Calif. Parents Eager for Ruling on Home Schooling

LOS ANGELES -- Parents of an estimated 166,000 children in California are eagerly awaiting a state appellate court ruling on whether they have a constitutional right to home-school their children without a teaching credential.

That question sprouted unexpectedly on Feb. 28, when a panel of three judges ruled that parents or tutors of children who are home-schooled must be certified by the state, basing their ruling on a rarely enforced state education law. Few parents knew the law existed.

The court's ruling -- since suspended pending a June rehearing -- threatens to send back to the classroom those children who now spend their days studying math, Spanish or the Bible in the comfort of their living rooms.

Reaction to the ruling quickly spread through the state, home to the nation's largest number of home-schoolers, and across the country.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) said the "outrageous" ruling should be overturned. Jack O'Connell, the California Department of Education's state superintendent of public instruction, assured parents they will still have the right to home-school. Blogs and newspaper editorials clucked with calls to prevent, as one writer put it, a similar "judicial tsunami" from landing in their back yards.

"All eyes are on California right now, because [home-school communities] don't want something like this to get bigger than it already has," said Luis Huerta, assistant professor of education at Columbia University's Teachers College. "This might set the trend where other states begin to examine the statutes that allow home schooling in their states."

The decision sprang from a juvenile court case in which a child reported a physically abusive father. An attorney for the child and a sibling asked the court to require their enrollment in a public or private school, rather than home school. The court refused, saying it violated the parents' constitutional rights.

But the state appellate court overturned the ruling, declaring that, under education code provisions, "parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children."

Home schooling is largely unregulated in California and vaguely defined under a private school provision. Parents who teach their children at home register as small private schools, in which they enroll their children, while other parents home-school through public charter or independent study schools.

Bethany Gardiner, a 38-year-old pediatrician from Irvine, registered as a small private school. She wanted her children, John, 12, and Amanda, 9, to learn from a classics-heavy curriculum. In addition to the core subjects, their courses include logic, penmanship, music and art appreciation, French, Greek and Latin.

"I think people have this weird conception that we're hermits or religious zealots who cut ourselves off from society," said Gardiner, noting that her children belong to Girl and Boy Scouts groups and play sports. "We pretty much adopt the attitude that learning can occur anywhere at any time, and that it can't only occur in a brick-and-mortar edifice."

She said the court's ruling paints the home-school community with too broad of a brush. And requiring parents to obtain a credential, she said, does not guarantee any better education.

"Home school has been alive and well in California for many years, and we have the same accountability that private schools have, and I don't hear a big hue and cry over those," Gardiner said. "As far as I'm concerned, I feel the system that has been in place has been a successful system."

A teaching credential is not required in many states, including Maryland and Virginia, as well as the District. But requiring one in California, said Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, is essentially "banning home schooling because 99.5 percent of families wouldn't qualify."