A local family has a six-year-old who's doing quite nicely in the third grade, as far as the State of Colorado knows. The only problem is, she's a dog.

The home-brewed scam arises from the home schooling movement in Colorado. According to the way the law reads (and Colorado's laws are considered middle-of-the-road in laxity/stringency), kids who are registered as home schoolers must be either tested or "evaluated" annually. The evaluation must be done by a teacher, psychologist, or someone with an education degree, but there's nothing that specifies how it needs to be done. As a result, a little cottage industry has sprung up in such evaluations, done by mail for $25. Which is what happened in this case.

As a result, the Colorado legislature is looking at requiring at least some personal contact in evaluations. Lobbyists are up in arms.

But Goossen said what the Campbells did in signing the evaluation form as parents amounts to a setup of Van Acker. "She did absolutely nothing wrong," Goossen said. "When you're in that position, there's an element of trust you're putting in people."
Goossen also compared the evaluations by mail to distance learning. "If you wanted to," Goossen said, "you could falsify information and get a degree for your dog."

That's true, which is why a lot of "distance learning" programs have a bad rep as "diploma mills."

The state has an obligation to both the citizenry that kids are being taught appropriately, and to the kids themselves. Under the present system, that obligation is not being met.

The public -- most vociferously the home-schoolers -- criticize the job the state does at teaching kids in public schools, but simply shifting the teaching over to parents doesn't mean the state loses the responsibility to make sure that education takes place. If it cannot confirm to some level of confidence that kids are getting an appropriate education, then it is not doing its job.

This is not about home schooling as a concept (that's a subject for another post). It's about the state's obligations -- for state, read society -- to provide education.

In the old adage of arms control, "Trust, but verify." The proposed legislation, at a minimum, should be passed.

Filed under :: Politics & Law