Judging by my e-mail, last week’s column offended a large number of families who teach their children at home, rather than send them to school. In Rhode Island there are 901 such children. I implied that a child’s experience at an excellent middle school would be preferable to home-schooling.

I apologize for raising their blood pressures.

Many home-schoolers have compelling reasons for getting their kids off the educational grid. I needn’t repeat stories you’ve heard about schools refusing to intervene when a child is ill-treated by a bully, a mean or incompetent teacher, or poor services. Rhode Island’s tiny school districts virtually never offer any public alternatives to parents unhappy with their school. So some school bureaucracies feel free to get nasty with demanding parents. Since Rhode Island does not successfully educate each of its young people, state and school-district bureaucracies should help, not hinder those parents who choose to do the work themselves — provided they can. (Some families should not be permitted to home-school.)

This column observes all kinds of kids and programs, but I admit home-schooling gets short shrift. Most families do not have the opportunity, capability or desire to take on the significant burden of teaching their kids at home. If anything, I’m most concerned about children from poor, urban, single-parent, challenged or chaotic families. Some of those children are far too isolated in their problematic families as it is. There are no scholarships to home-schools.

Mary Ryan, coordinator of the Home Education Network of Rhode Island, believes that in the best of all possible worlds, all children would be home-schooled by their parents. “Schools should not be the norm! Because of them, children have become nothing more than a way to fund teaching jobs.” Sadly, she is not entirely wrong about this.

Furthermore, she cites a survey which found that a majority of students in traditional schools feel they learn only when a teacher teaches. They are passive learners. The home-schooled children tend to direct their own learning, at least in part, all along. Ryan says, traditional schools “are just corporate America prepping kids to perform for them. It teaches them victim mentality, and if they don’t learn it, they’re expendable.”

Again, I can’t totally disagree. Traditional, factory-model schools teach a passivity that is painful to see. When asked about their dreams, kids often say they want to get a good education so they can get a good job and buy all the stuff they want. Grownups, concerned more for the economy than the kids, nod approvingly. But such dreams do not grow out of nurturing kids intellectually, but from teaching them compliance.

Ryan did not start out to be a home schooler. She enrolled the first of her four children in her local public school, expecting the best. But when that child became bored and unchallenged, the school offered no services for gifted students, nor was it concerned with developing a way to engage her son. Private schools were out of reach for Ryan’s modest-income family. So her only option was to teach the kids herself. Her family made major financial sacrifices to home-school the kids. So she doesn’t want to hear one word about “institutional priorities” that cut music and art to pay for educator benefits that “we certainly don’t see in the private sector.”

Again she’s not wrong. Programs and services for the students are always on the chopping block, while generous pensions, health care and other benefits for the grownups are legally protected.

She says, “Have you ever read the Rhode Island General Laws Regarding Education? They’re all about protecting the teachers. There’s nothing about protecting the kids.”

For these and many other reasons, home-schooling in the United States continues to grow, educating 1.1 million children as of 2003. But home-schooling will always be only a tiny sector. Rhode Island’s home-schooled children represent 0.49 percent of the state’s school-age children.

I believe most people wish the public schools would improve, and I don’t mean just test scores. Parents and the public want safe schools whose caring teachers engage kids with rigorous, useful and creative work.

Rhode Island parents badly need more viable public school options.

Currently, the only real public alternatives are the 11 charter schools whose collective waiting list is larger than their current enrollment. A legislative moratorium halted the approval of any new charters.

People with money get a house in a district whose schools they like, or pony up for a private or parochial school tuition. Of the 183,000 school-age children in Rhode Island, about 30,000 go to private and parochial schools. Just under 16 percent of Rhode Island’s children are in private or home schools. That’s a big portion of engaged, probably well-educated parents whose values, energies and voices are not invested in making public schools work.

Good public-school choice systems have shown that they can improve parent satisfaction radically. Giving parents options, which is to say creating some competition, forces schools to become responsive to children and families. When Mrs. Ryan says that her child is bored, the school either responds or loses the family — and its per-pupil expenditure — to another public school.

Ryan is entirely correct that we must stop organizing schooling of all kinds for the benefit of the grownups. The system needs to be turned on its head so the kids and their families come first.

We need to empower all the parents with more options. Including the home-schoolers.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.