alt.education

Jeff Strickland wrote:
>
>>
>
> Well, when I was a kid, my parents spanked me when they felt I needed
> it. Somebody somewhere at sometime challenged a parent's right ot spank,
> the court ruled that spanking was intolerable and the legislature
> created a law to codeify the ruling.

"Somebody somewhere"? That's another way of saying you don't know what
you are talking about.

>>> In my example of the homeschool and CPS, the courts clearly jumped
>>> into an area of state law that is covered and works -- schooling --
>>> and forced a family to send kids to school, and the court did it in
>>> such a manner that all home schools in the state may be shut down.
>>> The court is doing this, not the legislators.
>>
>>
>> In this case the legislature passed statutes which required schooling
>> at a public school, private school, or tutored elsewhere (including
>> the home) by a state-licensed teacher.
>>
>
> This is not true. A home schooled child (as of today) can be taught by a
> parent or legal guardian that registers with the state that they are a
> home school, and they use a cirriculum administered by the proper
> authority (where the gamit of authority is too broad to specify here,
> and makes no difference). It is the court that is dictating the
> credentials that a home school must have.

No, you are wrong. From the case
(http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B192878.PDF):

"... enrollment and attendance in a public full-time day school is
required by *California law* for minor children unless (1) the child is
enrolled in a private full-time day school and actually attends that
private school, (2) the child is tutored by a person holding a valid
state teaching credential for the grade being taught, or (3) one of the
other few statutory exemptions to compulsory public school attendance
(Ed. Code, § 48220 et seq.) applies to the child."

The legislature made the rules.

>> None applied to the parents and child in question, and so they sued
>> asking the courts to invalidate the legislature by declaring a
>> Constitutional right to home schooling.
>>
>
> That is patently false.
>
> The ONLY issue in the case was child abuse. Period. CPS never challenged
> the schooling, never.

I stand corrected in that the parents did not sue. It was a lawyer
representing two of the children asking the court to enforce the
statutes as passed by the legislature. The issue the court dealt with
was not child abuse (even though such allegations set the ball rolling),
but rather whether there is a Constitutional right to home schooling
that trumps the statute.

> The only goal of CPS, the plaintiff, was that it wanted two of eight
> kids observed by the school teachers and administrators for signs of
> abuse that the CPS case workers were not equipped to spot. That is, CPS
> is so overwhelmed that its workers can not perform the inspections
> necessary to preclude abuse, so it insisted that the school be used as a
> surrogate. Nobody in this case ever challenged the quality of the
> education that the children were getting.

I didn't say they challenged the quality of education, nor did I say
what motivated the desire to take the kids out of home schooling. All
of that is irrelevant to the *legal* question, which is solely whether
the legislative statute prevails (the kids go to a regular school) or
there is a Constitutional right to home schooling.

One more time: for you to get your way, you need the court to *ignore*
the will of the majority as expressed by the statute. Stop blaming the
courts for your woes and convince your lawmakers to change the law.

Josh Rosenbluth