Eh. I guess... it's not great, but it's not As Bad As It Could Be (like those states which require a diploma...). The classes are privately created and run, and it doesn't take much college to not have to take one anyway.
When we were first looking to move from California to Washington four years ago (when my only child at the time was just a year old), it seemed like a lot of homeschoolers actually recommended taking one of the classes even if you had enough college to not need to, to help get information about various ways of homeschooling and how to go about it (legally) in Washington state. At the time in California, it seemed like there were quite a few threats to homeschooling there, various superintendents and state officials questioning the validity of the "private schools" consisting of 1-4 kids all in the same family, and that kind of worried me- I looked at the laws in Washington, and while they meant more requirements (annual assessments, parent qualification, annual declaration of intent), it was also soothing to me (at the time) that home based instruction was explicitely written into law there, which, it seemed to me, meant it was less likely to be able to be just summarily outlawed in some way. And looking at the laws a little more closely, they seem to be primarily meant to soothe the concerns of non-homeschoolers... you have to have an annual assessment, but the results don't go to anyone but yourself and there are a variety of ways (none of which include any government entities) to satisfy this requirement, including utterly painless ones; you have to "qualify", but you don't have to tell anyone in what way you have done so; you have to cover a set of subjects, but again, nobody's demanding anyone's syllabus (nor is there a way for anyone to do so). In exchange for that, homeschoolers have the right to access public school programs on a part-time basis, without losing their home-based-instruction status (this has been, in many cases, harder to wrench out of the actual schools- but again, since it's codified, there is a basis for that wrenching).
So, yeah, I dunno. California's setup seems better to me right now, but this sure beats New York, say, for my style of homeschooling.
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