Michelle Malkin is in stratospheric dudgeon today, and I can't say I blame her:
New Jersey's child welfare system, like most state child welfare systems, is a corrupt and deadly mess. Children are lost in the shuffle, shipped to abusive foster homes, returned to rapists and child molesters, and left to die in closets while paperwork piles up. So who does the government decide to punish for the bureaucracy's abysmal failure to protect these innocents?
Homeschoolers.
And what does the government think will solve its ills?
More power and paperwork.
Last week, a Democratic assemblywoman introduced a bill that would impose annual academic testing and annual medical exams on home-schooled students in the Garden State. Never mind a federal law that prohibits states from requiring that homeschoolers take the state assessment designed for public school students. And never mind the fact that no public or private school students are subject to such health regulations. The State Board of Education would be given unprecedented regulatory authority over homeschoolers.
I'm not aware of the federal law to which Michelle refers, but she's right about the medical exam (Update: As Daryl tactfully points out, Michelle means the NCLB Act. Doh!). And it's appalling for NJ Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg to claim that the heinous cases of foster child abuse are the rationale behind this focus on homeschoolers.
When it comes to the travesty that is NJ's foster care system, Michelle has data to back up her flaming comments:
While New Jersey politicians attempts to punish law-abiding homeschoolers for the sins of DYFS and the Jacksons, one of every 14 children in foster care in the state is placed in a home operated by someone with a criminal conviction or documented as having mistreated a child.
Moreover, according to a study released last summer by the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, one in 10 were abused or neglected by the agency caregiver and one in five didn't receive needed medical care. "The DYFS picture is not just bleak; it is one of chaos and tragedy," the report concluded. "From the reading of the disorganized and incomplete case files, to the statistical analysis of the status of children in the 'care' of DYFS, institutional abuse, neglect and ineptitude are the dominant themes."
Earth to New Jersey: "institutional abuse, neglect and ineptitude" are not the dominant themes of your state's homeschooling familes. But they are the themes of the homes in which your foster children live. Targeting homeschoolers with forced medical exams will do nothing to fix this problem.
Posted by kswygert at January 14, 2004 02:58 PM