RockEnds
05-12-2013, 10:13 AM
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130512/NEWS09/305120062/Home-schooling-tripping-up-education-reform?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Frontpage&nclick_check=1
Home schooling tripping up education reform
Efforts to improve public education face a move to also alter parent-led instruction
May 12, 2013 |
Written by
Jason Noble
The success of education reform in the Iowa Legislature this year may hinge as much on the instruction Jason and Tamara Pool provide at their dining room table as what teachers offer in the classrooms of Iowa’s public schools.
Home schooling — and specifically three proposed changes to the state law regulating it — has emerged as a key division between Democrats and Republicans working to craft a compromise over K-12 reforms.
Both sides recognize it as one of the few remaining issues standing between them and passage of legislation that all sides say they support and that Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has made a personal crusade. House and Senate leaders have not yet negotiated language in earnest in an attempt to broker agreement.
What hangs in the balance: a push for sweeping reforms aimed at improving instruction and student achievement in Iowa’s public schools. A generation ago, Iowa was a top-performing state in national testing, but its average scores have stagnated, while the averages in other states have climbed.
The three changes would loosen existing restrictions on in-home, parent-led instruction and have long been sought by home-school parents, a small but influential bloc in Republican circles. The proposals sharply divide legislators, who either deride the changes as having little to do with either public education or reform, or champion them as ensuring a fundamental right and expanding the options available for teaching kids.
House Education Committee Chairman Ron Jorgensen, R-Sioux City, described the home-school measures last week as must-haves for Republican lawmakers.
One of the measures would allow home-school parents to teach their children driver education, while another would allow home-school educators to teach up to four unrelated students. The most controversial, though, would remove requirements currently in law for home-schoolers to file paperwork with their local school district and to undergo testing by an independent teacher. Results are reported back to the district.
Even with the requirements, some children slip through the cracks with too little education — raising questions about what could happen if they went away entirely, said Mary Gannon, attorney for the Iowa Association of School Boards.
<snip>
The Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators has lobbied for years on behalf of the changes now included in the bill. Its legislative liaison, Bill Gustoff, echoed the Pools’ point, suggesting that eliminating the requirements for bringing in a supervising teacher and reporting data to school districts could make home schooling more affordable.
“It levels the playing field and makes the option more available for more parents to teach their own kids,” he said.
Several other states do not have such stringent requirements, including neighbors Illinois and Missouri, Gustoff added.
Other supporters embrace more militant views on the subject. Rep. Matt Windschitl, R-Missouri Valley, who was home-schooled himself and home-schools his own children, sponsored the amendments adding the language to the reform package. He called the language an “independence amendment.”
“Quite frankly, as I’m home-schooling my children, it is my duty and my job to raise them to the best of my ability. It’s not the government’s job to do that,” he said. “So if I’m choosing to independently educate my children, I should not be accountable to the government for how I am choosing to raise my children.”
Lawyer: State needs info to protect kids
Public education organizations, however, see big problems with the language and question its inclusion alongside the public-school reforms.
Gannon, the attorney for the school boards association, said the current home-school reporting and assessment requirements are critical to ensure students are learning what they need to know. She said she’s heard “horror stories” from around the state of home-school students entering the public schools for their final years of high school grossly unprepared for grade-level course work.
“We have had first-hand evidence of these students not getting the appropriate education they need to be getting,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the majority of home-schoolers by any means, but I don’t know how you pick and choose who’s going to do a good job and who’s not.”
Gustoff dismissed such situations as aberrations, pointing to research showing that home-schoolers routinely outperform public school peers, he said.
Indeed, studies from 1999 and 2009 frequently highlighted by home-school advocacy organizations suggest that home-school students rank in the 80th percentile or higher on standardized tests of reading, math, science, language and social studies. But an author of one of those studies and other researchers have argued the results are not representative of all home-schoolers and may suffer from selection biases.
The nonpartisan International Center for Home Education Research, based at the University of Indiana, cautions that no reliable research has yet been performed to assess the effect of home schooling on academic achievement.
The state’s largest teachers union, the Iowa State Education Association, meanwhile, sees something of a double standard at work in the inclusion of the home-school language.
ISEA Executive Director Mary Jane Cobb noted that while other aspects of the reform package are aimed at improving accountability of public school teachers with new evaluation procedures, the home-school language does the opposite.
“It seems to me to be a really odd mix of strong accountability on our public school teachers but much, much less accountability on home-school parents,” she said.
Parent choice, or kids 'held hostage'?
How the home-school measures will play into the negotiations over the final form of the bill remains to be seen. Jorgensen, chairman of the House Education Committee, and his Senate counterpart, Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, both said they’ve been focused on larger aspects of the package and haven’t even begun talking about that language.
But Jorgensen stressed that Republicans in both chambers would need to see the language in the final bill to vote for it. Including the provisions is what helped him persuade fellow Republicans to boost state aid to schools by 4 percent each of the next two years, meeting a Democratic demand, he said.
“We felt we have given from a funding standpoint to meet their need, and now it’s important for them in the spirit of compromise to meet our need from a parent choice standpoint,” Jorgensen said.
Quirmbach, however, said that adding home-school measures complicates the areas of agreement on a reform package that originated in the governor’s office, occupied by a Republican, and which contains several elements favored by Democrats and Republicans alike.
“I’d prefer to focus the efforts in the bill on the theme that is common in the governor’s version, the House version and the Senate version, which is recruiting more great teachers into the profession and making the great teachers we have even better,” Quirmbach said.
The GOP insistence, he added, amounts to holding public school students “hostage” to the desires of a far smaller but politically potent minority.
Home schooling tripping up education reform
Efforts to improve public education face a move to also alter parent-led instruction
May 12, 2013 |
Written by
Jason Noble
The success of education reform in the Iowa Legislature this year may hinge as much on the instruction Jason and Tamara Pool provide at their dining room table as what teachers offer in the classrooms of Iowa’s public schools.
Home schooling — and specifically three proposed changes to the state law regulating it — has emerged as a key division between Democrats and Republicans working to craft a compromise over K-12 reforms.
Both sides recognize it as one of the few remaining issues standing between them and passage of legislation that all sides say they support and that Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has made a personal crusade. House and Senate leaders have not yet negotiated language in earnest in an attempt to broker agreement.
What hangs in the balance: a push for sweeping reforms aimed at improving instruction and student achievement in Iowa’s public schools. A generation ago, Iowa was a top-performing state in national testing, but its average scores have stagnated, while the averages in other states have climbed.
The three changes would loosen existing restrictions on in-home, parent-led instruction and have long been sought by home-school parents, a small but influential bloc in Republican circles. The proposals sharply divide legislators, who either deride the changes as having little to do with either public education or reform, or champion them as ensuring a fundamental right and expanding the options available for teaching kids.
House Education Committee Chairman Ron Jorgensen, R-Sioux City, described the home-school measures last week as must-haves for Republican lawmakers.
One of the measures would allow home-school parents to teach their children driver education, while another would allow home-school educators to teach up to four unrelated students. The most controversial, though, would remove requirements currently in law for home-schoolers to file paperwork with their local school district and to undergo testing by an independent teacher. Results are reported back to the district.
Even with the requirements, some children slip through the cracks with too little education — raising questions about what could happen if they went away entirely, said Mary Gannon, attorney for the Iowa Association of School Boards.
<snip>
The Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators has lobbied for years on behalf of the changes now included in the bill. Its legislative liaison, Bill Gustoff, echoed the Pools’ point, suggesting that eliminating the requirements for bringing in a supervising teacher and reporting data to school districts could make home schooling more affordable.
“It levels the playing field and makes the option more available for more parents to teach their own kids,” he said.
Several other states do not have such stringent requirements, including neighbors Illinois and Missouri, Gustoff added.
Other supporters embrace more militant views on the subject. Rep. Matt Windschitl, R-Missouri Valley, who was home-schooled himself and home-schools his own children, sponsored the amendments adding the language to the reform package. He called the language an “independence amendment.”
“Quite frankly, as I’m home-schooling my children, it is my duty and my job to raise them to the best of my ability. It’s not the government’s job to do that,” he said. “So if I’m choosing to independently educate my children, I should not be accountable to the government for how I am choosing to raise my children.”
Lawyer: State needs info to protect kids
Public education organizations, however, see big problems with the language and question its inclusion alongside the public-school reforms.
Gannon, the attorney for the school boards association, said the current home-school reporting and assessment requirements are critical to ensure students are learning what they need to know. She said she’s heard “horror stories” from around the state of home-school students entering the public schools for their final years of high school grossly unprepared for grade-level course work.
“We have had first-hand evidence of these students not getting the appropriate education they need to be getting,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the majority of home-schoolers by any means, but I don’t know how you pick and choose who’s going to do a good job and who’s not.”
Gustoff dismissed such situations as aberrations, pointing to research showing that home-schoolers routinely outperform public school peers, he said.
Indeed, studies from 1999 and 2009 frequently highlighted by home-school advocacy organizations suggest that home-school students rank in the 80th percentile or higher on standardized tests of reading, math, science, language and social studies. But an author of one of those studies and other researchers have argued the results are not representative of all home-schoolers and may suffer from selection biases.
The nonpartisan International Center for Home Education Research, based at the University of Indiana, cautions that no reliable research has yet been performed to assess the effect of home schooling on academic achievement.
The state’s largest teachers union, the Iowa State Education Association, meanwhile, sees something of a double standard at work in the inclusion of the home-school language.
ISEA Executive Director Mary Jane Cobb noted that while other aspects of the reform package are aimed at improving accountability of public school teachers with new evaluation procedures, the home-school language does the opposite.
“It seems to me to be a really odd mix of strong accountability on our public school teachers but much, much less accountability on home-school parents,” she said.
Parent choice, or kids 'held hostage'?
How the home-school measures will play into the negotiations over the final form of the bill remains to be seen. Jorgensen, chairman of the House Education Committee, and his Senate counterpart, Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, both said they’ve been focused on larger aspects of the package and haven’t even begun talking about that language.
But Jorgensen stressed that Republicans in both chambers would need to see the language in the final bill to vote for it. Including the provisions is what helped him persuade fellow Republicans to boost state aid to schools by 4 percent each of the next two years, meeting a Democratic demand, he said.
“We felt we have given from a funding standpoint to meet their need, and now it’s important for them in the spirit of compromise to meet our need from a parent choice standpoint,” Jorgensen said.
Quirmbach, however, said that adding home-school measures complicates the areas of agreement on a reform package that originated in the governor’s office, occupied by a Republican, and which contains several elements favored by Democrats and Republicans alike.
“I’d prefer to focus the efforts in the bill on the theme that is common in the governor’s version, the House version and the Senate version, which is recruiting more great teachers into the profession and making the great teachers we have even better,” Quirmbach said.
The GOP insistence, he added, amounts to holding public school students “hostage” to the desires of a far smaller but politically potent minority.