The Auditor
General in Nova Scotia has released a strongly anti-home education report. The report makes 12 recommendations for
change. Among those recommendations are
the following:
·
The
Department of Education should require periodic, independent assessment of home
schooled children against learning objectives and outcomes.
·
The
Department of Education should assess the programs proposed by parents to
determine if they are designed to achieve appropriate learning objectives and
outcomes for home schooled children.
·
The
Department of Education should obtain information on learning outcomes of home
schooled children to determine if they are making reasonable educational
progress.
·
The
Department of Education should track home school registration using its
computerized database to determine which children are not registered for the
current year and whether follow up is needed.
·
The
Department of Education should track children leaving public school for home
schooling to ensure they are properly registered for home schooling.
·
The Department
of Education should explore the possibility of establishing an information
sharing protocol with the Department of Health and Wellness to enable tracking
of all school-aged children in the province to determine whether they are
registered for school.
The full
report as well as a summary of the report is available here.
HSLDA
condemns this report for its clear anti-home education bias and clear lack of
understanding of home education. It is obvious that the Auditor General’s
office has not consulted the research on home education, home educating
families, or home education experts.
Home
education is successful because it is not standardized. Parents, who know their
children better than anyone else, are able to tailor the curriculum, learning
style, and evaluation methods to the unique needs of their children. If the
recommendations in this report are put in place, parents will have so much
control and oversight of their homeschooling that they will lose virtually all
of this flexibility. This would harm education in Nova Scotia and reduce the
quality of education for home educated students.
If the
recommendations in this report are put into practice, Nova Scotia will become
the most oppressive province in Canada in which to home educate. HSLDA will be
working with local home education leaders to ensure that homeschooling freedoms
are maintained in Nova Scotia. Stay tuned for further updates.
If you can not view the full report, follow this link:
http://www.hslda.ca/blog/nova_scotia_auditor_general?year&month&page=1
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