Texas public schools hiding behind homeschoolers!

Yeah, I thought it was funny, too, until I realized the deeper implications.

For those readers who haven't a clue as to what I'm talking about, it's an article that appeared in today's Houston Chronicle about how Texas public schools are hiding behind the "left to homeschool" check-off box on their student withdrawal forms.

The numbers aren't adding up, and even homeschooling advocates are wondering whether so many kids are actually being homeschooled or whether public schools are trying to hide their dropout numbers behind that claim.

See, Texas schools get penalized for dropouts (okay, they get penalized indirectly because of homeschoolers, too, because every child absent from the classroom means lost funding) and they will do just about anything to lower their dropout rates.

If they actually tried to lower those rates, that would be good.

Instead, it looks as if they may be lying. If kids withdraw to homeschool, public schools don't get penalized.

Soooo. . .

According to the Chronicle article:

Texas' lax documentation and hands-off practices make it impossible to know how many of these students are actually being taught at home. It also opens the door to abuse of the designation, which could help school districts avoid the sanctions that come with high dropout rates, experts said.

“This is just a bad practice on the part of these schools,” said Robert Sanborn, CEO of Children at Risk, a Houston advocacy group. “Schools are beginning to use the home-schooling designation as a way to encourage students to leave or indeed for some school districts to looks like they have fewer dropouts.”

My only gripe, aside from public schools co-opting the decent reputation of legitimate homeschooling families, is the niggling suspicion that instead of forcing school districts to clean up their own houses some tree-hugging kumbaya-ist is going to try to use this problem as another excuse to regulate Texas homeschoolers.

The irony is, of course, that public schools are the most closely scrutinized, measured and monitored educational entities in the world and they STILL manage to turn out kids who cannot read, write, or do basic math without a calculator.

Why closer monitoring of homeschoolers would appreciably alter the status quo of poorly-taught citizens is beyond me.

But you watch, someone in Austin will use this as a reason to "follow up and make sure those kids are REALLY being taught at home."

And then we'll be stuck with the crappy regulations other states have in place, the ones that force parents to document every sneeze their kid makes during the school day and that force them to sit for standardized tests (the kind that prove nothing about what a child has really learned).

Maybe I'm borrowing trouble. Maybe I am the heir to Chicken Little's empire. But when it comes to the government's interest in those who live and work and learn outside its boundaries, one can never be too careful.