Florida has state-subsidized home schools?

According to World Net Daily (lovingly called World Nut Daily by some) you can home school your child on the state's bill. That's right: you can simply redirect your tax dollars into a cyber school of your choice if you don't want your sons and daughters to learn the heathenous reality about evolution or that oh-so-miscreance inducing subject of comprehensive sex education.

One Susan Lockhart found herself complaining at the school day in and day out about her local public school's curriculum. So she took manners into her own hands, yanked her daughter, Kristin, from school, and started homeschooling her. Really, she's signed her up for a cyber school called the Florida Virtual School, which provides her with up to 95 courses grades 6-12 for her daughter to access. The best part for them seems to be that Kristin gets to be shielded from things her parents' find religiously offensive like evolution.

Susan says, "[FVS] make[s] everything available for the parents so they can read every word of the curriculum and every word of everything your child turns in. You are totally in control of everything. It is far better than regular school systems." Not only this, you can opt out of assignments you don't like at no penalty. So I guess that when Kristin gets to Biology class she will just skip over the evolution stuff (and their language on the website is about "microevolution and macroevolution" which might be code for some level of evolution denial). Yep. She did. She got to do a creationist assignment. How this passes muster in a science class, I don't know.

I have some pretty mixed feelings about this. Some of you might find it puzzling that I think that homeschooling or unschooling is a good idea under some conditions. Parents well-equipped with skills, knowledge, and wherewithal to create a free and open structure in which their child or children can learn better than those children can in a public school should go ahead and do it. If my wife and I can one day have the time and organizational prowess and the ability to work with some other like-minded parents, I would be more than willing to homeschool my son. I say this because I think that with an experientially rich environment that is structured by loving people, children and adults do better. But we should, at this point, have to pay for it ourselves as part of a tax-funded public school system that exists to ensure public well-being.

The Lockarts are escaping this so far as I can tell. They are using the public coffers to shield their child from public knowledge. That makes for a potential tragedy of the commons through free-riding. Why should Kristin get the money to do whatever she and her family want to do when other kids have to do what the state wants them to do? Or is Kristin really doing what the state wants kids to do? The vast majority of cases would seem to indicate that the state likes kids in state schools (where there has been plenty of evolution fighting by the way). But it's not clear to me, at this point, what the rationale is for the state to do this. It's lopsided in Kristin's favor in a small "tragedy of the commons" and suggests, to me, that Florida needs to rethink how it regulates these new schools.

Evolution has become part of the science education standards in Florida. Kristin and her family are opting out of that because of creationist ideas. That may be their right to do in Florida and it would seem to hold in light of religious freedom court cases. The state may be able to compel schooling, but it seems unable to compel all of its curricula on those who reject it because of conscience. As whacko as I think it is to deny evolution, it might well be within an individual family's rights to temporarily secede.

But to "send" them to a cyberschool? I'm not sure about this. This looks like vouchers gone bad and an easy way for parents to pilfer the public's money for their own religious purposes. It's a way to publicly fund private religion. That seems shady. I hope someone takes a look at this.