Until recently there were no homeschool regulations in Washington DC. That’s the ideal situation. When government regulates homeschooling it is a bid to exert control on something that’s a natural process that can be enacted between loving parents and their children.

The new regulations were developed with input from homeschoolers in that area. Parents must now submit a written intent document to let school districts know they plan to educate their children at home. They must also keep a portfolio of each child’s work and submit to school district reviews twice annually.

While I feel this is controlling, over-bearing excess of government involvement, it is much better than some of the regulations I’ve seen coming out of some of the states. Compared to weekly or even monthly supervision of charter school teachers, this looks like freedom. It’s all relative.

I’ll be happy on the day that the US government no longer involves itself in education in any way. We were brainwashed (in public schools) to believe we live in “the land of the free” but we have more laws and regulations than anywhere else on earth.

Source: Schools Roundup: Let’s Be Grownups Edition by Rachael Brown, published July 22, 2008 in DCist.

California education authorities are concerned about an ever-growing ‘drop-out’ rate. High school students are disappearing by the dozens. Where are they going? Could they be homeschooling independently?

A quote from the article by Nanette Asimov:

Did they leave the state? Join a homeschool? Die? The new system recognizes 29 kinds of student invisibility, 10 of which are logged as dropouts, including “expelled.”

One stunning fact they learned was that 53,600 students who claimed they were transferring to a new school never actually showed up.

Source: California high school dropout rate far higher than expected by Nanette Asimov for the San Francisco Chronicle, published Wednesday, July 16, 2008.