You make some good points but "The parent is the person most able to accurately assess their child’s needs" feels like a really strong claim to make without any support. Evaluating a child's needs can really require the opinion of an expert and potentially require testing to evaluate things like learning disabilities or identify what the child is good at. I think it's reasonable to say that the final decision on a child's education belongs to the parent, but that doesn't mean they're actually a domain expert on parenting or education just because they had a kid. Becoming an educator requires lots of study.
My two siblings and I all dealt with different individual educational challenges and it was way beyond the ability of an ordinary parent - even well-educated ones like my parents - to be able to fully understand what was going on with us and how best to address it, so they had to bring in qualified experts to help figure stuff out. "everything begins and ends with the parent" is an opinion I've seen quite a few times and it really does not hold up from my PoV.
I can imagine maybe the majority of homeschooled children are "ordinary" with no unusual challenges, and in that case educating them at home (or at a trusted friend's home) is not a problem. But how many people are truly ordinary? Disabilities are way more common than most people think - depending on the statistics you trust, 10-25% of adults have some sort of disability.
Thanks for adding this context. My wording was ambiguous, and I think there’s broad agreement…responsibility rests with the parents but there are real needs which are outside of their skill to meet.
Certainly, trained specialists should play an important role at various points for all children.
My two siblings and I all dealt with different individual educational challenges and it was way beyond the ability of an ordinary parent - even well-educated ones like my parents - to be able to fully understand what was going on with us and how best to address it, so they had to bring in qualified experts to help figure stuff out. "everything begins and ends with the parent" is an opinion I've seen quite a few times and it really does not hold up from my PoV.
I can imagine maybe the majority of homeschooled children are "ordinary" with no unusual challenges, and in that case educating them at home (or at a trusted friend's home) is not a problem. But how many people are truly ordinary? Disabilities are way more common than most people think - depending on the statistics you trust, 10-25% of adults have some sort of disability.