Conejo Valley Unified School District officials indicate that allowing home schooling in the Conejo Valley will provide a sense of “community” to local families that currently must enroll students through other districts.

Area parents and voters would be wise to consider other aspects of this program administrators have failed to mention. Chief among them is that test results from home- schooled students would be included with the scores from classrooms.

The greatest advantage of the proposed home school program for administrators (other than the $6,500 per student from the state) could be that they will manage to dodge the No Child Left Behind bullet that targets schools which fail to show adequate annual improvement on standardized exams, all without having to improve a single classroom result.

High proficiency obtained on standardized exams by students receiving “direct” instruction at home, using instructional materials of their own choosing (think traditional math), will help to cover up evidence of low test scores indicative of failure on the part of the Conejo district classroom programs which employ “discovery” teaching methods. If a large number of home school students participate in future years, scores from all subjects could rise across the district, thus making the task of identifying classroom failures extremely difficult.

A startling fact revealed in the home school meeting is that only $100 per pupil per year is made available for books in the Conejo Valley public school system. This perhaps explains why our son’s first-grade desk in public school contained only two workbooks — a writing book more appropriate for a lower grade level, and a math workbook that is not approved by the state Board of Education.
The weakness of Conejo Valley’s public education became obvious once our child attended first grade in a private school where eight traditional workbooks are employed to provide a thorough educational experience.

The inability of public school funding to trickle down to the individual students is catastrophic and the single most important issue that education officials must address if improvements in classrooms are to be had. The administration’s lack of will to eliminate bureaucratic waste on experimental programs and to improve the quality of classroom resources must end, or public education will crumble under the weight of its own mismanagement as parents and voters decide enough is enough.

— Jo Anne Cobasko, Thousand Oaks