Home schoolers strike back; California case centers on parents' rights.(the legal beat)

To their surprise, California's home-schooling parents found out in February that they were scofflaws. A state appellate court ruled in In re Rachel L. that state law requires all children to be taught be certified teachers. Thus, nearly 200,000 children were being taught illegally, leading home schoolers to predict the imminent arrival of police investigating accusations of truancy.

Few were aware that the legality of home schooling was even under judicial consideration. Home schooling was initially an ancillary consideration in a child welfare case involving Phillip and Mary Long, parents of eight home-schooled children. An investigation into claims of mistreatment by one of their daughters revealed that they were providing at best a poor education. A juvenile court judge ruled nonetheless that the Longs had a constitutional right to home school. At the request of a court-appointed attorney for two of the children, the appellate court both overturned the juvenile court and took the broader step of ruling that home-schooling parents must have state teaching certification, leaving the vast majority in violation of the law. To no one's surprise, the state's teachers unions praised the decision.

Prior to the ruling, the California Department of Education had interpreted the state's education code to allow four ways for children to be taught at home: 1) qualify as a private school, 2) use a certified tutor, 3) officially enroll in a private school satellite program, or 4) enroll in a public school's independent study program. The Longs had been home schooling under option 3, having enrolled their children in the Sunland Christian School's satellite program.

The appellate court ruled that there were only two permissible exceptions to the state's compulsory public education laws: enrollment in a private school or private tutoring by a certified teacher. A strict reading of the state's education code and judicial precedents on home schooling from the 1950s and '60s clearly supported the ruling. But the code and the precedents originated long before the rise of today's large home-schooling movement, with more than 1 million students nationwide as of 2003, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This made the political circumstances surrounding the case far different from those of past judicial decisions.

If the ...