Ads
©2006 NDHSA
Ads
Legislative Activities
"The three great essentials to achieving anything worthwhile are; first, hard work, second, stick-to-it-iveness, and third, common sense. Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." -- Thomas Edison
WHEN GOOD PEOPLE DO NOTHING “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” -- Edmund Burke More..
Legislative Watch #3 (January 19th, 2007)
Legislative Watch #4 (January 25, 2007)
Legislative Watch #5 (February 9, 2007)
Legislative Watch #6 (February 16, 2007)
Legislative Watch #7 (February 24, 2007)
Legislative Watch #8 (March 9, 2007)
Legislative Watch #9 (March 21, 2007)
Legislative Watch #10 (March 30, 2007)
Legislative Watch #11 (April 6, 2007)
Legislative Watch #12 (April 13, 2007)
Legislative Watch #13 (April 20, 2007)
Attorney General Opinion (February 1, 2007) It states that only a qualified parent may provide instruction to that parent's child and that a qualified parent may not supervise someone else who is providing instruction to the child.
March 14, 2007
Grand Forks Challenges Home Education Supervisors
In November 2006, Home School Legal Defense Association assisted two member families in Grand Forks after school officials asserted that the fathers did not qualify as supervisors of their respective home education programs. In both families, the fathers had a baccalaureate degree but worked full-time outside the home while the mothers provided the majority of the instruction to their children. As a result, the school district contended that since the mothers did not have baccalaureate degrees, their programs had to be monitored by a state-certified teacher.
HSLDA Senior Counsel Dewitt Black responded to the families’ request for assistance and wrote letters to the school officials. Black explained that both fathers were qualified to serve as supervisors of their home education programs without personally conducting all of the instruction. Section 15.1-23-01 of the North Dakota Century Code defines home education as “a program of education supervised by a child’s parent, in the child’s home, in accordance with the requirements of this chapter.” The fathers were supervising the programs of education. The statute does not state that the supervisor must personally provide all of the instruction or even any of the instruction.
Contrary to HSLDA’s analysis of this legal issue, on February 1, 2007, North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem issued an opinion stating that state law “does not permit a parent to supervise education provided to that parent’s child by another individual.” The attorney general acknowledged that the language in the homeschool law “creates an ambiguity.” He went on to say that the statute is not clear whether a parent must supervise the education by providing the instruction directly to the student or whether the parent may supervise someone else who is doing so. In the end, he based his unfavorable opinion on inferences he drew from testimony of witnesses at the legislative hearings for the original homeschool law in 1989.
The attorney general’s opinion is not law. However, it is likely that the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction and local school districts will follow this opinion. HSLDA remains prepared to represent in legal proceedings any of our member families who wish to challenge the attorney general’s opinion or who are prosecuted by their local school district because of this monitoring issue.
Each instance in which the teaching parent is not also the supervisor of the home education program must be analyzed individually to determine whether the intent of the law is being met. Accordingly, families considering the same or similar arrangements for teaching their children should consult with HSLDA prior to doing so.
In the case involving the Grand Forks families, both of them decided not to challenge the attorney general's opinion in view of the fact that they are military families and short-term residents of North Dakota.
RESULTS
SB2377 STUDY Midwives
SB2414 $1000 Tax Credit for homeschoolers
NORTH DAKOTA HOME SCHOOL LEGISLATIVE NEWS
The home education laws in North Dakota are still among the most restrictive in the nation. The biblical, logical and statistical data are available to convince rational persons that the ND home education laws are more restrictive than necessary, serve no genuine educational purpose, undermine the Christian ethic and bolster a failed education monopoly paradigm. The case can even be made that the state's interest in education is actually better served by home education.
For these reasons and others, the NDHSA is working with ND home educators (Galatians 6:2) and their legislators to encourage a deeper understanding of educational philosophies and uphold a vision for learning knowledge that begins with the fear of the Lord and continues to acknowledges Him (Proverbs 1:7, 3:5-6) as an important outworking of Constitutional religious freedom in North Dakota.
On October 16th, 2006, the NDHSA Board voted to draft legislation that will: January 22, 2007 Note: The NDHSA Board voted in December 2006, not to introduce legislation this session. As of this date, we are aware that three separate individuals contacted their legislators to pursue: the grandparents issue, the legal guardian issue, and the tax credit issue. |
1. Grandparents want to home educate their grandchildren, too. This is necessary and or helpful when both parents work. The Scriptures also encourage grandparent involvement in childhood training.
Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it: That thou mightest fear the LORD thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged. Deuteronomy 6:1-2
Deliberately dumb
“Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s new book, ‘ the deliberate dumbing down of america’ is without doubt one of the most important publishing events in the annals of American education in the last hundred years.
“John Dewey’s ‘School and Society,’ published in 1899, set American education on its course to socialism. Rudolf Flesch’s `Why Johnny Can’t Read’ published in 1955, informed American parents that there was something terribly wrong with the way the schools were teaching children to read …
“But Iserbyt has done what no one else wanted or could do. She has put together the most formidable and practical compilation of documentation describing the well-planned ‘deliberate dumbing down’ of American children by their education system.’” Samuel L. Blumenfeld, writing on “Deliberately dumbing us down,” Dec. 2 on World Net Daily at worldnetdaily.com
Charlotte Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms.
NATIONAL HOME SCHOOL LEGISLATIVE NEWS
WILL NEW CA BILL STOP HOME SCHOOLING? "Recent television campaigns have told my mommy friends and me that if we don’t start our children in the right preschool, our little darlings may have trouble getting into the right college. And “Preschool for All,” as CA Assembly Bill 172 is called, is being promoted by none other than Rob Reiner. How do these Hollywood sitcom stars help us make educational decisions? Or more to the point, why do they sell us on such silly ideas? I’d love to say that the moms I know are exempt from preschool and kindergarten mania, but they are not." More..
Strategy to closing down public schools?
The linked article below [“MANY S.F. SCHOOLS TO CLOSE OR MERGE”] discusses the effect that a modest exodus from the San Francisco public schools is having on the SF school district. Bear in mind that school closures, mergers, etc. destabilize the district financially, tend to set the tax consuming school district special interest groups at one another's throats, and break ties parents have with the system, thereby encouraging yet more parents to leave. As you will see, the article discusses some of the consequences of SF schools losing just 1,000 students per year. Consider what would happen if only 20-30% of Christians around the country took their children out tomorrow." More..
MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS AND QUOTES
SHOULD CIVL GOVERNMENT EXPLICITLY ACKNOWLEDGE GOD AND JESUS CHRIST?
Thornwell Memorial to Presbytery - Relation of the State to Christ
by James Henley Thornwell
Introduction:
Some Southerners did not think the Confederate Constitution went far enough in setting forth the Sovereignty of God, and the authority of Christ within the civil realm.
After the Southern States seceded, the Presbyterian Church split between the Northern and Southern congregations. The newly formed Southern Presbyterian Church met in Savannah and James Henley Thornwell submitted “a memorial which, it was overtured, should be sent to the Confederate Congress, for the incorporation of an article in the Confederate Constitution distinctly recognizing the Christian religion.” He was not to see his work come to fruition.
What follows is the text of that memorial. This was taken from James Henley Thornwell’s Collected Writings, Volume IV, Pages 549-556:
The petition of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America now met and sitting in the city of Augusta , in the State of Georgia , to the Congress of the Confederate States of America , now met and sitting in the city of Richmond , in the State of Virginia , respectfully showeth:
That this Assembly is the supreme judicatory of those Presbyterian churches in the Confederate States which were formerly under the jurisdiction of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States; that it comprises ______Presbyteries, ______Synods, and ______members; that it represents a people devotedly attached to the Confederate cause, and eminently loyal to the Confederate Government. The changes which your honorable body has made in the Constitution of the United States, and which have been ratified and confirmed by the various States of the Confederacy, have received the universal approval of the Presbyterian population of these States; and none have been more grateful to God than themselves for the prudence, caution, moderation, and wisdom which have characterized all your counsels in the arduous task of constructing the new Government. We congratulate you on your success. But, gentlemen, we are constrained, in candour, to say that, in our humble judgement, the Constitution, admirable as it is in other respects, still labours under one capital defect. It is not distinctively Christian. It is not bigotry, but love to our country, and an earnest, ardent desire to promote its permanent well-being, which prompts us to call the attention of your honourable body to this subject, and, in the way of respectful petition, to pray that the Constitution may be amended so as to express the precise relations which the Government of these States ought to sustain to the religion of Jesus Christ.
The Constitution of the United States was an attempt to realize the notion of popular freedom, without the checks of aristocracy and a throne, and without the alliance of a national church. The conception was a noble one, but the execution was not commensurate with the design. The fundamental error of our fathers was, that they accepted a partial for a complete statement of the truth. They saw clearly the human side -- that popular governments are the offspring of popular will; and that rulers, as the servants and not the masters of their subjects, are properly responsible to them. They failed to apprehend the Divine side -- that all just government is the ordinance of God, and that magistrates are His ministers who must answer to Him for the execution of their trust. The consequence of this failure, and of exclusive attention to a single aspect of the case, was to invest the people with a species of supremacy as insulting to God as it was injurious to them. They became a law unto themselves; there was nothing beyond them to check or control their caprices or their pleasure. All were accountable to them; they were accountable to none. This was certainly to make the people a God; and if it was not explicitly expressed that they could do no wrong, it was certainly implied that there was no tribunal to take cognizance of their acts. A foundation was thus laid for the worst of all possible forms of government -- a democratic absolutism, which, in the execution of its purposes, does not scruple to annul the most solemn compacts and to cancel the most sacred obligations. The will of majorities must become the supreme law, if the voice of the people is to be regarded as the voice of God; if they are, in fact, the only God whom rulers are bound to obey. It is enough, therefore, to look upon government as simply the institute of man. Important as this aspect of the subject unquestionably is, yet if we stop there, we shall sow the seeds of disaster and failure. We must contemplate people and rulers as alike subject to the authority of God. His will is the true supreme; and it is under Him, and as the means of expressing His sovereign pleasure, that conventions are called, constitutions are framed and governments erected. To the extent that the State is a moral person, it must needs be under moral obligation, and moral obligation without reference to a superior will is a flat contradiction in terms. If, then, the State is an ordinance of God, it should acknowledge the fact. If it exists under the conditions of a law superior to all human decrees, and to which all human decrees behoove to be conformed, that law should be distinctly recognized. Let us guard, in this new Confederacy, against the fatal delusion that our government is a mere expression of human will. It is, indeed, an expression of will, but of will regulated and measured by those eternal principles of right which stamp it at the same time as the creature and institute of God . And of all governments in the world, a confederate government, resting as it does upon plighted faith, can least afford to dispense with the Supreme Guardian of treaties.
Your honourable body has already, to some extent, rectified the error of the old Constitution, but not so distinctly and clearly as the Christian people of these States desire to see done. We venture respectfully to suggest, that it is not enough for a state which enjoys the light of Divine revelation to acknowledge in general terms the supremacy of God; it must also acknowledge the supremacy of His Son, whom He hat appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds. To Jesus Christ all power in heaven and earth is committed. To Him every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess. He is the Ruler of the nations, the King of kings, and Lord of lords.
Should it be said that the subjection of governments to Jesus Christ is not a relation manifested by reason, and therefore not obligatory on the State, the answer is obvious -- that duties spring not from the manner in which the relation is made known, but from the truth of the relation itself. If the fact is so, that Jesus Christ is our Lord, and we know the fact, no matter how we come to know it, we are bound to acknowledge it, and act upon it. A father is entitled to the reverence of his son, a master to the obedience of his servant, and a king to the allegiance of his subjects, no matter how the relation between them is ascertained. Now, that Jesus Christ is the supreme Ruler of the nations, we know with infallible certainty, if we accept the Scriptures as the Word of God.
But it may be asked -- and this is the core of all the perplexity which attends the subject -- Has the State any right to accept the Scriptures as the Word of God? The answer requires a distinction, and that distinction seems to us to obviate all difficulty. If by “accepting the Scriptures” it is meant that the State has a right to prescribe them as a rule of faith and practice to its subjects, the answer must be in the negative. The State is lord of no man’s conscience. As long as he preserves the peace, and is not injurious to the public welfare, no human power has a right to control his opinion or to restrain his acts. In these matters he is responsible to none but God. He may be Atheist, Deist, infidel, Turk or Pagan: it is no concern of the State, so long as he walks orderly. Its protecting shield must be over him, as over every other citizen. We utterly abhor the doctrine that the civil magistrate has any jurisdiction in the domain of religion, in its relations to the conscience or conduct of others, and we cordially approve the clause in our Confederate Constitution which guarantees the amplest liberty on this subject.
But if by “accepting the Scriptures” it is meant that the State may itself believe them to be true, and regulate its own conduct and legislation in conformity with their teachings, the answer must be in the affirmative. As a moral person, it has a conscience as really and truly as every individual citizen. To say that its conscience is only the aggregate of individual consciences, is to say that it is made up of conflicting and even contradictory elements. The State condemns many things which many of its subjects approve, and enjoins many things which many of its subjects condemn. There are those who are opposed to the rights of property and the institution of marriage, yet the public conscience sanctions and protects them both. What, then, is this public conscience? It is clearly the sum of those convictions of right, that sense of the honourable, just and true, which legislators feel themselves bound to obey in the structure of governments and the enactment of laws. It is a reflection of the law of God; and when that law is enunciated with authoritative clearness, as it is in the Scriptures, it becomes only the more solemnly imperative. And as the eternal rule of justice, the State should acknowledge it. Considered in its organic capacity as a person, it no more violates the rights of others in submitting itself to the revealed will of God, than a Christian, when he worships the supreme Jehovah, violates the rights of an Atheist or idolater. What the State does itself, and what it enjoins upon others to do, are very different things. It has an organic life apart from the aggregate life of the individuals who compose it; and in that organic life, it is under the authority of Jesus Christ and the restraints of His holy Word.
That, in recognizing this doctrine, the State runs no risk of trespassing upon the rights of conscience is obvious from another point of view. The will of God, as revealed in the Scriptures, is not a positive Constitution for the State; in that relation it stands only to the Church. It is rather a negative check upon its power. It does not prescribe the things to be done, but only forbids the things to be avoided. It only conditions and restrains the discretion of rulers within the bounds of the Divine law. It is, in other words, a limitation, and not a definition, of power. The formula according to which the Scriptures are accepted by the State is: Nothing shall be done which they forbid. The formula according to which they are accepted by the Church is: Nothing shall be done but what they enjoin. They are here the positive measure of power. Surely the government of no Christian people can scruple to accept the negative limitations of the Divine Word. Surely, our rulers do not desire that they shall have the liberty of being wiser than God.
The amendment which we desire, we crave your honourable body to take note, does not confine the administration of the State exclusively to the hands of Christian men. A Jew might be our Chief Magistrate, provided he would come under the obligation to do nothing in the office inconsistent with the Christian religion. He would not be required to say that he himself believes it, nor would he assume the slightest obligation to propagate or enforce it. All that he would do would be to acknowledge it as the religion of the State, and to bind himself that he will sanction no legislation that sets aside its authority. The religion of the State is one thing; the religion of the individuals who may happen to be at the head of affairs is quite another. The religion of the State is embodied in its Constitution, as the concrete form of its organic life.
Your honourable body will perceive that the contemplated measure has no reference to a union or alliance betwixt the Church and State. To any such scheme the Presbyterians, and, we think we can safely venture to say, the entire Christian people of these States, are utterly opposed. The State, as such cannot be a member, much less, therefore, can it exercise the function of settling the creed and the government, of a Church. The provinces of the two are entirely distinct: they differ in their origin, their nature, their ends, their prerogatives, their powers and their sanctions. They cannot be mixed or confounded without injury to both. But the separation of Church and State is a very different thing from the separation of religion and the State. Here is where our fathers erred. In their anxiety to guard against the evils of a religious establishment, and to preserve the provinces of Church and State separate and distinct, they virtually expelled Jehovah from the government of the country, and left the State an irresponsible corporation, or responsible only to the immediate corporators. They made it a moral person, and yet not accountable to the Source of all law. It is this anomaly which we desire to see removed; and the removal of it by no means implies a single element of what is involved in a national Church.
The amendment which this General Assembly ventures respectfully to crave we have reason to believe is earnestly desired, and would be hailed as an auspicious omen by the overwhelming majority of the Christian people of these Confederate States. Is it not due to them that their consciences, in the future legislation of the country, should be protected from all that has a tendency to wound or grieve them? They ask no encroachments upon the rights of others. They simply crave that a country which they love should be made much dearer to them, and that the Government which they have helped to frame they may confidently commend to their Saviour and their God, under the cheering promise that those who honour Him He will honour. Promotion cometh not from the East, nor from the West, nor from the South. God is the ruler among the nations; and the people who refuse Him their allegiance shall be broken with a rod of iron, or dashed in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Our republic will perish like the Pagan republics of Greece and Rome , unless we baptize it into the name of Christ. “Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth...Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.” We long to see, what the world has never yet beheld, a truly Christian Republic, and we humbly hope that God has reserved it for the people of these Confederate States to realize the grand and glorious idea. God has wooed us by extraordinary goodness; he is now tempering us by gentle chastisements. Let the issue be the penitent submission of this great people at the footstool of His Son.
The whole substance of what we desire may be expressed in the following or equivalent terms, to be added to the section providing for liberty of conscience:
Nevertheless we, the people of these Confederate States, distinctly acknowledge our responsibility to God, and the supremacy of His Son, Jesus Christ, as King of kings and Lord of lords; and hereby ordain that no law shall be passed by the Congress of the Confederate States inconsistent with the will of God, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures.
North Dakota is one of only eight states in the nation requiring any type of testing for homeschool students. It is an unnecessary expense to the home educator, tends to secularize home education curriculum, and promote government dependency and worship by Christian home educators. There is no evidence that standardized testing improves learning. The testing requirements stand as evidence that statist educators have usurped the educational authority of the family and church.
The financial cost to home educators to fulfill this unnecessary testing requirement can be estimated to be at least: $15 for test preparation materials + $25 for test proctor + $40 for the nationally normed test = $80 for each student for each of grades 4, 6, 8, and 10. The total per student is therefore about $320. For the average homeschool family with five children, this cost would be more than $1600. This amount is enough to cover all the home school materials needed to educate an entire family for grades 1-12.
Considering that about 1200 families home educate in North Dakota, then the total cost to this group for their testing is $1,920,000. Much more value could be added to the family, church, and state if these funds were directed by the respective families to their family education, church, or other interests. It appears that this testing requirement is undermining the home education movement by removing significant funding in addition to its philosophical and religious implications.
Consider also that standardized tests are not helpful evaluation tools, not objective, not reliable, do not reflect real differences among people, are biased, do not measure intelligence, do not reflect what teachers know about how students learn, do not measure student achievement, and are not helpful to teachers. Read What's Wrong with Standardized Tests? for more.
Beware of the "free - to serve homeschoolers" movement!"
From http://Edwatch.org
Assorted Quotes From the Front Lines
"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well - by creating the international child of the future.""The National Education Association is under fire for its advice to teachers on how to spend the anniversary of September 11. The critics say that the NEA's lesson plans are too relativistic and insufficiently patriotic. Students would hear a lot about 'intolerance': the need to avoid it, America's shameful history... The critics would like students to learn more about America's virtues and about our enemies' deadly intolerance. ...What the critics have uncovered, in other words, is not the NEA's lack of patriotism. It is modern liberal culture's shallowness. September 11 cannot be understood.... History is consulted only to the extent that it teaches us that people in previous eras have had feelings of grief and anger after disasters, too, and that these feelings have been expressed in more and less healthy ways. The history of the Middle East is not mentioned anywhere. Islam is a source of 'diversity,' and the only thing students need know about Muslims is that they are not all alike. ...Tolerance, diversity, and psychological well-being are all fine things if they are rightly understood. But a country needs other things to defend itself: things like courage, confidence, endurance, manliness, intelligence. Neither our school curricula nor our public culture is designed to cultivate those qualities. We need better lessons, and not from the NEA."
--National Review"The 'Islam is peaceful' message was recently reinforced at the University of North Carolina, when freshmen were assigned selections of the Koran -- peaceful selections, that is. The parts about how it is the duty of Muslims to kill Jews, Christians, and other 'infidels' -- the parts about holy wars that are of vital importance in light of September 11 -- were somehow left out. ... The problem is not so much that kids are being taught about Islam or even asked to read the Koran -- though I have my objections to that. The problem is that there is no balance in those teachings. In the name of tolerance, Islam is being whitewashed; the distinctions between Islam and Western culture are being systematically scrubbed away."
--Chuck Colson"...how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant....the world view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane...."
--George Orwell's 1984From the Founder of Modern Education: Socialist John Dewey
1896
"It is one of the great mistakes of education to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of the school work the first two years. The true way is to teach them incidentally as the outgrowth of the social activities at this time. Thus language is not primarily the expression of thought, but the means of social communication ... If language is abstracted from social activity, and made an end in itself, it will not give its whole value as a means of development... It is not claimed that by the method suggested, the child will learn to read as much, nor perhaps as readily in a given period as by the usual method. That he will make more rapid progress later when the true language interest develops ... can be claimed with confidence."
1899: School and Society
"The tragic weakness of the present school is that it endeavors to prepare future members of the social order in a medium in which the conditions of the social spirit are eminently wanting ... The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat."
1916: Democracy and Education
"When knowledge is regarded as originating and developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied. When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody else."
1935: Liberalism and Social Action
"The last stand of oligarchical and anti-social seclusion is perpetuation of this purely individualistic notion of intelligence."
Voter Apathy Hurts Our Children's Prospects of Liberty
Did you know that in Nazi Germany, 90% of German Lutheran bishops endorsed Hitler? Hitler was, to borrow a contemporary phrase, "the lesser of two evils" compared to the threat of Communism. Nazi tyranny and genocide came into existence not as a result of overthrowing the democratic process, but as a result of it. Not in spite of the voting block of Christians, but as a consequence of it. Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it. We must not be so full of pride to think that we are more righteous than they and less deserving of judgment. More Americans died by abortion with a Republican president and with a Republican congressional majority from 2000 to 2006 than all the Jews that were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. http://www.newswithviews.com/Johnston/patrick16.htm
Welcome to the
North Dakota Home School Association