Warner's educational bigotry

Last week, Gov. Mark Warner vetoed House Bill 675, which would have dropped the requirement that homeschooling parents have a college degree. The veto shows more of Warner’s true colors.

HB 675 passed the House of Delegates 60-40. It passed the Senate 25-15. While these were not quite veto-proof majorities, even the lieutenant governor and Sen. Russell Potts, R-Winchester, one of Virginia’s most liberal Republicans, urged the governor to sign the bill. Had Warner had the courage to veto the bill immediately and allow the General Assembly to consider his veto, the bill would have become law.

So, Warner took the low, deceptive road instead. He proposed an “amendment,” which would have placed homeschooling parents under the control of the Department of Education. In effect, the governor wrote his own, brand new bill, and called it an amendment. The House of Delegates rejected Warner’s interference, by an even larger margin than that of the bill’s original passage. Warner then vetoed the bill after the General Assembly had adjourned.

There is not a shred of evidence to show that the educational level of homeschooling parents has any impact whatever on the likelihood of success for their children, and indeed, Warner did not cite any evidence. Homeschooled children, even those whose parents have only high school diplomas, score 20 to 30 points higher than the national average on standardized tests. Forty-eight of the 50 states do not require homeschooling parents to have a college degree. Here in Virginia, however, eleven U.S. presidents, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, would not qualify to teach their own children.

With the weight of evidence clearly on the other side, what reason might there be for Warner’s veto? HB 675 was opposed by Warner’s Secretary of Education, Belle Wheelan, a lifelong educational bureaucrat. Wheelan testified against the bill before the Senate Education and Health Committee and was not able to provide any fact-based reason for her opposition; under questioning, she indicated that she does not trust parents.

But there may be more to it than even Warner’s and Wheelan’s bigotry. There is a canard about homeschooling that has generated opposition even from those who are not simply prejudiced. That is the belief that homeschooled children somehow take resources away from the public schools. This is nonsense. Homeschooling parents accept the common sense proposition that the fundamental right to educate children rests with their parents.

Most parents in Virginia will hire the public school system to perform this task. Public schools perform a vital function and have done so for almost 100 years (but not, as many seem to think, for much longer than that). But the fact that most parents will hire public schools does not mean that all parents should do so. Some parents (like Mark Warner, for example) will choose private schools, or parochial or church schools. And some will choose to school their children themselves.

There is absolutely no contradiction between an excellent public school system and an environment friendly to homeschooling. The plain fact is, parents who homeschool still pay taxes to support the public schools at the same level as parents who hire the public schools. There is not one dime less money available to the public schools because of homeschooling. In fact, thanks to homeschooling, the public schools have the same amount of money to educate fewer children. Put differently, homeschooling parents do the job of the public schools, and pay to permit the public schools to educate other parents’ children.

Even this double sacrifice is not good enough for the Wheelan-like educational bureaucrats, who fear any freedom of choice in education (except for the very wealthy, like Warner). And here we find the real reason for Warner’s original “amendment” to HB 675. Warner wanted parents without college diplomas to have to answer to a secretary of education who admitted she does not trust parents to start with. Warner claimed in his veto message that his amendment was to uphold standards. He even cites the No Child Left Behind Act, which, as he well knows, has provisions in it protecting, not persecuting, homeschooling parents.

The governor has this matter of educational standards exactly backwards. The SOLs and the innovations of the NCLB exist to make the schools, and the bureaucrats who run them, accountable to parents. Warner’s plan would have made parents accountable to the bureaucrats. This plan does not show a commitment to high standards; it shows a predilection for government control of citizens. An insistence on higher taxes shows the same thing.

The veto of HB 675 seems like a cheap political payback to people Warner suspects, probably correctly, did not support him. If only it were that innocent.