with a sciencecurriculumdevelopment national average of almost $6,000 per student [3]. Homeschooled children represent over seven billion dollars out of reach of local government schools and, at its current growth rate, each year more than another billion dollars slips away. Politically, homeschoolers are a force to be reckoned with when their rights are endangered. The most highly publicized and effective example of their growing political clout occurred in 1994 when the House of Representatives inserted language into an educational appropriations bill that would have required all teachers to be credentialed. Homeschoolers perceived this provision as a threat to their autonomy and overwhelmed phone and fax lines to their representatives until the credentialing language was removed by a 424-1 vote. Homeschooling’s economic and political impact is keenly felt by teacher unions,

recapture sciencecurriculumdevelopment the rest by imposing mandatory homeschooling oversight regulations. Will this seduction succeed in eliminating independent homeschoolers and derailing the growing free market in education? Economics and the history of private schools versus government schoolsprovide ample lessons on what to expect. With more students getting even busier these days, the new library system in Bismarck public schools has been a godsend. The new system, which went online this fall, gives students, as well as anyone with an Internet connection, access to the library and all its functions. with kids today, so many work or are involved wit activities, so this will give them access when they get home at night," said Konnie Wightman, the district''s library media coordinator. The school district was using the Central Dakota Library Network and an operating system called Info*Lynx, but the cost to

In that year, which was some 40 years after the start of a massive effort by reformers to consolidate districts into larger administrative units, there were about 120,000 individual school districts in the U.S. This meant that on average there were only two schools per district. Now, that is really local control. Even now, after consolidation has continued for another 60 years, we still have about 15,000 separate school districts -- each with primary control over financing, staffing, and setting curriculum standards for our schoolsCertainly state governments have taken steps over the years to assert greater control over these matters in K-12 schooling, and even the federal government has made tiny and tentative moves in this direction. But all these efforts have been undertaken in the face of enormous resistance by local communities, which have vigorously fought to preserve the autonomy of their schools.

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