Tuesday's meeting of the "Evaluations and Records Subcommittee" began with three of its five members present: Reps. Harvey, Price, and O'Neil. Rep Barbara Shaw arrived later in the meeting. Rep. Hutchinson did not attend.

The subcommittee's chairman, Representative Phil Harvey presented a remarkable document, which is his proposal for what the evaluation portion of the law should look like when the committee is done with it.  It involves every child being tested every year by a credentialed educator under standardized testing procedures.   The portfolio of every child would be read and evaluated by a team of two to three evaluators appointed by the local superintendent (even for students whose PA is a nonpublic school), and judged to pass or fail by a best two of three vote of the team.  The proposal did not seem to be getting much traction with the other members of the subcommittee. 

Rep. Harvey's stated rationale is that the state has no data on homeschoolers, and superintendents do not have enough information to judge whether particular programs are successful or not.

There were about a dozen homeschooling parents, about as many students, and several interested state representatives in the audience to hear this presentation. Several homeschoolers commented about the reality that, under RSA 193-A, data are collected every year from every homeschooler, that participating agents have these data, that participating agents are not called upon to judge the programs themselves, that the expense of creating teams of evaluators for 5000 homeschooled students would be astronomical, and so on.  Rep Barbara Shaw spoke heatedly about the drawbacks of inflicting standardized testing on students in school or at home.  Rep. Susan Wiley, in the audience, spoke, as a former test coordinator for a NH SAU, in opposition to Rep. Harvey's testing proposal..   

One homeschooler cited the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- proposing that in seeking to measure a homeschooling program using the blunt standardized testing instrument proposed, we would inevitably alter the program, potentially destroying some of its essential qualities.  I have always told my students that you never know when chemistry will come in handy -- in particular the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- so I was glad to encounter this application of it. (Can we work the dual wave-particle nature of light/matter into the debate, too?)

I addressed the subcommittee to say that it is an absolute error to continue to maintain that there is no data on NH homeschoolers -- in particular we do know that no homeschool program has been terminated against the wishes of the parent under the provisions of RSA 193-A in the almost twenty years since the law's enactment.  

Some parents, including, presumably, some who have a program on probation, voluntarily return children to school, of course.  If no progress is demonstrated during the probationary year, the commissioner of education  must notify the parent that a due process hearing is available before the program is involuntarily terminated.   No such instance has been reported by DOE representatives.  

Rep. O'Neil indicated that the absence of any terminations does not mean that no homeschool program is unsatisfactory and that it is only natural to expect that some programs which should be should be terminated are not. Rep. Harvey's position was that there just is not enough information from these evaluations to generate terminations.

I concluded my remarks to the subcommittee by telling them that the US Supreme Court has ruled on a number of occasions that parents have what  is called a "liberty interest" in their children's education, which gives parents enormous latitude to direct the education of their children, subject to regulation only on the grounds of the state's "compelling interest" in the matter.  The state is limited to using only the "least restrictive means" to satisfy its compelling interest.  It could be argued that NH's current law (not to speak of the proposed new regulation) may go beyond these least restrictive means --  although evaluation requirements are not the only consideration, about half the 50 states have no evaluation requirements for home education programs. 

--  Mary