susan

Tam Voynick wrote:

> Here's some info on HS politics on the national level as seen by
> the Wall Street Journal. It may be of interest to those curious
> about the Tim Lambert / HSLDA axis. The magazine Home
> Education has a column by Larry and Susan Kaseman which
> frequently addresses these issues.
> Cheers, Tam
>
> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
>
> A Powerful Lobbying Force, Parents
> Campaign Through Phone, Fax
> By DANIEL GOLDEN
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
> WASHINGTON -- Driving here from their Maryland home one March morning,
> Tabatha Freivald asked her nine-year-old son, "How does Congress know what
> we want?"
> Joshua thought about it, but was stumped. His mother supplied the answer:
> "Lobbying."
> It was no idle question. The Freivalds were headed to the nation's capital
> as trainees for a little-known but potent educational lobbying force -- home
> schoolers. Soon they joined 130 home-school parents and 40 children in a
> Holiday Inn conference room, praying and singing hymns as they learned such
> techniques as researching a congressman's voting record on the Web.
> "When I started home-schooling, I was worried that we were withdrawing from
> society," says another trainee, Jo Hershey of Lancaster, Pa. "But now I feel
> we have the best of both worlds. We home-school, and we influence
> educational policy nationwide."
> Do they ever. Although often portrayed as an isolated fringe group, parents
> who teach their children at home have become inside-the-Beltway pros,
> wielding enough clout to help block a Clinton administration bid for
> national student testing, launch their own political action committee and
> push their concerns into the midst of this year's presidential race.
> Despite relatively small numbers -- an estimated million to 1.5 million of
> the nation's 53 million schoolchildren are taught at home -- their ability
> to overwhelm Congress and state legislatures with phone calls, faxes,
> e-mails and visits has won them a unique status as educational conscientious
> objectors, in the form of exemptions from compulsory attendance laws and
> state tests.
> But home schoolers aren't content to be left alone. Suspicious of any
> federal intervention in what they consider a family matter, they are
> rallying resistance to the bipartisan coalition of government, business and
> academic leaders seeking more accountability and higher standards in K-12
> education.
> For instance, in a quiet alliance with publishers McGraw-Hill Cos. and
> Houghton Mifflin Co., home schoolers are assaulting the National Assessment
> of Educational Progress, a federal test given to a fraction of
> schoolchildren that is the preferred tool of policymakers for figuring out
> whether learning levels are rising or falling.
> Pennsylvania Congressman Bill Goodling, chairman of the House Committee on
> Education and the Workforce, calls home schoolers the most effective
> educational lobby on Capitol Hill. They frequently volunteer in his election
> campaigns. "They know the issues," says Rep. Goodling. "And they have an
> outstanding phone network."
> A study last year by two University of North Carolina sociologists concluded
> that home-schooling families are more likely than public-school families to
> work for political campaigns, contribute to candidates, participate in
> protests or boycotts, sign petitions and write letters to the editor. "We're
> the activists," says Michael Farris, president of the 60,000-member Home
> School Legal Defense Association in Purcellville, Va.
> That activism often trumps public opinion. Ninety-two percent of Americans
> believe that home-schooled students should take the same standardized tests
> that are required of public-school students, says a 1999 Phi Delta
> Kappa/Gallup poll. Yet home-schooled children, like private-school students,
> are exempted from these tests, which public-school students in many states
> must pass to graduate.
> This exemption has emerged as an issue in the presidential campaign. The
> presumptive Republican nominee, George W. Bush, rarely misses a chance to
> espouse accountability in education. As Texas governor, he toughened
> consequences for students who do poorly on state tests. If elected
> president, he says, he will boost funding for states with high test scores
> -- and punish the laggards.
> Nevertheless, Mr. Bush was among four Republican presidential candidates who
> addressed the legal-defense association's convention last September and
> expressed support for home schooling. And Mr. Bush has made what Mr. Farris,
> who has endorsed him, calls the "big promise": to shield home schoolers from
> all regulation, including testing mandates. Mr. Bush contends that home
> schoolers don't need to be held accountable in this way because they don't
> receive government funding.
> Mr. Bush's supporters include some prominent home-school activists: Mr.
> Farris; Tim Lambert, the Republican national committeeman from Texas and
> head of the Texas Home School Coalition; and San Antonio hospital-bed
> magnate James Leininger. Dr. Leininger, whose four children have been taught
> at home, has given at least $40,000 to Mr. Bush, $50,000 to Texas Lt. Gov.
> Rick Perry and $300,000 to other Republican committees and candidates since
> 1996, according to state and federal records.
> The Democratic National Committee says it is inconsistent for Mr. Bush to
> exempt home schoolers from tests. More surprisingly, so does Chester Finn
> Jr., a former assistant U.S. secretary of education whom Mr. Bush identifies
> as an adviser. "If standards are important for all kids, they're important
> for home schoolers too," Mr. Finn says. "But it's a kind of accommodation
> that America frequently makes with strong-willed minorities. They protest
> loudly, they have very vigorous fax machines and they are capable of
> mobilizing a very large fraction of their actual numbers."
> Kristen Amundsen learned that the hard way. When the Democratic member of
> the Virginia House of Delegates proposed in February that home-schooled
> children take the state's Standards of Learning exams, which public-school
> students starting with the Class of 2004 must pass to receive diplomas, so
> many angry calls and e-mail messages poured into the legislature that her
> bill was scuttled without a vote. Its supporters, she says, were afraid to
> go on record against the home-school lobby.
> Fear of similar initiatives on the federal level motivates the 170 people in
> the hotel conference room who are training to be volunteer lobbyists for the
> legal-defense association. "Any organization that's going to stand up and
> say, 'Hands off!' has my support," says Elizabeth McCormick, a
> home-schooling mother from Wisconsin.
> The trainees are taught how to dress (suits for men, skirt and blouse or
> dress slacks for women), field frequently asked questions ("How are you
> going to teach calculus and physics?") and access the association's online
> library and Congressional directory.
> If they pass muster with the association, the volunteers will be expected to
> spend four or five days a year on Capitol Hill, meeting each day with seven
> to 10 staffers for 20 minutes each. That includes children. The association
> encourages them to lobby with their parents so congressional staffers can
> see that they're not social misfits.
> This early introduction to politics breeds the home-school activists of the
> future. With similar foresight, Mr. Farris, the legal-defense association
> president, is opening a college in Purcellville for home-schooled students
> in September. All students at Patrick Henry College will major in
> government, and as many as possible will be placed in public-sector summer
> jobs and internships.
> The association is not popular with secular home schoolers. Many are
> alienated by its fundamentalist religious bent and three Rs approach to
> education. But the secularists also tend to be individualists. Their latest
> stab at a national organization, the National Home Education Network,
> doesn't take positions on issues.
> Beth Richardson, a home-schooling mother, belongs to a splinter group that
> left the legal defense association's Rhode Island affiliate three years ago.
> The association fosters "groupthink," she says. "We feel that nobody should
> really lead, nobody should be in charge."
> In practice, such iconoclasm leaves the legal defense association as the
> home schoolers' voice on Capitol Hill. Founded in 1983, it first worked in
> courts and legislatures to legalize home schooling, which came to pass in
> every state by 1993.
> That year, in response to Bill Clinton's election, the association set up
> what one official calls its "one-two punch." Volunteers from nearby comb the
> Hill, as more-distant members make their views known by phone, e-mail or
> fax. Members are organized by Congressional district, with a parent
> coordinator in each.
> This system got its first test in February 1994, when George Miller, a
> Democratic representative from California, offered an amendment to an
> education bill known as HR6. Mr. Miller says he didn't intend the amendment,
> which specified that teachers must be certified in the subjects they teach,
> to apply to home-schooling parents. But the association, alarmed that the
> courts might interpret it that way, activated its network, alerting
> Christian-right radio shows as well.
> Hundreds of thousands of phone calls deluged Congress and tied up Mr.
> Miller's office lines, forcing him to resort to a voice mail recording for
> five days. The amendment, which had sailed through committee, got only one
> vote on the House floor -- Mr. Miller's. Since then, major federal education
> legislation has contained boilerplate language exempting home schoolers. And
> Mr. Miller has become a valuable bogeyman for Christian-right fund-raisers,
> who elicit home-school contributions by warning that, if the Democrats win
> back the House, he would become the education-committee chairman.
> Mr. Miller says that the association exaggerates potential dangers to
> justify collecting $100-a-year dues from members. HR6, he says, "was a
> tuneup to see whether they could stampede the House. And the evidence is,
> they can."
> As a nonprofit, the legal defense association can't endorse candidates,
> because it would lose its tax-exempt status. But the line sometimes gets
> blurry. Its president, Mr. Farris, is also chairman of the Madison Project,
> a political action committee that says it funneled about $350,000 in each of
> the last two Congressional elections to conservative Republican challengers
> for Democratic-held and open seats.
> Mr. Farris expects the Madison Project to give between $20,000 and $30,000
> to each of 20 candidates this year. It is also spinning off a home-school
> political action committee to focus on key congressional races. One likely
> target: Kansas Democratic Rep. Dennis Moore. In 1983, when Mr. Moore was
> district attorney of Johnson County, Kan., he brought -- and won -- a case
> against two children for truancy because they were home schooled.
> Legislatively, home schoolers want to shrink the National Assessment of
> Educational Progress, or NAEP. "This will probably be the first issue you'll
> be lobbying on," Christopher Klicka, senior counsel of the association,
> tells the group at the Holiday Inn. "We noticed what we call 'NAEP creep.'
> It's the back door for another national test attempt."
> Two years ago, home schoolers joined a right-left coalition -- also
> including black and Hispanic Democrats in Congress -- to defeat the Clinton
> administration's proposal for a national test for all students. Although
> participation would have been voluntary, home schoolers predicted the test
> would spawn a national curriculum.
> Unlike that proposed test, NAEP doesn't give results for individual
> students. It provides state and national scores on various subjects, based
> on a sample of public, private and parochial school students. (Home
> schoolers haven't participated because the survey is limited to schools.)
> The nonprofit Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., designs NAEP
> under a five-year, $75 million agreement with the federal government.
> Now, the Clinton administration and Vice President Al Gore have proposed
> extra funding for states that do well on NAEP, which is due for
> congressional reauthorization this year. (Gov. Bush would use NAEP as one of
> several measures for rewarding states.)
> Worried that NAEP will morph into a national test, home schoolers linked up
> with McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin, which fear that an expanded NAEP
> would give states and local school districts less reason to buy their
> standardized tests, now used chiefly to measure individual student
> performance.
> "I actually was shocked the first time I met with the test publishers," says
> Doug Domenech, director of governmental affairs for the home-school
> association. "I didn't think they'd buy our changes."
> Executives at both CTB/McGraw-Hill, the McGraw-Hill division that sells the
> Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, and Houghton Mifflin, which sells the
> Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, confirm the alliance. Michael Kean, vice
> president of CTB/McGraw-Hill, describes NAEP as a competitor and says its
> state results are largely useless. "In terms of networking in Washington,
> the home schoolers provide some access," Mr. Kean says. "They carry some
> people power."
> Keith Oakley agrees. As chairman of the Texas House of Representatives'
> public-safety committee in 1997, he sought to repeal a law that allowed
> parents to teach their children to drive, in place of certified instructors.
> Hundreds of home-schooling families packed the legislature in protest. With
> the help of a state representative whose own son was home-schooled, the bill
> was trounced.
> Chastened, Mr. Oakley cites the defeat as part of the reason he didn't seek
> re-election in 1998. "I've still got their tire tracks on my back," he says.
>
> ------- End of forwarded message -------
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Good friends, school spirit, hair-dos you'd like to forget.
> Classmates.com has them all. And with 4.4 million alumni already
> registered, there's a good chance you'll find your friends here:
> http://click.egroups.com/1/2885/6/_/16416/_/956715067/
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------