Home Education Is Booming

When parents are a child's best teachers:

Although parents in the UK have the right to educate their children on their own, the law says that such an education must be suitable. If a parent is known to a local authority, the person who makes the initial judgements about this will be an inspector. "Some officers are extremely helpful," says Brenda Holliday, a trustee of the Home Education Advisory Service. But others, says Holliday, "are bullying and overbearing, and demand that people at home draw up timetables as if it were a school". Some inspectors see their role as pushing parents into returning children to school. It is how they define success. Their ultimate sanction is a legal one; they can take parents to court.

The fact is that huge numbers of urban (and nonurban) youngsters in America are not achieving anywhere near satisfactorily--and that should be the main message. Moreover, at a time when our premier education goal is to close race-related achievement gaps, it is bizarre to settle for academic outcomes adjusted for "demographics and family economics." Such statements imply that poor and minority kids ought not be expected to attain proficiency and that we should be content if those in our big cities do as well (that is, as poorly) as similar kids elsewhere in the land.