Posted on 01/24/2018 5:41:05 AM PST by Kaslin
It's elementary. Education control freaks will use any excuse to crack down on competition. With two million K-12 students now educated at home (including our 9th grade son), the temptation to exploit the most marginal cases of alleged child abuse by home-schoolers has proven irresistible to statist politicians and government apologists.
Take the case of David and Louise Turpin's 13 starving children, reportedly found tethered to their beds after one of the siblings escaped and contacted police. The Turpins' "house of horrors" in Riverside County, California, grabbed international headlines last week -- and lured a parade of publicity hounds. Former neighbors in Texas claimed they suspected physical abuse by the parents but did nothing at the time. These thirsty fame-seekers will, however, be appearing on "Dr. Phil" later this week to slurp up their 15 minutes of leechdom.
Louise Turpin's half-sister, Teresa Robinette, who also sat on the sidelines for years, miraculously found the energy and motivation to wake up early for an interview on NBC's "Today Show," where she gregariously gossiped about family secrets.
Another of Louise Turpin's sisters, Elizabeth Flores, dry-cried and show-sniffled on ABC's "Good Morning America" about her "love" for the Turpin children whom she claims to have tried to Skype unsuccessfully "for 20 years." How heroic of her. Flores also confessed that David Turpin allegedly spied on her while she showered. For some reason, it was more urgent for Flores to report this information to "GMA" anchor Robin Roberts and millions of strangers tuned into the boob tube than it was to tell her sister. Or her nieces and nephews. Or authorities.
But instead of training tough scrutiny where it belongs -- on the parents, relatives and acquaintances of the alleged victims -- California legislators and narrative-shaping liberal journalists have instead directed their wrath at home schooling.
The Turpins had filed required paperwork with the state registering their supposed home school, the Sandcastle Day School, as a "private school." Several court cases in California have upheld the right to home school. Parents have the option to sign an affidavit establishing a home-based educational program, hire credentialed tutors or register with an independent study program.
The deep, wide and vast majority of home-schoolers nationwide are loving, excellent and responsible instructors and parents. Yet, public school lobbyists have marginalized them as amateurs, weirdos and menaces who don't have the intelligence to raise and educate their own children. Democratic legislators in California have sought to undermine home-schoolers' autonomy with intrusive legislation, such as a bill proposed last fall that would have required parents to allow inspectors to search their residential bathrooms for state-mandated feminine hygiene products for female students.
In New York City, incompetent nanny state bureaucrats have routinely harassed home-schooling families and falsely accused them of "educational neglect" after losing their paperwork. Home-schooling mom of two, Tanya Acevedo, who is suing the Big Apple, told my CRTV.com program how bureaucratic snafus that classified her son as a truant led to a Child Protective Services investigation.
"You start to question yourself as a parent when they come through those doors," Acevedo recounted. "My child he eats three meals a day, he's well taken care of, and I felt that there was no need for them to be knocking at my door. ... it was a really scary and really nerve-racking experience."
For her crime of exercising educational self-determination, Acevedo was treated as guilty of child abuse until proven innocent.
The idea that there is something especially sinister and crime-enabling about home schooling -- The Week's Damon Linker warned darkly of the "sickening danger of home-schooling," for example, and NPR invoked the specter of a "cult" -- betrays an all-too-common bias against parental autonomy that ignores the government's own gross misconduct. From coast to coast, child welfare agencies see parental negligence where none exists and conversely ignore abuse when it's under their employees' noses. Federal audits of state child welfare bureaucracies in California and Texas last year found rampant failures to detect abuse, investigate allegations and track referrals.
Moreover, sexual abuse scandals have rocked inner-city schools, suburban public school districts and wealthy private schools alike. "In 2014 alone," according to former federal education official Terry Abbott, "there were 781 reported cases of teachers and other school employees accused or convicted of sexual relationships with students."
Yet, the vultures of political opportunism are using the plight of the Turpin children to impose expanded control over all home-schoolers in the Golden State. California Assemblymember Jose Medina, D-Riverside, plans to introduce a bill requiring that "mandated reporters" designated by the state Department of Education conduct annual assessments in all home schools.
Echoing Medina's concern for "the lack of oversight the state of California currently has in monitoring private and home schools," liberal New Republic writer Sarah Jones decried how "lax homeschooling laws protect child abusers." She pivoted quickly from the Turpin tragedy to an attack on the home-school movement's academic achievements and opposition to mandatory kindergarten.
Fundamentally, the home-school crackdown caucus views the very freedom to educate one's own children as a threat to government authority. In the name of liberating the Turpin children, they seek to keep the rest of us home-schooling families in regulatory chains.
If she considers the Turpins to be a " most marginal cases of alleged child abuse", I'm not going to pay any attention to anything else she has to say.
We don’t need government rules and regulations over home schooling because some of our fellow human beings are how should I say it ‘a few fries short of a Happy Meal’.
This is just like all the shooting incidents.
Just because whackos use guns doesn’t mean we ban guns or impose new curbs on the Second Amendment.
Just because whackos homeschool should not lead us to go after home school parents.
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Skype has not been around for twenty years.
And some people over eat.
Should we set controls over food?
And some people drive drunk.
Should we ban cars or enact Prohibition again?
Where there is freedom, there will always be people who abuse it.
That doesn’t mean we blame the freedom or take away the freedom. It means we properly deal with those who abuse it.
Your 2nd Amendment illustration is great.
I think they’re using “marginal” in the sense of “extreme outlier” i.e. out on the margins.
For anyone to try to turn this horrific case of child abuse in to fodder for their anti-home-schooling crusade is despicable.
That is not what she said.
That is not what the author meant.
“I think they’re using “marginal” in the sense of “extreme outlier” i.e. out on the margins.”
I agree. The author used marginal to mean this child kind of child abuse is statistically rare for homeschoolers and not to mean that it barely qualifies as abuse.
“With two million K-12 students now educated at home...”
I had no idea it was that many kids being home schooled. That’s great!
When my step-son, and the two nephews we raised, were coming up, Suppertime was ALWAYS, ‘De-Programing 101’ at our house. The kids were in good schools and were LEARNING, but the teachers were 99.999% Libs and that came out in their teaching, of course. They can’t help themselves as ‘recruiters’ for The Socialist Democrat Party.
Anyhow, a good friend is homeschooling her 8 kids. They are amazingly bright, well behaved, a joy to be around, and she’s doing a remarkable job.
This situation with these nut job parents really has nothing to do with homeschooling and everything to do with EVIL. And those relatives should be held accountable, too.
Maybe we should send kids to public school so they can be picked off by shooters?
Who doesn’t know quite a few abusive school teachers?
How about sexual abuse by teachers?
Bullying by teachers and students?
Point is, educators really need to dust out the corners of public education facilities before pointing fingers at private homes.
As I predicted this horror show is being used to send people into a panic over homeschooling. Keep in mind this family was not isolated and had numerous contacts with members of the public. They went on numerous outings and (if I understand correctly) rather prolific presence on social media. Yet nobody was alarmed enough to call authorities. What difference would being in school have made? Even if reported we know that CPS often drops the ball. But this “what difference” is just an “what if” but public school statists are turning into “never again.” Don’t fall for their lies.
In context I take her to use marginal in reference to the likelhood of such abuse occurring in the homeschool community. Not that the abuse itself is marginal or less than horrifying.
So parents raised in the public school system may not be qualified to educate their own children, so should send them to the same public school system that didn’t educate them enough to educate their children?
Yes, abuse happens within some homeschools.
And abuse happens within some public schools.
And abuse happens within some private school.
Solution: Damn them all as dysfunctional? Shut them all down? Bring in a bureaucrat to oversee each system?
It’s plausible to see why the family didn’t care in this tragic case, if it already expected the state to be an all-nanny.
But again how many of supposed “us” mock and hoot at “see something, say something”?
Something had gone so badly wrong that Romans 13 was apropos. And we can’t have it both ways. Either an all-nanny, or a “see something say something” that runs a risk of being erroneous.
” Parents have the option to sign an affidavit establishing a home-based educational program, hire credentialed tutors or register with an independent study program. “
OK. Did the Turpins do ANY of those three things ?
Read that the other way around. They are “marginal” in that they are way, way out on the extreme. This sentence construction, unfortunately, lends itself to being read that the abuse is being minimized.
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