Standards In Education Should Not Be Shortchanged

Should school districts allow students to graduate from their high schools when those students are getting the majority of their credits from nonaccredited programs?

Absolutely not. Why is there even a disagreement about this to begin with? (“Home schools balk at accreditation proposal,” Spokesman-Review, Dec. 4 edition.)

What this argument comes down to is choice. When parents withdraw their children from publicly funded schools and enroll them in a nonaccredited private school or home school them, these parents have made a decision, for whatever reason, to seek an alternative education for their children.

That’s all well and good, but public schools are held to standards, and they must meet these standards or lose their accreditation.

While we may disagree about the content, efficacy or relevancy of these standards, what is not in dispute is that every graduate is a de facto representative of that school’s efforts to provide an education that meets or surpasses the standards the school is held to.

A diploma provides official recognition of this.

Does this mean that every student who walks away with a diploma is competent in every core subject taught at school? No. Does it mean that every student who carries a diploma is a good representative of that school?

Most certainly not. There is always an exception.

It therefore stands to reason that the school must do everything in its power to ensure that there are as few exceptions as possible.

Parents who withdraw their children from public, accredited schools and later apply their children for readmission are relinquishing to the school district the burden of ensuring that the children possess the necessary and requisite education when they graduate.

In this vein, granting transfer credits to these children should have everything to do with the quality of education their parents or a private school may have given them - I think we can all agree on that point.

However, the problem arises when these credits come from a program that the school has absolutely no visibility into. How can the school ensure that the child has received an education meeting the standards that the school has to live up to? And yet, these same parents want the school to provide a diploma with the schools’ name embossed upon it in bold writing.

Should school officials disregard the standards they’ve been asked to uphold? They have no way of knowing the quality of the education the child received in a nonaccredited program - especially in Idaho.

Idaho’s laws providing for the oversight of our children’s education at home are some of the most lax in the country. Parents who choose to home school are not required to pass any competency tests nor obtain a teacher’s certification. The only real requirement states vaguely that the education a child receives should only be “comparable” to that which would be normally received at a public school.

That’s not a standard. It’s an embarrassingly thin law with loopholes the size of Texas.

While I’m sure this law sufficed 100 years ago when schools focused on a more basic education, this is certainly not the case today when your average high school offers courses such as French, classical literature, physics, chemistry, advanced algebra and even calculus. Show me the home schooling parent who has mastered the formulas of physics, the equations of calculus, speaks a foreign language and possesses knowledge enough to talk about the finer points of classical literature and English grammar, and I’ll show you a rare exception to the rule.

When a student transfers from another accredited school, officials may at least breathe a little easier knowing that the student came from a school where there was some oversight and public review of the processes and standards used to educate that child.

This is not the case with children who transfer from nonaccredited schools or who received their education at home.

At the end of the day, the Lake Pend Oreille School District seemed to reach an agreeable compromise with the group of parents who complained about the plan to restrict the number of credits allowed from nonaccredited schools or programs. And Superintendent Roy Rummler gained a little accreditation of his own by conceding to some of their demands.

The accommodations included requiring these transfer students to attend only their senior year at the high school and to give proof of competency by providing “course descriptions, hours spent per course, methods of instruction and final comprehensive exams for each course” taken in a nonaccredited program.

This all sounds pretty good - on the surface.

And I’m sure that in the majority of cases where a student transfers in from a private school or from a home program that this won’t prove to be a problem.

What I’m concerned about are the exceptions.