Our View - Saturday

No place like home

For educating your kids, that is

On May 31, Evan O’Dorney, 13, from Danville, Calif., won the Scripps National Spelling Bee held every year in Washington, D.C. But that’s not the real news, part of which is that O’Dorney is home-schooled. The other part is that he’s the third home-schooled winner of the Bee in the past six years.

To put that in perspective, you need to know that there are about 2 million home-schooled children in the country, which represents about 3 percent of the school age population. Yet home-schooled children represent some 15 percent of the finalists in the Spelling Bee, and about the same percentage in the national geography contest for like-aged children.

Why the disparity? Well, studies show a 20-30 percentile point gap between public school students and home-schooled students . . . in favor of the home-schooled.

There are other revealing differences between public school and home-schooled students, among them that some 74 percent of home-schooled graduates between 18 and 24 years old voted in an election in the past five years, while public school graduates of similar ages voted at a paltry 29 percent rate.

The key factor in all of this, homeschoolers believe, is the role played by parents. Homeschooling takes enormous dedication and concern. Home-schooled kids aren’t smarter, obviously, than their counterparts in public school systems. They’re just brought up in a disciplined atmosphere, taught responsibility, shown the long-term advantages of a quality education, and, not least, are expected to learn. And behave. What child would not prosper under such a regimen?

Yet whom, do you suppose, fights the idea of home-schooling so strenuously that a nonprofit advocacy organization, Home School Legal Defense Association, has sprung up to defend parents’ rights to educate their children at home? If you said it’s the same people who oppose vouchers, charter schools, and any attempt to provide educational choice for children and their parents — teachers’ unions and the public school system — you’d be exactly right. We also might note that homeschool opponents are vociferous in trying to deny the use of certain public school amenities — speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy — to homeschooled children. This, of course, despite the fact that those parents also pay taxes, and thus provide financial support to the public systems.

Fortunately, HSLDA has been so successful in fighting off government — i.e., union — intrusion into educational choice that the number of home-schooled children is growing at between 7 percent and 15 percent a year.

This all seems somehow appropriate to bring up during the graduation season. A huge majority of the home-schooled children now graduating will proceed to college, where they will, if the past is a guide, continue to outperform their public school counterparts. That’s not only the real news, it’s the good news, an uncommon coupling in this business.

As for the ossified public school system, an old refrain from a Pete Seeger tune comes to mind: “When will they ever learn?”

Pardon Libby

For lying about a noncrime, 30 months seems a harsh sentence. As one of the major behind-the-scenes architects — as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff — of the lamentable war in Iraq, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has a great deal to answer for, whether in the depths of his conscience or in the annals of history. For the crimes of which he was convicted in March, however, it is outrageous that he has been sentenced to 30 months in jail and fined $250,000.

It was an abuse of prosecutorial discretion to charge him with perjury and obstructing justice. A jury did find that he lied and we accept that he did. But he lied about an act that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was never able to charge as a crime and which — as Fitzgerald knew early on but concealed from the public — was committed not by Libby but by somebody else.

To recap: Robert Novak in summer 2003 published the fact that administration critic Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. Whether she was an undercover agent or not, which could have made a knowing revelation of her identity a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, has still not been revealed officially, though it seems to have been informally confirmed that at least she was at some time.

However, Fitzgerald knew early in his investigation that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the one who revealed her identity to Novak and he never charged Armitage — or anybody else — with violating that law. Nor did he charge anybody with violating the Espionage Act, which could also have come into play. If Libby lied to investigators, he lied about a noncrime. It might have been appropriate for him to be fired or to face some penalties. But 30 months in jail is out of line.

In arguing for such a stiff penalty, Fitzgerald in essence told the judge he wanted Libby sentenced for the underlying crime with which he had never been charged, writing that the grand jury “obtained substantial evidence indicating that one or both of the statutes may have been violated.” The fact that he brought no such charges seemed to fade into irrelevancy.

Federal Judge Reggie Walton, imposed a sentence twice as long as recommended by probation officials because “people who occupy these types of positions . . . have a special obligation to not do anything that might create a problem.” We respect his concern about the importance of high public officials being truthful, but the sentence is outrageously out of proportion to the offense.

Bush should pardon Scooter Libby immediately and end this politically motivated farce.