Sometime this
week Virginia
lawmakers are expected to vote on a law which would allow the
state’s “tens of thousands of” homeschooled kids to play
sports on public school teams; in fact it would prevent public
schools from being part of any intramural-type organizations which
barred the presence of homeschoolers.

HB 947 is known to its friends as as the “Tim Tebow law”
because the Denver Broncos quarterback was homeschooled in
Florida, but played on his local school’s football team after
pushing for the bill which gave him permission to do just that.
Said bill is expected to pass in in the State House, having already
cleared the House Education Committee.

Fourteen states allow for homeschooled kids to play public
school sports. Thirteen more allow kids to play with certain
conditions attached.

So, who are the folks objecting to this bill? (You know they’re
out there.) Various news reports summarize objections along the
lines of: hey, public school kids have to keep up certain academic
standards to do extracurriculars, why do those
pajama-clad-until-noon, weirdo spelling champs get out of that? The
Governor of Virginia supports the bill, but the 60,000-strong
Teacher’s Association
is not keen for reasons both tentatively practical (public
schools say their belts are tight enough as it is) and school
spirit-heavy (you didn’t want to be a part of this whole
experience, so no, you don’t get to play soccer!).

Washington Post columnist John Kelly is also displeased
with this legislative notion. After mentioning the problem with
Teacher Mom or Dad grade-inflating
so that little Josiah can be the school’s starting quarterback,
and comparing the bill to Kelly’s old drama teacher casting
students from a girl’s school and a college student in high school
plays, the columnist continues:

[M]y main objection is philosophical.

School does a lot of things, just one of which is educating
students. School is a place children learn to get along, learn what
it means to work in a group, to navigate the shoals of cliques and
conflicts. It’s where you learn some of the basics of what it means
to be a citizen.

We often despair about our public schools in this country, but
they’ve been a common experience for millions of us. If you happen
to not agree with that common experience, you might decide, as is
your right, to home-school your child.

You may have all sorts of reasons. Perhaps our public schools
are too secular for you. Or maybe our public schools aren’t
rigorous enough for you. Maybe our public schools aren’t safe
enough for you. Maybe you love your children more than the rest of
us love ours and you just want them around you all the time.

Whatever the reason, you’ve made a decision. You have the
courage of your convictions. Except now, supporters of this bill
want to loosen their convictions a bit.

“They just want to try out,” the bill’s
sponsor, Del. Robert B.
Bell (R-Charlottesville), told The Washington
Post’s Anita Kumar. “They just want a chance
to participate with their friends, their neighbors, their community
members.”

Guess what: They do have the chance. They can
go to public school.

And the vital point, which everyone else who objects to the bill
seems to be making in one way or another:

I’m not against home-schooling. I’m against people wanting to
pick and choose the parts of a public education they agree
with.

Libertarians or homeschoolers who vehemently dislike public
schools are often accused of being purists, but the people making
these arguments are real hard-liners.

One choice is being opened up to students here, the choice to be
homeschooleled and also to play sports with kids their own age. Even
without the compelling hey, my parents pay the taxes which help
this school exist argument, what’s so terrible about one more
choice for kids and their families? Kelly’s column is carefully in
favor of homeschooling’s legality, but he really doesn’t seem to
like the practice, he’s more wearily resigned to it.

Bob Cook over at Forbes.com is initially less snotty about the
fact of homeschooling, but this attitude of “you made your
education bed, now lie in it” still lingers throughout. That gets
real, as the kids say, about here:

I just find it so rich that homeschool advocates are more than
happy to run down public schools and explain why they’re just not
good enough for their little budding geniuses, yet they’re begging
to lean on and cherry-pick the public school for things they can’t
provide. 

“So rich” is a pretty strong rhetorical cue. Cook thinks
homeschoolers are elitist egg-heads! But he then goes on
to make the point that private school families have to pay
taxes but are not offered this option.

Fair point.

But why aren’t they? If a private school doesn’t have a football
team or a soccer team, but the local school does, well, why not let
kids get their chance to play? Or even let each school decide
instead of mandating at the state-level, which the Tebow bill
admittedly does?

Maybe that’s a bad idea, but having just celebrated School Choice Week at Reason
DC, I’m feeling particularly keen on choosing. The columnists and
other dissenters say kids can’t have an education buffet, but why
can’t they? Why can’t they take physics at school, but read history
at home, or any another variation?

I suggest that with super-optimism and a general love of
freedom but also, dammit, if you want the parents’ tax
dollars, there should be some education options. Parents pay, so
you had better let in a thousand homeschooled Christian dorks so
that they too can be future football stars who provoke an ire I
cannot began to understand. That’s fair. And that’s one small step
towards real school choice.

(Still, in my day in Pennsylvania we played touch
football in the park near the house where we had
our homeschool group. We didn’t need no dad-gummed public
school for that. Sometimes we didn’t even have shoes. Really, there
was a memorably muddy spring day in about seventh grade where we
all played shoeless.)

Reason on
education and
homeschooling; Veronique de Rugy on how increased school
spending doesn’t
seem to produce smarter kids.