New Jersey Judge Orders Penal Charges Against Mom for Home-Schooling

Queen: Now, Ha ha... are you ready for your sentence?

Alice: Sentence? Ah, but there must be a verdict first!

Queen: Sentence first! Verdict afterwards.

Alice: But that just isn’t the way!

Queen: All ways are...

Alice: Your ways, your majesty.

Queen: Yes, my child. Off with her...

King: Consider, my dear. Uh... we called no witnesses... Uh... couldn’t we... uh... maybe one or two? Ha? Maybe?

Queen: Oh, very well. But get on with it!

King: First witness! First witness! Ah, we’ll call the first witness.

Thanks. I know a few home schoolers in Monmouth County - I'm going to pass this article on to them.

It's a beautiful state, ugly politicians.

Unfortunately WE will have to support these kids when they are dumped on taxpayers at age 18 if they are uneducated. So long as WE are on the financial hook, WE ought to have some system of oversight to catch problems before or as they occur. As I wrote earlier, the oversight need not be government interference, it can be a standardized test of basic knowledge created by an independent body and administered to both public and homeschooled students, say every three years or so.

I homeschooled my kids and I know it's not for the faint-hearted. The problem is when the faint-hearted use home schooling as an excuse to be lazy and use their kids for home. One family I know has an older daughter, 19 years old now, who is fit only for babysitting because she was "homeschooled" and that was what she did ninety percent of her time. We need a way to see that kids are not abused in homeschooling. Imagining that only loving, dedicated parents homeschool is a dangerous fantasy. Some kids are being abused and we need some means of finding those kids before they are ruined.

You are really starting to sound socialist. It is up to the "social establishment" to assure this doesn't happen.

I pay tax dollars for a public education system that is putting out a majority of students who are probably less qualified to be a babysitter than that so called homeschool student you are so worried about.

Get your priorities straight.

Thanks for posting the HSLDA comment on this. They are right.

Unfortunately WE will have to support these kids when they are dumped on taxpayers at age 18 if they are uneducated. So long as WE are on the financial hook, WE ought to have some system of oversight to catch problems before or as they occur.

No no no no! You are using government bloat to justify more government bloat. Where do you draw the line? That logic is what got us here and is what is constantly growing the government in all aspects of our lives. One day we will wake up in a totalitarian police state and wonder how we got there. You can't use one wrong to justify another. All that leaves you with is two wrongs. Instead we should be using the fact that the government has not business raising kids to demonstrate that they have no business using tax dollars to pay people to stay poor.

Some kids are being abused and we need some means of finding those kids before they are ruined.

Kids are being 'ruined' every day by public schools. I challenge you to prove that homeschoolers are being 'ruined' at a higher' rate. Prove that and I might agree (but probably not) we need more oversight. What is wrong with only being fit to babysit? That is what a preschool teacher does all day. Sounds like she has some career options. A public school kid might not even be that qualified (or trustworthy)

...is too difficult for the mother to teach the children at five different grade levels.

My sainted grandmother, who taught in rural one-room schools in Oklahoma and Kansas for decades, would laugh out loud at such a foolish assertion.

Wrong antecedent. I thought the *she* in one of the sentences referred to the judge.

I'll call BS on that. Where'd you get your stats?

In 1812 Pierre DuPont de Nemours published a book called "Education in the United States,” DU PONT De NEMOURS, Pierre S. National Education in the United States of America (Newark, DE, 1923). Dupont, one of the founders of the DuPont fortune, who was known to be brutally honest and direct, spoke of the phenomenal literacy rate in the United States; he was amazed by the difference he saw when compared to European literacy. In 1812, forty years before the passage of our first federal compulsory school laws. Dupont said that less then 4 people out of every thousand in the new nation could not read and do numbers well. He saw our world as a world which nearly every child was trained in argumentation (critical thinking). How could this be possible without compulsory schooling?
DuPont wrote:

The United States are mote advanced in their educational facilities than most countries. They have a large number of primary schools; and as their paternal affection protects children from working in the fields, it is possible to send them to the schoolmasters — a condition which does not prevail in Europe. Most young Americans, therefore, can read, write and cipher. Not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly — even neatly....England, Holland, the Protestant Cantons of Switzerland more nearly approach the standard of the United States, because in those countries the Bible is read; it is considered a duty to read it to children; and in that form of religion the sermons and liturgy in the language of the people tend to increase and formulate ideas of responsibility. Controversy, also, has developed argumentation and has thus given room for the exercise of logic. In America, a great number of people read the Bible, and all the people read a newspaper. The fathers read aloud to their children, while breakfast is being prepared — a task which occupies the mothers for three quarters of an hour every morning. And as the newspapers of the United States are filled with all sorts of narratives ... they disseminate an enormous amount of information.

Almost 20 years later deTocqueville wrote "Democracy in America" he characterized the U.S. Citizens as the best-educated people in history. In 1838, 14 years before the United States Militia began enforcing public schooling at the end of a rifle, another French aristocrat, Michael Chevalier wrote that the American farmer ranked with the immortals in history. The book said in effect that the farmer went into the field with his plow in one hand and Descartes in the other. The American Public school system was not installed because the U.S. citizens were uneducated; one can assume all kinds of reasons why compulsory education was enforced in the U.S. You could start by reading The Origins of Compulsory Education - by John Gatto (John Gatto's book Dumbing Us Down and his Six and Seven Lessons. These facts helped dispel for many the false notion that no one could educate our children better then an organized educational system.
_________________________________________________________________________
National Review
That's right - they're wrong - contribution of illiteracy to deteriorating educational standards
Regna Lee Wood
Nothing can be done with our schools until the basic problem is solved--and no one even sees what it is.
CHESTER FINN of the Educational Excellence Network is wrong. Michael Levin,. controversial professor at the City College of New York is wrong. John Chubb, scholar at the Brookings Institution, is wrong. Former Yale University President Benno Schmidt and Christopher Whittle, partners in the Edison Project to build a thousand "innovative" private schools, are wrong. Past and present U.S. Secretaries of Education William Bennett and Lamar Alexander are wrong. So were Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, and Reagan. And so are President Bush, Congress, fifty governors, and virtually everyone in the media. They all were and are tragically wrong.
The primary reason the U.S. has the poorest schooling in all the developed countries is not, as Mr. Finn says, the lack of "world class standard" achievement tests. It is not, as Mr. Levin says, "the staggering energy expended to bring American Negroes into the educational mainstream." It is not, as Mr. Chubb says, the lack of "vouchers for free choice." It is not bureaucratic bungling or the high cost of federally mandated programs such as racial busing, free lunches, Head Start, and Even Start. It is not the lack of homework. Nor is it crowded classrooms, low expectations, easy curricula, working mothers, missing fathers, TV, automatic promotions, the NEA's leftist agenda, poor discipline, too much testing, too little testing, drugs, or godless textbooks.
The major sottree of America's catastrophic educational predicament cannot be our inability to cope with any of these mostly social and governmental afflictions. For the level of U.S. educational achievement fell long before any of these problems appeared.
It started to sink 25 years before anyone but NAACP attorneys had expended any energy bringing blacks into the "educational mainstream." It sank 28 years before Congress, scared by the launching of Russia's Sputnik, passed the first inclusive education appropriations bill. It sank 35 years before court-ordered busing, 21 years before the first 4 million "baby boom" first-graders crowded into classrooms built for 3 million, and 25 years before most American families owned TVs.
For five decades business and political leaders, who notice the slightest change in interest rates, sales figures, or voting trends, have watched the ratings for U.S. school performance drop from excellent to good to fair to poor to pathetic to abysmal with little indication--before the 1980s--that they saw anything alarming. They watched, without even noticing, the incredible multiplication of illiterate schoolchildren--who were growing into illiterate teens, who were growing into 40 million illiterate or barely literate citizens.
How Could It Happen?
SUCH blindness is almost impossible to understand. But with hindsight we can see some of the reasons.
--Most of the 12 million World War II veterans and their wives were too busy moving from wartime to peacetime to Korean War-time and back to peacetime in less than eight years to notice that many of their children (almost 40 out of 100) were not learning to read in the first three grades.
--From 1951 to 1975, administrators and teachers blamed big classes crowded with baby-boomers for the extraordinary number of failures.
--Long busing routes for "racial balance" that shrank class periods and stretched distances between parents and teachers are still cited as major reasons.
--School critics often focus on the least important considerations. In 1982 a ratio of 39 students to 1 computer was regarded by a Newsweek writer as strong evidence that those who budgeted school dollars were grossly incompetent. Yet seven years later, when National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports revealed that 2 out of 3 17-year-olds could not read well enough to do high school work in any subject--with or without a computer the critics were bewilderingly silent.
--For a half-century two sets of statistics used by professionals and the media to measure educational achievement-literacy rates and reading grade levels-have confused most Americans. They are not what most people think they are.
"Official" literacy rates, published after the Census every ten years, have been as fictional as Little Red Riding Hood ever since 1940. Through 1930, Census takers counted readers--by giving reading tests if necessary. But starting in 1940 Census no longer counted readers. Instead, it counted as literate adults with a certain number of years of school attendance.
Correctly interpreted, then, the official 1980 and 1990 literacy rates of 95 per cent and 95.5 per cent indicate that 95 to 96 out of 100 U.S. residents have attended American schools for at least five years. This may be valuable information, but it has little to do with literacy. Schooling for any length of time no longer equals literacy.
In 1930, only 3 million Americans couldn't read. Most of the 1 million white illiterates and the 2 million black illiterates were people over age fifty who had never been to school. By 1990, 30 to 35 million U.S. citizens could not read. Most are people under fifty who have been to school for at least eight years. True U.S. literacy figures for adults over 25 have dropped from a 1950 high of 98 per cent to a 1990 low of 81 to 83 per cent. Seventy nations have higher literacy percentages.
Reading grade levels (RGLs) have been similarly disguised. Since World War II they haven't equaled skills that students must have to read lessons in particular grades. Instead, reading grade levels have equaled skills that students in each grade do have--as demonstrated by average scores on standardized reading tests. And the difference in reading skills that students must have and those they do have is like the difference between Mark Twain's "lightning" and "lightning bug." It's a big one.
Twenty years of NAEP reading tests show that most 7th-graders today can't read 6th-grade lessons; most 8thgraders can't read 7th-grade lessons; and most 11th-graders can't read 9thgrade lessons written with 6th-grade vocabularies. This is why the military services must teach reading to highly screened, volunteer recruits with average 11th-grade reading levels.
Where Did It Start?
BUT NOTHING explains how anyone who can count his toes, let alone any scholar studying educational achievement, can look at fifty years of scores on academic military or college entrance exams and fail to see when our serious school troubles began." For scores on American College Tests (ACTs), Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs), and Armed Forces Qualification Tests (AFQTs) are as accurate as they have been ever since college-bound seniors first started taking SATs in 1926. So, someone should have noticed that there was trouble in more than River City long before the 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education report. For the average SAT verbal scores fell 24 points--from 500 to 476--in the 11 years from 1941 to 1952, and AFQT scores indicated that illiteracy (defined by the War Department as inability to read 4thgrade lessons, or today's 5th-grade lessons) among millions of prospective recruits with at least four years of schooling soared from almost zero (0.004 per cent) during World War II to an unbelievable 17 per cent during the Korean War.
But apparently no one did notice. No one wondered why virtually all World War II recruits with any schooling could read, whereas 17 out of 100 Korean War recruits could not read. If anyone had investigated, the difference would have been obvious. Nearly all the 12 million young men who served in World War II had learned to read in phonics classes. Between a third and a half of those registered for service in the Korean War had received only "whole-word sight repetition" reading instruction.
The massive failure of our schools did not start in 1963 or 1952 or 1941. It started just when Rudolph Flesch said it started in his 1955 best-seller, Why Johnny Can't Read. It began in 1929 and 1930 when hundreds of primary teachers, guided by college reading professors, stopped teaching beginners to read by matching sounds with letters that spell sounds, and started teaching them to recognize the 1,500 most commonly used words simply by seeing them printed over and over in the new "see and say" readers.
That switch from sounding words by syllable to sighting them by configuration is the reason that since 1950 about 50 million children with poor sight memories have reached the 4th grade still unable to read. And it is the reason that two-thirds of these 50 million have never learned to read.
It is also the reason 10 million of the nation's 40 million public-school students in all grades--25 per cent-are struggling with grade-school lessons in thousands of very small, very expensive special and remedial education classes. Struggling, even though 9 of the 10 million in these classes for the deprived or disabled have normal sight, hearing, and intelligence.
This transition from sounding syllables to sighting whole words must be the reason for such extraordinary numbers in these two compensatory programs. For schools in other countries with instructors who teach beginners to read by matching sounds and letters do not have more than 2 or 3 per cent of their students requiring special instruction in special classes, and nearly all of these have diagnosed mental or physical handicaps.
Teachers in other countries with alphabets have successfully used phonics for the last 3,500 years. The United States is the only country in the world with teachers who try to teach most of their students to read with sight repetition of whole words. And the United States is the only country with illiterate schoolchildren, and with illiterate adults who were once illiterate schoolchildren.
We must stop pinning our hopes for better schools on "free choice" systems for millions of parents and students who live in towns with one poor grade school, one poor middle school, and one poor high school. And for millions more who live in inner cities with fifty poor grade schools, twenty poor middle schools, and ten poor high schools. Chester Finn's "world class standard" achievement tests won't help students who can't read "world class standard" questions--much less answer them. More trips to the zoo and the ballet for pre-schoolers aren't the answer.
We need to give all children the only "head start" that matters--literacy by the age of seven. We did it before the introduction of "see and say." We can do it again. Then we can see what else needs to be done. Many of these new proposals might help.
But offering calculators and computers, more college loans, and longer school days and years to the 20 out of 40 million students who never learned to read well enough to understand junior-high-school lessons is a travesty.
________________________________________

Want more? You can Google everything above.

"Kids are being 'ruined' every day by public schools. I challenge you to prove that homeschoolers are being 'ruined' at a higher' rate."

I never said they were being ruined at a higher rate than public education. The difference is that homeschooler abuse can remain hidden for years and years and public education failures, while numerous, are at least somewhat visible due to standardized testing and promotion to new teachers. The danger to the homeschooler, therefore, is higher if abuse is happening.

I also never tried to justify bureaucracy by bureaucracy. I said an INDEPENDENT body could develop a standardized test for both homeschoolers and public schoolers and thereby measure their performance equally. So long as homeschoolers can demonstrate they are learning the 3 Rs, I don't care who measures it. I certainly don't believe public education should have anything to do with measuring homeschooling.

The problem is that everyone thinks of welfare as the ultimate backup for failure, as you noted. I would like to get rid of it also but it is not realistic in these days when politicians can promise the world to anyone who can vote.

Before the turn of the century, and the huge influx of European Immigrants, it was the churches that were in charge of education children or they were just home schooled like Abraham Lincoln.

Best quote of the day, Professor!

Might I add, "To be truly free, one must be free to fail".

both cases were big dyfs screw-ups. the one in Newark is where the child should have never been placed with family members who were incapable of being parents. Liberals have the idea that a child of a certain race would be better with bad relatives of that race than with someone of another race.

the other in Camden where the 19-yr-old weighed only 45lbs. was another case where DYFS and the community screwed up. The parents were hailed by their minister and congregation and nobody did anything. Once again, these boys were placed by dyfs where improper monitoring took place.

But obviously the failure of schools to educate students is not being seen and corrected. Kids are just being pushed through the system and graduated with diplomas they can't read.

It's becoming more and more apparent that lawmakers are owned by the teachers' unions, who are of course opposed to homeschooling. I won't sit still for laws to make me prove myself a suitable instructor for my children. Do children belong to the government, or their families?

Sounds like the father simply has an axe to grind. However, on the flip side, it would be dangerous for the court to ignore the father's opinion of his children's education as 'credible evidence'.

It's a he said/she said - if in fact the children can be proven to be engaged in appropriate equivelant education then this will become a moot opinion. Considering the general history of home schooled children performin far above thier peers I would hope that these kids are among that group and can by clear evidence get themselves out of the middle of this parental dog-fight.

"Do children belong to the government, or their families?"

Well, so long as the welfare system exists, technically you could say the adult children belong to the taxpayers. I don't like it any more than you but how would you propose ferreting out those parents who are not actually educating their kids? I proposed an independent body to monitor both public and private education and subject them to the same BASIC education standards. What each does beyond the 3Rs I believe should be controlled by parents, either by homeschooling, vouchers, or demanding more of public education. If we had some kind of standard test which would allow the kid to enter college, then whenever the kid reaches the level of competency, leave them alone completely. If someone can come up with a better standard, let them do so. But I don't believe ignoring the abuses of homeschooling is the answer any more than ignoring the abuses of public schooling.

The government needs to be sure its schools are adequately educating students, because they are offering the service (or forcing it at gunpoint on us, rather) and therefore have a duty to prove they are doing what they say. They do not have the right to come into my home and see that my kids meet their arbitrary standards.

School lunches presumably have certain standards of nutrition they have to meet. Does that give the government the right to come into peoples' houses and make sure the food they feed their kid meets those standards?

That's why I recommend an independent body to define what is adequate education for an American child. Then apply it across the board and act accordingly. Can we not define the minimum competency a child should have and then test for it without destroying homeschooling? I do not advocate the government be allowed to invade homes. I do think some organization not controlled by public education should have some power to act where it appears homeschooled children are not actually being educated.