During the final year of the Obama administration, U.S Secretary of Education John King took a nasty swipe at homeschoolers in what more than a few analysts viewed as the potential start of an attempted crackdown on educational liberty. By contrast, this month, the U.S. Department of Education used its official blog to highlight a successful Christian homeschooling family that thinks everyone should know their options.
Hopefully it is a sign of more positive changes to come at the far-left bureaucracy that has helped lead the way in destroying American education, culture, and morality for generations. But there is always a risk that the feds could be seeking to warm up to homeschoolers — even offering tax money and other perks as part of a “School Choice” model — as a means to achieving the longtime establishment goal of controlling them.
As part of its “RethinkSchool” series, the USED blog ran an article this month headlined “Military Family Finds Homeschooling to be Just the Right Fit.” The piece profiles a military family with six children and shows that homeschooling is a great choice for them, for a wide array of reasons.
“When asked to share their thoughts on the benefits of school choice and their homeschool experience, this military family did what they do every day: they turned the occasion into a learning opportunity,” the ED staffer wrote. “Dan, his wife Jenna, and their six kids gathered at the dinner table to shape a response – as individual, independent thinkers and as a family.”
Even more amazing, the family is openly and proudly Christian. “We are Christians and believe it is important to adequately share that worldview with our children,” the family was quoted as saying. “We appreciate that we have choice over our curricula. We do openly discuss various worldviews with our children, which often results in healthy discussions, as we examine issues from all sides. Ultimately, though, our school reflects our family’s worldview and values.”
And they want others to know about the options. “We believe all parents should understand, and be made aware, that they have the option to exercise this right of choice,” the family continued. “We suspect many parents don’t even know there are alternatives (like homeschooling) outside the traditional school model. For some families, a child who really struggles in the traditional mold could possibly be rescued and inspired in his or her education, simply by changing the child’s educational environment.”
What a difference two years makes! During the final year of the Obama regime, Education Secretary King said he was “concerned” about homeschoolers. “I worry that in a lot of cases students who are homeschooled are not getting the kind of the breadth of instruction experience they would get in school, they’re also not getting the opportunity to build relationships with peers unless their parents are very intentional about it,” King said. “And they’re often not getting those relationships with teachers and mentors other than their parents. I do worry whether home school students are getting the range of opportunities we hope for for all kids.”
Keep in mind, largely the same crop of bureaucrats who were running the Education Department during Obama’s years is still there. And keep in mind, too, that more than 99 percent of the money they gave during the 2016 campaign went to Hillary Clinton. Perhaps changes are slowly starting to emerge, but draining a swamp like USED would take many years, if it were even possible.
The Department of Education continues to unleash educational destruction on America. While some of the rhetoric may be changing, Common Core and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) are still being used to nationalize, globalize, and destroy education in America.
Ultimately, the whole department must be shut down. A federal educational bureaucracy that supports home education is just as unconstitutional as one that does not. And in the meantime, homeschoolers must beware of Big Government efforts to ensnare or regulate them with tax-funded bribes.
Still, the homeschool post was a welcome reprieve from the normal agenda promoted by USED.
