Is homeschooling in Kentucky under attack?
A new bill in the Kentucky House presents notable problems for Kentuckians interested in homeschooling.
House Bill 574 from Representative Chris Harris, D – Forest Hills, would add significant new state mandates on the shoulders of parents who decide to homeschool.
The bill requires:
Parents to submit an affidavit attesting a homeschool student received 1,062 hours of instruction. This even though many homeschooling parents get more done in four hours a day than the public schools accomplish in seven or eight hours.
Parents to submit a portfolio of student work to the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) annually.
The KDE to review the portfolio to determine whether the student has achieved adequate academic growth.
A remediation plan if a student has not achieved adequate academic growth.
New administrative procedures for terminating homeschooling if the student has not achieved adequate academic growth after 24 months on the remediation plan.
Basically, items 1, 2 and 3 make the KDE the final arbiter of both the curriculum and performance standards homeschoolers must meet. In practical terms, this probably sets the stage for the department’s own standards – currently still based on the Common Core State Standards – to become the de facto mandate for homeschools, as well.
But, there are a whole lot of other issues with this bill.
Incredibly, the bill’s extraordinary increase in surveillance means homeschool students would have to meet higher standards and requirements than the state’s public-school students meet.
For example, while the state’s public schools are required to offer at least 1,062 hours of classroom time, there’s no required makeup for hours missed by individual public-school students due to things like illness, sports trips and so forth. HB 574 thus holds the homeschool student to a higher attendance standard.
The bill’s mandatory portfolio requirement creates enormous burdens for both the KDE and parents and even raises a privacy issue that public-school students don’t face. With portfolios, each homeschool child’s performance would be made far more transparent and available to the department than currently is true for public school students. Public school students do take department-required tests but are not required to provide what would be extensive files loaded with examples of other “tests, writings, worksheets, workbooks, and creative materials used or developed by the student,” which the draft bill would require for homeschool students. Thanks to collecting all that material, the department basically would know a lot more about homeschool students than it does about traditional public-school kids.
There are more issues, but the bottom line is this bill seems like it’s a very bad solution in search of a problem.
No one seems to have accurate statistics on the number of homeschoolers in Kentucky, but I suspect there are fewer than 2,000, maybe a lot fewer, per grade level from Kindergarten through 12th grade. Based on reports of homeschoolers cleaning up on spelling bees and other academic competitions – as well as being favorites of many university recruiters – out of each class of 2,000, not very many are likely to be in a weak academic situation. If even 20 percent of the homeschool seniors were actually in a dropout status, that would only be 400 students across all of Kentucky.
Meanwhile, just examining the official Kentucky School Report Card data for 2016-17 indicates that while the overall high school on-time (Four-Year Adjusted Cohort) graduation rate was 89.7 percent, only 65.6 percent of those graduates were able to meet muster under any of a variety of ways to demonstrate college and/or career readiness. Mixing that information together with our Effective High School Graduation Rate calculation tells us that only 58.8 percent of the incoming 2013-14 ninth grade class became on-time graduates in 2016-17. That class probably had about 50,000 first-time ninth graders or so, which means that about 29,400 graduated with an effective education. The rest either never graduated or got a hollow diploma. Those ineffective graduates would total more than 20,000 students that the public school system failed.
Based on this information, I would submit the legislature needs to spend a whole lot more time worrying about the state’s public schools before trying to chase after, at best, a few hundred students each year who might not – or, then again, might – be getting a decent homeschool education.
So, what is the real motivation for this bill? This article about one Kentucky situation from the Home School Legal Defense Association might provide a clue.