Two Stories From the War on Homeschoolers

If you're a homeschooled student, you'll have a better chance of getting into first rate colleges, but you won't be able to enter a Subway Restaurant's writing contest or work for the state government in Tennessee. Here's the Subway story:

Subway, the sandwich restaurant, wants to hear your child's story – unless he or she is homeschooled.

The national chain's "Every Sandwich Tells a Story Contest" offers prizes and a chance to be published on the Subway website and in Scholastic's "Parent & Child" magazine but specifically excludes homeschoolers:

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. Contest is open only to legal residents of the Untied (sic) States who are currently over the age of 18 and have children who attend elementary, private or parochial schools that serve grades PreK-6. No home schools will be accepted.

Subway's website promotion not only misspells "United" States, but offers the grand prize winner a "Scholastic Gift Bastket (sic) for your home."

The 2007 winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee was Evan O'Dorney, a 13-year old homeschool student from Danville, Calif.

Amazing. And now, from Tennessee:

Tenn. Declares Only Dumbest Kids Wanted for State Jobs

-By Warner Todd Huston

It’s true. The State of Tennessee has officially declared that from this point forward it will accept only less educated student applicants for state, county and city jobs in the Volunteer State. Why would the kindly folks in Nashville make such a stupid rule? Well, it’s all about control, you see. The state controls the less educated kids and they don’t control the ones that show higher academic aptitude. It really is just that simple.

It has come to pass that the State of Tennessee has officially invalidated the high school diplomas of thousands of home-schooled Tennessee kids, at least where it concerns their eligibility to apply for the positions of fireman, police officer, state government employee, even daycare worker — any government job or government controlled position that the state regulates is covered.

The reasoning the Board of Education used to justify this obscene act is almost a sensible sounding one. Since religious schools and home-schools each have their own curriculum that is designed by people not working for the state government (i.e. the state Board of Education), then the state has no real control or input in those curricula. Therefore, the state cannot make the assumption that kids educated in institutions or via home programs meet the standards of an officially recognized state education. Like I said, this almost seems logical until one does a tiny bit of research. Fortunately Tennessean Rob Shearer has done just that.

You can read the rest at Stop the ACLU.

The education establishment is petrified by the success of homeschoolers and the threat they pose to traditional government-run public education that fails so many kids and desperately tries to give kids a diploma that some of them can't even read in order to keep their graduation statistics from being completely embarrassing. (How's that for a run-on sentence? As a graduate of public school I'm sure the NEA would be proud.)

Teacher's unions have a lot of money and a lot of power, and they won't stop until they force every kid back into public schools.