Homeschool Regulations: Your Turn

Lately, I’ve been written a lot about why I think there needs to be some reasonable regulation and oversight of homeschooling, but while I’ve made a few suggestions in the comments sections I haven’t really laid out any sort of actual plan of what I think this should look like. Part of the reason is that I’m not completely sure about that myself yet. But just this morning, one of my readers made an interesting request:

Would Libby Anne be willing to open up a post just for debating what regulations are appropriate and which are too prone to problems?

So that is what this is—a post for discussing which homeschool regulations you think are appropriate, which you think would be the most effective, and which you think go too far.

As far as rules go, I ask only that you stick to my commenting policy and stay away from personal attacks (read my comment policy before commenting if you haven’t already). It would probably also be helpful if you would mention if you have ever been a homeschool parent or a homeschooled child. You are definitely encouraged to respond to each other and back up your points, but if you move into personal attacks or character smears, I will delete your comments.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about discussing here, here are some regulations I’ve seen suggested or discussed:

• Requiring homeschool parents to register their home schools with the state.
• Requiring homeschool parents to submit an annual curricular plan for review.
• Requiring homeschooled students to take some sort of annual testing.
• Requiring homeschoolers to turn in annual portfolios displaying their work.
• Requiring that homeschool families have an annual home visit.
• Barring those currently being investigated for child abuse from beginning to homeschool, or at least requiring that they be monitored if they do so.
• Putting homeschool parents who have previously been convicted of child abuse or child sexual molestation under monitoring from CPS.

And with that, I’m interested in seeing where this goes!