Are Homeschooled Kids at a Disadvantage?

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Many parents do choose public homeschool programs, whether for the contact with an experienced teacher, help with choosing materials, or access to other resources. These families stay with the public programs as long as the help they receive is greater than any burdens that the program places on them. When that balance shifts, as often happens, they leave.

But parents who forego the public programs are not lacking in support. Public schools do not hold a monopoly on providing help to the homeschooling parent. There is a growing community of homeschoolers that maintain websites with information, e-lists for families in similar geographic areas or with similar educational or life philosophies, or facing similar special needs, and annual conferences where master classes are offered for the parents and children can learn new and exciting things. Families cooperatively arrange field trips, social opportunities, classes. Countless suppliers are eager for a share of the homeschooling family's educational budget, offering materials to please those who wish to teach the classics as well as those who want a more holistic approach.

Homeschooling families are able to teach creatively, something that has been squeezed out of the public classroom with increasing high-stakes standardized tests. They are able to critically assess whether the scope and sequence of the public curriculum is really the best way to approach a given subject and whether the materials used in the public classroom are really the best means of sparking a child's interest. Teachers who join the public programs for homeschoolers but are new to working with this group are frequently amazed, and baffled, by the diversity of approaches and resources these families use, few of which look anything like a standard public school curriculum. But these approaches work. And if they don't, the families are free to discard them and try something new, something the public school teacher can't do.

If a homeschooling family is enrolled in a public program, they are subject to all of the same standards and regulations as other public school students, taking the same tests, etc. But California has no such rules for any private school, and creating rules just for homeschoolers in private schools, but not for students in "brick and mortar" private schools, would have serious legal problems. In addition, there just isn't any proof that homeschoolers aren't doing well without regulation. To the contrary, homeschoolers who want to go to college are meeting the requirements of colleges, many of them highly selective.  These children are getting jobs and are doing well. Adopting regulations in advance of knowing there's a problem just because the state can't believe it can be done without regulation is not right and should bother any citizen.