<p>Home schooling has come under fire recently in the press when the actual problem was child neglect. In no case that I have seen like this recently was the child actually being home schooled. In fact, the lack of home schooling was part of the neglect.
I worked as a caseworker in New York for quite a few years monitoring child abuse and neglect. It would have been a quick and easy call to determine whether the child wasn’t in school because he or she was home schooled, or because of the parents’ disorganization and neglect.<br>
As for the protections afforded children by virtue of the attention of teachers at school, I have some first hand experience with that. Many times, with the parents’ written permission, I scheduled conferences with children’s teachers. I was most apt to do this when the child was going through a particularly high level of turmoil in their lives. In no case (let me repeat- no case) had the teacher any sense that the child was going through anything at all. I’m talking about scores of conferences. I was shocked, but eventually I came to understand that the teacher has 20-30 kids to manage, a curriculum to work through, announcements to make, etc., etc. By the middle school years, when children began having multiple teachers, I never even bothered to find out much about a kid by scheduling teachers’ conferences.
Sometimes the school social worker had some information to provide, but their involvement was almost always due to poor school attendance.
As for hard cases making bad law, I can quote George McGovern (remember him?) in Friday’s Wall Street Journal saying that we don’t take away everyone’s drivers license because people are killed in car accidents.
In the case of California, I think the state needs a new law that doesn’t predate the home schooling movement.</p>