The home schooled, the unschooled and AZ’s “empowerment scholarships”

by David Safier

You may have seen this morning's article in the Star about Unschooling, a variation of home schooling. The only real difference is in emphasis. The idea of home schooling is that the kids go through a reasonably standard curriculum at home, not at school. Unschooling is a free form home schooling where the children take more of the lead in their own educations.

On another front, this is the first year of Arizona's "Empowerment scholarships" (SB1553), the latest and potentially the most dangerous incarnation of the school voucher. According to a PR release from American Federation for Children (a charters/vouchers advocacy group), 167 families signed up. Right now, only students with diagnosed learning disabilities are eligible, though conservatives hope to open it up to everyone in the future.

The idea is, money is put into an "educational savings account" administered by the state. It can be used for private school tuition, storebought or online curriculum, tutoring, test taking — in other words, a whole host of education-related services. If you don't use it all in a given year, it piles up in your account. If you don't use it by the time the child has "graduated," you can use what's left to pay for college.

Some savvy, educated parents can probably figure out how to massage this program to give their children a good K-12 education and put some money toward college. Less educated, less savvy parents will be taken for a ride by smooth, sleazy operators, and their children will be the victims. This scheme, dreamed up by the Goldwater Institute, is the latest, and one of the dangerous, steps toward taking the "public" out of public schools, degrading one of the most important and precious parts of the American life. (No, public education and public schools are not a failure, contrary to the conservative mantra. The educational attainment of children at the bottom of the economic/social ladder is disgraceful and needs drastic improvement, but the middle and high end of our public education compares favorably with education in Europe and Asia.)

What do "Empowerment Scholarships" have to do with home schooling and unschooling? Clever home/unschooling parents can get state money for their children's home educations, something which was never possible in the past and can't happen with most voucher programs. Just enroll your child in a public school for 100 days (a little over half a school year), find someone who will diagnose your child with a learning disability (not a hard thing to do for lots of children, since the term is so loosely defined), and voila! You get 90% of what the state would spend on that child in a public school, for years and years and years.

So far as I know, no one is challenging the constitutionality of the law, even though the "savings account" workaround may not be strong enough to withstand the prohibition against state money being used for religious purposes. Most people — even, I imagine, legislators — are either unaware of the law or of how dangerous it is. This is one that needs to be watched very closely.