New Party Taipei City councilors yesterday challenged the homeschool education system after some parents protested against the admittance of home-schooled students into high schools with a perfect grade point average (GPA) marked by their own parents.
Showing a home-schooled student’s GPA from seventh to ninth grade with all As, New Party Taipei City Councilor Hou Guan-qun (侯冠群) said the student was accepted into Taipei Huajiang High School. Another student, whose GPA was also graded by the parents, was accepted into Muzha Vocational High School.
“Those students were accepted into high schools with perfect grades given by their own parents. It is not fair for students in the normal education system,” he said yesterday during a press conference at the Taipei City Council.
New Party Taipei City Councilor Pan Huai-tsung (潘懷宗) said the number of students taught at home had increased from four 12 years ago to 303 last year.
Without a proper home schooling system and a monitoring mechanism by the Ministry of Education, increasing numbers of parents will choose to teach their kids at home as an easier way to get them into high schools and even colleges, he said.
The ministry allows parents to home-school their children if they find standard elementary or junior high school education inadequate and can show that they have a solid curriculum plan that has been approved by the ministry’s review committee.
According to Taipei City regulations on experimental education, home-schooled students’ grades can be given either by certified homeschool teachers — usually parents — or local schools, if they chose to take entrance exams.
Taipei City became the first city to admit home-schooled students into high schools whose grades met admission standards after the city started the “Northern Star Program” last year.
This program allows junior high school students to get into high schools using only school grades, and Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) accepted a petition from the homeschool association to allow homeschoolers to join the program as well.
Lin Hsin-yao (林信耀), deputy commissioner of Taipei City’s Department of Education, acknowledged the lack of a grade monitoring mechanism for homeschooled kids, and said the department would set regulations for homeschoolers who plan to join the entrance exam-free program. Details of the regulations would be announced next month, he added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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