In an unusual move, The Oklahoman devoted a house editorial to the recent Miss America competition.

Specifically, the newspaper noted, that the 2011 winner of the iconic pageant, Teresa Scanlan, a 17-year-old Nebraskan, was largely taught at home and that her educational background had “the homeschooling community buzzing with excitement.”

The paper also noticed the homeschooling bonafides of this year’s 4^th runner-up, Emoly West, the reigning Miss Oklahoma.

Quoting homeschool mom, Dawn Shelton, the editorial stated:

I think when home-educated individuals like these young women, or Tim Tebow or Condoleezza Rice earn public acclaim, it helps the public image of homeschooling, showing that it is a wonderful, viable, doable and ‘legit’ way to educate our children.

“Indeed,” agreed the Oklahoman.

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Talk about social promotions! Laura Berman, a writer for The Detroit News, recently penned a column about Otis Mathis’ inability to write a coherent sentence.

Berman offered readers several examples of Mathis’ unique talent. Here’s one of his emails:

If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

Another:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?

Mathis, a product of the Detroit public schools, is none other than the president of the Detroit school board – a man who “repeatedly failed an English proficiency exam” at Wayne State University (also in Detroit) but was shrewd enough to mount a legal challenge against the requirement. (more…)

A federal immigration judge in Tennessee has awarded political asylum to a German couple that was threatened by the German government with having their children forcibly removed from their home because the couple chose homeschooling instead of sending them to state approved schools.

Uwe Romeike may now stay as a legal resident in Morrisstown, Tennessee, where the family moved in 2008 after being threatened by German authorities.

The Associated Press was one of the few Old Media outlets covering this story. Of the Romeike’s plight, the AP reported:

The Romeikes took their three oldest children out of school in Bietigheim-Bissingen in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2006. Romeike said the couple was fined the equivalent of about $10,000 over a two-year period. (more…)

It’s one of the more laughable attacks upon homeschoolers ever concocted.

And it came courtesy of a handmaiden of the mainstream media, a feminist legal theorist affiliated with the Georgetown University Law Center.

Robin L. West, in an essay titled, “The Harms of Homeschooling” (scroll down for the article), and published by the University of Maryland’s Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly, argues for greater government oversight of home schooling and takes a shot at fundamentalist Christian families who are short on mammon but big on procreation.

Here’s the quote:

The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000 square foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots.

West provides no evidence of these exotic tarp-dwellers, which would have brought out the national media, anyway, if they actually existed.  But I’m happy to supply an example of parking-lot homeschoolers.

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