Tragic deaths of home-schooled kids rarely lead to new rules
[...] cases are horrific but they don't typically lead to new restrictions on home-schooling, which many parents see as their deeply personal right, said Rob Kunzman, director of the International Center for Home Education Research at Indiana University.
Eleven states do not require parents to notify state or local officials that their children will be home-schooled, while 10 states require parents to file a one-time notice when they first start home schooling, but nothing further, Coleman said.
The information required to be included varies from state to state, with some requiring only the name of the home school and its administrator, while others require basic curriculum plans, student names and ages, and in some cases a copy of each student's birth certificate.
Dr. Barbara Knox, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said research she and five other pediatricians conducted on the torture of children found that of the 28 young victims studied, nearly half were home-schooled and an additional 29 percent weren't allowed to attend school at all.
Knox said she would like to see uniform home-schooling laws across the country that at least keep tabs on children with open or previous Child Protective Services cases who are removed from school to be home-schooled.
For the 47 percent of children in her study who were removed from their schools to be home-schooled, it "appears to have been designed to further isolate the child and typically occurred after closure of a previously opened CPS case," the researchers wrote.
In response to Chang's proposal, a group called the Michigan Freedom Fund issued a news release blasting the lawmaker for concocting a big-government scheme "designed to force and frighten parents into enrolling their children in government schools and removing their freedom to decide how their children are educated_this time by accusing homeschool parents of being murderers-in-waiting."