State Control Children?
by Renny Hartmann
Issue 106 - April 23, 2008

The Lefty Coast judicial system is attacking parents again by recently ruling that students may only be taught by “credentialed teachers.” That’s National Education and other union-speak for “No home schooling”—unless the parents happen to be certified public school teachers.

Interestingly, many private school teachers are not credentialed in any way and yet are perfectly capable of being hired, paid, and given rule over classrooms outside the state’s particular vetting system.

This wisdom was produced by one Honorable H. Walter Croskey, an associate justice of the California Court of Appeals, 2nd District, Los Angeles and Ventura. He ruled on February 28, 2008, that all young persons six to eighteen in the State of California may only be instructed by those with a “teaching degree.” Using a 1953 law under the Education Code that concerns mandatory school attendance (instituted in California in 1913), Croskey decided the State meant “parents do not have the right to home school their children.”

Although State Superintendent of Schools, Jack O’Connell, assured, “…parents still have the right to home school their children” and Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger has announced what the courts do not resolve, his legislature will, 166,000 children could be directly affected by the decision. This judicial fiat fits well with a pattern in California of relegating parents to the back of the education bus.

In 2005, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in the case Fields v Palmdale that parents have no right to opt out of sex surveys, and Circuit Court Judge Rheinhart and his colleagues, Judge Sidney R. Thomas and Senior Judge Donald Lay, said, “…there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider regarding sexual matters to their children.” Additionally, these justices proclaimed, “We also hold that parents have no due process or privacy rights to override the determination of public schools as to the information to which their students will be exposed while enrolled as students.”

As a current college adjunct professor and retired public school teacher of 33 years, I find those last words more than chilling, because I know that much taught in any public school isn’t worthy of a pinch of salt let alone the subjugation of enforced attendance on the vast population of children. Not only did I teach for decades with former anti-Vietnam War protestors who spent incalculable time indoctrinating their “students” with a virulent anti-Americanism but also I was all too often exposed to the faddism and anti-educational inanities like Whole Language and Math Education for Thinking (finally given up by the Math Teachers Council in September, 2006) that actually taught students to be stupid. They couldn’t learn to read or compute from the popular methods espoused by liberal educators who are always looking for some cheap trick to make the tough work of education easy.

Now courts are telling parents and teachers that public schools are monolithically the first and last resort of information for children. The experts who will determine this body of knowledge are often “credentialed professionals” who graduate college with a C+ college average that allows them to become certified teachers: New Jersey permits such nonsense. It is only with gargantuan grade inflation that Stanford and Harvard could report up to 72 percent of students’ receiving A’s. Who are these people with such low skills that they deserved only a C average? These are the people Judge Croskey and his cohorts on the Ninth District Court of Appeals decree will provide all content for a child’s education without concern or resort to parental rights or inputs.

Perhaps as the state closest to falling off the continent, California often offers a stark vision of the future, but other states and courts are also assiduously working to lessen parents’ rights and separate children from them legally and socially. In New Jersey, twelve-year-old girls can have abortions without parental knowledge, although these children may have allergies to medications or chronic conditions of which they are not fully aware. The American Civil Liberties Union’s opinion on parental notification is “Mandating parent involvement jeopardizes teenagers’ health”; as if concern for one’s twelve year old undergoing major surgery with anesthetic and risks of disability or even death were some cruel abuse only parents would inflict on their captive children.

Sometimes this liberal system of laws controlling minor children being constructed court by court and legislature by legislature seems, as the president of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, said, to come from people who have “never been parent to a seven year old.” Or even from people who have never reached seven years of age themselves.

Renny Hartmann is an adjunct college professor in New Jersey.