The lack of regulation is concerning. What's truly disturbing is how easily it is for children to fall through the cracks when there are no teachers to report possible abuse. Frightening.
You should go talk to some teachers at large school districts. "Regulation" can be both a blessing and a curse. There is plenty of bullying, drug use, etc. at large schools where nobody wants to deal with it.
Those kids can snitch to much more competent people who are well trained and respond more quickly than schools which are notorious for suspending children who stand up to their bullies or call the police on kids just because they got into a little fight.
It’s called calling 911 and calling CPS, or going to your nearest healthcare place.
There are tons of ways, to checkup on kids, even just a annual mandatory children checkup is enough, or neighbours keeping an eye out and reporting issues.
School neglect is often the very thing that lead children to failures, abuse from their peers, suicidal thoughts, gun violence, you name it.
Not sure if modern schools are the messiah.
I’m anti homeschool tho, i think parents are mostly incompetent at raising kids well, and if their children do not pass certain academic exams at grade 2,5 and 7 then they should be banned from homeschooling, an entire nation’s future depends on it.
Schools should also be less politicised, all this lgbtq , critical race theory, math is racist, etc should be removed from schools, I understand it’s meaningful in some ways and well intentioned, that children learn their history, that kids learn to be more tolerant of others, but these are all values that their parents should teach them, not schools.
Gutting out of advanced classes from school because too many white and asian kids got into it, instead of trying to improve outcomes for black and hispanic children, they just destroyed the advanced classes in major schools, and worsened the outcomes for EVERYBODY (I meant kids of masses, rich folks and politicians kids will still get top tier education at private school)
Schools != Parents
Too many schools tried to become the parent
Now parents are starting to remove schools altogether. This will be bad for everyone in this country, but it was schools and government who started this mess in the first place.
Whole heartedly disagree. It will be very good for some people and for others it will not be good.
We have been homeschooling for the last 8 years. Our kids are more mature and far exceed anything public school would have done for them. However, we see home schooling as a vocation and something we have to put effort into—not just something we sign up for on a website and then let our kid do all the work online.
Given the right reasons, homeschool will always be superior because the student/teacher ratio is so low. Plus you know your kids better and can adapt to their needs.
Given the wrong reasons, sure, it will fail people. But arguably those folks are already failing—and being propped up by a system which tries to support them but ultimately cannot.
>It’s called calling 911 and calling CPS, or going to your nearest healthcare place.
Who is suppose to do this exactly? If you're raised in an abusive household, it is not entirely likely you are aware you can do these things, or even if you are there is alot of fear and psychological manipulation to overcome in situations of abuse. With no outside party to intervene, it is extremely difficult for abuse to be overcome.
This is why, for example in California (and other states that have this law), if a there is a domestic dispute call, it is mandatory by law that the police separate the people involved for at least 24, even if the victim does not press charges at that time. This gives room for a victim to stand up for themselves once the threat has been removed. Not perfect by any means, but this has saved countless lives and improved countless others.
With children, an even more vulnerable population, removing them out of public school with no recourse for checking in with that child in a safe setting, you will exacerbate child abuse further than it already exists. I think the trade off of home school being that there is child safety checks routinely built in over the school age of the child, would be something parents could weigh as a trade off.
Yea, If you were abusing your kids, It would be easy as hell to do it if you home schooled. That's the secret, don't take them to a place where there are mandated reporters.
Maybe you should talk to an old social worker or few, about the huge number of kids who are both abused, and attending public schools. "Teachers are mandated reporters" is nothing resembling a magical fix, even in school districts where the teachers are not already stretched to burn-out by all the other demands placed upon them.
> Maybe you should talk to an old social worker or few, about the huge number of kids who are both abused, and attending public schools.
Social workers being aware of abused kids at schools seems exactly the thing we want. Most abusers are parents or relatives. Hiding the problem in home schooling and then saying it doesn't exist because social workers never hear about it seems the utterly wrong viewpoint.
The question is are they doing anything about it?
If the abuse doesn't stop, it doesn't matter if you are attending public school private school or home school
On the other side of the ledger, schools are a place for kids with troubled home lives to abuse all the other kids who have loving, supportive parents.
I'm watching kids fall through the cracks of the public school system here in Canada. There's quite a violence problem with even teachers and staff being seriously injured and powerless to deal with it. But there is also functional literacy issues since 1/3 in my province are not meeting basic competency requirements. In this environment, i can see why home schooling is a thing if you can't afford to send your kids to private school.
John Oliver is entertaining but he's also very strongly biased and misrepresents the situation. He talks fast and yells and mocks people to give the illusion of confidence and authority.
Does he address how many schools have run from March of 2020 to today despite the regulations?
Reading Math and other test scores have plummeted across multiple states at their public schools.
"lack of regulation" means freedom. That's what people find concerning? Looking at the current situation, I would prefer more freedom to less. To me lack of regulation is typically a good thing.
Your "freedom" is allowing kids to be abused since they don't have the checks of other adults being able to see them.
A bare minimum "are the kids physically ok" doesn't remove any of your freedom unless you consider starving and beating your kids a "Freedom" you care about.
For any type of education, you can point to instances of abuse. For home schooling, for public schools, for private schools, for religious schools, for universities. Kids are regularly shot to death in numbers in public schools, for example. People have been beaten and abused in private schools.
What they are trying to do is to use scare stories about home schooling to scare people into giving up their freedom. It's the same tactic that's used all the time to get people to give up their rights, to get us into wars, and so on.
I want more freedom, not less. I won't let authoritarian fear tactics change that.
No I it is a reasonable assumption based on how the OP responded to my comment.
I said:
> A bare minimum "are the kids physically ok" doesn't remove any of your freedom unless you consider starving and beating your kids a "Freedom" you care about.
Which they responded:
> I want more freedom, not less. I won't let authoritarian fear tactics change that.
They are trying to justify "more freedom" at the cost of children being abused. The only reasonable reason you would do this, when all I am asking for is basic checks to make sure a child is ok, is that you yourself which to starve and abuse children.
There is NO other valid reason to fight against what should be a basic protection for children. That reason doesn't exist. Especially when your only defense is "fear tactics".
> No I it is a reasonable assumption based on how the OP responded to my comment.
No, it is not any kind of "reasonable assumption".
You are, quite simply, lying. You do understand that lying doesn't really work very well when the person's original words are still there for all to see, right?
> The only reasonable reason you would do this, when all I am asking for is basic checks to make sure a child is ok, is that you yourself which to starve and abuse children.
I was debating on wether or not I was even going to bother responding to this because I feel like the votes are clear...
This is wild. You're comparing killing someone without evidence to protecting children.
Here is the thing, you seem to be assuming I am saying go check in with this officer or something and have my child checked on.
No, that is ridiculous.
I am talking simple things so other adults know your child is even alive. Requiring that they go somewhere for their tests. Maybe physical activity, other completely normal things. Requiring socialization. Idk, something.
> By the way, no one put you in charge of deciding what "basic protections for children" should be. In fact, no one put you in charge of anything.
Last I checked this is a forum and we were having a discussion. I never claimed to have an authority I just question how someone keeps arguing against protecting children without giving a single reasonable reason against it.
Also I would consider basic protections making sure the kid was alive and the kid was fed and not physically hurt. That is such an incredibly low bar that I do not understand how we are having this discussion at all. Maybe instead of attacking me you offer an alternative to this real problem? I would love to hear a solution that we can actually talk about.
I have been accused of fear mongering in this thread and yet it seems that while we have evidence that some parents are using the loopholes in the home schooling system to be able to do this, you don't want to do anything about it.
I have been accused of fear mongering, and yet the people like you responding are using a "slippery slop" argument of surveillance or "Freedom" that is not a valid argument.
> Your "freedom" is allowing kids to be abused since they don't have the checks of other adults being able to see them.
At what cost? Innocent until proven guilty means that we don't treat people like criminals until you have a reasonable suspicion at a minimum.
You don't get to load spyware on everyone's computer because someone, somewhere, committed a crime on a computer. You don't get to remove all end to end cryptography so you can snoop. No, just no. Our society is flirting with these ideas, and they are BAD ideas.
On balance, the abuse happening in homeschooling household is microscopic compared to the abuse happening in current public schools. Both the every day kind and the dramatic makes the news murders and suicides. Put them on even scales rather than putting the specs of dust on the other side under a microscope.
There is a major difference between "make the investigation of crimes easy" and being able to even know they happened in the first place.
Children are incredibly vulnerable and we should be able to put basic protections in place.
It is not surveillance to require in some form that an adult in the system sees your child on some regular basis. This is something that your child simply being in school provides.
Either a way for an adult to notice that something is very wrong or a safe place for a child to report something.
> It is not surveillance to require in some form that an adult in the system sees your child on some regular basis. This is something that your child simply being in school provides.
That is surveillance in the same what that checking in with a probation officer is a form of surveillance. Just like encryption I'm not obligated to live my life in a way that makes detecting crimes easy or possible.
That's not really a related topic. In this case the parameter you demand to be prevented is "parental abuse" and the tool for preventing is "regulation". With the application of such regulation being applied via forcing the children into certain government run facilities.
The logical end of that is not "public school". It's an elimination of the concept of parents raising their own kids, in favor of removing children at birth and placing them in government run facilities.
That thing was incredibly frightening to see and just how much power the home school lobbying group has.
I am sure that what is shown here is in the severe minority, but I don't understand how we don't have some basic requirements in place. (well I understand how, but I can't think of a better phrasing)
Do you consider the power of the teacher's unions to shut down in person education for years in response to covid "incredibly frightening to see and just how much power the teachers Union lobbying group has"?
John Oliver's ostentatious display of concern and commentary frequently veers into the realm of exaggerated and borderline hysteria-inducing theatrics. Consequently, I approach his statements with a considerable dose of skepticism.
Maybe it's a quantum observer effect and the galaxies only exist because there's an observer. Dark matter/energy is need to make things balance only because we haven't been looking in all the right places.
The universe would be an odd old place if that was true.
> Why can't the US government mandate hospitals need to purchase a percentage of their supplies from US manufacturers in order to receive medicaid/Medicare.
Trade agreements most likely.
I would not be surprised if that sort of preferential treatment would count as a subsidy and be actionable under NAFTA (whatever it's called now).
We also have a healthcare cost crisis. It wouldn't just be masks, it would be literally everything the hospital buys, and it would "tie their hands from getting the best price for patients" (I guarantee you a Republican would use a similar line in a campaign if that proposal went through.
> Arguably the more important outcome than monetary damages
Every single consumer that bought a product from one of these third party sellers, or a matching product from Amazon, has been cheated out of several dollars. For each product, for each sale... that adds up to way more than $2.5 million.
And the funny part is that a few database queries could likely surface exactly who has been harmed, how many times, and a gross sale amount affected.
