Steven Singer explains here why public schools are the safest environments for children. They are supervised. They are run by professionals, who are licensed and certified.
He writes:
“A California home-school where parents shackled, starved and abused their children is a symptom of a larger disease.
“And that disease is privatization.
“David Allen Turpin and his wife, Louise Anna Turpin, were arrested after police found the couple’s 13 children living in deplorable conditions in their Perris, California, home.
“Some of the children were actually young adults but were so malnourished investigators at first mistook them for minors.
“It is a situation that just could not have happened had those children been in the public school system.
“Someone would have seen something and reported it to Child Protective Services. But school privatization shields child predators from the light and enables a system where minors become the means to every adult end imaginable.
“Let me be clear. Privatization is defined as the transfer of a service from public to private ownership and control.
“In education circles, that means home-schools, charter schools and voucher schools – all educational providers that operate without adequate accountability.
“We are taking our most precious population – our children – and allowing them to be educated behind closed doors, out of sight from those tasked with ensuring they are getting the best opportunities to learn and are free from abuse.
“And since home-schooling operates with almost zero oversight, it is the most susceptible to child neglect and mistreatment.
“Children who in traditional public schools would have a whole plethora of people from teachers to counselors to principals to cafeteria workers who can observe the danger signs of abuse are completely removed from the home-school environment.
“Home-schooled children receive their educations almost exclusively from parents.
“While most moms and dads would never dream of abusing their kids, home-schooling provides the perfect cover for abusers like the Turpins to isolate children and mistreat them with impunity.
“It is a situation that at least demands additional oversight. And at most it requires we rethink the entire enterprise as dangerous and wrongheaded.
“Charter and voucher schools at least utilize whole staffs of people to educate children. The chances of something like this happening at these institutions is much smaller. However, both types of school also are much less accountable for their actions than traditional public schools.
“And that is the common factor – responsibility. Who is being held answerable when things go wrong? At traditional public schools, there is a whole chain of adults who are culpable for children. At these other institutions, the number of people in the hot seat shrinks to zero.”
Read it all. Think about it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I really think this is quite unfair and takes advantage of a heinous crime and loops other into it. Recently in Prince George’s County MD a worker was found to have molested children. I could list many other instances in public schools where people have been found guilty of preying in children, or as bad, teachers having sex with minors (often in public schools). What saddens me here is that instead of all agreeing with that children need to be protected no matter what Alan Singer chooses to try and make it a divisive matter of private vs public schools…where are the hard core facts that children in private schools are more likely to be molested?
First, you’re mixing up your Singers. This is Steven Singer.
But more importantly, this, “What saddens me here is that instead of all agreeing with that children need to be protected…” is kind of the point. When kids are homeschooled or when anyone can start a private school with no credentials or qualifications and there’s no oversight, then how do you propose protecting children? I have no problem with private schools (my middle daughter is in one), and I suspect Singer doesn’t either. But private schools need to have the same kinds of protections that public schools do.
Yes, abuse can happen in public schools. But it’s much more likely to be caught and the perpetrator dismissed and otherwise punished when it happens at public (and well-regulated private) schools. The other day Diane posted a link to a database full of deaths and serious injury/abuse of kids in homeschools and other unregulated private schools. The database is huge. What possible protection do those kids have? The Turpin children would have died had their seventeen year old sister not managed by fluke to get a hold of a cell phone. Many, many others have not been that lucky.
So, since you want us to agree that all children should be protected, do you think that all private and homeschools should be subject to similar oversight and regulation as public schools?
Thank you for clarifying my confusion of singers…and I appreciate your perspective. Yes schools should be regulated. But to me Singer here lumps all private and home schools kids into one and the same which is not valid or true. The tone here is that public schools will protect kids more because of the layers of support. And yet there are still plenty of public schools where abuse has happened despite these layers. To me the tone here is attacking instead of trying to solve a problem
Did you read all of Singer’s article, or just the part that Diane posted? Because the rest of it addresses the issues you’re raising. Singer admits that abuse can happen at public schools, but not nearly as often and not nearly to the same degree simply because of how open and regulated public schools are required to be. No way could a kid in public school be shackled and starved like the Turpin kids were.
It’s unfair to report the truth?
Yes, abuse can happen any where but at lest with public schools there is constant scrutiny, micro managing and back up protections. Not to mention that public school employees have extensive background checks and fingerprinting in most states.
I will send more later as I am not at a computer but for now here is a story of 13 kids who were home schooled and were NOT shackled:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/13-kids-13-college-educations-not-rich-retiring-early/2016/08/08/3abe7cec-38b4-11e6-a254-2b336e293a3c_story.html?utm_term=.69739b73c046
I taught one of the girls who is now a high school math teacher (yes on a private school but she’s teaching)
My point here – we should be careful about taking one horrific situation and thinking that ALL situations are the same
Wow, you found 13 kids that are homeschool that were not abused. I’m so impressed with your the depth of your research. That massive example is 0.000734-percent of the total number of children that are homeschooled.
“The new report concludes that approximately 1,770,000 students are homeschooled in the United States—3.4% of the school-age population. NCES said that among children who were homeschooled, 68 percent are white, 15 percent are Hispanic, 8 percent are black, and 4 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander.”
https://www.hslda.org/docs/news/2013/201309030.asp
Are you alleging that those 13 children represent the norm and there is nothing to be concerned about — just let the homeschooled student continue to be taught at home with no oversight of any kind?
I think you should contact the Coalition for Responsible Home Education and talk to them to find out if they agree with you. Discover if you large study group of 13 kids will impress them enough so they will close their nonprofit and stop advocating for some form of protection for all homeschooled children.
“Homeschooling laws around the country currently allow for broad parental freedoms but are seriously lacking in protections for the rights of children and youth. As a result, some homeschooled children receive stellar educations while others do not learn basic reading, writing, or mathematics skills and are at a greater risk of experiencing abuse and neglect. Feedback from the first generation of homeschooled students indicates that those who are homeschooled responsibly generally do well in college and professional life while those who were neglected or subjected to an abusive homeschooling environment often face low-wage job prospects, poor integration and connection with their communities, and struggles with poverty and dependency that could have easily been prevented.”
https://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/about-crhe/what-we-do/
Oh, and all of the founders of this organization were home-taught as children.
“In December 2013, Kathryn Brightbill, Rachel Coleman, Heather Doney, Kierstyn Darkwater, and Ryan Stollar launched the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a nonprofit organization created to advocate for homeschooled children. We were all homeschool alumni, and had met earlier in the year through a network of alumni blogs and facebook groups. We came from parts of the country as disparate as Florida and California, Indiana and Louisiana, and had varied homeschool experiences, some negative and some positive. We shared something important in common—a growing concern about the widespread lack of protections for homeschooled children.”
https://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/about-crhe/our-story/
Lloyd is your math accurate on the total. Maybe I will let them know to share a positive example of home schooling
Why are you challenging my math? This topic has nothing to do with my math. This topic is more important than if I messed up dividing the total number of homeschooled students by the 13 you found that were not abused.
I seached Google to discover how many children in the US were homeschooled and I took the first answer. That total could be more or less but that number came from a reputable site.
Then I divided your 13 by that number. I used a calculator but didn’t copy out the entire answer.
Do it yourself, on your own, just like I did. Divide 13 by 1,770,000 students. It’s really easy and I learned how to do it when I was a public school student decades ago except I did it the easy way with a calculator. We didn’t have calculators back then. We had to do it longhand and use our brains.
Let’s see, I typed in 13 and then hit the divide key with that divide symbol on it and then I typed in 1,770,000 (the number I got from a reliable site from my Google search) and then hit the % key, and just like magic, the answer popped up.
The complete answer was 0.00073446327
This is what I think. You have no foundation for your thinking so you changed the subject and looked for anything you could use to divert our attention. Shame on you. I think you are either a fool or a minion of the oligarchs or maybe you are both.
Lloyd your right about the math – I shouldn’t have challenged it…but would the same math hold for the family from CA?
My point in all of this is that we should be careful to paint an entire group of people good or bad based on one good or bad example
Who is painting an entire group of people, the parents of homeschool children, with the same brush?
Click the links and read what Responsible Homeschooling.org has to say to discover that they aren’t painting all homeschooled parents with the same brush.
They clearly say that some kids have good parents and get a good education and some don’t and without oversight to protect all homeschool children, there is no way to know who the abusers and the abused are.
There is no way to discover who the abusive parents are without widespread protections for all homeschooled children, protections that are already in place in the form of legislation/laws for or all community based, democratic, TRANSPARENT, non-profit, traditional public education.
Answer this question: Why are the oligarchs and/or the corporate charter schools so totally against TRANSPARENCY (and the laws that support it) for schooling in the private sector that even includes homeschooled children?
Lloyd look at the first words of the post:
A California home-school where parents shackled, starved and abused their children is a symptom of a larger disease…And that disease is privatization”
Yes ,there is need for transparency and proper accountability at all schools to make sure that children are not harmed. One can say that public schools have accountability systems in place, and yet, somehow they still hire people who either molest children or have sex with minors. I am honestly not sure what is worse – having no accountability or having faulty accountability.
My point in sharing the story of the Fatzinger family is that NOT all privatization and/or home school means that you will end up with children who are shackled, starve. What if I were to write an article that began with “A family that home schooled 13 kids and has already produced three college graduates is a sign of what is possible when kids are home schooled…”
That’s my point. Yes, I believe that all schools should be transparent. However, as someone noted in another post – the state had the responsibility to monitor the school – and well it seems they didn’t do that, did they. I’d say that there were faulty accountability systems in place..
I read about those 13 abused and near starvation young people. HOLY COW. Talk about being in a deranged environment. Public school teachers must report abuse.
Read this: https://www.alternet.org/voucher-schools-are-teaching-kids-right-wing-propaganda?akid=16642.2673806.2hmEzC&rd=1&src=newsletter1087848&t=6
HOLY COW … even SCIENTOLOGY?
“Who is being held answerable when things go wrong? At traditional public schools, there is a whole chain of adults who are culpable for children. ”
A chain that begins and ends with the classroom teacher.
“Who is being held answerable when things go wrong?”
Teachers get the blame
When students fail the test
Teachers get the blame
When students ain’t “The Best”
Teachers get the blame
For politicians’ acts
Teachers get the blame
When latter fudges facts
Teachers get the blame
When Common Core’s a bust
Teachers get the blame
When testing turns to dust
Teachers get the blame
When PISA scores are bad
Teachers get the blame
For every single fad
Teachers get the blame
For neighborhood of blight
Teachers get the blame
For bullying and fight
Teachers get the blame
For everything that’s wrong
Teachers get the blame
The list is very long
Here is some advice for anyone considering writing a piece like Singer’s.
Read about what happened at Miramonte Elementary in Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest district, where many, many, many pairs of eyes didn’t stop a serial sexual predator from destroying the lives of dozens of children in the most gruesome, sadistic ways. Understand that there are numerous instances of physical and sexual abuse in traditional public schools, each year, every year. Rip up the piece you were thinking about writing and be glad that you didn’t share it with anyone. You never should have tried to play this card, but playing it after Miramonte would be unimaginably insensitive and poorly informed.
http://beta.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-1122-miramonte-settlement-20141122-story.html
Tim,
The only Perfect schools are owned by Eva Moskowitz, which never have problems, never.
I realize the children were tormented and starved but some state supervisors were supposed to monitor their education as home schooled individuals. I’d like to add to this discussion by asking,who monitored their education throughout those years?
Not only are they coming out of a horrendous situation but can they even read or write? Some of these kids are adults. If one applies to home school isn’t there a curriculum to follow and tests to pass? Doesn’t anyone from the state check on those individuals ?
I realize I don’t know know a great deal about home schooling but the few people I do know who took part in home schooling had guidelines.
The abuse that takes place in homeschooling is so bad that it led to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.
Here is their website and the lead post “Abuse in Homeschooling Environments”
Introduction:
Homeschooling allows abusive parents to isolate their children and hide their abuse in a way they could not if their children attended school. As a result, the lives of abused children who are homeschooled are substantively different from the lives of abused children who attend public school.
Physical Abuse
Abusive parents who homeschool their children do not have to worry about a teacher noticing or reporting their children’s bruises or other physical manifestations of abuse. This allows them to push farther and abuse their children in more extreme ways than they might otherwise.
Verbal & Emotional Abuse
Homeschooled children who are verbally or emotionally abused may have nowhere to go for respite or a break from their abuse. They may also have no one to contradict their parents’ abusive and manipulative messages. Children homeschooled by narcissistic or mentally unstable parents may be especially at risk.
Confinement & Food Deprivation
Homeschooling gives abusive parents the ability to deprive their children of food or confine them permanently. In some cases, children have been starved to death or kept locked in their rooms for years. This is one way abuse in homeschooling situations differs substantively from abuse of children who attend school.
Isolation & Totalistic Families
In some cases, homeschooling families become cult-like as abusive parents’ desire for absolute control melds with extreme religious ideas. These situations may be characterized by brutal beatings, long-term rape and incest, and a brainwashed fear of the authorities, though less severe situations may be no less harmful.
https://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/policy-issues/abuse-and-neglect/abuse-in-homeschooling-environments/
Who founded this group?
“Our Story
“In December 2013, Kathryn Brightbill, Rachel Coleman, Heather Doney, Kierstyn Darkwater, and Ryan Stollar launched the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a nonprofit organization created to advocate for homeschooled children. We were all homeschool alumni, and had met earlier in the year through a network of alumni blogs and facebook groups. We came from parts of the country as disparate as Florida and California, Indiana and Louisiana, and had varied homeschool experiences, some negative and some positive. We shared something important in common—a growing concern about the widespread lack of protections for homeschooled children.” …
https://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/about-crhe/our-story/
I’m no child psychologist, but leaving the home to attend school —whether public or private, secular or religious—must be a critical step on the road toward separating from the dominant and domineering personalities of one’s parents and establishing a separate identity. I imagine that road involves confronting multitudes of new perspectives that differ from your own, and new authority figures who are distinct from one’s parents. This is a journey that everyone has to take, and homeschooling seems like a surefire way to stunt the development of identity and critical thinking. Only truly desperate circumstances warrant homeschooling, in my opinion.
I disagree FLERP – see the article I posted in the Fatzinger family. They home schooled in part for religious reasons (I believe) but also for costs, etc…again I think it’s dangerous to assume all Home school children have issues adapting, etc
I don’t think you need to assume “all” home-schooled children have issues adapting to agree with what I wrote.
Really, when someone says “homeschooling seems like a surefire way to stunt the development of identity and critical thinking”…how else should one take the comment?
I’m of the view that there are always exceptions to every statement — even those written quickly with aggressive language like “surefire.”
Look at the database for abused and/or murdered homeschooled children where the parents were caught. It’s long, and be WARNED, it is detailed and graphic, and in some cases shockingly horrible. Looking through this list and reading all the details could ruin any sane person’s day and mess with their ability to sleep.
The Timeline on this site goes back to 1986. The Title of this site is Homeschooling’s Invisible Children.
https://hsinvisiblechildren.org/timeline/
Let’s see, how many public school teachers torturned and/or murdered their students.
There’s a big difference between starving a child, torturing a child, and murdering a child vs an underage teen having a sexual affair with one of their teachers that ends up caught and goes to prison for decades.
After you read the entire Timeline from 1986 to 2017, how many parents were caught torturing and/or murdering their home-taught child?
And these are just the ones that were caught.
Abusive parents are abusive parents, whether their kids go to public school or private school. But it makes sense that child abuse by parents would be more likely to go unnoticed when children are home-schooled — fewer opportunities for outsiders to notice the signs of abuse, and particularly for professionals with an obligation to report abuse. Would be interesting to see the incidence of child abuse among home-schooled children versus non-home-schooled children.
child abuse by parents would be more likely to go unnoticed when children are home-schooled
I think that’s the essential point.
And I agree that it’s hard to dispute that logic.
Even when there are state laws in place mandating oversight, the likelihood of children slipping through the cracks increases the further they are removed from the public eye. This is especially true when state resources (eg, for social services) are stretched as thin as they now are in many states.
I’m pretty sure the Turpin case simply could not have occurred had the kids been enrolled in public schools (or even most private schools). There probably would still have been abuse but it never would have gone on for as long as it did. Someone would have noticed and reported it even if the kids themselves had said nothing.
This is really just common sense.
While the claim that “the Turpin case doesn’t indicate that all home schools are bad” is undoubtedly true, that’s not the real issue.
Tell this to a homeschooling parent, and they will tear you a new one. Literally, I wrote a post on FB about the 13 kids in the home “school” shackled to the furniture and abused. Clearly, I started out with hoping these children will now get the education, nutrition, attention they need, etc. and mentioned that being homeschooled allowed this to happen and perhaps there should be more regulation, etc. One lady in particularly went nuts. Well, I agree, abusers are gonna abuse–but had the kids been exposed to guidance counselors, other parents coming and going dropping/picking up students, teachers, aides, lunch monitors, other kids, etc. in a public school….or literally had there been some “home school supervision on behalf of the state, town, government” the abuse might have been picked up on long ago.
You can’t change some peoples’ minds. Devos is one of those minds; Fundies are of that mind set too, and if you’re mentally ill and have 13 kids, you’re going to ruin your kids if you’re allowed to sequester them from humankind.
For that one woman who went nuts, you might want to send her this link for “Homeschooling’s Invisible Children”. This is a page for a timeline starting in 1986 that lists incidents where the parents of homeschooled children were caught for abusing, torturing, enslaving and even murdering their children.
Be warned, if you start clicking on individual links in that timeline, you will be taken to the details of each incident and some of them are horrific.
http://hsinvisiblechildren.org/timeline/
Anyone that still doesn’t want legislation that holds parents accountable for their homeschooled children, after studying this site in depth, is mentally ill, dysfunctional, and a deplorable sadist, …
The only time I expressed concern about children homeschooled by illiterate parents, I received hundreds of vile and threatening responses from homeschoolers. Proving they are angry and uncivil but not illiterate
Proving also that it is actually not the illiterate parents we need to worry about.
The illiterate parents KNOW they are illiterate and undoubtedly want a better life for their kids).
Don’t know about the Turpin mom, but the dad was a former engineer who worked for a big defense contractor. Certainly not illiterate and probably no dummy either (though one can certainly be a literate dummy and there seem to be a lot of them about)
“the dad was a former engineer who worked for a big defense contractor”
Could he be the same type of person as Charles that leaves ignorant, irrational, Trumpish comments here that often supports the Alt-Right lying conspiracy theory machine?!?!
On second thought, it does not prove that we don’t need to worry about illiterate parents because they could not have written a nasty email even if they wanted to, unless they had some literate person write it for them
But it does prove that some literate parents are of concern.
And I still think it more likely than not that illiterate parents would not desire their kids to be illiterate as well ,– ie, not think it wise to teach their own kids.
Maybe there is an Alt-Right website where illiterate Trumpish supporters can log on and watch YouTube videos to find the comment they want to make. They watch and listen until they find what they want and the comment is below the video to copy and paste.
This debate has gone back and forth. Yes the situation with those monsters in California is terrible. But, to extrapolate this one incident to the over 2 MILLION responsible, loving parents, who choose to home-school their children is just wrong.
And there are many many cases of publicly-employed school teachers/staff sexually abusing and molesting public school children. I live in WashDC metro, and an individual in Prince George’s county, MD, is facing multiple counts of sexual abuse and child prn.
Just do a google search on children abused in public schools.
There are attorneys who specialize in public school sexual abuse victims.
https://www.paulmones.com/sexual-abuse-in-public-schools
Public and parochial schools, often deal with abuse allegations by “passing the trash”, which means transferring the accused to a different school, and not informing the victim/parents.
Why can’t we just stop the “p*ssing contest” and just admit, that all children are at risk of abuse. (I can speak from experience, I was sexually molested and abused when I was nine years old).
Our society needs to be more vigilant, and all citizens should be on the alert. Adults should be educated, on how to spot abuse, and how to report it. Children need to be informed of “good touch, bad touch”, and how to get help. (in 1963, such topics were not taught to children),
Citizens should be demanding legislation, that will better protect children from abuse . I would like to see laws making it a crime for a person not to report child abuse/endangerment, when the person was aware of it.
Charles “alleged” (but made it sound like a fact) that all other parents of homeschooled children are loving, responsible parents but the facts don’t support that.
Charles wrote, “But, to extrapolate this one incident to the over 2 MILLION responsible, loving parents, who choose to home-school their children is just wrong.”
Charles, what happened in California is not an isolated incident.
There is a website that documents known cases of the parents of homeschooled children that abused and even murdered their children.
It’s called “Homeschooling’s Invisible Children”.
I suggest you start with the Timeline and click on each link to read the details starting with Dominick J. (Andrew) Diehl in 1986. If you do, we won’t hear back from you for several hours as you wade through the horror stories of children abused, tortured, starved, raped, and murdered.
http://hsinvisiblechildren.org/timeline/
Now, let’s follow your same reasoning for the more than 3 million public school teachers, … that the vast majority of public school teachers are loving, hard-working, responsible teachers and not rapists and torturers and murders of the children they teach.
How many of the millions of public school teachers have been convicted in a court of law for having sexual affairs with or abused or murdered their students?
A Study out of Hofstra University attempted to answer this question.
Click to access orsp_shakeshaft_spring03.pdf
While reading this report looking for any evidence that it is an epidemic int he public schools, don’t forget that the total number o teachers are about 3.2 million full-time public school teachers, and that I can refer back to this report to blow any of your exaggerated alleged future exaggerated allegations into dust.
Every allegation and claim must be compared in a ratio to the total 3.2 million teachers.
When you look at the sexual abuse chart in Table 1, you will notice that the percent for “all” in the first column is less than 10-percent of the total
I would respectfully suggest that when almost all of your comments reference one source alone as the basis for your judgements, you are taking one perspective alone as truth. That in itself is a dangerous generalization. I am one of those 2 million people. I was also a dedicated public school teacher for many years. I believe in and support our public schools. They weren’t the best environment for my child, however, so I chose something else, because I can.
I would suggest you need more comprehensive, cumulative statistical analysis of abuse in its occurrences, over simply quoting the horror filled timeline on one particular anti-homeschool website. Notwithstanding that it’s founders were homeschooled.
Where is the range of sources? The well-documented analysis of abuse in Salk its forms across the spectrum? You can’t quote the statistics from one source alone as the be-all end-all. Or rather, you can, but it is not acceptable analysis for rational comparison.
There are truly horrible abuses that happen. They are NOT confined to the homeschool population. Painting the entire population with this brush, when in fact, you are trying to point to the homeschool parents who ISOLATE their children, is just errant.
Statistically, there are more children in public school settings than anywhere else. Odds are, flat out rates of abuse are higher there than anywhere else. Even strictly statistically speaking.
I was a victim. School didn’t detect or report it, any better than we “catch” the kids who are slipping through, being passed along, without acquiring basic literacy.
You can’t conflate one statistic with another and call it cause and effect.
Abuse is horrible, wherever it happens. The perpetrators are sick and deranged power-seeking individuals. But choosing to shackle your children is no more a part of the general homeschool population than it is part of the general population. It is an abusive, aberrant behavior that deserves to be rooted out and punished. Wherever it occurs.
In the meantime, don’t assume that homeschool parents are the crazy folk of the world. It’s the hardest choice in the world, requiring study, hard work, and dedication to what’s best for your family. You don’t make that choice because you’re NOT trying to address the best interests of your family.
My children are sociable, resilient, and comfortable speaking people of all ages, because they practice doing so every day. Many other homeschool children are, as well. You simply cannot extrapolate that all kids are experiencing all-good or all-bad in either setting, without doing more expansive hard work to look at real world analysis than one anti-homeschool website you source and quote from.
I appreciate the opportunity to expand the dialogue. Respectfully, a devoted reader and supporter of both our public schools, and our right to homeschool.
I think it is fair to say that bad things can happen in all settings. However, it is also fair to say that children are better protected when they are in a supervised setting. In most states, when teachers see children who come to school with unexplained bruises, they are required by law to refer them to protective services.
Dr. Ravitch – we would like to assume that officials in public schools would report such things, but as we know, that does not always happen. To make the leap that because home school children are supervised by their parents, and that no one is really supervising them means more opportunities for abuse seems to be a stretch. And as Devoted Teacher and Charles noted, this post from Mr. Singer seems to take one horrible case and then make the claim that this is a result of privatization of schools…I am Catholic – I know that there are horrible things that have been done by many priests across the nation and world, and I know that some of those horrific things have led people to leave the Church. That being said, every time I interact with the priests at my parish, I don’t assume that they are molesters…Isn’t that the same type of thinking that you and others would be against – it’s similar thinking that has led to the Muslim ban, etc.
All of us agree that more needs to be done in terms of oversight and protection of children at all schools – whether public, private, home schools, etc. You have noted time and again instances of charter schools failing, and yet at the same time I could possibly site instances where public schools have failed (look at the situation in DC). I appreciate that you have posted both of these on your blog. But as Charles said, when we instead led to attacking one another in terms of the types of schools we support instead of looking at larger solutions for all children, that does not help at all…
Jlsteach,
Great nations have sound, well-resourced public school systems. Nations that pay for private schools experience higher rates of segregation. Public schools are a public responsibility, like Police, firefighters, the military, public parks. Etc. A society that abandons public responsibility for the public Good quickly turns nasty and brutish, as those with the most get the most and those with the least sink even lower.
What you describe is nothing less than the abandonment of the American Dream. The rich get richer and each man for himself. Most of our families fled from those kinds of societies to build a better world, not to reproduce the inequality of the old world.
I don’t disagree about the importance of public schools in our society or the fact that nations should not just subsidize private schools. But I don’t agree with pointing the finger at a horrible situation and saying that is a sign that home schooling is horrible. I also am not sure where you took my post and said that I am against the “American Dream”…Do I think that our Fed govt should give more money to support private schools? No. I have friends who posted about the new 529 plan for kids not attending college but attending private schools. Do I agree with this? Not really. And I taught in private schools before (not to mention attended one for three years). When I did attend one in Atlanta, GA back in the 1980s – it was in many ways because of the poor reputation of the public schools in the area I lived. That being said, three years later in St. Petersburg Florida I attended public schools (including graduating from an International Baccalaurate program)…
One of the freedoms that we have in this nation is the freedom to chose how we educate our children…I am confident that you are NOT saying that we should force all families to send their children to public school, are you? For what its worth, I send my two children to our local public school…However, for some reasons – including over-testing, larger class sizes, etc. I have considered sending one of my daughters to private school…
My concern is that those that make those choices are considered outcasts…The finger pointing that stemmed from this post, to me, makes it less likely that people will come together to support the American dream that you discuss.
That one source only listed incidents where the police were involved and most if not all of the parents ended up in court. That one source did not report alleged incidents. That one source makes it clear that without any way to monitor the home environment of home-schooled students, all of those children are at risk.
And I never “assumed” or “alluded” that all homeschool parents are crazy.
Even the other source, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, that I included with a link didn’t do that.
“Homeschooling allows abusive parents to isolate their children and hide their abuse in a way they could not if their children attended school. As a result, the lives of abused children who are homeschooled are substantively different from the lives of abused children who attend public school.”
Read more.
https://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/policy-issues/abuse-and-neglect/abuse-in-homeschooling-environments/#introduction
@Lloyd: I am not asserting that ALL of the 2million families that home-school their children are saints. I am certainly not claiming that that the Perris, California incident is a unique and isolated occurrence. Sadly, this is not the case. Without doubt, there are other home-schoolers who abuse their children. I readily admit that.
Children are at risk from BOTH home-schoolers and public/private school teachers/staff. The years of abuse at Penn State, a public institution, testifies to this sad fact.
Can we just agree, that all citizens should be vigilant, and be aware of child abuse, which occurs in our society? Children are innocent victims, and often do not know to ask for help. Can we not serve to monitor the innocent?
“The years of abuse at Penn State” Penn State is a university where the students are not children. They are young adults. Was there abuse of underage children (under 18 for most states) at Penn State?
“The age of majority — the age at which individuals are considered adults under the law — is 18 in most states (others are either 19 or 21). Anyone who has reached the age of majority is liable for most of his or her actions, whereas a ‘minor’ is the legal responsibility of parents or legal guardians.”
As for “all citizens should be vigilant”, how are the neighbors living near a home where the children are home taught going to be vigilant when they can’t enter any of their neighbors’ houses at any time to inspect it for child abuse?
Are you advocating that we should turn the law over to vigilantes?
However, the public schools where the alleged abuse between teachers and adolescents seldom leads to torture and murder and is mostly sexual abuse by law, it is not easy to keep a secret and get away with the crime with so many people around all the time and there are laws in place that allow other children and adults to be vigilant and report suspected abuse. In California, for instance, if a teacher doesn’t report suspected abuse (physical or sexual), that teacher can lose their job for not reporting what they suspect.
Charles – I don’t agree with everything here that you said – but I do agree with and appreciate the sentiment. thank you for sharing it.
@jlstreach: Thanks for your remarks. The tragedy which is unfolding in Perris, California should serve as a warning to our nation. Child abuse occurs in all types of environments. Maybe in this tragedy, we can come together, and find new ways to seek out and report child abuse, and bring the perpetrators to justice, and prevent future tragedies.
New legislation to encourage reporting of child abuse can be enacted. New programs to teach children, how to report abuse is needed. Protection for people who might fear to report, is needed. (too many people do not want to get involved, for fear of reprisals).