoolers' Petition.  The Supreme Court has ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to respond to the Home School Legal Defense Association's (HSLDA) petition on behalf of the Romeike family, a German family who sought legal asylum in the United States to escape persecution because homeschooling is largely prohibited in their home country.  In a press release, James Mason, HSLDA's director of litigation, said that the order is a hopeful sign that the High Court will hear the case.

Judge Allows Federal Oversight Louisiana Voucher Program.  A federal judge ruled against Louisiana in a case against the state's scholarship program on Friday [11/22/2013], requiring federal oversight for the program that allows children to escape failing schools.  The ruling may lead to a lengthy review process preferred by the Justice Department (DOJ), which Gov. Bobby Jindal (R.) says could regulate the program to death.  The decision was the latest in a legal battle between the Obama administration and the state, dating back to August.

DOJ Drops Anti-School Choice Lawsuit in La..  The Obama administrated has abandoned its request for an injunction against Louisiana's school-voucher program, designed to help low- and middle-income students in failing schools to attend schools of their choice.  The Department of Justice claimed that the program impeded the federally mandated desegregation process, but in late October was unable to produce the documents central to their lawsuit, saying they needed to obtain the documents from archives and review them.  A number of more comprehensive studies indicated that the program presented no such problem, and may have actually been encouraging integration.

One Hundred Reasons to Abandon Public Education Now.  [For example,]
  (42) History curriculum designed by post-Marxist revisionists.
  (43) The entitlement mentality.
  (44) Natural attachment to the "provider." Abstract state replaces concrete parents as the object of future obligation and duty.
  (45) "Gender role" and "alternative lifestyle" lessons.
  (46) Unceasing Marxist critique of Western civilization: sexism, systemic oppression, capitalism is racist, the rich get richer, etc.
  (47) Public education requires lowest common denominator approach. Stifles natural intelligence.
  (48) Discouraging female modesty.
  (49) Discouraging male admiration for female modesty.

Where do public school teachers send their own kids?  About 11 percent of all parents — nationwide, rural and urban — send their children to private schools.  The numbers are much higher in urban areas.  One study found that in Philadelphia a staggering 44 percent of public school teachers send their own kids to private schools.  In Cincinnati and Chicago, 41 and 39 percent of public school teachers, respectively, pay for a private school education for their children.  In Rochester, New York, it's 38 percent.

This happened in Germany, but could happen here someday:
Police Raid on German Home School Family Brings Back Memory of Darker Times.  Even if the raid and the law were not contrary to certain European Union human rights agreements, Germany ought to be embarrassed at the spectacle of armed police kidnapping children for the crime of being home schooled.  That it gives rise to an earlier, much darker time in German history almost goes without saying.

Police storm homeschool class, take children by force.  Four children, ages 7 to 14, have been forcibly taken from their Darmstadt, Germany, home by police armed with a battering ram, and their parents have been told they won't see them again soon, all over the issue of homeschooling, according to a stunning new report from the Home School Legal Defense Association.

Police Raid on German Home School Family Brings Back Memory of Darker Times.  Apparently the raid stems from a Nazi era law still on the books in the Federal Republic of Germany that requires all children to be educated in state sanctioned schools, no exceptions.  Dirk and Petra Wunderlich preferred that their children be home schooled, a widely accepted practice in the United States, because of their religious convictions.  The German state disagreed and made their objections known with brutal efficiency.  The Wunderlichs have been informed that they will not see their children any time soon.

Ohio Lawmakers Consider Homeschooler Property Tax Credit .  Senate Bill 127, pegged to become effective in 2014, would give homeschoolers a tax credit equal to the proportion of property taxes on their home that fund their local school district.  "Home schooling requires an immense amount of parental involvement, which has many positive benefits for children, but it also involves a great deal of sacrifice," said bill sponsor and state Sen. Kris Jordan (R-Powell), in a statement.  "Families that elect to home-school their children often pay directly out of pocket for many of the materials and other items needed, and my proposal could help significantly in defraying some of these costs."

Senate Dems to resurrect United Nations treaty opposed by home schoolers.  Senate Democrats will try to resurrect a United Nations treaty on rights for the disabled that was rejected last year over GOP concerns it would imperil home-schooling.  The treaty fell five votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority in a 61-38 vote in December after former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) led a charge that it would give unelected UN bureaucrats the power to challenge U.S. home-schooling.

Education News report tells us homeschooling is thriving.  In a recent report, we learn that since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75 percent.  Though homeschooled children represent only 4 percent (about 2 million) of all school-age children nationwide, they are growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12.

Report: Homeschooling Growing Seven Times Faster than Public School Enrollment.  As dissatisfaction with the U.S. public school system grows, apparently so has the appeal of homeschooling.  Educational researchers, in fact, are expecting a surge in the number of students educated at home by their parents over the next ten years, as more parents reject public schools.

GOP Senators Drafting Letter to Urge Asylum for German Homeschooling Family.  In an interview with Breitbart News, William Estrada, Director of Federal Relations of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), said that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has taken the lead in the Senate to draft a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, urging him to allow the Romeike family asylum in the United States.

Another reason to abandon government schools:  They are not safe.
Black on white violence in the schools.  The word bullying is often used to obfuscate.  Not illuminate.  In this case, it covered up significant and intense black mob violence in this school.  And it is happening all over the country.

Enough With the Bipartisanship.  In 2001, newly elected president George W. Bush decided he wanted to work with Democrats in Congress to do something about education.  So backs were slapped and hands were shaken.  Sen. Ted Kennedy was invited to the White House for a movie screening.  The resulting No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was co-sponsored by Kennedy, and amounted to little more than a consolidation of federal education power.  The one initiative that might have ameliorated the plight of inner-city students — school vouchers — was stripped out during negotiations.

Dewey: Stalin's Propagandist, the World's Teacher.  [In 1928], The New Republic published Dewey's Impressions of Soviet Russia and the revolutionary world.  This polemic stands as a remarkable testament to progressivism's disdain for mankind, reason, and truth.  It is also Dewey's most honest and concise primer on the principles of his progressive education method.  Anyone prepared to defend the idea of government-controlled schooling after reading this work is perhaps beyond reach of rational argument.

Obama Admin Wins Ruling to Deport German Homeschooling Family.  The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the Obama administration's denial of asylum granted to the Romeike family, who fled Germany over its strict anti-homeschooling laws.  In a press release Tuesday [5/4/2013], Michael Farris, founder and chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), said, "We believe the Sixth Circuit is wrong and we will appeal their decision.  America has room for this family and we will do everything we can to help them."

US Court Denies German Home-Schoolers Asylum.  The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Obama administration's refusal to grant asylum to the Romeike family.  U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder filed against the family, arguing that asylum should not be granted because home schooling isn't a fundamental right protected under religious freedom.  The Romeikes fled Germany in 2008 facing criminal prosecution for home schooling.  In 2010, they were granted political asylum by immigration Judge Lawrence Burman, but his decision was overturned by the Board of Immigration Appeals last year.  On Tuesday [5/14/2013], the three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit issued a unanimous decision against the family.

Court Rules Against German Homeschool Family Seeking Asylum.  The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Obama Administration's decision to deny asylum to a German homeschooling family.  The Romeike family fled their German homeland in 2008 seeking political asylum in the United States — where they hoped to home school their children.  Instead, the Obama administration wants the evangelical Christian family deported.

25 Reasons To Dislike Liberals.  [#14]  There's a reason why the average homeschooled kid gets a better education than he would in a public school run by liberals.  It's because the kid's parents are interested in educating him while his liberal teachers view public schools as just another way to indoctrinate children.

The Case of the German Homeschoolers.  In a case that calls to mind Melissa Harris Perry's recent opinionating on MSNBC about children and their relationship to their families and to the community ("We have to break through the kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or that kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities"), the Obama administration is trying to deport a German family, now resident in Tennessee, that sought refuge in the United States for the purpose of homeschooling their six children.  Homeschooling is against the law in Germany and can result in fines, jail time, and the removal of children from their families.

The Education of the Romeiki Family.  One of the great moments in this author's academic career came when I dropped out of public high school to return to homeschool.  My mother marched into the principal's office and informed the administration that she would be taking me out.  The principal, a woman who ran the school with all the delicacy of a Hessian dragoon, was visibly indignant.  "You can't do that," she said.  "Oh," my mother said, smiling, "yes I can."  And she could, thanks to Virginia's generally permissive homeschooling laws.  So I left, free to pursue an actual education instead of a daily helping of public school eyewash.

The Education of the Romeiki Family.  All homeschoolers in Germany, religious or otherwise, are persecuted in the same way; since the Romeikes aren't being singled out for their religious beliefs, but are merely suffering the same indignities as everyone else, they don't have a case.  Got that?  We've gone from a country of "All men are created equal" to "All men are created to suffer equally."

The Fifth Column.  [Scroll down]  At issue is the question of whether they can defy the German law against homeschooling their children.  The German Supreme Court has ruled that it wants to "counteract the development of religious and philosophically motivated parallel societies" — thus preventing the development of a 5th Column.  In pursuit of that policy goal the Romeikes were fined and punished; and so they fled to the US to avoid 'persecution'.  Or so they thought.  But the Obama administration isn't buying it.

Ron Paul launches his own home-school curriculum.  Former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched his own K-12 home-school curriculum to provide an "education in liberty like no other."  The curriculum, which includes courses on "the economics of the Austrian school," provides its K-5 program for free, meaning that students and families will be able to learn under Ron Paul for six years "without spending a dime," according to one of the curriculum's high school teachers, Ludwig von Mises Institute senior fellow Tom Woods.

There are a hundred compelling reasons for removing your children and grandchildren from the public schools.
American Education: Rotting the Country from the Inside.  [Scroll down]  So it is my conclusion that what the WU failed to accomplish when they went underground and began their strategic sabotage is now being accomplished through the educational system and the political means that they have gained by supporting such people as Barack Obama and his Chicago supporters.  I tell people today that we are losing our freedoms because of the attacks that emerge from the left and are targeted on all of our basic societal organizations.  God is eliminated from the classroom; the history of our country is no longer being taught, but rather a revised edition which depicts our people and our nation as enemies of the world and of all that is good and right.  This includes church, religion, veterans, educational institutions, and any organization that supports the greatness of our country and the strength of its institutions.

One Hundred Reasons to Abandon Public Education Now.  [#10]  Benjamin Franklin.  Little formal schooling; a printer's apprentice at twelve.
[#11]  Jane Austen.  Little formal schooling; read books and wrote stories at home.
[#12]  Alexander Pope.  Little formal schooling; major poet and literary critic at twenty-three.
[#13]  John Keats.  Medical apprentice (and orphaned) at fourteen, professional surgeon's assistant at twenty, licensed apothecary at twenty-one, greatest English poet of his era at twenty-three (dead at twenty-five).
[#14]  Under compulsory schooling, only two entries in Keats' biography (item 13) would have been possible — "orphaned" and "dead at twenty-five."

Title IX for our boys.  Large urban school districts are losing students at an alarming pace.  They're going to charter schools, to online schools and to home-schooling.  But now there's another reason for parents to think about moving their children out of public schools — the boys.  It seems that teachers — overwhelmingly female — just might be prejudiced against boys and it's hurting their grades.  Stereotyped as "naughty," boys quickly learn that they are thought of as dumber and more trouble than girls.  And that has consequences.

Atty General Holder Argues Parents Have No Right to Educate their Children.  The background for this case is the German war on homeschooling that has led some families to seek political asylum in the United States where homeschooling is still legal for now.  While the Obama Administration refuses to expel illegal aliens who have committed felonies and welcomes in immigrants with AIDS, European Christians who don't like the compulsory indoctrination of their children are not their cup of tea.

A Miscarriage of Justice: Obama administration seeking to deport Christian homeschooling family.  The Obama administration is attempting to deport a German family that came to America seeking asylum from a Nazi-era law that prohibits homeschooling.  Uwe and Hannelore Romeike decided to homeschool their children in 2006 because the curriculum at their public school ran counter to the family's Christian convictions.

German home-schooling family fights to stay in US.  While the White House and many lawmakers push to grant legal status to immigrants who crossed the border illegally, the Romeike family thought they followed the rules — but now face deportation.  They are devout Catholics who emigrated from Germany in 2008 to home school their six children in Tennessee.  As Uwe Romeike told Fox News, it is illegal to do that in Germany.

The Editor says...
The government allows millions of unwelcome people to sneak across the Mexican border, then rewards them with food stamps.  The Romeike family came to America seeking freedom, and Barack H. Obama and his evil minions want to throw them back over the fence.

It's Time to Push for Impeachment Proceedings Against Eric Holder.  Attorney General Eric Holder has again shown his true colors — his disdain for America and her laws.  Recently, he took action against the Romeike family that is seeking asylum in the United States after being forced to flee their home country or risk losing their five children to the German government.  Germany was attempting to force the Romeikes to put their children in a government school against their religious beliefs in a terrifying repeat of history.

Home Schooling German Family Fights Deportation.  Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, devout Christians from the southwest of Germany who now have six children, initially took their three oldest children out of school in their native country in 2006.  Shortly after, the German government started fining the family and threatening them with legal action.  Home schooling has been illegal in Germany since 1918, when school attendance was made compulsory, and parents who choose to homeschool anyway face financial penalties and legal consequences, including the potential loss of custody of their children.

Obama Trying to Deport Homeschooling Family.  In 2010 a federal immigration judge awarded political asylum to a family whose German government was persecuting for having the temerity to homeschool their children.  Now, three years later, the Obama administration seems poised to reverse that decision and deport the family back to Germany.  Uwe Romeike, his wife, and children were told that they could stay as legal residents in Morrisstown, Tennessee, when the family moved there in 2008 after being threatened by German authorities because they homeschooled their children instead of sending them to government schools.

Obama Admin Wants to Deport Christian Home School Family.  The Romeike family fled their German homeland in 2008 seeking political asylum in the United States — where they hoped to home school their children.  Instead, the Obama administration wants the evangelical Christian family deported. The fate of Uwe and Hannelore Romeike — along with their six children — now rests with the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.  In 2010 an immigration judge granted the family political refuge, but the Dept. of Homeland Security objected and argued they don't deserve asylum.  Neither the Justice Dept. nor the Dept. of Homeland Security returned calls seeking comment.

DOJ seeks deportation of family persecuted in Germany for homeschooling.  In the United States, the right to homeschool ones' own children is accepted, although frequently mocked by the left.  The homeschoool movement is thriving in the United States, but in Germany it is illegal, a holdover from Nazi-era law.  The Romeikes fled to the United States in 2008 after they faced mounting fines and the potential of imprisonment.

Deportation of German homeschool family affects US homeschool freedom.  In 1938, the practice of homeschooling was outlawed in Germany by Adolf Hitler and the infamous Third Reich. [...] Sadly for freedom and for many families, Germany has never lifted this archaic and totalitarian ban on homeschooling.  On the contrary, the German government seems to have stepped up its opposition to homeschooling over the past decade, forcing several families to flee, and others to enroll their children in state-approved schools against their will.

Obamunist America Is No Sanctuary for Homeschoolers.  Brainwashing of children to reject notions of individual liberty in favor of collectivist ideology has always been crucial to the progressive agenda.  This is why Hitler era laws against homeschooling are still on the books in Germany, the land that produced modern socialism.  Escaping from Germany to America isn't as effective as it once was.

Swallow Your Pride, Save Your Child.  To summarize:  parents who are capable of providing private or home schooling, but who leave their children in public school while hoping to undo the damage at home, are fooling themselves.  Some damage can never be undone, and even that which can be somewhat mitigated would be better avoided entirely.

Why Homeschooling is Becoming Hipster.  When I was five years old, homeschooling was not as cool and acceptable as it is today; homeschooling parents were scrutinized and ridiculed.  My mother did not care; she was an entrepreneur.  My mother's friends openly doubted her ability to teach her own children.  She proved them wrong; I graduated Summa Cum Laude from college, my sister is a teacher at a private school and I have a brother in medical school.

School Vouchers Are So Popular Some Districts Are Running Out.  More states have been adopting expanded school choice options, offering vouchers for families who wish to move their children from failing public schools to private schools.  In just the past year, nine states have adopted new rules that not only provide for this choice but have reduced or eliminated caps on household income levels so that even less economically challenged families can qualify for the vouchers.  This trend is creating budgetary challenges for states while raising questions over programs that were originally envisioned as a way for low-income households to help their children succeed.  But it also highlights the question of how education, long viewed as primarily a publicly funded responsibility of the state, can survive if it increasingly moves into the private sector.

Democrats Are Throwing Kids Off the School Bus.  Have you heard the outrageous story of what happened recently in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's capital?  Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.), elected in 2022, had campaigned on school choice for tens of thousands of children, mostly minorities, who are forced to attend failing public schools in places like Philadelphia.  "It's what I believe," Shapiro, then state attorney general, assured voters as he ran for governor.  Last month on a national Fox News broadcast, Shapiro was unequivocal in his support for school choice because "every child of God" deserves "a quality education."  But there's a force far more powerful in politics than Shapiro's convictions, such as they are.  And that force is the teachers unions.  They put on a full-court press to stop the roughly 10,000 vouchers for the poorest kids in Pennsylvania's worst school districts even though the state budget bill gave billions more for the public schools.  It didn't matter that this voucher program comprised less than 0.5% of state spending.  The union brass commanded Democrats to vote no on even a single penny going to schools that work.

Pennsylvania governor [terminates] school voucher push [due to] opposition from teachers unions.  Pennsylvania Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro says he plans on dropping his push for private school vouchers from the state budget amid opposition from teachers unions and members of his own party.  The budget passed the state House and Senate on Wednesday after discussions had been deadlocked on the $100 million voucher program, local outlet Spotlight PA reported.  Shapiro as well as Senate Republicans had supported the voucher program, but Pennsylvania House Democratic leadership did not and refused to act on the Senate's budget bill.

Pennsylvania Republicans Get Played and Betrayed on School Choice.  Pennsylvania continues to be a place of nightmares for Republicans.  Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro, who ran in 2022 on being a strong supporter of school choice (an oddity in his party), has done an about-face and will now line-item veto the necessary funding to provide vouchers.  That represents a capitulation to the teacher's unions that lobbied the governor's office.  In all, $100 million will now be denied, locking students in failing schools.  Democrat in the State House had previously demanded $750 million more in funding for public schools as a counter to the school voucher program.  Senate Republicans in the state put out the following statement in response.  [Tweet]

Iowa [was] Flooded With Over 25K Applications For New School Choice Funds.  Iowa was flooded with more than 25,000 applications for the state's new school choice savings accounts, nearly twice as many as the program's budget can fund.  A total of 25,576 students have signed up for an education savings account as of Friday, hours before the midnight deadline.  Iowa began accepting applications just a month earlier, on May 31.  The education savings accounts give families about $7,600 per year in state money to spend on tuition or other education expenses related to an accredited private school.

North Carolina's governor, who sent his own kid to private school, just issued a state of emergency over Republicans pushing school choice.  This is an emergency!  People with lower incomes in North Carolina, particularly people of color, may soon be able to enroll in private schools soon, ruining the party for the rich kids!!  Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper seriously thinks this is an emergency[.]  [Tweet]  The North Carolina House just passed a school voucher bill that would more than double the funding for school vouchers, opening opportunities for kids to get out of failing public schools.  School voucher programs give money to students instead of school systems and allow students who otherwise couldn't afford it access to private schools.  Democrats, of course, oppose this because they want kids in government schools because they're Democrat propaganda machines and activist training grounds.  They don't want poor kids to become less dependent on the government.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declares 'state of emergency' over school choice bill.  Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a "state of emergency" on Monday [5/22/2023] in an attempt to stop a school choice bill from passing the state legislature.  Cooper released a video announcement where he declared a state of emergency, arguing that the state of public education is "no less important" than other emergencies.  "It’s time to declare a State of Emergency for public education in North Carolina.  There’s no Executive Order like with a hurricane or the pandemic, but it’s no less important," Cooper stated.

The Editor says...
The three-year Covid "emergency" worked so well, it's now a tool that will be used whenever the socialits meet insurmountable political resistance.  An impending political defeat in the legislature is not an emergency.  Moreover, any adverse developments in the public schools have taken place over the last several years.

Houston, we have a problem.  Down in Austin, Texas education has dominated the legislative session.  First, there is a move for school choice.  Second, there is a move to have the state take over the Houston school district.  Third, to no one's surprise, the other side is playing the race card.  Let's look at school choice, a favorite of Governor Greg Abbott. [...] Some version of school choice will come out of Austin this year.  The other big topic down here is Houston's school district, perhaps Exhibit A of why we need school choice.  At the moment, there is talk of the state taking over the district.

Five Democrats Who Hate School Choice, Unless It's for Themselves.  In recent years, Republican lawmakers have taken the lead to promote school choice policies, which empowers parents to select the best education for their children.  In some states, these policies include Education Savings Accounts, that allows parents to access the state's per-pupil spending amount for their kids.  Parents can then use these funds on education expenses of their choice, such as tutoring, textbooks, or private school tuition.  Many Democrats oppose ESAs and other similar measures that ensure that families have school choice.  However, many notable Democrats either attended private schools themselves or sent their children to private schools as opposed to the public schools available in their area.  From Democratic governors to our current president, here's five Dems who choose private education over public and push for policies that will not give parents across the country the same opportunity for their kids.

How public employee unions damage schools, policing and government itself.  Two public schools in Manhattan illustrate the high stakes of a political choice that the nation, and many states and municipalities, must reconsider.  In 2019, Success Academy Harlem 2 charter school ranked 37th among New York state's 2,413 public elementary schools, one of which, PS 30, had only about a third as many pupils as Harlem 2, spent twice as much per pupil and ranked 1,694th.  PS 30 and Harlem 2 operate in the same building.  The contract for PS 30's unionized teachers is 167 pages long, mostly detailing job protections, and what teachers can and cannot be required to do.  The contract for Harlem 2's nonunion teachers is one page long.  Those teachers can be fired at will, and are paid 5 to 10 percent more than PS 30 teachers on the other side of the building.

Two States Now Have Universal School Choice — And Yours Could Be Next.  On Tuesday, Iowa became the second state in the country to pass universal school choice, directly providing families with funds to support their children's education.  Arizona was the trendsetter for this new wave of educational freedom after Gov. Doug Ducey signed universal school choice into law on July 7, 2022.  Now the race is on to advance educational freedom, with several red states looking to follow suit.  The significance of these developments can hardly be overstated.  What was once a pipe dream for many education reformers — the enabling of school choice at scale during their lifetimes — is now becoming a reality.

Arizona Teachers' Union Push to Overturn School-Choice Expansion Fails.  The teachers' union-backed campaign to overturn school-choice expansion in Arizona has failed due to a shortfall in signatures, the state's secretary of state announced Thursday.  Under the expansion of Arizona's universal-voucher program, known as the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA), enacted in June, over one million K-12 public school students in the state will become eligible to receive vouchers to fund their attendance at private, charter, or home schools, up from the 11,000 students who are currently eligible.  To subject the expansion to a referendum, the anti-school-choice advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona had to collect 118,823 valid signatures.  After completing the statutorily prescribed review of petition sheets and signatures enclosed in them, Secretary Katie Hobbs and her office determined that the initiative does not "meet the constitutional minimum" and therefore "will not qualify for the 2024 General Election Ballot."

Hypocrisy: Fetterman Puts His Own Kids in Private School, While Standing in the Way of Vouchers.  As most readers know, Pennsylvania's race for Senate is one of the most-watched across the country to potentially swing the upper body of Congress back to the GOP, with Democrat candidate John Fetterman facing off against Republican candidate Mehmet Oz in the purple state.  Of course, Fetterman's unforced errors and inability to put on a semblance of a real campaign make for prime fodder for ridicule — since they're attempting to pass his campaign off as running the way a normal Senate campaign should.  One of the most glaring issues is of him not agreeing to debate the Republican nominee — as my colleague Bonchie pointed out earlier this week, not because the Keystone state lieutenant governor holds a slight, five-point lead in August and doesn't want to shine a spotlight on Oz, but because videos show he can't hack it after suffering a stroke before the Democrat primary.

Homeschooling as a Safe Haven.  Teachers are being caught molesting students, working in pornography in their free time, and even allowing young girls to pose topless in sexual positions for art projects.  These incidents are growing.  Child sex changes are being normalized, and sexuality is being pushed onto children even in preschool.  No longer can parents brush these incidents off as isolated.  Children are being sexualized more and more at younger and younger ages and it's gotten to the point that parents who wish to protect their children's innocence must stand up and take control.  While politicians and the media fearmongers about the 1 in 10 million children who will face school shootings (those are the same odds as being struck by lightning), 1 in 10 public school students are sexually abused by a teachers or other school staff members.  This is the epidemic communities need to be fighting.  Yet the sexualization of minors has become so commonplace that Ghislaine Maxwell was charged and sentenced for sex trafficking minor girls and not a single man who sexually abused those involved has been arrested or brought to justice.

Libs Have Full Blown Meltdown After SCOTUS School Choice Ruling.  As Katie reported, the Supreme Court sided with school choice advocates on Tuesday in a 6-3 decision regarding voucher programs in Maine.  [Tweet]  Predictably, as with any victory for individual freedom — and especially in dealing with parents' choice of where their children get an education — the mainstream media and liberal activist organizations have not been taking the Supreme Court ruling well.  Most of the unhinged wailing centers on the supposed "separation of church and state," which is invoked dubiously to claim that allowing parents to choose where their children attend school means that religion is being forced by the government.  But, that's just not true, as the Court's ruling made clear.  When in full meltdown mode, though, libs never let the facts get in their way.

Supreme Court Rules State and Local Government Cannot Ban Faith-Based Schools from Public Funding.  A major win for parents and school choice today in a 6-3 decision from the Supreme Court [pdf Ruling Here].  The high court ruled that Maine violated the Constitution by refusing to make public funds available for students to attend faith-based schools.  The ruling is broad and makes it clear when any state and/or local government choose to subsidize private schools or provide vouchers for school choice, they must allow families pay for religious schools.  Teachers' unions, left-wing indoctrination institutions and the media are not happy with the Supreme Court decision.  The ruling now makes it possible for state or local school vouchers to be used for private, faith-based schools.  Those schools also have religious exemptions on the types of material and educators they allow in their education programs.

Where did all the kids go?  A Dallas friend well connected with Catholic schools told me that the phone does not stop ringing at the office.  Why?  Parents are calling wondering how they can move their kid from public schools.  Most of them are not even Catholic.  As my friend said, one mother said on the phone that she wants to send her kids to a school where boys and girls go to different bathrooms and no one makes it a constitutional issue.  Homeschooling is booming, too, or another way that parents are voting against the system.

Iowa Dem Wants To Keep Kids in 'Failing' Public Schools, Just Not Her Daughter.  In 2011, fourth-grader Mira Bohannan Kumar was thrilled to start her new life at Willowwind School, a private pre-K through sixth-grade school in Iowa City.  Kumar "had trouble fitting in" at her old school, she told the Iowa City Press-Citizen, and she couldn't wait to take advantage of the smaller class sizes, individual attention, and advanced curriculum her newfound private education offered.  Roughly a decade later, Kumar's mother, Iowa Democrat Christina Bohannan, is fighting to make it harder for local children to enjoy the same private school experience.

COVID-19 school closures led to boom of support for school choice.  The failure of many public schools to reopen during the 2020-2021 school year appears to have created a boom of support for school choice policies nationwide among the general public and elected officials.  As COVID-19 case rates waned over the months and years following the lockdown of spring 2020, many public schools across the country remained closed even as restaurants and businesses reopened their doors and despite repeated assurances from public health officials that schools could safely reopen to in-person instruction.

For Parents, School Choice Provides Hope.  There's a local coffee shop that has become a hub for people working from home who also want to get out a bit.  As we all sit in front of our computers, taking calls and working from large community tables, it never fails that someone, usually a parent, sees my "Love Your School" logo — and asks me what I do.  "I help families learn about their education options.  Do you have kids?"  Without a second thought, a conversation has begun, and parents begin to share about their kids and their concerns, curious if I might be able to offer some hope for their situation.  I love these conversations — because I do have hope to offer.  Its name?  School choice.  Parents worrying about their children's futures is nothing new, but the last two years have compounded those worries and added a dose of fear.

This activist wants all parents to have educational freedom for their kids.  Seventeen years ago, Corey DeAngelis made a decision in middle school that changed his life.  He applied to Communications Arts High School, a magnet high school in San Antonio, Texas, got in, and his experience there turned him into a national advocate for parents demanding a choice in their children's education.  "Everyone wanted to be there.  Everybody wanted to learn," recalled 30-year-old DeAngelis of his magnet school.  His magnet happened to share a campus with the local traditional public school.  When he took a math class in the other school's building, the difference was stark.  "Just walking through the halls, you could see the difference immediately," he told me.  "The classrooms were disorderly.  The culture incentivized bad behavior.  Being in a gang and doing drugs was the cool thing to do."  Meanwhile, the hallway at his magnet school boasted a map plotting where graduates were heading to college.

5 Supreme Court Cases to Watch in the 2021-22 Term.  [#3] Carson v. Makin:  The Carson and Nelson families are challenging Maine's prohibition of applying state funds from the state's tuition assistance program towards secondary schools that, in addition to teaching academic subjects, provide religious instruction.  Petitioners argue this law prevents their families from using the funds towards the schools they consider to be best for their children and, more importantly, that it violates their Constitutional rights under the free exercise, establishment, and equal protection clauses.  Petitioners filed suit and lost in both federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit.  Although the Supreme Court ruled in Espinoza v.  Montana Department of Revenue, that states cannot exclude families or schools from participating in a student-aid program solely because of a school's religious status, the lower courts relied on a distinction between use-based versus status-based restrictions.  The lower courts reasoned that the Supreme Court's decision in Espinoza v.  Montana Department of Revenue prevented states from excluding schools from government programs on the basis of the school's religious status, but it did not address whether states could prohibit how the funds were being used — for religious education.

Voting With Their Feet:  Parents [are] Taking Their Kids Out of Traditional Public Schools in Astounding Numbers.  A new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows what a great advertisement American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten and her more radical members provided for school choice.  After more than a year of school closures, Zoom classes, and battles over critical race theory, parents are increasingly taking their children out of public schools.  The study looked at enrollment shifts between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years.

Arizona charter schools add thousands of new students amid COVID-19 closures.  Arizona's charter schools experienced a rush of new applications amid the COVID-19 pandemic.  The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools released a compilation of state-by-state data on charter school enrollment compared with enrollment in the 2019-2020 school year.  It found nearly 240,000 new students enrolled in charter schools nationally, a 7% increase from the prior year.  The report, released Wednesday, said the pandemic forcing schools to educate children remotely led to frustrated parents who saw charters and private schools welcoming students back to classrooms.  "During the 2020-21 school year, the pandemic forced schools of all types to close their doors and switch to remote learning," the report said.  "Many families were dissatisfied with the quality of what was available to their children.  And that dissatisfaction led them to learn more about the other educational options available.  For many families, charter schools' nimbleness and flexibility made them the right public school choice."

Despite Union Efforts, School Choice Gains New Ground.  People can choose where to live, work, and shop for goods or services.  But few Americans are afforded the opportunity to choose where their children attend school — a more important choice than almost all others.  And efforts to expand educational freedom are vigorously opposed by groups with self-serving agendas.  To them, parent empowerment is a dangerous enemy to be defeated.  Government control, teacher union money, and dominance are prioritized over freedom.  Students are assigned to failing public schools year after year, despite the existence of successful alternative options, which often cost less than the mandated government school.  For example, public charter school students consistently outperform traditional public school peers despite charter schools only receiving a portion of the government funding per student.  Similarly, private school students achieve higher test scores, graduation rates, and matriculation to college than traditional public school students.  In contrast, private schools spend on average $4,000 less to educate each student per year.

School Choice [is the] Only Option in [a] Divided Nation.  The issue of critical race theory is raising a more fundamental question about our nation: education.  Education is about more than teaching children to read and write.  It is about transmitting values, transmitting a worldview, that will define how our youth think and how they will live.  Per the Department of Education, in 2020, 56.4 million children were enrolled in K-12 education.  Of these, 50.7 million were in public schools, and 5.7 million were in private schools.  So, government plays a substantial role in the education of our children.  Per the Department of Education, "Each educational institution that receives federal funds for a fiscal year is required to hold an educational program about the U.S. Constitution for its students."  But do we care at all what is taught?

Demand After COVID-19 Sparks School Choice Proposals in Pennsylvania.  Low-income families in Pennsylvania's lowest-performing school districts could gain access to tuition assistance for private schools as part of a reform package.  Pending legislation would create education savings accounts, into which the state could deposit funds that parents may use to buy education products and services for their children.  Such accounts can make private schooling options more affordable.  The proposal also would expand existing tax credit programs that provide students with tuition assistance in the form of scholarships.  "Once this bill moves forward and passes, Pennsylvania is going to be a model state for educational opportunity," state Rep. Andrew Lewis, a Dauphin County Republican and lead House sponsor, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Biden Says He'll Kill Federal Funding For Charter Schools.  Many Of Those Schools Hugely Benefit Minorities.  Speaking to Lily Eskelen Garcia, the president of the National Education Association, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he had the same feeling that the NEA has about charter schools, adding that no "private charter school will receive a penny of federal money.  None."

School Choice Shines This Week.  School choice was a policy star this week at the Republican National Convention.  President Donald Trump capped off the week by stating his desire to "expand charter schools and provide school choice for every family in America" during his speech Thursday night, the final night of the convention.  A slate of speakers throughout the week made impassioned cases for school choice, including Rebecca Friedrichs, famous for bringing a legal challenge to the forced collection of union dues.  Her effort resulted in the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of teacher freedom in the case of Janus v.  American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.  South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., also made powerful arguments for education freedom.  Scott called a good education "the closest thing we have to magic in America... When a parent has a choice, a kid has a better chance."

The School Choice Debate Misses the Point.  The debate on school choice focuses on whether parents should have a right to choose what school their children attend and if the public education funds should follow the child.  Both sides spar over the efficiency and effectiveness of the public school system and if parents should have the right to opt out of it in order to pursue other options for their children.  However, this debate fails to question the conventional structure of school and only operates within the narrow framework of controlled learning, standardized tests, and measuring and ranking human potential rather than how to best develop it.  Consequently, it ignores more important questions like:  Should children control their own education?  Do standardized tests prepare students for real world challenges and develop critical thinking skills?  Why should children be forced to learn subjects against their will, especially subjects that have little relevance to today's economy?  Does expanding school choice strengthen or weaken the relationship between parents and children?  Should we use statistics to justify freedom of choice?  Should the school day be shorter or at least start later to prevent children from experiencing sleep deprivation?  Should children have more time for free play without supervision?  Is the education business doing more harm to students than good?

Democrats Hate What Trump Is Highlighting about Them.  Poorer Americans, many of them minorities, are harmed disproportionately when forced to send their children to failing schools.  The Democrats, buried in the pockets of the teachers' unions, have no room to maneuver on this issue.  The fiscal argument also strongly favors school choice since it is costing more by the year to send kids to public schools.  In the Northern Virginia area, where I live, it costs between $15,000 and close to $20,000, depending on the county, to educate each student every year.  To spend that much to send students into often unsafe environments where they are certain to fail is ludicrous.  As the president noted, "no parent should be forced to send their child to a failing government school."  My only quibble is that schools are failing only when examined from an American perspective, since they are doing exactly what Democrats want, which is cranking out postmodern anti-American anti-religious future Democrat voters by the truckload.

On school choice, Democrats are the hypocrites.  Ask most Democrats, and they will claim that it is their party that represents marginalized Americans, and specifically lower income black and Hispanic voters.  This makes the Democratic Party's near abandonment of charter schools, and the mostly minority voters who need them, one of the most politically perplexing shifts in recent memory.

Black and Latino Voters Blast Dem 'Establishment' for Opposing Charter Schools.  As top 2020 Democratic candidates unveil plans to curb or reverse the spread of charter schools, many Black and Latino voters are asking why their voices aren't being heard, according to a New York Times report.  "As a single mom with two jobs and five hustles, I'm just feeling kind of desperate," Sonia Tyler told the Times.  "They're brilliant; they're curious.  It's not fair.  Why shouldn't I have a choice?"  Tyler is seeking to enroll her children in a suburban charter school outside Atlanta, joining many other parents who have found in charters a lifeline to escape failing public schools.

Say Goodbye to Charter Schools.  There's no way to reform public schools, in California or elsewhere, given that they are government monopolies that are dominated by unions.  They will put kids first, as one former teachers' union official reportedly said, after the kids start paying dues.  People who think that such schools can be improved through new reforms and more money probably believed that the Soviet economy could have been fixed with a better-developed five-year plan.  The only way to deal with that reality is to escape.  In 1992, California passed one of the nation's most far-reaching school-reform experiments, by making it easy to create publicly funded alternative schools where kids could flee.  The original law authorized the establishment of 100 charters.  The state now has more than 1,300 of them, and they educate 11 percent of the state's students.

Study Links School Choice to Crime Reduction.  A new study compared over 1,000 students on vouchers to their public school peers, finding that school choice programs may help reduce crime.  The study, authored by Prof. Patrick J. Wolf of the University of Arkansas and Corey A. DeAngelis, Director of School Choice for the Reason Foundation, found that participation in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) lowered the chances of a student being convicted of a crime in adulthood.  The pair analyzed over 1,000 students on vouchers via the MPCP in 2006 and compared them to their peers at public schools.  Enrolling in the MPCP throughout high school lowered the chances of a student committing a misdemeanor by 2 to 7 percentage points, a felony by 3 to 4 percentage points, being accused of any crime by 5 percentage points, and being found guilty of theft by 2 percentage points.

Bernie Sanders flips off urban minority kids.  Few things offend Bernie Sanders as much as people escaping from command-and-control government systems, even minority students whose parents are desperate to get their kids a decent education.  The socialist wants to turn George Wallace on his head and not block black children from attending traditional public schools but block them from exiting them for something better.

How Charter Schools Empower Inner-City Children to Escape Failing Public Schools.  Butler College Prep, a top-rated charter school on the South Side of Chicago, provides an atmosphere that reflects and engages the local community.  The founder and principal, Christopher Goins, built his school community by intentionally hiring teachers from historically black colleges so students would have relatable role models.

Elites' hypocrisy on charter schools for blacks.  The Nation's Report Card for 2017 showed the following reading scores for fourth-graders in New York state's public schools:  Thirty-two percent scored below basic, with 32 percent scoring basic, 27 percent scoring proficient and 9 percent scoring advanced.  When it came to black fourth-graders in the state, 19 percent scored proficient, and 3 percent scored advanced.

The Moral Bankruptcy Of Charter School Opponents.  Often located in low-income, minority neighborhoods, these schools have in many cases produced educational outcomes far better than the traditional public schools in such neighborhoods.  A Success Academy charter elementary school in Harlem had a higher proportion of the children in one of its classes pass the statewide math exam than in any other class at the same grade level, anywhere in the state of New York.  As a result of the charter schools' educational achievements, it is not uncommon for thousands of children to be on waiting lists to get into such schools — in New York City, tens of thousands.  This represents a huge opportunity for many low-income, minority youngsters who have very few other opportunities for a better life.  But, to politicians dependent on teachers' unions for money and votes, charter schools are expendable.

Levine is gunning for private charter school operators.  Democratic gubernatorial candidate Philip Levine may be relatively new to politics, but he has a veteran campaigner's knack for sidestepping or talking around questions about issues about which he seems not fully informed.  So when a someone at a Suncoast Tiger Bay Club luncheon in St. Petersburg today [5/10/2018] asked the Miami Beach businessman about how Florida virtual schools can damage the funding for local school districts, Levine did not miss a beat.  He launched right into an applause-generating denunciation of charter schools in Florida, which sounded like he actually might have been talking about Florida's school voucher system.

Democrats say school choice is racist.  Democrats are saying that letting Black parents choose which school their children go to is racist.  That's because the teachers unions pump millions into the Democrat coffers each year.  If Democrats weren't racist they would support school choice because wherever it's tried Black kids do better and learn more.  But giving Black parents a choice threatens the union teachers in public schools whose pay is not impacted by their inability to actually teach Black children.  Perhaps, and this is just speculation, the Democrats of today believe what the Democrats of yesterday believed; namely that Blacks are inferior and can't be educated.  Or perhaps Democrats realize that if Blacks could get a decent education they'd realize how the Democrats are using them.

The Benedict Predicament.  The spread of homeschooling, the lines to get into charter schools, the sacrifices made for private education, the increasing popularity of alternatives to meaningless, expensive college degrees, attest to Americans' coming to grips with our educational system's top-to-bottom rot.

Why Government Schools Are Unsustainable.  The private school-charter school debate is complex, but it's obvious that the traditional government school system is broken.  The very way it has been set up makes its demise inevitable.  Its doom is a matter of not "if," but "when."  How many students have to suffer and fail before its ultimate downfall becomes reality?

Fresh proof of charter school miracles.  Yet another study is out showing New York City charters outperforming the regular public schools — even as Mayor de Blasio keeps on working to stifle charters' growth.  The study, by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, used test scores to compare the gains of 75,000 third- through eighth-graders in 197 city charters to those of their traditional-school peers between 2011-12 and 2015-16.  It found an average charter kid displays growth in reading "equivalent" to 23 extra school days; for math, it's 63 extra days.

Matt Damon makes anti-school choice movie — but sends kids to private school!.  The point of "Backpack Full of Cash" is to decry alleged funding cuts for music and art classes in public schools, and "save" public education.  "To see these kids not have that kind of access — how many of these kids in these schools, how many artists have we lost?" Damon said.  "How many learners have just given up because they feel like this is not for them?"  Damon said helped with "Backpack Full of Cash" because public education has been "at the forefront of our family and dinner table conversations my entire life."  Those conversations, however, convinced Damon to send his own kids to private school — an option he would rather deny to parents who can't afford it.

School choice keeps the peace.  Public schools are commonly described as engines of democracy and citizenship, and a bulwark against social strife.  Which makes the Democrats' bitter and unremitting campaign against Betsy DeVos all the more ironic. [...] Teachers unions, which exercise so much clout in Democratic Party circles, despise DeVos because of her passion for dramatically expanding school choice — through charter schools, online "virtual" teaching, homeschooling, or vouchers to pay for private or parochial school tuition.

Tim Kaine's appalling smear of vouchers.  If Sen. Tim Kaine harbors any sour grapes over his failed vice presidential campaign last year, those grapes have now become poisonous.  Last week, the Virginia Democrat attempted to smear school choice programs by tying them to the unconscionable segregation of his home state in the 1950s and 1960s.  In fighting the nomination of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Kaine waved the bloody flag of segregation, likening school choice to the "states' rights" movements of a half a century ago.  DeVos is a staunch supporter of allowing parents to send their children to private schools using government-funded vouchers.

DeVos Critics' Hypocrisy on Public Schools.  "The basic reason I'll oppose her nomination is that I don't think she is committed to public education," Senator Robert Casey (D., Pa.) declared about DeVos.  This could be easier to take from Casey, if he were the product of public education.  "Casey and his father are regarded as the most famous alumni of Scranton Preparatory School, a Catholic Jesuit preparatory day school in Pennsylvania," the Daily Signal reported last month.  "Casey's daughters, Caroline Casey and Julia Madeline, also attended Scranton Prep."  Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) announced that "I have received thousands of letters, calls, and emails in opposition to her nomination, many of them citing the school voucher and privatization agenda Mrs. DeVos and her allies imposed in Michigan."  He also addressed government-education advocates in Providence in December.  As WPRI reported, "The senator also questioned whether DeVos had ever entered a public school, drawing laughs from the supportive roundtable."  While Whitehouse surely has entered a public school, he never studied in one until he had graduated from Yale and entered the University of Virginia Law School.  Whitehouse is an alumnus of St. Paul's School, a private boarding institution set on 2,000 bucolic acres in New Hampshire.  Whitehouse's daughter, Molly, studied at Providence's Wheeler School.  His son, Alexander, also attended a private boarding school, as the Daily Caller discovered.

Think Again, Collins and Murkowski.  There is no shortage of problems to address when it comes to the American educational system, but the central and urgent problem is the spectacular expansion of the federal government's role in local education decisions.  For going on 20 years, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, the federal government has more and more aggressively insinuated itself into the day-to-day workings of school districts and classrooms.  In the last few years, there has been modest rollback at the state level, as states and municipalities, aiming to break the longstanding, union-backed public-school monopoly, have created new opportunities for school choice.

By Taking Down DeVos, Unions And Democrats Hope To Kill School Reform.  [Betsy] DeVos is unquestionably qualified to head the Education Department.  She has spent most of her adult life as an enthusiastic and thoughtful school reformer, fighting the teachers unions and their bought-and-paid-for Democratic political pals, to bring hope and educational change to the state of Illinois' dysfunctional schools.  What irks unions and Democrats alike is that DeVos is an unabashed advocate of school choice, which mostly means charter schools and voucher programs.  Most thoughtful critics of our failing education system agree that greater choice for parents and students is the only way to make our schools excellent again.

NAACP is supposed to be for blacks?  The NAACP wants to freeze expansion of charter schools until, according to the resolution, they meet the same "transparency and accountability standards as public schools," no longer compete for the same public funds as public schools, don't reject students public schools accept, and that evidence of segregation is no longer evident.  It is disappointing that the NAACP, which defines itself as a civil rights organization, wants to deny a right as fundamental as parents determining how and where to educate their children.  But although disappointing, it not surprising.  It is not just charter schools NAACP opposes, but all alternatives to public schools.

Corrupt Academics and the Media.  More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools.  Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools.  The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support "a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools."  It's easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools.  Many of its members work in public education.  However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves.  In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public-school teachers send their children to private schools.  In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools.

Detroit Free Press Editor Calls For Murder Of GOP Lawmakers.  [Scroll down]  While teacher unions and the politicians whom they support fight many changes to the educational system that give parents more leverage, charter schools have been making a difference in educational outcomes.  A Stanford study last year showed they make a meaningful difference for underserved kids in urban areas.  These results carried across multiple subgroups, including black, Hispanic and Asian students, as well as students from poor families and students with special educational needs.  In the 41 cities studied, students educated at charter schools learned significantly more than their peers in traditional public schools in math and reading.

As charters grow, public schools see sharp enrollment drop.  Standing before the Los Angeles Unified School Board, Susan Zoller delivered a startling assessment:  More than 100,000 students in the nation's second-largest district were now enrolled in charters, draining more than $500 million from the budget in a single academic year.

Charter schools turn away thousands in Texas.  Business is booming at Texas charter schools.  The independently operated public campuses continue to grow — and so do the waiting lists to get in.  IDEA charters — with 44 schools in San Antonio, Austin and the Rio Grande Valley — conducted their annual admission lottery on Saturday.  More than 26,000 children applied; 7,000 were accepted.  Overall, 129,589 children are on charter waiting lists in Texas, more than double the 56,000 reported in 2011.  Total charter enrollment in the state hit 227,827 last year.

State law prevents 3rd grader's return to charter school because he is black.  A decades-old Missouri anti-segregation law is preventing a third-grader from returning to his charter school because he is black.  Edmund Lee's mother has started an online petition to change the law.  She had gathered more than 45,000 signatures.  "When I read the guidelines I was in shock," La'Shieka White told Fox 2 Now.  "I was crying."  Edmund is an A student at Gateway Science Academy in St. Louis.

In Tennessee, vouchers aren't the problem. Scare tactics are.  Called the "Tennessee Choice & Opportunity Scholarship Act," the program would offer "opportunity scholarships" to families to pay for a private school education of their choice.  By targeting students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch and are zoned to attend a public school in the bottom 5% of all Tennessee schools, the program would create an unprecedented opportunity for some of the state's neediest families.  The program would expand by 5,000 students each year before reaching 20,000 students total.  Despite the bill's potential to create opportunity for those who need it most, it has faced much of the typical anti-voucher rhetoric from teachers unions and some legislators, often grounded in false claims and scare tactics linked to money, race, and privatization.

Louisiana School Kids, 1; Obama's Anti-School-Choice Fanatics, 0.  In a victory for school choice, an appeals court has thrown out a Department of Justice bid to take over a popular voucher program in Louisiana and thereby deny poor African-American kids a better education.

All Hail The Unions! Just Kidding, You're Awful.  Again and again they prove that the end goal isn't to get the most children the best education, but to maintain their power and ability to exact dues from every teacher working in the state.  Even going so far as to vote to, in essence, hold hostage Washington students during their yearly strike in order to bend the state to their contract demands.  As it stands right now over 1,000 students will be without schools in the next 20 days if the ruling is upheld.

State Supreme Court: Charter schools are unconstitutional.  After nearly a year of deliberation, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 late Friday afternoon [9/4/2015] that charter schools are unconstitutional, creating chaos for hundreds of families whose children have already started classes.  The ruling — believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country — overturns the law voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.  Eight new charter schools are opening in Washington this fall, in addition to one that opened in Seattle last year.  It was not immediately known what would happen with the schools that are already running.

The Border Hoppers Liberals Don't Love.  Washington DC's attorney general recently sued a married couple, alleging they had illegally enrolled their three children in well-regarded local public schools despite living outside the District, and demanding more than $224,000 in back tuition.  Reached by the Washington Post at home, Alan Hill, the father named in the lawsuit, sounded bewildered:  "We are in the middle of this process and still trying to understand it."  "The issue of nonresidents enrolling in D.C. public schools is often heated, particularly as students compete for a limited number of seats in highly sought-after schools," the Post reports.  "Parents often talk of sitting on wait lists for schools while they see drivers with license plates from neighboring states lining up to drop off their children."

A Union Charter Flunks Out.  'Our schools will show real, quantifiable student achievement and with those results finally dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success."  So declared teachers union chief Randi Weingarten in 2005 upon launching the United Federation of Teachers charter school in Brooklyn, New York.

Public School Maven Predicts Public School-Free Cities in Ten Years.  Diane Ravitch says that America's urban public schools are about to go belly-up, killed by the Right (charter schools) and the Left (the Common Core curriculum).  I dearly hope she is correct.

Sen. Tim Scott: Choice in Education 'Would Lead to Revolution'.  Sen. Tim Scott, the first black Republican elected to a full term in the Senate from South Carolina, says putting more poor students in better schools is a priority for him. [...] Scott said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has done a "great job" of changing things in his state, where 90 percent of students in New Orleans are in charter schools.  "I'd love to see that throughout this country," Scott said.  "I am a great advocate and champion ... on that issue."  He also hailed the District of Columbia's opportunity scholarship program, a voucher system that has produced a much higher percentage of college-bound students than ordinary public schools.

In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good.  The second-graders paraded to the Dumpster in the rear parking lot, where they chucked boxes of old worksheets, notebooks and other detritus into the trash, emptying their school for good.  Benjamin Banneker Elementary closed Wednesday as New Orleans's Recovery School District permanently shuttered its last five traditional public schools this week.  With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.

Soros-Backed Group Claims Charter Schools Are Racist.  A George Soros-backed advocacy group filed complaints in three cities alleging that charter schools are racist.  The Advancement Project is asking the Justice Department to investigate the closures of failing public schools in New Orleans, Chicago, and Newark on the grounds that the closings are racially motivated.  The group, whose mission is to dismantle "structural racism" and promote "racial justice," filed complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act on behalf of "Journey for Justice," a coalition of grassroots organizations supported by teachers unions.

Emanuel's Plan to Build Elite 'Barack Obama High School' in an Upscale Chicago Neighborhood Has Parents Enraged.  Shortly after he became president, Barack Obama killed Washington, DC's school voucher program.  His own Department of Education had concluded that students who received the vouchers benefited from it and improved, but that did not matter a bit.  He callously turned a deaf ear to pleas from parents and students who found the vouchers to be an escape from the city's terrible schools.  He sided with the teachers' unions against those families and their children, even while claiming to be a champion of the oppressed and under-represented.  Obama also sided with the unions on charter schools, another escape path for children from terrible public schools in Washington.  He only relented under massive pressure three years later, in an election year.  So, Barack Obama's record on education opened to scenes of him siding with the powerful teachers' unions against the powerless children our public schools are supposed to exist to educate.  Barack Obama stood in the doorways of private schoolhouses, keeping poor children out.

Congress Should Promote Charter Schools.  There is bipartisan agreement that the American economy needs entrepreneurship.  There is bipartisan agreement that our education system could stand some improvement.  Charter schools are a development that addresses both of these needs.  Entrepreneurs have been putting energy and innovation into the charter school effort, and we are starting to see positive results.  Now is the time for Congress to provide funding to states to set up the apparatus needed to facilitate further charter school growth.

When government bullies children.  Last Monday, March 17, parents in New York City who send their children to Success Academy, a Harlem charter school, filed suit in federal court to stop another school bully, Mayor Bill de Blasio, from denying them previously arranged space in a public school building.  Without space, their children and 173 others will not be able to continue at Success Academy this fall.  Across the nation, teachers unions' and civil rights opportunists are standing on the school house steps, trying to stop the rapid growth of school choice and the emergence of charter schools that serve kids rather than union bosses.

Democrat Bullies Against School Choice.  On March 17, 19 parents who send their children to Success Academy, a Harlem charter school, filed suit in federal court to stop New York Mayor Bill de Blasio from denying them previously arranged space in a public school building.  Without space, their children and 173 others will not be able to continue at Success Academy this fall.  School bullying is a problem nationwide, but in New York the bullies are de Blasio and his pals — state NAACP President Hazel Dukes and teachers unions.  Their targets are middle-school kids, 97 percent of them minorities, and 80 percent eligible for lunch assistance.

New York, Chicago, and the war on charter schools.  New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched a war against charter schools. [...] But a welcome thing has happened.  The assault on charter schools has been met by a public backlash.  New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has forcefully defended charters.  Many New Yorkers have made it clear that they elected de Blasio — but they didn't elect him to push poor children out of successful schools.  [New York Schools Chancellor Carmen] Farina and de Blasio have felt the heat and have tried to step back.

Parents will file federal suit over Harlem charter school's closing.  Parents of students at Success Academy Harlem Central Middle School contend the city's decision to close the school violates their children's constitutional right to adequate education, a source told the [New York] Daily News.

The Left versus minorities and charter schools.  If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the political Left's avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a fraud, it would be now — and the place would be New York City, where far-Left Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their funding, among other things.  These schools have given thousands of low-income minority children their only shot at a decent education, which often means their only shot at a decent life.  Last year, 82 percent of the students at a charter school called Success Academy passed city-wide mathematics exams, compared to 30 percent of the students in the city as a whole.

Fired Up Gov. Cuomo Vows To 'Save Charter Schools' At Massive Capitol Rally.  A fired up Gov. Cuomo vowed Tuesday afternoon [3/4/2014] to "save charter schools."  "We are here to tell you we stand with you.  You are not alone," said Cuomo, speaking at a massive pro-charter school rally that attracted thousands of parents, teachers, and kids from across the state who braved frigid 20-degree temperatures to fill the park in front of the Capitol in Albany.  "Our point today is that parents deserve a choice," Cuomo said.  "I am committed to ensuring charter schools have the financial capacity, the physical space, and the government support to thrive and grow."

De Blasio starts his war on charter schools.  Mayor de Blasio brought down the hammer Thursday on three charter schools operated by his nemesis Eva Moskowitz, leaving hundreds of kids without classrooms this fall.  "This has to be the saddest day for the Success Academy's children, family, teachers, school leaders," Moskowitz said after meeting with stunned charter parents in Harlem.

NYC mayor boots charter schools from city space.  New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took off the gloves in his battle with education reformers, rescinding an agreement for the city to share space with several public charter schools.  The move undercuts educators, parents and some 700 students at four schools, including Harlem Success 4, one of the public charter school movement's top success stories, and two set to open in the fall.  While agreements at those schools were rescinded, expansion of a fourth school was also blocked.

Politics Versus Education.  Among the few bright spots in a generally dismal picture of the education of black students are those successful charter schools or voucher schools to which many black parents try to get their children admitted.  Some of these schools have not only reached but exceeded national norms, even when located in neighborhoods where the regular public schools lag far behind.  Where admission to these schools is by a lottery, the cheers and tears that follow announcements of who has been admitted — and, by implication, who will be forced to continue in the regular public schools — tell the story better than words can.

Jindal: DOJ 'More Interested In Skin Color' Than Education.  In November, the Obama Justice Department dropped a lawsuit aimed at stopping a school voucher program in Louisiana.  The Louisiana Scholarship Program is intended to give students in failing public schools a chance to attend better schools, including private ones.  Justice tried to block the program on the basis that it may have violated a 1975 federal desegregation order.

DOJ Tries to Stop Parents from Defending Louisiana School Voucher Program.  The Justice Department is attempting to block parents from defending the Louisiana school voucher program in court, according to a brief filed Tuesday [10/22/2013].  Four families filed last month to intervene in the DOJ's lawsuit against the Louisiana Scholarship Program, which grants vouchers to students so they can flee failing schools rated C, D, or F.

Mendacity, thy name is Eric Holder.  Mendacity should never be associated with the U.S. Department of Justice, but Attorney General Eric Holder's minions are giving the nation a textbook example of that characteristic.  In a motion filed earlier this year in federal court, Justice Department lawyers asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana to enjoin state officials from "awarding any school vouchers to students attending school in schools operating under federal desegregation orders."  Why?  Because enabling such students to flee their typically failing institutions to other schools allegedly "impedes desegregation."

"What makes charter schools preferable to traditional schools is that failing schools can be easily closed down and replaced by new schools."

– Michael Van Winkle.   

What Democrats Really Care About.  Black unemployment is twice that of whites.  Yet not only do liberals refuse to try to improve the black inner-city schools so that blacks have a fighting chance of using their talents to support themselves, but they actually work to ensure that public education stays bad.  Obama ended a school choice program that disproportionately helped blacks in D.C., and Obama's administration is suing Louisiana to end a school voucher program that is primarily helping poor blacks.  Any competition would result in the public schools having to improve, but if they do, then there will be fewer dependent people, and that is bad for Obama.  Obama proves he cares more about power than about the poor when he works to ensure that the public schools in poor areas remain horrible.

Justice Department vs. Louisiana Voucher Kids.  School-choice programs have faced no shortage of legal challenges en route to their adoption in 18 states and the District of Columbia.  But none of the challenges is so perverse or perplexing as the Justice Department's motion last month to wield desegregation decrees to halt Louisiana's voucher program.

Obama's cruel fight against school choice.  The Justice Department has challenged my state in court for having the temerity to start a scholarship program that frees low-income minority children from failing schools.  In other words, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder would rip children out of their schools and handcuff them to the failing schools they previously attended.  And, in the ultimate irony, they are using desegregation orders set up to prevent discrimination against minority children to try to do it.

Obama, Holder Stand In Louisiana Schoolhouse Door.  The Justice Department has asked a federal court to stop 34 school districts in Louisiana from handing out private-school vouchers so kids can escape failing public schools, just like the president's daughters.

Bobby Jindal: Obama's DOJ using civil rights law against black children.  President Obama spoke about the fulfilling the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who hoped every American child receive a good education, but his Justice Department is using a civil rights law to shut down a school choice program that allows black children to escape failing schools.

Justice Department bids to trap poor, black children in ineffective schools.  Nine of 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black.  All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults.  So it's bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.

The Holder-Jindal Collision.  Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal found out late on Friday, August 23.  Attorney General Eric Holder was suing to block the state's school voucher program, which aims to give low-income kids in terrible schools the opportunity to attend better public schools and even private schools.  The Justice Department claims the two-year-old program could interfere with federal desegregation orders in several Louisiana parishes, holdovers from the Civil Rights era.

Justice Dept. tries to stop La. school vouchers.  The U.S. Justice Department is trying to stop the state from distributing school vouchers in any district that remains under a desegregation court order.

MLK's Dream Deferred.  The irony isn't merely rich.  It's tragic.  As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech this week, the Obama Justice Department is suing the state of Louisiana to stop it from distributing school vouchers to kids seeking to escape failing schools.

Meet the Radical Lawyers Suing Bobby Jindal to Block School Choice.  Personnel is policy, and the Obama administration knows it.  That's why they hired swarms of committed leftist lawyers to populate the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.  Bobby Jindal and school choice advocates are finding out the hard way how it works.

Holder vs. Martin Luther King Jr..  Give Eric Holder credit for cognitive racial dissonance.  On nearly the same day the Attorney General spoke in Washington to honor the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, his Justice Department sued to block the educational dreams of minority children in Louisiana.

Some say vouchers push limits of the law.  As the Indiana voucher program enters its third year, with more than 9,300 students enrolled in private schools this academic year, some still say the program pushes the limits of the state constitution's clause calling for separation of church and state.  The voucher program, established in 2011 under House Enrolled Act 1003, enables parents to use state tax dollars to pay tuition for their children attending private schools, typically religious schools.  The law also expanded the state's pre-existing tax credit scholarship program and instituted a tax deduction for families with children home-schooled or already enrolled in private school.

More about the one-sided separation of church and state.

The Research Conclusively Supports School Vouchers.  School choice opponents frequently claim vouchers don't improve recipients' academics, hurt public schools, cost taxpayers, increase segregation, and even reduce civic unity.  A new report reviewing the highest-quality research on all these topics concludes the opposite is true.

Indiana Supreme Court upholds nation's broadest school voucher program.  The Indiana Supreme Court has upheld the nation's broadest school voucher program, clearing the way for its expansion.  Critics had argued that the program primarily benefited religious institutions that run private schools.  But the program's supporters say parents can send their children to any school they want, whether it's public or private, religious or not, and the Supreme Court agreed with that Tuesday [3/26/2013].  In a 5-0 decision, the justices said the program does not violate the state constitution.

"The behavior of young people in society is of particular importance; it should, above all things, be marked with propriety in the presence of superiors and elders:  the youth who does not learn betimes a seemly behavior in company will scarcely know how to conduct himself judiciously on any future occasion."

–  George Crabb (1778-1851).