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To: dmz
I don't understand calling a group that defends those who homeschool instead of a group that defends those falsely accused of child abuse.

Try homeschooling, and you will understand. Homeschool families regularly have CPS called by relatives and school districts because they disagree with their education decision. CPS doesn't like homeschooling either, so they come in predisposed to find something.

CPS has a tendency to grab kids to punish parents for decisions CPS doesn't like: owning guns, homeschooling, being a little too "republican."

Here in Houston they have even been so bold as to refuse court orders to return children to parents.

240 posted on 10/18/2005 7:01:53 AM PDT by hopespringseternal (</i>)
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To: hopespringseternal
All true, but the flip side of that is that CPS has seen many cases where pseudo-homeschooling has been used in order to avoid detection of abuse. And there is a certain subset of homeschoolers who aren't just normally concerned with the pathetic lack of academic and social standards in public (and many private) schools, but are suffering from full blown paranoia and other psychiatric disorders and/or involvement with cult-like organizations, which form the primary basis for their decision to homeschool. Russell and Andrea Yates were "homeschoolers" who fit both those categories.

When CPS gets an allegation about abuse of a homeschooled child, statistically it is more likely to be true than an allegation about an outside-schooled child, for the simple reason that a child who is being seen by a variety of other adults and children outside the home every day, is more likely to have already come to the attention of police and/or CPS if there is real abuse going on. And out of all the confirmed cases of severe child abuse, a much higher percentage are in children whose parents claim to be homeschooling them, than in children who have been attending outside schools. This is due both to the phenomenon of deliberate use of phony homeschooling to conceal abuse, and the fact that severe abuse or neglect of a child who is attending an outside school, is usually detected before it reaches the national headlines level. One has to think that the Yates children would still be alive if they had been attending even the lousiest public schools, because their appearance and the things they said about their home life would certainly have tipped off authorities that intervention was urgently needed.

The bias against homeschoolers is very real, though, and ought to be formally addressed. Homeschooled children rarely grow up to be low paid government workers, so CPS workers have virtually never been homeschooled themselves, nor do they usually have any colleagues who were homeschooled. As a result, their experience with homeschooled families is seriously skewed toward those who have been the target of abuse reports, and while plenty of perfectly innocent homeschool families have been the targets of such reports, I'm sure the percentage of truly abusive homeschool families who've been reported to CPS is far higher than the percentage of all homeschool families who are trulyabusive. HSLDA would do well to start a program in which sane and healthy homeschool families invite CPS workers and social work students planning to go into CPS-type work, into their homes to see how it works.

274 posted on 10/18/2005 9:17:28 AM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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