I am a home schooling mom, but I am also a foster parent. So, I am trying to look at this issue from both sides. In many ways I would love for our government to go to a voucher system for school dollars, allowing us home schoolers to cash our vouchers to pay for curriculum costs. But I also realize that this would encourage some people to try to "get around" the system by keeping their children home in order to receive voucher funds. It is also an added problem with abusive parents whose children may then have little outside contact with anyone to whom they might report problems or abuses. My experience has been, however, that most abusive or neglectful parents want their children going to public schools since they then don't have to feed their children from their own dollar, their children are marked as "in need" and often receive clothing, gifts and other things that their parents can't or won't provide them with, and they get a "break" from their children so that they can do what they want to be doing. The cases of children being kept home from schooling for any length of time because a parent wants to abuse or neglect the child are extremely rare. Even in the case you have provided, the story states that the girls and the mother went outside the home to work. This means the girls DID have outside contact with people away from the father. It is stories like this that give homeschooling a bad name. We should not jump to the conclusion that ALL home schoolers may have an ulterior motive.
So very true!