Of course if one district successfully engages in arm-twisting to force home-schoolers into the system that’ll encourage other districts to do the same. Two reasons why I think that hasn’t happened:

1) home-schoolers have shown very little reluctance to go to the courts. Rather then being a budget booster then home-schoolers become a budget drain since court costs could easily wipe out per student funding increases.

Further, home-schoolers have also shown no reluctance to use every other legal means at their disposal to make life unpleasant for the determined to drag their kids into the system. Legislators suddenly find themselves bombarded with angry correspondance, the local media is kept up to date with no expenditure of effort on their part and school board meetings become soap operas.

2) the districts may not have to concern themselves with the ultimate source of operating funds but the state board of education sure does and if they don’t think they can get a tax increase through the legislature then home-schoolers will reduce per-student funding.

Failing to get a tax increase through would be politically damaging because it would indicate a reduction in influence and, oh by the way, the schools did run on the reduced per-student funding. Must mean they *can* run on less funding. Oops.

On your first paragraph, schools are funded by the state on a per-capita basis, so 2 million and counting home schoolers are costing them more than charters and tax credit combined.

Besides, they still pay into the public system and get nothing out of it. Since they exist outside the current system they have little to no impact on the current system.

In fact, to the extent that they can, home-schoolers ought to support vouchers and charters. The more, and closer to home, the threats to the district system the less energy and attention the defenders of the district system have to devote to lesser threats like home-schoolers. Vouchers and charters are a much more distinct threat to the district system since they drink from the same cup but worse, as politically-derived phenomenon they’re much more likely to be compared to the district system then are home-schoolers.

The one big – huge – thing that decentralized, self-regulating mechanism needs is a means of determining who’s on first and what’s on second.

If you think that, say, the Florida Gators are the best college football team that’s just your opinion but if the Gators end the season at the top of the standings then the facts bear out your opinion. I’m willing to bet that parents would really like to have some roughly similar scoring system that’ll tell them which reasonably nearby school had the best academic scores. At some point in the future supply will start to reach out to the demand for objective measures of performance and charters will begin to embrace those measurement instruments but it would be really nice if pundits started blabbing about how terrific it would be for parents, and anyone else who’s interested, to know with certainty which school is number one and which teacher won the equivalent of the Heismann trophy.