Law School Dean: outlaw private/homeschooling

[TranquilMind]

Here's the article:

http://www.wcl.ameri...rinskyessay.pdf

 

It's a couple years old, but apparently Dean Chemerinsky recently gave a talk restating his proposal. It's hard to know even where to start with the wrongheadedness of all this, but I find myself thinking about Compelling Interest Inflation.

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My proposal is simple, although unrealistic at this point in American history. First, every child must attend public school through high school. There will be no private schools, no parochial schools, and no home schooling. Second, metropolitan school districts will be created for every metropolitan area. In each metropolitan area, there will be equal funding among the schools, except where educational needs dictate otherwise, and efforts will be taken to ensure desegregation. Third, states will ensure equality of spending among metropolitan school districts within their borders.

 

How could this happen? One possibility would be through the Supreme Court, though of course not with the current Court. The Supreme Court could find that the existing separate and unequal schools deny equal protection for their students, and order the creation of a unitary system as a remedy. Another way to achieve a truly unitary system is by legislative action. Congress could adopt a law to achieve these goals or state legislatures could do so within the states’ borders.

 

I do not minimize the radical nature of this proposal, but this may be the only way that equal educational opportunity can be achieved. If wealthy parents must send their children to public schools, then they will ensure adequate funding of those schools. Currently, they have no incentive to care about funding in public schools as long as their children are in private or suburban schools. Moreover, as described above, desegregation can be meaningfully achieved only through metropolitan school systems, which include suburbs and cities, because white students could not flee to private schools.

 

The most significant objection to this proposal is that it is unconstitutional under current law. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court held that parents have a fundamental right to send their children to parochial schools. The Court based this on the right of parents to control the upbringing of their children. This right, however, like other fundamental rights, is not absolute. I would argue that strict scrutiny is met and therefore interference with the parents’ right to control the upbringing of their children is justified. There is a compelling interest in achieving equality of educational opportunity and the means are necessary because no other alternative is likely to succeed.

 

Parents desiring religious education for their children would claim a violation of their free exercise of religion. Of course, under the Supreme Court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith, such a neutral law of general applicability would not violate the free exercise clause. Also, as explained above, strict scrutiny would be met by the proposal. I do not minimize the interests of parents in providing religious instruction for their children. Parents, however, could still do this through after-school and weekend programs. This is not the same as education where religion permeates instruction, but it does provide a way in which parents can provide religious education for their children.

 

Perhaps the Court would need to reconsider Wisconsin v. Yoder as well, to the extent that it is read as creating a right of parents to isolate their children from the influences of public education. In Yoder, the Court held that Amish parents had the right to exempt their fourteen- and fifteen-year-old children from compulsory school requirements so as to preserve the special Amish culture. Read broadly, parents could invoke Yoder to justify a right to home schooling if parents wanted to insulate their children from the influences of public education. Simply put, the courts should hold that the compelling need for equal schooling outweighs this parental right.

 

 

The Dean can bite me. A compelling interest for a whole generation of kids should fall through the cracks while they try to create the unachievable utopian schools? Ridiculous. It would never work anyway. Involved, educated parents will still find or create opportunities for their kids to raise them from the abyss.

 

And he couldn't be MORE wrong about the equal funding. I'm paying a huge chunk of taxes on my own home as well as on every rental for a school system I did not use (until recently). So they've taken all the money from me that they would have received had my kids been in public school all along, while I had to separately pay thousands a year for our own classes and activities.

 

I've got one response for his ridiculous argument that underprivileged kids cannot succeed because they have illiterate parents or bad surroundings: Dr. Ben Carson (Pediatric Neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins for years). His illiterate mother turned off the *^*&( TV one day and required her two boys to write two book reports a week.

[TranquilMind]

regentrude' :

 

Teachers were trained experts in their subjects: a math teacher could teach math without a textbook (that was used as a source for homework problems only); he would lecture on the blackboard without notes. A foreign language teacher was fluent in the language she taught. Teacher training, IMO, is the single biggest difference - many teachers in the US are not qualified to teach their subjects, particularly in math and science.

 

You are SO right about this, I have discovered. A few are great. The rest should be doing something else.

 

Parents did not interfere much, so teachers would not have to teach and grade in a way as to appease parents. Grades of A were few and hard to obtain - you could not get 10% wrong and still get an A as it is here, one spelling or math mistake could mean a B.

My kid's co-op is like this. You must receive a 96%+ to get an A. 95.99 is a B.

 

 

At least for communist East Germany, it is not true that a large part of funds went to gifted education. Actually, the communists prided themselves in a uniform education for all students. Kids were taught together until grade 8 (in the 80s until grade 10) and then college bound students would continue through 12th grade at a college preparatory high school. It was a privilege to attend such a school, so there were no behavioral problems because they could always kick you out.

 

High school should be a privilege here too. Too many lazy kids not doing any or much work.

[Leav97]

 

And as far as getting rid of the religious exemption, that won't happen either, because there are too many things in text books (math, science, history, reading) written from one perspective or on a topic that I would have issue with religiously, as would many others. How would the remove ALL of that??

 

 

Out of curiosity how does math have a perspective that doesn't work with religion?

[PachiSusan]

I wish I could agree with this. While I'm reluctant to decree any parent "shouldn't homeschool," there are parents who, if they homeschooled their children, would not leave them better off than the public school does.

 

I have a friend who is functionally illiterate at times and she is home schooling her 11 year old. As sad as it makes me to say it, he would be better off being schooled by anyone/anyway else but her. :(

[Susan of Croton]

More abstract, top-down, statist, utopian thinking, which would result in an inhumane, freedom-robbing result if implemented. As usual "education" is not the goal of the professor's proposal, controlling people is, and what a low opinion he has of people, by the way.

[mamajudy]

More abstract, top-down, statist, utopian thinking, which would result in an inhumane, freedom-robbing result if implemented. As usual "education" is not the goal of the professor's proposal, controlling people is, and what a low opinion he has of people, by the way.

Maybe he should run for office. Our politicians seem to have this down to a science. :leaving: