More Views on the California Home Schooling Ban

"In the annals of judicial imperialism, we have arrived at a strange new chapter," observed the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, discussing the recent California appellate court decision banning home schooling unless the home-schooled children have credentialed teachers.

The Kosher Hedgehog believes the decision to be an unconscionable intrusion on parents' right to educate their children as they see fit, and believes the culprits behind the scenes are the teachers' unions, who are frightened to death by the fact that home schoolers excel over public school students in every objective measure of achievement.

Paul Kujawsky is a reasonable man, and therefore reacted to the decision more mildly than the Kosher Hedgehog. In a column in the Los Angeles Daily News, he argues that the court probably was right on the law, and blames the legislature for not acting sooner to create a proper exception to the state truancy laws for properly regulated home schooling. While he acknowledges that parents who teach their own children should not be required to hold full teaching credentials, he would favor a government program "in which the California Department of Education creates standards for initial training and continuing supervision of home-schooling parents. This training and supervision could be carried out by organizations of credentialed teachers under contract with the department. "

The Kosher Hedgehog (who sent his children to Jewish parochial schools) counters that any such regulatory program applied to home schooling would start home schooling down the same slippery slope of over-regulation that has driven down the quality of public school education, the problem that drove many parents to resort to home-schooling in the first place.