A lot of people started homeschooling in 2020. After sitting in their homes and seeing what their kids were taught, parents realized that maybe public school wasn’t a great idea. Others found themselves forced to teach their children and realized they could, in fact, do so and would prefer to have more control over what was being taught in the first place.
Of course, this bothers the educational establishment.
Homeschooling represents a choice parents can make that takes the control out of the hands of teachers, administrators, and the government and puts it back where it belongs, the parents. It allows parents to decide on what gets taught, how it’s taught, what times things are taught, etc.
And now we’re being told what homeschooling really needs is federal regulation.
That’s according to a piece in the June issue of Scientific America.
Homeschooled students have won the National Spelling Bee; one was the most prolific mathematician in history. Many are well-rounded and well-adjusted children who go on to thrive as adults. But others do not receive a meaningful education—and too many have suffered horrific abuse. The federal government must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in homeschooling across the country.
When a traditional classroom setting cannot meet the educational, social or emotional needs of a child, homeschooling can allow parents to take over. For children facing bullying or gun violence or who need more challenging or more advanced schoolwork, a homeschooling environment may be best.
But many parents are attracted to homeschooling because they want to have more say in what their child learns and what they do not. Nearly 60 percent of homeschool parents who responded to the 2019 NCES survey said that religious instruction was a motivation in their decision to educate at home. Some Christian homeschooling curricula teach Young Earth Creationism instead of evolution. Other curricula describe slavery as “Black immigration” or extol the virtues of Nazism.
Some children may not be receiving any instruction at all. Most states don’t require homeschooled kids to be assessed on specific topics the way their classroom-based peers are. This practice enables educational neglect that can have long-lasting consequences for a child’s development.
It should be noted that this study looked at kids who were truant to a significant degree. That means they were supposed to be in a traditional school and weren’t. There’s absolutely nothing at that link that actually says anything about homeschooling.
Yes, educational neglect can be problematic, but the fact that this research was able to find it and study it in cases that had absolutely nothing to do with homeschooling makes it clear that the issue has nothing to do with whether someone decides to educate their kids at home or not.
But, of course, we get the typical anti-homeschooling argument that’s almost obligatory at this point: Abuse.
In the worst cases, homeschooling hides abuse. In 2020 an 11-year-old boy in Michigan was found dead after his stepmother used homeschooling to conceal years of torture. A small study of children who had been seriously abused found that eight of 17 school-age victims were ostensibly being homeschooled. In these cases, homeschooling was a farce—a hole in children’s social safety net for abusers to exploit.
Although it’s impossible to say how commonly homeschooling conceals abuse, data from Connecticut paint a concerning picture. Following the abuse and 2017 death of an autistic teenager whose mother had removed him from school, Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate found that 36 percent of children withdrawn from six nearby districts to be homeschooled lived in homes that had been subject to at least one report of suspected abuse or neglect. Not one state checks with Child Protective Services to determine whether the parents of children being homeschooled have a history of abuse or neglect.
And yet, that study says nothing about Connecticut finding sufficient grounds to remove the child from an abusive or neglectful home.
Funny, that.
Now, understand that I’m not saying that homeschooling isn’t ever used as a cover for abuse. It can be. However, so can contact sports. “Yeah, he’s always bruised because he’s always playing football or wrestling. What can you do?”
Plenty of abused kids were in public school and no one had a clue.
And this is Connecticut. That’s a state that generally has a political lean where traditional education is always going to be preferred and supported, meaning there are fewer reasons for some to opt for homeschooling. That’s going to skew the results.
Then, of course, all the data that shows homeschooling is beneficial for kids? You can’t trust that.
Homeschooling advocacy organizations promote studies that claim to show equal or higher levels of academic achievement among homeschooled students. But these studies often are conducted by homeschooling advocates and are methodologically flawed. It’s difficult for social scientists to recruit representative samples for more rigorous research because of lax reporting requirements and the underground nature of homeschooling, making the kind of sweeping comparison between homeschooling and nonhomeschooling students that some groups report impossible. Still, studies of different homeschooled populations have shown that children’s success depends heavily on their parents’ education background. Despite this, in 40 states parents do not need to have even a high school–level education to educate their children at home.
Now, I’ll admit that’s a fair point. We often need to be critical of studies that too closely conform to a sponsor’s position, and that applies even if we agree with that position.
But there’s a flip side here that the author doesn’t look at. Just as there’s not a lot of supportive data showing homeschooling’s benefits as a whole, there also isn’t a ton showing it to be problematic, either. Sure, they cite one study that shows parents’ educational background plays a role, but it’s still just one study and it has its own problems.
Moreover, we have all kinds of evidence that more traditional education isn’t working, including the Nation’s report card which has shown almost no improvement in test scores since 1971.
For the sake of argument, however, let’s see what the author’s solution is, and this is where things get interesting to me.
It is clear that homeschooling will continue to lack accountability for outcomes or even basic safety in most states. But federal mandates for reporting and assessment to protect children don’t need to be onerous. For example, homeschool parents could be required to pass an initial background check, as every state requires for all K–12 teachers. Homeschool instructors could be required to submit documents every year to their local school district or to a state agency to show that their children are learning.
Except that mandates for reporting would, in fact, be onerous.
Homeschooling is intimidating. You’re constantly scared you’re not doing a good enough job teaching your child. Imposter syndrome is rampant among homeschool parents and each summer has us looking around and evaluating what worked and what didn’t, what we can do better and what we overdid.
Now we have this…individual trying to say that we should have to undergo a background check to educate our own children. This is nothing but an attempt to treat homeschool parents like they’re criminals.
My homeschool co-op requires that if you opt to teach a class, but that’s because other people will be trusting their children to you for a period of time. We do it for peace of mind.
But what if I were a convicted felon? Should I be barred from homeschooling my kids simply because of something that had nothing to do with children?
As annoying as a background check would be, though, that’s the least of the issues.
See, the whole “you should have to submit reports” thing is precisely the kind of onerous thing I was talking about. Remember, homeschool parents don’t teach just one class. Hell, a lot of times they don’t teach just one kid. That would mean their reports would have to cover every subject for every kid.
With it comes the anxiety of wondering if the government will decide you’re doing a good enough job or that you reported everything properly. Couple that with the imposter syndrome stuff I mentioned earlier, and it’s going to be nerve-racking.
Yet that’s the point.
The starting place is to just dissuade people from homeschooling at all. A big part of the public education model in the early days was control. People in public schools could be “educated”—read: indoctrinated—however the state wanted them educated. They could push whatever ideology they wanted and parents were powerless to do anything about it.
It’s still going on today, too.
Yet I don’t think Scientific American has an issue with that. On the contrary, I can’t help but think that the editorial board of the publication sees that as a feature rather than a bug. After all, let’s remember that this is the same Scientific American that pushes transitioning children despite the evidence against it.
But again, that’s the starting place.
Once there are federal regulations such as those noted above, it becomes easier to just add a few things here or there. Suddenly you have to include a discussion of climate change or LGBT issues or exclude religiously-based curriculums as not meeting the appropriate standards.
Suddenly, the state is telling you exactly how to indoctrinate your kids against your own beliefs.
Regulatory creep is a thing, after all, and it will happen here if given half the chance.
It’s also amusing to me how this entire piece is predicated on the idea that there’s something wrong with parents not having to answer to the state, but there’s no mention of how the teachers’ unions shield bad educators from being answerable to anyone.
Terrible teachers are often protected and remain at work despite sucking at their jobs, but we’re supposed to be answerable to the government over how we raise our own children? I don’t think so.
Now, with that out of the way, there’s an upside.
That upside is that this is just Scientific American going on about what they want to see. They don’t actually have the ability to make it happen. Doing so would require Congress to step in and pass legislation, and that’s not going to happen right now.
I’m just pissed that someone thought they could do this crap.
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I think I mentioned before on a related thread that my daughter had a misogynistic math teacher in 7th grade, who was quite blunt in saying girls often had trouble with math. She learned so little that the next year I (with a B.S. in math so I was "qualified") I had to teach her what she missed as she was trying to master algebra in parallel. End of story: She received her B.S. in Mathematics and went on to work in Information Technology.
I heard a similar story from a neighbor whose daughter had the same "teacher", had similar results in 7th grade, yet somehow managed to attain an M.S. in Physics.
Was this "teacher" ever reprimanded, or - God forbid - fired? Nope. There are few, if any, consequences for incompetence in the NYS Public Education System after three years and receipt of tenure.