Law degree

The legal ramifications of choosing to homeschool your child is heavily dependent upon which state you live in and how state and local authorities interpret the laws of compulsory attendance, private education and homeschooling. State officials may require some or all of the following: registration, a notice of intent to homeschool, regular progress evaluations, or advance approval prior to beginning to homeschool your child. State statute interpretation and enforcement often take a back seat the the statutes themselves.

Here are five tips to keep the homeschooling legal worries to a minimum and allow you to concentrate on your child’s education:

1. Be aware of your state’s statutes on homeschooling. Keep current copies of all applicable statutes in a safe place in your home for easy reference. Communicate with other parents who homeschool their children on a regular basis. Sign up with a state homeschooling organization that watches the regulations affecting homeschoolers and attend meetings as often as possible.

2. Find out what difficulties exist with statute interpretations in your state. Contact other homeschooling parent who have dealt with these problems successfully. Make a plan with all available options to cope with known issues should you be confronted with them. Don’t wait until you have a problem before beginning to work on the solution.

3. Don’t assume that explanations of homeschooling legal issues are correct. Always investigate any possible concerns for yourself. Homeschooling laws are complex and definitive statements may leave out important information you should know.

4. Don’t allow concerns over legal issues keep you from the important business of educating your child. Most homeschooling parents only object to state requirements for documentation and testing because they interfere with the learning experience for their child. As long as you are meeting your state’s legal requirements, you shouldn’t have to change your approach to homeschooling for your child.

5. Be expressive about your homeschooling. Making homeschoolers visible in your community helps make homeschooling more acceptable to and supported by the public. As more parents choose to homeschool their children, communities nationwide may accept homeschooling as a fun, exciting and effective alternative to traditional public or private institutional style education.

Rebecca Welch is a successful Webmaster and publisher of Home-School-Resources.blogspot.com. She provides researched information on home school resources.

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Why do we need compulsory-attendance laws? Why compel parents to send their children to public schools? Wouldn’t parents naturally educate their children without compulsion? Human nature and history prove this to be the case. All over the world, parents push to educate their children, with or without public schools.

In Japan, school is compulsory only up to the equivalent of junior high school (ninth-grade level). High schools in Japan, like colleges in America, are privately owned and charge tuition. Middle-school students compete fiercely for a place in high schools even though their parents must pay to get them in. Yet most Japanese parents push their kids to apply for high school and scrape up the money for tuition, without the Japanese government’s pressuring them to do so.

In America, millions of parents voluntarily pay thousands of dollars a year in tuition to send their young children to private kindergartens, and their older children to a private college. Obviously, most parents think that educating their children is very important. So why do we need compulsory attendance laws for first through twelfth-grade education?

Compulsory-attendance laws imply that government has to force parents to educate their children. Common sense and history prove this notion false. Up to the 1850s, before we had public schools in America, the literacy rate was over 90 percent. Yet most parents taught their children to read at home. They did not need town officials to force them to educate their children. All over the world, most parents’ want to give their children a good education so they can have a secure future.

Compulsory-attendance laws also imply that some parents are too ignorant or indifferent to their children’s welfare to educate their kids. If this was not the case, then why compel parents at all? Local governments therefore believe they have to force these “bad” parents to deposit their kids in public schools, for the alleged good of the children.

In effect, local governments and public-school authorities don’t trust average parents to have the decency and common sense to educate their kids, unless public-school authorities force them to. That notion is as absurd as claiming that parents would not feed their children unless government authorities forced them to.

There is a saying that if you want to know the real purpose of a law or social system, follow the money. Who benefits the most from our public schools? Certainly not our kids. I submit that the real purpose of compulsory-attendance laws is to enforce a public-school system that benefits public-school employees.

Joel Turtel is the author of “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children.”

Website: http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com,

Email: lbooksusa@aol.com,

Phone: 718-447-7348.

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.

NOTE: You may post this Article on another website only if you set up a hyperlink to Joel Turtel’s email address and website URL, http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com

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Whether you’re submitting a personal statement, a statement of purpose, or a diversity essay, make sure to follow these rules:

Rule #1: Edit and Proofread, Then Proofread Again Your grammar, spelling, and punctuation must be flawless. When in doubt, pullout those old standbys The Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk & White. If grammar, spelling, and punctuation aren’t your strong points, enlist a friend to help (and give you a tutorial, while you’re at it). There’s no excuse for a college graduate to mess this up. And beware the spell-check trap — it won’t catch “right” when you should have written “write,” and it won’t catch your “commitment to pubic service.” (You laugh, but I saw that typo as a law review editor.) Always have a second pair of eyes proofread your essays before you send them off.

Rule #2: Nothing Cutesy Anything cutesy or gimmicky will make admissions officers groan. Stay away from the following:

Essays in the form of poetry
Essays in the form of a legal brief (”For all the reasons cited above, the admissions committee should admit Petitioner to Slamdunk Law School.”)
Essays in the form of an obituary (”Tracy Johnson died the most respected jurist of her time.”)
Essays in the form of an interview
Crayons, construction paper, perfume, or illustrated essays, no matter how sophisticated

Rule #3: No Legalisms You’re not a lawyer yet, so your use of legal concepts or terminology will most likely demonstrate that you have no idea what you’re talking about, not to mention the fact that legal writing is considered god-awful by the rest of the world, including admissions officers. Many applicants, for example, refer to a company or a person violating someone’s right to free speech, when, in fact, the First Amendment applies only to government restrictions on speech. And by all means, steer clear of anything in Latin.

Rule #4: Show, Don’t Tell Back up any general statements with examples and anecdotes. If you write, “The student presidency taught me that leadership means more than delegating,” tell us how you learned that lesson. What were the conflicts and problems you faced? If you write, “I have excellent time-management skills,” back up that statement by pointing out that you graduated in the top 10 percent of an engineering program that 40 percent of engineering freshmen drop.

Rule #5: Respect Page Limits and Other Minutiae If a school gives you a page or word limit, abide by it. And follow the spirit of the rule as well as the letter — don’t get too sneaky with fonts, margins, and line spacing. Admissions officers won’t cut you any slack if your essay comes in under the page limit but makes them go cross-eyed because the font or line spacing is so small. If a school doesn’t specify a length, a good rule of thumb is two to three pages, double-spaced, in eleven-point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins all around. When in doubt, shorter is better than longer. As an admissions officer buddy of mine likes to say: “The vast, vast, vast majority of just-out-of-college applicants (almost all applicants, really) are not interesting enough to fill six pages. Show me that you understand my time is valuable, and show me that you understand how to pick out what’s really important.”

Make sure to put your name and Social Security number in a header and page numbers in a footer, just in case your file goes splat and has to be reassembled. Also, identify in the header what essay question you’re answering, if you’re given more than one option or are submitting more than one essay (”Personal Statement,” “Optional Essay #3,” etc.). By the way, you don’t need to give your essay a title like “Morris 405″ or “Jorge.” I added those titles in the appendix essays so that I could refer to them easily in this chapter.

Don’t submit pages that are crumpled, stained, or smell like pot smoke — most admissions officers really aren’t looking for that contact high. Really, your essay shouldn’t smell like any kind of smoke.

And finally, if you’re getting too close to your material and think you’re losing perspective, turn to the sample essays in the appendix to keep your big-picture objective in mind. Can you see how much more engaging and revealing the good ones are?

Copyright © 2006 Anna Ivey

Excerpt
An excerpt from the book The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions
by Anna Ivey
Published by Harcourt; April 2005;$14.00US; 0-15-602979-0
Copyright © 2006 Anna Ivey

Anna Ivey, JD, served as dean of admissions at the University of Chicago Law School. She now runs Anna Ivey Admissions Counseling, a counseling firm for college, business school, and law school applicants. She divides her time between Boston and Orlando. Please visit her website at http://www.annaivey.com.

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