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Subject Do Home Schoolers Deserve a Tax Break?

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Original Message [link to www.nytimes.com]

Chester E. Finn Jr. is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The boundary between “going to school” and “being home schooled” grows ever more porous as online learning opportunities proliferate and more families supplement what their children learn “in school” with educational offerings at home.

In return for financial help, home-schooled students should be required to take state tests; if they don't pass, the subsidy vanishes..Though data in this realm are shaky, the best federal statistics (from 2003) suggest that barely 2 percent of U.S. children are entirely “home schooled” by their parents. This is up a bit from earlier years and apt to keep rising as online options make it easier for parents to educate their children at home without having to devise and deliver the curriculum themselves.

From a policy perspective, however, there’s not much difference between teaching kids at home and enrolling them in any of hundreds of “virtual charter schools” or district- or state-run alternatives like the Florida Virtual School. Yet the virtual schools, which are fiercely resisted by teachers unions' and other education-establishment forces, are fully paid for with public dollars, while traditional home schooling is done almost entirely at the parents’ expense.

What’s fair about that, especially for low-income families that may favor instruction around the kitchen table but can’t access a virtual school and can’t afford to cover these costs out of pocket?

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