How Changes to U.K. Homeschooling Laws Affect You
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published June 13, 2009 |
Articles |
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Learn how some recent changes to U.K. homeschooling laws affect you!
Future Outlook
The implementation of these proposed rules is obviously a setback for the U.K. homeschooling families.
But what may not be that obvious is that there are some dark and heavy undercurrents pointing to some sort of showdown across Europe, the U.S., and the rest of the world as it relates to homeschooling laws. Not an Armageddon (because the situation can still be defused it we're all proactive about it), but definitely a showdown between the regulators and the homeschoolers.
This is the comment directly from the U.K.'s Children's Secretary in the article that really started my theory of the showdown, "[More homeschooling regulations are needed to] bring us into line with many European and other developed countries".
So what I inferred from the Children's Secretary's comment is that, given the proposed regulations mentioned above, the U.K. isn't ruling out the possibility of even more regulations in the future.
Also, I didn't even know there was a desire in the U.K. to embrace homeschooling regulations similar to those of other European countries.
Now, let's see what's going on in our country. The Obama camp just announced its own initiative on fixing education here. The solution? Industrial Strength No Child Left Behind (NCLB)! The "Industrial" part comes from more funding for schools and pay-for-performance features for teachers. Oh, and also, improved tracking of student academic performance through stricter achievement benchmarks and national certification for all teachers (whether homeschool teachers are included in this, we'll see).
I don't know about you but this sounds like tougher standardization to me.
Not concerned yet?
Get this - ever since I was old enough to understand the shortcomings of the public education system in the U.S. (and I'm talking about this on a national level, so this does NOT apply to each and all school districts), it seems one of the favorite pastimes in illustrating these shortcomings, especially by highly-sought-after-intellectuals, is by comparing our education systems to those of other countries.
"Our kids only achieved [insert low percentage here] in math and science while [insert any country] kids performed at 80%" - this seems to be a required mantra of sorts, especially when coming from U.S. presidents talking about reforming the state of education.
So, now it was President Obama's turn and he said that he wants to lengthen the school calendar and compared our public school year with South Korea's, which is a month longer.
Now, I don't remember how many times I've heard U.S. presidents comparing our education system to a foreign country's education system, but it's A LOT. And if done enough, someone in President Obama's cabinet team might actually say, "Hey, after we get done comparing education progress against ourselves, why not start to look outward and start formally comparing against those foreign countries that always seem to rack up those glowing figures in academic performance?"
And that's EXACTLY what happened.
Per CNN, this article states that Education Secretary Arne Duncan, "…is pushing for new benchmarks that would use international standards to compare American students with those overseas."
My fear here is that this spirit of global standardization may spill over into homeschooling territory, and I would just hate to see that happen. I don't want to raise unnecessary concerns, but think about this, there's the U.K. driving towards increased homeschooling laws partly to come up to standards with other European countries. Then, there's us with Obama pushing Industrial Strength NCLB, especially with a desire for teachers to be nationally certified. Oh, and let's not forget Duncan's comments about wanting to measure U.S. education against international benchmarks.
Connect the dots. See what you get. It doesn't seem too pretty to me.
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