A. J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, tells us that California’s Second District Court of Appeal was correct to rule last week that parents without teaching credentials cannot educate their children at home — i.e., that most of the 166,000-odd homeschooled students in the Golden State could be truants and their parents may be violating the law.

Duffy missed a fine opportunity to keep quiet when he said, “What’s best for a child is to be taught by a credentialed teacher.” This echoes other union honchos and even former California Superintendent for Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, who wrote in 2002 that all schooling in her state needed to be supervised by professionally trained teachers. Furthermore, Eastin noted, “Home schools are not even subject to competition from private schools, where the marketplace would presumably ensure some level of quality and innovation.”

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Such statements are risible. Los Angeles Unified School District enrolls some 700,000 students taught by the credentialed teachers that Duffy represents, and a mere 33 percent of those pupils are proficient in reading, only 38 make the grade in math, and only 44 percent ever graduate. What’s best for a child, it seems, has little or nothing to do with the credentials Duffy cherishes.

Furthermore, it is particularly noxious for the head of a big-city teachers’ union, the members of which are failing to educate a stunning number of their pupils, to cheer a court decision that denies the competence of parent educators. Duffy — whose motivations for pushing more students into L.A.’s classrooms may be laudable, but may also stem from a desire to swell the ranks of public-school students to force the district to hire more dues-paying teachers — ought not lecture parents about “what’s best” for their own children.

Eastin’s ideas are less distasteful than Duffy’s but just as brazen. To complain that home schools are not “subject to competition” is 1) wrong and 2) quite rich coming from a former higher-up of a state-run, public-school bureaucracy that actively tries to eliminate competition that might entice families away from it.

The specifics of the court case in question are these: The eldest of Phillip and Mary Long’s eight children reported the father as physically and emotionally abusive. All eight children were hitherto homeschooled. An attorney representing the two youngest siblings asked a juvenile court to order that they be enrolled in a public or private school where teachers could monitor them daily. The lower court declined to issue such an order, noting that California parents have a right to home school their children. The Second District Court of Appeal disagreed.

It found that People v. Turner (1953) mandated that California parents have either to send their children to a full-time private school or a full-time public school, or they must have them educated by a credentialed tutor. Turner, wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in his decision for the appellate court, “specifically rejected the argument that it is unconstitutional to require that parents possess the [teaching] qualifications prescribed by statute.”


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