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What Rights Do Children Have in Public School?
By now you’ve likely heard about the piece in Harvard Magazine on homeschooling leading up to its upcoming anti-homeschooling conference. The piece asks “What rights do children have in homeschooling?” Erin O’Donnell writes,
A RAPIDLY INCREASING number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home. Homeschooled kids now account for roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of school-age children in the United States, a number equivalent to those attending charter schools, and larger than the number currently in parochial schools.
Yet Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children—and society—in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.
The piece got me wondering: What rights do children have in public schools? What rights should parents who remain be able to demand of the system?
Americans have become so accustomed to the parameters of the public school system, we can easily forget about how little control or sayso parents have over their own childrens’ education. Parents can’t choose their kids’ school or teachers, and have zero input about the curriculum and lesson planning. And that’s just their traditional education; the sexual health and education decisions that schools can take with no parental consent or knowledge is beyond the pale of acceptability.
Teachers’ unions exist in order to protect teachers and teachers only; no matter how ineffective or potentially dangerous they are in a classroom. Teachers have a union, but what about parents and kids? With Harvard’s questions about what rights homeschooled kids have, public school parents can and should be asking what rights their families can start demanding from the public education system.
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@bethanymandel Great post and right to the point! I think we should rename them “Government Schools”, and maybe hang a plaque above each entrance that reads “This school is paid for and the property of ____ city taxpayers.” There’s no more important investment in America’s future than our children, and we should be active participants in what and how they’re being taught.
The short answer is: tons. Big federal statutes like FRPA, FAPE, ESSA, many sections of broader civil rights acts, many constitutional rights apply to students, plus a bunch on the state level and then those contained in local school board policies. These laws generally regard privacy, anti-discrimination, accommodation for students with disabilities, and just about anything else you can think of. Really, it is a bit of a struggle for local districts to keep up with all of the rights afforded to their students under these various statutes. Administrators spend enormous amounts of time and resources sorting these things out. Entire large lawfirms are dedicated solely to representing school districts and helping them navigate all these regulations and requirements.
You are certainly right about parents having little say in the curriculum, though they can usually have their child opt out of particular things they find objectionable. There are lots of drawbacks to public education, one of which is certainly that parents have to give up a lot of control over the process, but I would say a dearth of students’ rights is not one of them.
The Parental Rights organization was brought into this argument. The Parental Rights organization has been trying to get a constitutional amendment passed to guarantee the right of parents or legal guardians to direct their children’s healthcare and education. I support them (although not with donations) and admire them.
They have this note on their website today and have sent out an e-mail to their supporters in response to Professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s claims. To wit:
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Parents should have a presence at the conference in June. Again from the Parental Rights organization:
This is the original Harvard Magazine article.
To its credit, Harvard hosts a great many ideas and arguments. It is also hosting a rebuttal conference for homeschooling parents. :-) This is an online conference May 1.
I was homeschooled. The state of California made us take standardized tests every year; so long as we did well the state didn’t bother us. I remember growing up my mother always said what opponents of homeschooling really wanted was the funding that would come with attendance. This strikes me as more of the same.
People who send their children to public school should be arrested for child abuse.
Can that be my conference talk?
Since the public education system cannot provide a “meaningful education” for the majority of students in minority school districts (normally under control of Democrat Politicians), I think Elizabeth Bartholet needs to heal thyself first.
I was skeptical of home schooling when my daughter educated her five children at home. The two oldest girls finally entered one of the best private schools in the country for their junior and senior years. They were both number one in their classes. It seems number three and four are now doing the same with similar results and the oldest finishing her first year of university. They had to work harder than previously with less time for leisure reading. (No TV except selected movies on weekends) My daughter followed a variety of home school education systems of which there are clearly very serious systems available. My son in-law finally entered my daughters’ youngest in a bi lingual public school so he’d learn Spanish. He liked it at first, but is now bored and not doing well so she will return him to home schooling now that all the other kids are either in university, going soon or attending high school.
Poor kids in India have totally dysfunctional public schools and must home school. There they have to find parents who know some basic math, history or english and they pay those parents a few pennies a day to take a number of children. It works well and in the US parents who can’t home school for any number of real reasons should spend some time finding parents who follow some of the excellent materials and guidance serious home schooling systems have made available. Some of our public and private schools are good but many are abominations. Parents have to take charge one way or the other because the bad schools provide not just poor education but across the board bad guidance from top to bottom.
@daventers, good comment about the rights – although one might argue that the wealth of rights the students have are tangential or even cross-purpose to the goal of education.
Yes, I agree that those mazes of statutes are not necessarily helping many of the students. Some students definitely do benefit, but as I mentioned, it is a tremendous drag on the system. A lot of tax dollars go to helping school districts avoid violating their students’ rights. One small example is that they often must hire positions like special education coordinators who ensure that kids with disabilities (which is a bigger number than you probably imagine), are getting what they are entitled to get with their individual education plans.
This is all inevitable, to some extent, when you have a government system like this. If the government is providing something, fairness in how everyone is treated is an unavoidable issue. After several decades of trying to figure things out, you are naturally going to end up with huge statutory and regulatory systems.
Have you ever been in a large group of friends or family members – trying to figure out what restaurant to go to (remember when you could do that?), and then trying to figure out where everyone sits, and whose going to pay, etc…It’s a nightmare to try to please everyone, navigating everyone’s various attitudes, hopes, expectations, and sometimes even past grievances. Now imagine it’s not just a small group of friends and family, but millions of people, friends and strangers alike, and you’re not trying to work out the details of one meal, but rather 12 years of fundamental education – and you get the picture of what public school administrators are dealing with. You could not pay me enough to be a public school district superintendent. Extremely difficult job.
But I can’t knock public education too much without feeling like a hypocrite. The fact is my family wouldn’t be in the middle class without it. I’ve benefited tremendously from it. My kids go to public schools and, while I have my complaints, I’m generally very pleased with how much they are learning and growing from it. If my grandparents and parents would have had to find a way to educate their kids on their own, or pay for a private school, it may not have happened. I’m sure it is the same story for millions of families. As an institution, with all its faults, public education has been a tremendous benefit to this country over the past 150 years or so.
This is rich. The professor might search “LAUSD abuse settlement” for some insight about where the risks of “child abuse” in K-12 education really lie. And homeschooled kids are prevented from contributing positively to democratic society? Has the professor not heard of the “school to prison pipeline?” How much of that phenomenon do the experts attribute of home schooled kids? (Hint: zero.)
@daventers – “The fact is my family wouldn’t be in the middle class without it.”
Thanks for your response, and you make a nice analogy. I am curious about the last paragraph, however, especially the line quoted above. I hear this argument often (“My family wouldn’t be middle class without X”, with X being public education, unions, etc). I think that this is not a fact, but purely hypothetical.
The argument I like to put forward here in opposition is to look at grocery stores. Our country’s food supplies is one of the few things that hasn’t been highly stepped on by government (compared to education, say), and we have hundreds of thousands of well-stocked grocery stores with highly affordable products. Now, say we DID have government-run grocery stores, and they were naturally less plentiful, less bountiful, and less affordable. We *still* might say, “The fact is my family wouldn’t have food without the government-run stores”.
You wouldn’t know what could have been, same as how you don’t know now what private institutions or organizations would have developed in the absence of government intrusion. Who knows, we could have eliminated poverty and have the best schooling system in the world if not for the compulsion and waste of time that public education entails.
You make some very good points here. It is somewhat speculative on my part, since no alternate private education system existed, due in part to the public school system’s presence. Still, my grandfather was a coal miner and an iron worker, his wife worked in a factory, all to provide the very basics, with very little left over. I’m sure there were small fees here and there they had to pay to the public schools, and obviously there were some small taxes involved. I strongly doubt, however, that those funds would have been sufficient to pay for a private education for 5 kids, or at least the extensive education they received in public schools. In the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s (and even today) very few people in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky had money to pay private teachers. What incentive would there have been for private educators to go there? No one there could pay them anything.
Again, you’re right that this is speculative. It’s possible some charitable system would have evolved to handle kids in that kind of situation. I think it’s unlikely, but I can’t deny it is possible.
For millennia no public school system existed, and the vast majority of people received no formal education. No private system developed to provide one broadly to everyone.
You mention that grocery stores provide for everyone without a public system. This is obviously true, but they also provide for basic subsistence. People are going to buy food and medicine no matter what. Education is more likely to be put on the back burner.
@daventers – “For millennia no public school system existed, and the vast majority of people received no formal education. No private system developed to provide one broadly to everyone.”
I don’t mean to be argumentative; you’ve made great points and this is clearly tangential to your main position. I might observe, however, that for millennia, a free-market economy also did not exist. We finally created the conditions for a private education system to develop, and then promptly preempted it with government school.
Regarding the grocery store analogy – interesting you bring up medicine, you could make some good comparisons with the government encroachment on the health care sector – but maybe another good one would be the *other* way, of the US Postal Service. It’s similar to education – one might point to it and say, “Thank heavens for the USPS, otherwise, how would I send a letter from A to B?”
I understand your point, and I’m a huge fan of private enterprise, believe me. This is one of those areas, however, where I think some public investment pays off for society as a whole. That’s not to say it shouldn’t be reformed or that it should be the only option, of course.
Again, I don’t know how my grandparents could possibly have afforded to pay for private teaching of any breadth or quality. How many years would it have taken for some private charity to have supplied teachers to their region? If my parents, a generation later, had to pay for private schooling, there are many other things they could not have afforded, which would have lowered our standard of living. The bang they got for their school tax buck was substantial.
But I certainly understand the point that if things had been different all along, they would be different now – and maybe some other system would have evolved sufficiently to cover it. But since that’s not the way it went, the question is what to do now. I suppose you could try to move in that direction, eliminating the public school system, but it would take years and years of reforms to get to an entirely private system that maintains the same level of access and quality.
They have the right to vote for school boards. This, in some minds, indemnifies the authorities.
Dave, every sector of the economy has to deal with a wide variety of ever-changing consumer preferences. Western societies have invented a lot of institutions to deal with that, from joint-stock companies to antitrust regimes. There is simply no excuse for how English-speaking countries run our K12 schools. It’s shameful.
Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children
This woman is insane
So many kids grow up with one or zero parents, broken homes, poverty or negligent/apathetic parents and this director of ‘child advocacy’ is worried about home schooling???
Madness