Some people will be miserable no matter who is running
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Truancy courts are not controversial. Literally holding a parent criminally liable for not sending their child to school. Maybe there’d be less Lord of the Flies gangs of tweenage criminals in every major city if truancy was better enforced.
Throwing people in prison does not benefit the children of those people.
And truancy courts don't typically target far right homeschooler quiverfull families. They're aimed squarely at Two Income Trap working families and poor single parents, already under the gun thanks to poor bussing policies, no statutory time off from work, and abysmal access to health care.
Truancy laws are a tool of the School-To-Prison Pipeline. They substitute a criminal mandate for accessible education.
More daycare, free school breakfast/dinner programs, public after school activities, and less child homelessness would go much farther towards reducing delinquent kids than arresting their parents.
...Because they don't have to. The homeschoolers are home schooling (or, at least claiming to do so), whereas truant kids aren't being educated at all. If the parents that were going to truancy courts were home schooling kids, they could just say that and be done with it. (I'm no fan of home schooling; I think that it's almost always a disservice to the kids. But it's still a legal right.)
IIRC, Harris had other programs that she was using/working with to reduce truancy rates, and courts were the last-ditch effort for parents that refused to even show up for anything else. If I recall correctly--and please, fact check me here--no parents received any jail time for truancy while she was a DA. It was used as a tool to get parents to take truancy seriously.
And yes, I agree that school lunches, etc. would all help, But there's only so many tools that a district attorney has to use. The DA can't mandate a tax to cover daycare or after school activities; that's the job of the city council or state legislature.
Right. Which is to say they pretend to teach and we pretend to believe them.
But these homeschool kids come out with all the same problems as their school skipping counterparts. They're misinformed, anti-social, and often xenophobic. They have trouble holding down jobs outside of a family business or parent's career. They're prone to crime and drug abuse. They don't do well in higher education. But they're spared the indignity of seeing their parents dragged into prison or being sent their themselves, so they've got that going for them at least.
Maybe the DA shouldn't be the one charged with fixing the problem.
I was homeschooled from kindergarten through highschool. While I don't dispute much of what you said here (I was mis- and under- informed, I was anti-social, and I was xenophobic), I think the situation is more nuanced than you make it out to be.
First, I don't think it's the role of the school to make sure that students are not xenophobic or anti-social.
Second, it took me one remedial class in college (trigonometry) to get caught up.
By the time I reached the university level, I was extremely good at learning things on my own, and the raw information was available online. The ability to learn on my own without anyone holding my hand has proven to be very useful, and it's a skill that is lacking in a lot of public school graduates.
It is the duty of school officials to maintain civility among the students. When districts aren't already segregated by state leadership, that means cultivating a certain degree of egalitarianism and inter-racial tolerance among the student body. Similarly, teachers and admins have a duty to discourage bullying and guaranteeing students an opportunity to participate in school life without fear. That gives students the freedom to interact without fear.
To a student at the high school baseline. Not a student who has been taking AP classes since junior year. This isn't just a question of meeting the minimum standard. High Schools - particularly well-funded and expertly administered schools - offer a wealth of college-level class opportunities at the high school level. And holding kids back from these schools means denying them access to a wealth of professional education and advanced tools.
Yes, it was cool to grow up in the early '00s and have a relatively reliable and robust online free-at-point-of-access reference library. Its a shame we're dissolving these resources and gatekeeping them behind paywalls, as well fill up the basic search tools with bullshit and FUD.
Yes. But that's the way the system works. We've decided, as a society, that parents have the right to manage their child's education, as long as they at least claim to be educating them. Parents of truant children aren't making that claim at all. They're more than welcome to do that, if that's what they want, but they're usually not interested in attempting home schooling either.
And yes, I agree that home schooling is, in almost all cases, a problem. I know some parents choose it because the schools refuse to follow IEPs for children with documented disabilities, and they simply don't have the resources to sue the schools to force compliance. But that's not most families that home school.
The DA is charged with fixing only one part of the problem, rather than the entire problem. In an ideal world, all of the systems would be working together perfectly, but since we have some people that are determined to break the system, and since they keep throwing sabots in the machinery, that's not happening.
They shouldn't be. But I recall the way that they were framed at the time made them sound really bad. When you looked into it, and realized that no one had even gotten past the threatened with arrest part, it started to make a lot more sense.