PHILADELPHIA – There are few school districts in the U.S. that are more dysfunctional than the Philadelphia school system.

Between its massive budget deficits and chronic levels of student failure, The School District of Philadelphia is on the brink of total ruination.

Philly school leaders should be beyond busy just trying to address those huge problems.

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Apparently, that’s not the case.

District administrators are also providing “quality control” over Philadelphia families who choose to homeschool their children.

At the end of every school year, area homeschool families are required to submit portfolios to the district that contain their child’s standardized test scores, evaluations, and work samples, the Home School Legal Defense Association reports.

Philadelphia school leaders take this job so seriously that they recently requested portfolios on children who haven’t even begun school yet.

It was a minor mix-up, but it highlights the irony of allowing school officials who can’t keep their own house in order to provide oversight to others.

After all, can homeschool parents do any worse than Philadelphia’s high-paid professional educators?

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The statistics say not.

In 2011, the Commonwealth Foundation found a mere 16 percent of 8th graders were proficient in reading while only 18 percent of the same students were proficient in math.

Those are disastrous numbers, but they’re far from being the only troubling statistics.

In 2011, the on-time graduation rate for Philly students was an abysmal 61 percent.

Regardless, local officials took pride that number.

As TheNotebook.org reported, it marked “the first time in memory that more than six of ten Philadelphia students have graduated on time.”

Congratulations … we guess?

To top it all off, Philadelphia’s school budget is routinely in the red. The latest numbers show the district is budgeted to spend a whopping $304 million more than it’s planning to bring in.

This spring, Philadelphia schools Superintendent William Hite Jr. acknowledged that most state lawmakers view the district “as a cesspool.”

Is it any wonder some area parents are choosing to educate their children at home?

Local homeschool programs should be subjected to some kind of oversight, but it should obviously come from somewhere other than Philly school headquarters.

Let Philly school leaders concentrate on keeping their district from total collapse.

If they can manage that, then maybe they’ll have some standing to monitor homeschoolers.