That’s a real question being asked of our State Supreme Court.
In an empty office at the family’s El Paso motorcycle dealership, Laura McIntyre says her nine kids were learning.
McIntyre’s brother-in-law says they were singing and playing instruments. Learning was unnecessary, one of the children allegedly said, because “they were going to be raptured.”
The two will take their dispute to the Texas Supreme Court next week, in a case that involves family feuds, competing legal complaints, claims about the Second Coming, a 17-year-old who ran away from home so she could go to school and a fundamental question that could impact all 300,000 or so children home-schooled in Texas: Where is the line between parents’ right to oversee their children’s education and the state’s duty to make sure children are actually getting one?
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An Texas state appeals court ruled in the school district’s favor, finding that parents “do not have an absolute constitutional right to home school,” and that there is nothing in state law that precludes an attendance officer like Mendoza from investigating whether home-schooled children are actually learning. Indeed, Chief Justice Ann Crawford McClure said, quoting a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, there is “no doubt as to the power of a state, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education.”
The McIntyres appealed that ruling, and now the case will go before Texas’s all-Republican Supreme Court, the Associated Press reported.
According to the AP, all but one of the McIntyre children have grown up and are no longer being taught by their parents. But Laura McIntyre said she is “looking for a little clarification” as she continues to teach her youngest child.
The state supreme court’s ruling could have broad ramifications for the ever-growing ranks of home-schooled children in Texas. As it stands, the state already has some of country’s laxest laws on home schooling. (Though, in court filings, the McIntyres allege that the El Paso school district is biased against Christians and has engaged in a “startling assertion of sweeping governmental power” by investigating their curriculum, according to the AP.)
Here’s the AP report on the case, which was heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, with no indication how they might be leaning. No indication when we might get a ruling either, though if I had to guess I’d say 8 to 10 months from now. Seems to me the state’s interest in ensuring that its children all get at least some minimally-acceptable level of education is pretty clear, but there’s not much on the books to regulate homeschoolers, thanks in part to their strong lobby and the complete unwillingness of Republican legislators to cross them. So we’ll see.