An article by Newt Gingrich
March 25, 2008
Parents “do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children.”
So wrote a California judge in a case that has ominous potential for the estimated one million-plus American families who have opted out of the public education monopoly and choose to educate their children at home.
Although the ruling is being appealed to the California Supreme Court, as it now stands, the 166,000 California children who are home schooled are truant, and their parents are criminals. Welcome, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized, to a “strange new chapter” in the “annals of judicial imperialism.”
No Teaching Credentials? No Home Schooling.
For background, you should know that although California’s compulsory education law requires that all children between the ages of six and 18 attend a full-time day school, the state law also contains provisions for parents to legally teach their children at home. Under these provisions, homeschooling by unlicensed moms and dads has flourished in California, as it has across the nation.
But all this began to change when the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services recently investigated a claim of abuse by a homeschooled child. Lawyers representing the child invoked the California compulsory education statute to send the child to a public school and a judge eventually agreed, ruling that homeschooling by an unlicensed parent teacher is illegal. Thus, writes the Journal, “a single case of parental abuse is being used to promote the registration of all parents who crack a book for their kids.”
The long and short of it: A California court has ruled that if you haven’t spent four years attending a teaching college and getting the proper licenses from the state, you can’t homeschool your children.
Another Case of a Special Interest Using the Courts to Do What It Can’t at the Voting Booth
The merits of homeschooling speak for themselves. Homeschooled children dominate academic competitions and get superior scores on standardized tests. They excel at all the things compulsory education laws are meant to promote, such as school attendance, academics and civic education.
But the California homeschooling decision is important in another respect — even those of us who don’t homeschool our kids should be outraged and concerned.
The decision represents yet another case of a special interest — in this case, the education unions and bureaucracy — using the courts to get what they can’t get through the popular vote.
This is yet another example of judicial supremacy: Rule by an out-of-control judiciary rather than the will of the people. It joins court rulings such as the removal of “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance on a long list of usurpations of the freedom and self-determination of the American people.
What You Can Do About It
The good news is that citizen activism can be a powerful tool in fighting judicial supremacy.
A good example is the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a group fighting for the rights of homeschooling parents in California and states across the nation.
They initiated a petition drive in the wake of the California decision that attracted a quarter of a million signatures in 10 days. The effort was so successful that they’ve stopped gathering signatures. But you can still learn more and help their cause by going to HSLDA.org.
And don’t stop there. Homeschool regulations are overwhelmingly developed at the state-government level. Call or write your state representatives and let them know that this is one case of judicial supremacy that will not stand.
What do homeschooling and drunk driving have in common? A lot, according to a German judge who made the comparison when he sentenced parents to three months in jail for educating their children at home. Juergen and Rosemarie Dudek, both Christians, are one of the estimated 400 couples in Germany who secretly homeschool their kids despite an antiquated ban on the practice instituted by Adolf Hitler 70 years ago. The decision, which smacks of Nazi-era oppression, will be appealed to a higher court, where the ruling will likely stand. German courts have repeatedly upheld homeschooling as a form of “child abuse,” a conclusion echoing that of a California court last February when a three-judge panel struck down the rights of homeschooling parents in that state. While the California ruling was later vacated, both have something in common–the desire to use public education as a vehicle for indoctrinating children in the liberal views of the state.