Democrats in New Jersey are being accused of trying to mandate DEI instruction for students who are homeschooled because parents want to escape the state’s mandated brainwashing.
In an article for The Daily Economy, Corey DeAngelis said that there is more than meets the eye to some proposed state legislation.
DeAngelis said Assembly Bill 5825, which purports to ensure “oversight of home education programs,” is actually “a power grab that threatens the very foundation of parental rights.”
“The parent or guardian shall submit a copy of the curriculum that will be utilized in the home education program, which shall be aligned with the New Jersey Student Learning Standards,” the bill reads.
The catch, he noted, was that diversity, equity, and inclusion curriculum is as integral a part of state standards as reading, writing and arithmetic.
Assembly Bill 5796 calls for a child who is homeschooled to be inspected annually by an official of the school district in which that child’s family lives and undergo “a general health and wellness check.” The bill says the individual inspecting the child should be a counselor, social worker, or nurse.
DeAngelis said that putting parents under the thumb of the very educators they have sought to distance themselves from is an attempt to drag “homeschoolers into the same ideological quagmire they sought to avoid.”
“Parents who’ve chosen to educate children independently often do so to avoid the heavily political worldviews imposed in government classrooms. By effectively compelling homeschooling families to parrot political narratives on race, gender, and identity, such mandates confirm the odd ownership many Democrats feel over people’s kids,” he wrote.
Tethering homeschooling families to the schools they fled suggests New Jersey Democrats believe “government school administrators, not parents, hold ultimate authority over a child’s upbringing.”
“The Democrats are inserting the government as a wedge between children and their families,” DeAngelis wrote.
Will Estrada, senior counsel at the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, said to Reason that no states force homeschoolers to align with public school curriculum.
He noted that the curriculum imposed by a state is often the reason parents opt for homeschooling.
Estrada also said that “public schools are there to educate children enrolled in the public school, not to do health and wellness checks on children in the community at large.”
Hellbound and Down 