(drat the copied formatting -- this won't go over to the left. anyhow, this is what will be on the current Federalization of Homeschooling page. It isn't up yet because publishing a site in fits and starts is ... not as useful as I'd like and leaves unlinked pages 'twisting in the wind.' Blogs, though !! [insert happy face] Blogs get to be as fractured as they like.
Later on I'll be working on the fisking of Section 10 to be published at the web site. In the meantime, you can mull this over.)
Oh, and email or fax your legislators about this.
HR 3753/SB 1691
In September of 2005, events from July 2003 replayed themselves with Rep. Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado introducing into the House of Representatives a bill titled "Home School Non-Discrimination Act," humanizingly given the acronym of HONDA. This was an omnibus bill that was killed in committee in 2003. In its resurrected form it is much the same, but with the inclusion of a new section "Recruitment and Enlistment of Home-schooled Students in the Armed Forces." The new section is nonsense.
Why homeschooled grads are classified as Tier II recruits
Homeschooled graduates are already able to enlist in the armed forces, but they are not traditionally granted the same categorization as publicly and privately schooled graduates. Studies have shown that recruits with non-traditional diplomas do not have the same success rate as recruits with public- or private-school diplomas. It's the one area where public-schooling is superior to homeschooling.
At the urging of HSLDA, a five-year study was commissioned to determine the enlistment track record of homeschooled graduates. The determining factor of 'success' was completion of the first hitch. Unfortunately, homeschool grads did not have as good a record of 'success' (in context of completing that first hitch) as do publicly-schooled grads. The Tier II label was not discriminatory, merely descriptive.
Why pacifists should care (answer: because they're taxpayers)
The phenomenon of public-schooling as the best predictor of success in the military was determined through studies conducted since 1959, and a tier-system was put in place to ensure that the nation's military services accept and pay to train the people with the greatest chance of making full use of that training by completing a first-term enlistment and possibly re-enlisting. This makes the best use of the taxpayers' money, whether those taxpayers have any intention of supporting the military system or not. I assume that even people who do not support many military operations want those operations to be carried out as inexpensively as possible until the day that peace prevails.
What procedure does DoD see as producing a "High School Graduate?"
Homeschooled graduates are not 'second-class citizens' but only people who, if the military is their target, need the tools to realize their dreams. Unfortunately this begins early because the military's definition of 'High School Graduate' is 12 years of graded instruction. The 'grading' is doubly defined because it refers to 'taught subjects' that are graded by the instructor, and that the children progressed from First Grade on up to Twelfth Grade. For school-at-home families, this won't be as much of a problem as it will be for eclectic or unschooling families.
For families who did not use a school-at-home program for all twelve grades, the work-around for the potential recruit is to acquire 15 college credit hours, the equivalent of being a full-time college student for one semester.
Section 10 of HR 3753/S 1691 is longer than the sections from the 2003 version of the bills. Section 10 is longer because it would create a new section of public law: Title 10, Chapter 31, a portion that controls military enlistment. Because of the length, I've used up another portion of my 5MB of member-space on the freebie site of my ISP's server with a separate page for the 'fisking' (a blogger term meaning to examine a piece of writing column inch-by-column inch).
To use blogger style: the fisking is here. [blog note: that's what I'm working on right now -- or will be after I get back home today]
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