In Defense of Homeschooling

Dear Harvard University and Harvard Magazine,

Contrary to your woeful stereotyping of homeschoolers in the biased, speculative and wholly unsubstantiated portrait painted in Harvard Magazine currently, here is photographic proof that my homeschooled 10th grader is not chained to the kitchen table by horrible authoritarian parents who isolate and indocrinate him. 

There he is at the *Harvard Museum of Natural History* taking in the *gasp* evolution and zoology exhibits.  He wants to be an evolutionary biologist and a paleontologist.

Here he is at Columbia and Yale and MIT participating in enrichment programs for high school students, rather than languishing in a bookish prison as your article depicted. 

He has recently walked the Freedom Trail in Boston and visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University, Yale Art Gallery, and too many others to list here.

I will stack his DIY interest tailored education against any public school in the nation and feel confident it is at least equivalent, if not far superior. 

In some of the photos, he has on a ballcap that reads "Assume nothing." I would like to suggest that you adopt that as your mantra in attempting to understand the diverse and wonderful practice of homeschooling.  If Veritas is your motto, you need to seriously reexamine what you have published and your call for a presumptive ban on an educational modality that is effective, creative, and stimulates a lifelong love of learning.

Sincerely, an Ivy League educated libertarian retired lawyer who finds your latest foray into journalism laughable.

Hey, Harvard Magazine!

Here's something that I wrote a long time ago that I would like to serenade Harvard Magazine and a certain ignorant law professor with...  In case it isn't painfully obvious, it's to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic.

BATTLE HYMN OF THE HOMESCHOOLER

Under the Department of Education

We’ve produced some hopeless dolts

But at least they are quite passive

And the bulk of them don’t vote.

“There must be accountability!

Now teach them to the test!”

And stupidity marches on…

CHORUS: 

Glory, Glory education

Is a joke in this great  nation.

Glory, glory education

While testing marches on.

We have hamstrung all the teachers

With our great assessment tools

We have killed their creativity 

And generated fools

The kids are bored to tears

So that the brightest of them drool

Public education marches on.

CHORUS

If you live in a great district 

Then your kids have got a prayer

If you’re poor or from the city

Well, the rich folks do not share

When there’s 40 children in a room

Then chaos reigns supreme

And testing marches on.

CHORUS

The No Child Left Behind Law

Makes sure no one gets ahead.

They will drill and kill the subjects 

Till the kids wish they were dead.

We give lipservice to improving

But the game is rigged, you see,

And Bureaucracy marches on.

CHORUS

We tell kids that they must study

And that college is the goal

But when graduation comes

They’re in a financial black hole

And the jobs that they have worked for

Have been shipped out overseas

As propaganda marches on.

CHORUS

If you’d have your kids be thinkers

Then you need a better tool.

Pull them out of institutions,

Roll your sleeves up and homeschool.

Though they won’t have a diploma

Stamped and sealed by government

They will think for themselves!

Glory, glory education

Take a permanent vacation

Join the happy homeschool nation

And learning marches on.

Feel free to share with credit...

Homeschooling Isn't Anti-Progressive, Uninformed Group-Think Is.

Remember the Slate article last week deeming homeschooling un-progressive, and demanding that parents sacrifice their own children's best interests for the common good of supporting public education? (As if we don't support it enough already with our property taxes...)

Here are a couple of responses:

Article in the Atlantic

Blog by Laurie A. Couture

Compare and Contrast

The latest round of ignorant generalizations and stereotyping of homeschoolers in the New York Times versus a telling demonstration of the relative ability to think, write, use proper grammar and spelling by products of the public school system and by a bunch of homeschooled kids, which is just about the best argument for homeschooling ever unintentionally advanced in the Times.

Interesting...

Via: DegreeSearch.org

Woz on Homeschooling (and Comment Soup)

I'm reading an article about remarks on education made by Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple Computers. Woz decries the standardized testing craze and the discouragement of creative thinking in public education. He also mentions homeschooling as "very, very good as an alternative."

Then, I read the comments. For the most part, they agree that public education is broken, but can't muster the creativity to consider homeschooling a true alternative. It gets characterized as "a luxury", while in the same comment, those who are unhappy with their local public school are urged to consider private school. Huh? Homeschooling can be done *exceptionally well* for a fraction of the cost. A friend of a friend paid over $30,000 for private Kindergarten! Families can homeschool for orders of magnitude less. Money for private school necessitates a second income, and need for a second income makes homeschooling a luxury? Um, circular thinking much?

And of course there is the chestnut that "Home Schooling is the ultimate in segregated schools." I can't tell you how sick I am of being tacitly accused of racism because I made a different educational choice for my kid. My local school district is 99.9999 percent caucasian and affluent. My homeschool community is wonderfully diverse. Way to generalize!

Public schools are acknowledged to be bad at outside the box thinking, but anyone who thinks outside the box is apparently suspect, even among purported educational reformers. Well, suspect away, but like Captain Kirk, I don't believe in the no win scenario. Sometimes you have to creatively engineer your own solution, and I have a feeling that, eventually, those still too busy applying outmoded stereotypes to the homeschooling movement will one day have no choice but to sit back and take notice that, yes, there is a better way, if you are willing to prioritize your child's education, make some sacrifices and do the work.

NY Post on Homeschooling in NYC

The title is distasteful, but the article is sort of positive... It does trot out some of the extremes (there *had* to be a creationist homeschooling to avoid Darwin in there, as well as a radical unschooler!) and tends to ignore the center, as usual. It gives credence to the "parents are unqualified" myth, citing a misspelling in an email as evidence of doubt regarding the same, and raising the glorious alternative of paid tutors (our "expert" worshiping culture rears its ugly head), but at least it debunks the religious fanatic, banjo playing hillbilly myth... and mentions how diverse homeschoolers are, at least partially debunking the countervailing wealthy white elitist racist foe of diversity myth (while at the same time choosing to highlight parents in elite professional occupations, so backsliding somewhat there). In the negative column, the quoted expert's comments raise the specter of the socialization red herring... A further quibble is that the quote provided regarding the NY Regulations does not give a completely clear or accurate picture of them, and may exaggerate in referring to NY as the "most regulated state" -- Pennsylvania may actually be worse! Anyway, here is the link:


Is home schooling for freaks? Or the best option for NYC parents?
By SARA STEWART

An excerpt:

[T]he New York home-school movement is surprisingly diverse. The Bagleys are part of an increasingly visible network of local parents who’ve given up on regular school, for wide-ranging reasons — some religious. But many others think institutional learning turns kids into robots, worry their child is being bullied, or feel the curriculum isn’t challenging enough. “It isn’t a scene out of ‘Deliverance,’” Bagley says with a laugh, referring to the image that many have of home-schooled kids.

Given the dire state of the city’s — and nation’s — educational system, it’s not hard to understand why families are taking matters into their own hands. Charter schools are overflowing, private schools are unaffordable for many families — the Chapin School on the Upper East Side, for example, costs $33,400 a year — and even if they’re not, most have lengthy wait lists. Public schools vary in quality from one district to the next, and it can be next to impossible to transfer a child to a better district.

According to statistics released by the NBC-sponsored Education Nation summit at Rockefeller Center last week, American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science compared to 30 other industrialized countries. And 68 percent of eighth-graders can’t read at their grade level.

Look at the stats in that last paragraph! I am so tired of people questioning parents' competency to teach their own. How much worse than the "expert" results cited above is it possible for a committed parent to do? I'll give you a hint-- my kid reads high school level science books for fun. He's 7.

Maybe instead of trying to ridicule and regulate us out of existence, the experts could take a look at what we do and try to figure out what's working. Maybe there's something there that could help them help the kids. After all, isn't that what is supposed to matter? Not professional bragging rights, job security, or dissing the "competition", but actually helping kids to learn? The numbers in that paragraph are simultaneously pathetic, laughable and scary, if you buy into the idea that standardized testing is a reliable measure of performance... Which many homeschoolers don't, but the system claims to. Hoist on their own petard, methinks...

Homeschooling in the News

There have been three articles in the past couple of days. There's a piece in the NY Times about possible closure of NYSED's Office of Non-Public Schools, which has run interference between homechoolers and overreaching or ignorant school district personnel, who either misinterpret the state homeschooling regulations, or think they are free to invent their own special, additional requirements, just because. You can read it here. CNN has a video and a companion article which recognize the growth of secular homeschooling! Wow, progress! It is actually positive! And the Wall Street Journal has an article about "school refusal", in which psychologists caution against "well meaning parents" homeschooling in order to help kids with anxiety disorders. While the well meaning psychologists dismiss homeschooling, the comments are surprisingly favorable. As a person with an anxiety disorder, I can tell you that forced exposure to triggers never helped me any, and I doubt it helps kids with school anxiety. Being so overwhelmed and stressed can't possibly be good for children (or adults, thankyouverymuch.) It saddens me that the psychologists interviewed apparently can't think outside the box enough to see the benefits of homeschooling. Oh, wait-- they don't teach thinking outside the box in schools anymore, do they? Or perhaps they lack the compassion to realize that sacrificing someone's mental health in the name of making the "normal", societally approved, choice is folly. Or maybe they are just too knee jerk accepting of the socially maladapted homeschooler myth to be able to see the tremendous advantage that homeschooling can give an anxious child, allowing him/her to able to learn without the unnecessary distraction of sheer terror, or the "solution" of being drugged into compliance. Grrr.

On Why Homeschooling Works

An interesting article on the merits of homeschooling by two former public school teachers who homeschooled their own.

Just Commenting...

The NY Times' website published my comment on the hipster homeschooling piece they ran: Homeschooling is a very misunderstood practice, subject to a host of stereotypes that pieces like this do nothing to dispel. The media persists in painting it as the sole province of religious fanatics or the extremely privileged. That is not the reality. I am constantly surprised that articles on this subject are not better researched. Homeschooling is a mosaic of people from all walks of life, from every conceivable background, who have a multitude of reasons for choosing this path, and who follow many different educational approaches. The generalizations, the highlighting of the most extreme philosophies and practices, and the dogged refusal to accurately portray homeschooling is not good journalism. The subjects of this article are keeping their preschool-aged children home with a tutor. As lovely as the situation sounds for the families involved, it is not homeschooling. My far less succinct reaction to this piece, and media coverage of homeschooling in general, with some home truths about homeschooling, is here: http://homeschoolingonhudson.blogspot.com...

Why Does the Mainstream Media Reflect Only the Fun House Mirror Version of Homeschooling?

It seems that the mainstream media is dedicated to promulgating a distorted vision of the homeschool community, in which "most" or "the majority of" homeschoolers are religious fanatics, or else we are extremely privileged and wealthy hipsters. Apparently, the press would have America believe that we are all bigots or brainwashers, or too trendy and elitist to be taken seriously. Here's the latest from the New York Times: In which a bunch of urban artistes with preschoolers apparently make homeschooling in vogue. After the hatchet job that ABC did on unschoolers, I predict far more of the silly stereotyping, because most homeschoolers who don't fit the narrow media image are completely uninterested in signing up to be misrepresented to the world and ridiculed. Perhaps someday the media will understand that:

• Homeschoolers come from every race, ethnicity, socio-economic class, educational background and belief (or nonbelief) system. My homeschool group is far more diverse in every conceivable way than my neighborhood school. I do not homeschool to keep my child away from "people who aren't just like us" as the charge is often made. I homeschool to give him the world as his classroom, with all the wonderful diversity it offers.
• Single parents and families in which both parents are employed can and do homeschool. We are not all wealthy. In fact, many of us have considerably downsized our lifestyle in order to be able to do this. And some of us have the laudable stamina and dedication to be able to do it in the hours when we are not working outside the home. The "homeschoolers are wealthy elitists" stereotype spits in the face of all the families making financial and personal sacrifices in order to follow this path.
• We don't have to do it the same way the schools do, and are not bound by their choice of schedules or curricula. Homeschooling can happen in hours other than 9 am to 3 pm, Monday through Friday. Some of us learn in the evenings and on weekends. Some keep a year-round schedule as opposed to taking the long summer break that the schools do. Additionally, it does not take as much time to cover academic material with one or two of your own kids, whom you know better than anyone in the world, as it would in a school setting. Homeschoolers do not have the bureaucratic and crowd control concerns that you end up needing to address with large groups of children who are virtual strangers taught by strangers.
• Homeschoolers enjoy an unbeatable student to faculty ratio. Our kids get individualized attention, and we do not need to subject them to standardized tests to assess their progress, because we are intimately involved in it. We have the luxury of teaching to our children's individual level, and taking as much or as little time as is required for them to master the material. We do not have to bore a kid who "gets it" with endless repetition because some of his peers do not. We do not have to leave a struggling student behind in order to keep pace with the average student. This is the tremendous advantage of homeschooling. The differentiation that public schools can only strive for, we can make reality. We also are not hamstrung by administrators requiring us to teach to the test, and practice practice practice the test, at the expense of real learning. Many of us decided to homeschool for just these reasons.
• Homeschooling doesn't mean we just stay home all day, everyday. This is why we have no patience left for the uniformed inquiries about socialization. Homeschoolers are out and about, enjoying the real world, while schooled kids are stuck in an artificial age-segregated microcosm of society. Yes, there are some weird, socially awkward homeschoolers, just as there are some weird socially awkward school kids; it has more to do with personality type than educational choice.
• Parents do not all need to be able to teach calculus and high school physics in order to even consider homeschooling. First of all, we can outsource those subjects to more skilled teachers, if necessary. There is an amazing wealth of curriculum materials and classes that homeschoolers can access. Secondly, while we may have forgotten what we learned in school, we are perfectly capable of learning a subject alongside (or just slightly ahead of) our children. We value instilling in our kids a love of learning and the ability to find the answers they need in life above rote regurgitation of a set of facts. Children can only be inspired when they see their parents learning and growing along with them.
• Does the hypothetical horrible example homeschool parent exist who doesn't care about his/her child's education at all? Probably. Certainly there are parents who are utterly disinterested in their schooled child's education, and who do nothing to ensure that homework is done, or that studying happens. There are bad apples in every barrel. But unlike the school systems, homeschoolers don't think the hypothetical lowest common denominator should be used as an excuse to infringe the liberty of the rest of us who are doing the right thing. Nor do we believe that the government is entitled to dictate what goes on in our homes and families in the absence of probable cause to believe that abuse exists. That's the standard for government intrusion into family life. The fact that we homeschool doesn't mean that we have waived our constitutional rights to due process so that different rules apply. When the government is free to come into your house and check whether your kids did their homework, and not before, will I agree to have it look over my shoulder. Or maybe not. Because on that day, America will have ceased to be a free country. In the meantime, I will comply with the existing state regulations, and oppose any attempt to broaden state control over my family.
• Homeschoolers in most states do not receive any funding whatsoever from the government. I think that Alaska and maybe a couple of other places do have some sort of financial aid available, but here in New York, and in most places, homeschoolers do not get subsidies. However, we do pay school taxes, from which we reap no personal benefit. Teachers are allowed to deduct supplies they use in the classroom, but not so homeschoolers. And most of us like it that way, because there are no strings attached, as there might be if we were accepting public funding. Public schooling is state action, undertaken with public funds, and that is why it is regulated. Homeschooling is a purely private endeavor in which the government should have no purview. So that is why we don't all agree with the premise that, "Well, if you are doing the right thing, why shouldn't you want your kids tested like the school kids? If you have nothing to hide, why not?" Because I'm not an arm of the state, responsible to the people, nor am I sucking on the public teat, and spending money in which the American taxpayer has an interest. I am raising my own child, and saving the system the resources it would otherwise need to be commiting to his education. Why that makes me a presumptive villain, I will never understand.
• Ultimately, homeschoolers believe that the privilege and responsibility of raising our children and educating them belongs to families, not the government, and we are prepared to buck the system and do it ourselves, because we believe it is the best thing for our families. That is in no way a comment on what is best for anyone else's family, or a knock against people who send their kids to school. Everyone should be free to choose the best course for their own family. For us, it is homeschooling.

ABC on Unschooling

Here we go, another report by mainstream media depicting homeschoolers (unschoolers in this case) as kooks.

Sigh.

In Response to the Supposedly Scholarly Critique of Homeschooling...

Have you seen the utterly horrendous diatribe against homeschoolers that masquerades as scholarly critique in a public policy journal? If you haven’t, you have missed out on one of the most stereotype-laden, wholly unsupported by citations to authority, self contradictory, condescending, fear mongering rants I‘ve ever seen. Check it out for yourself, here: The Harm of Homeschooling.
Pdf available on the linked page. (Updated April 29, 2020 as the original link was broken...)
According to its author, Robin West of the Georgetown University Law Center, homeschooling used to be illegal in all 50 states (legal citation, please? Oh, there isn’t one, since this is patently untrue!), except for circus freaks, child actors and special ed kids who apparently don’t matter anyway. Way to promote diversity and tolerance, lady! Oh wait, that’s what you accuse homeschoolers of attempting to destroy, because we are all raging religious fundamentalists (hereinafter ”fundies”) with an anti-secular, anti-diversity and anti-feminist agenda. Or else, we are secular, anti-schooling, overeducated and under-employed suburban divas with too much time on our hands, and we are setting women’s rights back by choosing to devote our energies to our families and children. (Beware feminists who want to take choices away from women, I always say.) Sentences later, she mocks unqualified, uncertified homeschooling parents. Which is it? Does mere consanguinity render us overeducated types unsuitable educators? Or does lack of a paper credential, possession of which clearly didn’t prevent the author of this piece from delivering herself of a of a rambling, bumbling and ignorant screed, render them thar hillbillies “on tarps in fields or parking lots”, and fundies living in quiverfull squalor in “trailer parks”, unfit? And who is this woman to judge?

As I see it, the public school system in this country can be likened to a leaky lifeboat, overcrowded, understaffed, its crew’s hands tied by administrative requirements that fail to take into account the very dire straits the boat now finds itself in, and lacking any useful navigational equipment (to ensure that it meets its stated goal of a free and appropriate education for all students, including the special needs and gifted and talented cohorts), as it paddles around in circles, with its occupants and the shipping line powers that be demanding more of the same failed strategies (just throw more money at it, test more, teach to the test, hold the bored and unmotivated kids hostage for longer hours or an extended school year) which brought it to its current predicament. Homeschoolers are those confident enough in their own swimming skills to strike out for shore, leaving seats in the rickety boat for those who cannot or will not (because of temperament, life circumstances, or an “I could never do that” attitude) do the same. When we give up our seats on the lifeboat, rather than being thanked for the additional resources available to those who remain (and to which our tax dollars contribute), we are often condemned as selfish louts who have “abandoned public education” because we do not stay aboard, emulating the little Dutch boy at the dyke, and attempting to hold back the waters of ignorance by jamming a finger into the gaping hole in the ship of state funded and controlled education. The little Dutch boy wasn’t being chased away, told his concerns were unfounded, or called a helicopter parent by a system that talks favorably about parent involvement, while doing everything it can to discourage the same. The “experts,” who sunk the ship and are in danger of foundering the lifeboat, want no interference from “non-expert” parents. Are we supposed to sit there until they drown our children’s chances for the future?


It’s funny, I almost never hear homeschoolers say that public school should be abrogated, or illegal, or that their chosen method of educating their kids is the one and only right way to do things. But I’m inundated with that particular hymn coming from the pro-school side, which strikes me as more than a tad fundamentalist in its zeal to promote itself as the One Right Way to Educate. Please note for the record : I believe there are schools out there that are not abject failures, and teachers who do not fit the wretched stereotyping of the author of the article I’m discussing here, but are instead wonderful and caring, and I think there are kids who are well suited to learning in a traditional school environment, and who thrive there. I do not subscribe to the one size fits all, government knows best school of thought underlying the article in question.

The author’s prejudices are on full display here, and she does not shrink from misrepresenting reality or the law to make her “points.”

She states:

First, courts, and particularly
the federal courts, have never granted the
existence of the “right to homeschool.”

Contrast her statement with this language from the United States Supreme Court, quoted on my blog’s sidebar (Should there be any doubt, the US Supreme Court, well, that’s federal, lady.):
The United States Supreme Court long ago recognized the "liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children, " holding that:

"The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations."

Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 534-35 (1925). While not a direct holding that there is a constitutional right to homeschool, it is clear that, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, the state is not the final arbiter of a child’s education, parents are.

Next, after blasting home educators of every stripe, she claims that she is only against “unregulated homeschooling”. She claims that, in its present form, all homeschooling is by and large unregulated, but then recognizes:

I do not mean to deny for a moment that homeschooling itself is
often—maybe usually—successful, when done
responsibly. Passionately involved and loving parents,
whether religious or not, can often better educate their
children in small tutorials at home, than can cashstrapped,
under-motivated, inadequately supported,
and overwhelmed public school teachers with too
many students in their classrooms. Results bear this
out, as homeschool advocates repeatedly point out
(and as critics virtually never deny): the homeschooled
children who are tested, or who take college boards,
whether or not religious, perhaps surprisingly, perhaps
not, do very well on standardized tests, and on
the average, they do better than their public school
counterparts (though it must be noted that the parents
and children who voluntarily subject themselves to
testing are the self-selected educational elite of the
homeschooling movement).

But then she goes on to argue that:

My target is not the practice
of homeschooling, whether religious or secular.
My target, rather, is unregulated homeschooling—the
total abdication of responsibility by the states for regulating
the practice. The right to unregulated homeschooling
visits quite concrete harms on the
homeschooled children themselves, the mothers who
are teaching them, and the often rural and isolated
communities in which they are raised and taught.

Where, if the outcome for homeschooled children is a better education (as measured by the very standardized tests which the educational powers that be hold up as the benchmark of success) than the public schools are managing, is this “concrete harm” she imagines? Can she not see that any benefit of a different method will be regulated out of existence if states decide that homeschooling must look like a clone of public school? And in what world is homeschooling unregulated, anyway? I doubt anyone from Pennsylvania or New York will agree with her characterization. Even in states that do not specifically regulate homeschooling, all parents are subject to educational neglect laws. The freedom to:

teach nothing but the Bible, and nothing but a
literal interpretation of that, and secular anti-schooling
parents can allow their children to skateboard, dance,
or play video games to their hearts’ content, free of
any dull training in reading and arithmetic

that this author posits as the terrifying and abusive reality of homeschooled families, is just absurd, although it should of course be noted that plenty of children do learn to read and do arithmetic without compulsory resort to her self described “dull training” and the drill and kill methodologies employed by public schools.

Just like the idiotic attack on home education presently being mounted in the UK by a government functionary who likens homeschooling parents to those suffering from Munchausen’s by Proxy, our author here holds up the bugaboo of abuse as a justification for involving the state in people’s home lives prophylactically, absent any cause to suspect abuse:

First, children who are homeschooled with no state
regulation are at greater risk for unreported and unnoticed
physical abuse, when they are completely isolated
in homes

Are there really homeschooled children out there who are “completely isolated in homes?” If there are, that says more about the mental health situation in the particular family than their choice to homeschool.

If you look at statistics for abuse, poverty is one of the leading correlations to physical abuse. But you don’t see the Nanny State advocates declaiming that poor families must be subject to additional state scrutiny because of the specter of abuse. The hypothetical abuser argument gets reserved for the homeschoolers, because of the misguided perception that the kids are chained to the kitchen table doing workbooks (or else left to skateboard, obsessively game and generally run wild. Which is it, anyway? I’m confused.) We already have child abuse laws, and they are not used as prior restraints because some hypothetical harm is imagineable in any other situation. To claim homeschooling per se is an indicator of abuse is offensive and unsupportable by any credible evidence. If child welfare authorities are required to have probable cause to suspect abuse in order to intervene in any other context, why are homeschoolers not entitled to the same constitutional protections as every other citizen? Since when does educational choice equate with criminality of loss of liberty?

But wait! The author isn’t satisfied with government control of our children’s minds: It must also control their bodies, because the evil homeschoolers don’t vaccinate!

Second, there’s a public health risk. Children who
attend public schools are required to have immunizations.
Without the immunizations they will not be
allowed to begin classes. In only a few states have legislatures
written their homeschool statutes in such a
way as to require that homeschooled children be
immunized, and that the immunization be verified in
some way. Thus, deregulated homeschooling means
that homeschooled children are basically exempted
from immunization requirements. They are more susceptible
to the diseases against which immunization
provides some protection.

Yes, and they are also not confined to huge institutional germ factories day in and day out, hence their exposure and need for protection is actually lower than that of kids warehoused in schools. Not to mention, even school kids may go unvaccinated in states that allow philosophical, religious and medical exemptions to vaccination requirements. This straw man fails.

Third, public and private schools provide for many
children, I suspect, although I have yet to see studies of
this, a safe haven in which they are both regarded and
respected independently and individually. Family love
is intense, and we need it to survive and thrive. It is
also deeply contingent on the existence and nature of
the family ties. Children are loved in a family because
they are the children of the parents in the family. The
“unconditional love” they receive is anything but
unconditional: it is conditioned on the fact that they are
their parents’ children. School—either public or private—
ideally provides a welcome respite. A child is
regarded and respected at school not because she is her
parent’s child, but because she is a student: she is valued
for traits and for a status, in other words, that are
independent of her status as the parent’s genetic or
adoptive offspring. The ideal teacher cares about the
child as an individual, a learner, an actively curious
person—she doesn’t care about the child because the
child is hers. The child is regarded with respect equally
to all the children in the class. In these ways, the school
classroom, ideally, and the relations within it, is a
model of some core aspects of citizenship.


So conditional love (assuming that is what the student receives, rather than being patronized and forced to conform) of a governmental authority figure is superior to the unconditional (oh, sorry, genetically motivated) love of a parent? The same teachers that she describes above as “cashstrapped, under-motivated, inadequately supported, and overwhelmed public school teachers with too many students in their classrooms” are a greater boon to a child’s self esteem than a loving and involved parent? This is nonsensical, and it fallaciously assumes that homeschooled children have no access to interaction with supportive adults who value them, other than the parents who presumably keep them imprisoned at home. This woman has no concept of what homeschooling actually looks like, or how involved homeschooled children are in their communities. Or does she? Because with the next stroke of her pen, she condemns homeschoolers for their noxious political engagement. (How they manage all that while never leaving the house and while lacking the benefits of some school created safe harbor for growing self esteem makes you wonder, doesn’t it?)

Fourth, there are political harms. Fundamentalist
Protestant adults who were homeschooled over the last
thirty years are not politically disengaged, far from it.

And because she dislikes the politics of one segment of an extremely non-homogenous sector of society, it is appropriate to restrict the freedoms of us all? If the political flavors were reversed, that would smell like McCarthyism, wouldn’t it?


The remaining three sorts of harms—ethical, educational,
and economic—are much discussed in critical
literature both on homeschooling and on child-raising
in devout households, and I won’t belabor them here
other than to note them Child-raising that is relentlessly
authoritarian risks instilling what developmental
psychologists call “ethical servility”: a failure to
mature morally beyond the recognition of duties of
obedience.

We nonconformist, authority questioning, educational do-it-yourselfers are, in this woman’s mind, authoritarian bastions of conformity, I guess. Maybe this applies to some percentage of her bogeyman fundie homeschoolers, but to homeschoolers in general? Nonsense. Yes, those people whose kids are out there skateboarding and playing World of Warcraft all day are ethically stunting them with their rigid authoritarianism…

The educational harm is the most immediate, direct
risk of unregulated homeschooling. It is also the only
one in this litany of possible risks adamantly denied by
homeschooling advocates. There is indeed no credible
evidence that homeschoolers as a group do worse on
standardized tests, but contrary to their claims, there is
also no credible evidence that they do better. … Nevertheless, it is
clear from both anecdotal accounts, memoirs, and trial
transcripts that some homeschoolers are suffering educational
harm which would be avoided or minimized,
were they either in public school or were their homeschool
subjected to decent regulation.

And some public school children are shuffled through the system and graduate unable to read or do basic math. A woeful percentage drop out. Colleges are recruiting homeschoolers, because they are self directed learners, while at the same time, they are running remedial classes for far too large a percentage of their incoming public schooled students. There are always anecdotes to refute anecdotes, and the very existence of trial transcripts indicates that the child welfare system has in fact functioned in identifying children who are being educationally neglected. What would happen if the schools were subject to equivalent scrutiny? How many more kids are suffering worse fates under the state’s tutelage? And when will the Nanny Staters recognize the fundamental fallacy underlying their quest to render non-abusive individuals accountable to them? The state is accountable to its citizenry. Schools are responsible for demonstrating that they are performing, because they are creatures of the state, funded by tax dollars, and are responsible to the public. Families are not required to jump the same hoops because they are not publicly funded state institutions. And what is decent regulation anyway? With all the regulations imposed upon them, the public schools are still failing. Regulation is not a guarantee of quality, just a full employment act for bureaucrats.

Some children are less educated than they
would be, were homeschools either regulated or
banned. Also sacrificed is their exposure to diverse
ideas, cultures, and ways of being.

Some public schooled students are less educated than they would be if their parents were in a position to be able to homeschool. As for diversity, this assumes that the school that a homeschooled child would otherwise attend is more diverse than the opportunities he is exposed to out in the world at large while being homeschooled. That is far from a safe assumption.

Finally, the economic harms. The average homeschooling
family may have a higher income than the
average non-homeschooler, as was recently reported
by USA Today. The radically fundamentalist “movement”
family, however, is considerably poorer than
the population, and it is the participants in these
movements—the so-called “patriarchy movement”
and its “quiverfull” branch and related groups —
that are the hardcore of the homeschooling movement.

So, forget that you are talking about a small minority of homeschoolers, let’s tar everybody with the same brush, despite acknowledging the fallacy. There are plenty of families living in poverty who don’t homeschool. Is the government being invited into their business as well? Of course not. And the author falls back on homeschooling as the thing to regulate, because she knows that arguing that the government should regulate desperately poor quiverfull fundies because they are fundies is absolutely destined to fail. Rather than enforce existing child welfare laws insofar as people may actually be living with their children “on tarps in fields and parking lots”, let’s just sacrifice the rights and liberties of all homeschooling families because the author doesn’t like those rightwing fundies with the herds of children.

Nevertheless, the author concedes:

Even given these potential harms, there remain good
reasons to permit homeschooling, in plenty of circumstances.

She seems unable to accept that both the US Supreme Court and the states have all recognized the right of parents to educate their children, and would like to cast it as a privilege for which permission is required instead, but she is ignoring both history and legal reality to do so.

Parents, both religious and secular, often justifiably
wish to shield their children from public
schools. Public schools too often ill serve children
who are at risk of bullying, or who are hurt by the
overly sexualized culture of middle and high schools
in many parts of the country, or who have special
abilities or needs, or simply idiosyncratic learning
styles or habits. Many of these children can best or
even only be educated by those who know them best.
The children well served by homeschooling might
outnumber the children who are badly victimized by
the practice. The lessons given homeschooled children
by those who homeschool responsibly are also
often of very high quality. The gains to these children
may be such as simply to outweigh the lack of socialization,
diversity, training for citizenship and so on,
for those who do so badly. Because of the lack of
notice, testing, and review of homeschoolers, it’s hard
to know. But the evaluative question, for practical purposes,
at this point is largely moot. Homeschooling is
now such an entrenched practice, recriminalization is
not a viable option in any event.

It’s hard to know, says she. Who has the right to know, I ask. Homeschoolers are private citizens, not government agents. Under what twisted version of reality and law does she think private citizens are answerable to government in the absence of abuse or criminal behavior? It doesn’t work that way, despite all the Nanny Staters’ rhetorical prestidigitations.

However, even if we assume that the benefits of
homeschooling when done well are quite substantial,
and even if the harms of public school when done
poorly are equally so, nothing follows regarding the
wisdom of deregulating homeschooling.

Homeschooling hasn’t been deregulated. It has been codified and subjected to regulations in many states, and there is a colorable argument that all such regulation is unconstitutional. That’s for the courts to decide when presented with a test case… But the reality is, homeschooling has always been out there, and until fairly recently, was not regulated anywhere. In trying to reframe reality into a “deregulation” context, the author invokes the bugaboo of all recent failed deregulation schemes. But unlike the banking industry, homeschooling is not an area previously highly regulated and then set free to implode based on corporate greed. It is a historic right, a fundamental liberty, which people like the author would squeeze into a straight jacket so that it can be brought down to the least common denominator culture of our public education system. The very benefits she concedes in the paragraph below will be eliminated when homeschoolers are required to teach to the test and drill and kill in order to satisfy her vaunted bureaucracy. That is a bogeyman worth fighting.


Special needs kids, vulnerable or sensitive children,
parents of children who are for very good reason fearful of bullies,
children and parents who rightly or wrongly are
repelled by the sexual and misogynist propaganda that
proliferates in middle and high school culture, parents
of kids who are preternaturally curious and gifted kids
themselves, children of the over-educated and underemployed
suburban mothers who simply would prefer
to do this work themselves than delegate it to the
state, all of these children and parents would not be
hurt, and would likely be helped, by reasonable state
regulation. Annual standardized testing is not the bane
of all existence it is often made out to be, and it would
give rightly proud parents and children alike a
record—and evidence—of their accomplishments. It
would also make clear where they had slipped, and
where there is need for correction.

Homeschoolers, who are not overburdened with a chaotic roomfull of kids they hardly know, are perfectly capable of assessing their own children’s progress without the state’s stamp of approval, or a standardized test, the efficacy of which as an assessment tool is questioned even by the institutional educational establishment. Even the NEA states that such tests are not an effective measure of a student’s knowledge. See, e.g., Fact Sheet on NEA's views regarding multiple measures for educators. (“Standardized tests are imperfect measures that assess student's memorization skills, rather than the ability to think critically and demonstrate 21st century skills.”)

As the political philosopher and homeschool critic
Robert Reich has persuasively argued, curricular
review would give the state a way to ensure that the
academic content is such as to protect the children’s
interest in both acquiring the necessary skills for active,
autonomous, and responsible citizenship in adulthood,
and in being exposed to diverse and more liberal ways
of life.Mandatory testing would give the states, and the
parents, a way to ensure that the students are performing
at a level consistent with their own abilities, and
consistent with the abilities and performance of their
public and private schooled peers. It would give the
parents and the state a way to ensure that the children
who should be college bound are being prepared for
that path, or at least, it would ensure that the parents
are aware of their children’s capacity for college level
work.

It sounds relatively benign, if misguided, until you get to this:

Periodic visits would open the door to college
and career counseling, of benefit to both the children
and their parents. They would give the state a window
into the quality of home life, and a way to monitor signs
of abuse as well as immunizations. The sanction for failure
to comply with minimal curriculum, content, visitation,
and testing requirements would simply be
enrollment in a certified private or public school. The
benefits of homeschooling are now protected through
legalization of the practice. Deregulation, however,
serves no one’s interests and harms many. Many of the
most serious harms could be prevented through its
responsible regulation.


Last time I checked, we still had a Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures in the privacy of our homes. The government is not making “periodic visits” to my house unless it makes a showing of probable cause, thank you very much! The government does not own me, or my child, and no homeschooler I know will ever consent to the abrogation of our parental and constitutional rights. We have become a nation of sheep, afraid of our neighbors, thinking that the government is going to save us from imagined evils, when the author and her Nanny State colleagues are setting us up for tyranny by a government with unfettered power to invade our families, our privacy, and trample our freedoms. While the assumptions, skewed interpretation of history, questionable legal analysis and stereotyping going on in this article are so absurd as to be amusing, the threat that such thinking presents to our liberty, not just as homeschoolers, but as Americans, is frightening.

Clothe an elitist and discriminatory agenda as an attack on those crazy nonconformist homeschoolers, imply that there is a thread of racism or sexism involved, invoke the specter of abuse, and the Constitution disappears? What offends me most is that this screed originates from a law school, where apparently its author learned to value her own fears, assumptions, elitism, and politics over the law. And that is a particularly scary commentary on institutional education, as far as I am concerned.

~Chele, retired lawyer, homeschooling mother, tilter at windmills, and, if Ms. West, the author of the above-referenced anti-homeschooling diatribe masquerading as a journal article, is to be believed, anti-feminist, over-educated, bored suburban housewife.