Expert Witness on Education - Vaughn vs Reggie Jackson

As of this writing I have assisted in nine home-schooling cases, including four in behalf of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) of Purcellville, VA. One HSLDA case was in Fargo, ND, while a blizzard shut the airport down. Another, while uncomplicated by blizzards, was unusually interesting and frustrating—Vaughn v. Jackson, in the Superior Court of California for the County of Orange, in San Bernardino, Docket No. AD-61606 (1997).

Rather than pitting the fundamental rights of home-schooling parents against public school authorities, the Vaughn case pitted one parent against another—Wendy Vaughn against Reggie Jackson. When estranged California parents disagree on the upbringing of a child for whom they have joint custody, as in this case, the matter may be taken to court, where the judge will decide for them. HSLDA does not promise to fight custody cases for its members, but does so when a case has the potential of great impact. The Vaughn case had that potential because a famous athlete was involved. The mother was educating their child Kimberly at home for religious reasons, while the father wanted Kimberly in a regular school--partly, he said, so she would get plenty of athletic opportunity.

Before I agreed to testify, I insisted, as I usually do, on meeting with the parent in charge of home-schooling, and with the child. I was greatly impressed with the mother’s curriculum materials and procedures and with little Kimberly’s intelligence, reading ability (at age six), artistic skill, self-confidence when speaking with a strange adult, and apparent happiness. I was also impressed with the father’s intelligence, congeniality, and breadth, exhibited both in his testimony and in a brief conversation outside the courtroom, when he and I exchanged quotations from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

My experience on the stand was another matter. I left feeling I had been prevented from conveying even a minor element of the evidence and arguments for home-schooling that I had in hand. I was even more discouraged when the decision supported the father’s educational preference, though I knew custody cases like this were difficult for home-schooling parents to win. I was reassured, consequently, when HSLDA’s president, Mike Farris, wrote that I had done “a great job . . . even under very trying circumstances” (see his letter in Photocopies).

I always urge home-schooling parents to maintain membership (the fee is modest) in HSLDA (phone 540/338-5600) and to follow its advice. HSLDA is the agency most responsible by far for transforming home-schooling from a battered legal underdog to a reputable rover in every state. When government bureaucrats interfere with home-schooling, HSLDA provides it members, at no cost to them at all, with a defense I find impressive.

An even more important reason for HSLDA membership and for supporting the state home-schooling agencies that monitor legislation and government bureaucracies is that unending behind-the-scenes attacks (almost always prompted by public school interests) could doom home-schooling unless a powerful defense is maintained at all times. But far more is at stake than freedom to teach your child in the living room. Now that technology and other forces have unbundled the package of services known as school, parents of many points of view are preparing their young for adulthood via services of many kinds, including internet information and instruction, interactive individualized instruction on computer disks, instructional games, services in churches and temples, playgrounds and other facilities from park systems, parental instruction, videotaped lessons by master teachers, and much help from associations of cooperating parents.

Current freedom to assemble the services without daunting interference from state bureaucrats is significantly attributable, I think, to the skillful lobbying of agencies like HSLDA, and could easily be lost if that work does not continue systematically.

I worry that opponents of home-schooling and other forms of de-schooling may marshall, in a key court case, the biggest guns they can find (much as state attorneys did in the Bangor Baptist case, discussed earlier) and, if we have not prepared for it, may establish a precedent difficult to overturn. We had better get ready.

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