Chris Powell: Public schooling danger exceeds home schooling’s in Conn.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

At the recent week's hearing at the Connecticut Capitol on false claims of home-schooling that conceal child abuse, state officials stressed that they weren't accusing home-schoolers of doing anything wrong. They were only asserting the need to check periodically on children who have been removed from public schools -- to make sure that they are indeed being home-schooled and not being abused, as a few supposedly home-schooled children in Connecticut have been abused in recent years, as a boy in Waterbury recently was reported to have been imprisoned at home and abused for decades.

Home-schooling parents took offense at the hearing anyway. Of course home schoolers are not the problem, but there is  a problem with false claims of home schooling, and home schoolers should acknowledge it. At present no one in authority in Connecticut checks on children who don't attend public school.

Unfortunately there is a far bigger problem of child neglect and abuse involving  public  schooling, but it has not yet been acknowledged by state child-protection and education officials, the governor, and state legislators.

The solution to the danger demonstrated by the Waterbury case and others is obvious, and the acting state child advocate, Christina Ghio has articulated it. Ghio wants state law to require parents each year to show proof of enrollment for children said to be in private school and, for home-schooled children, to demonstrate to the state each year their academic progress and safety at home. 

The far bigger problem is that no one in authority checks on the academic progress and safety at home of most children in  public  school.

For if annual academic testing to prove achievement is a good idea for home-schooled students, why isn't it already in effect for public school students? 

Connecticut gives its public-school students very few standardized tests, and none is used to determine advancement from grade to grade and graduation. That is, all public education in Connecticut is based on social promotion, and, as a result, for years the occasional national standardized testing done in the state has shown that most students perform far below grade level in English and math and never master high school work before being given diplomas.

Indeed, as the Yankee Institute's Marc E. Fitch reported in January, many school systems in Connecticut, including Hartford's, New Haven's and Waterbury's, actually  prohibit  teachers from giving failing grades even where students learn nothing and have seldom attended class.

Additionally, nearly 20 percent of public school students in Connecticut are classified as chronically absent, missing 10 percent or more of their classes. The rate is much higher in the cities. Chronic absenteeism in New Haven's high schools recently reached 50 percent.

Unless it is caused by a student's illness or disability, chronic absenteeism is child neglect if not abuse at home. So is failure to learn. But there is no punishment of parents for it, just coddling and coaxing of those who fail their responsibility. Sometimes that coddling and coaxing works for a while, and absenteeism is reduced, and sometimes it doesn't. No matter.

Last September the Connecticut Mirror interviewed a recent Hartford Public High School graduate who confessed that she had just been graduated though she remained illiterate. The city's school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations but have reported nothing and seem to expect the case to be forgotten.

Of course because of their lack of parenting and living in poverty, many public school students get into trouble. More public school students lose their lives to drugs and crime than home-schooled and supposedly home-schooled students lose theirs to neglect and abuse at home. But state government considers the worsening failure of public education to be the natural order of things, and it very much wants everyone to worry about home schooling instead.

For worrying about home schooling will distract from the real catastrophe of child neglect and abuse and public education, for which state government is directly responsible but about which no hearings will ever be held.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).