By all accounts, I am homeschooling’s poster child. I “graduated” high school with a perfect GPA, played varsity sports, worked a part-time job, and got into one of the best universities in the country. When I was accepted to Vanderbilt, a teammate’s mom said I was an example of “homeschooling done right.”
In many ways, I was — in no small part because homeschooling was such a necessity for me. I had lasted all of six months in a public school kindergarten because of severe anxiety. With the nearest private school nearly an hour away, and no assurances that a different school would make a lick of difference, my parents had no option but to pull me out of school altogether.
They took great pains to ensure my education didn’t suffer from its nonconformity. I did multiplication tables in my mother’s office and read Tom Sawyer in my father’s backseat when they worked full time. My mother eventually quit her job to homeschool me and my three younger siblings, and we moved into a more structured world of homeschool co-ops and dual enrollment at the local community college.
In 2011, my parents’ choice to homeschool was a subversive one, but it isn’t anymore. Though homeschooling has been steadily gaining popularity for years, the pandemic sent numbers into the stratosphere. An estimated 3.4 million students were homeschooled last year — almost 1 million more than in 2019.
While homeschooling was the best option for me, and it worked swimmingly, I don’t wish it on most people. It’s an educational Wild West, with no federal oversight and a seriously flawed patchwork of state-by-state regulations, risking educational shortcomings and even abuse that can go unnoticed. I’m not calling to outlaw homeschooling, but the lack of oversight is alarming and must be changed.
I know from my own experience that this opinion is unpopular with homeschool families, many of whom homeschool specifically to avoid regulation. Many more are afraid of being lumped in with stereotypes — the Bible thumpers, the survivalists, the “unschoolers.” Homeschoolers are more diverse than people realize; still, 46% of homeschool parents say their local public schools were “too influenced by liberal viewpoints,” and more than half say they wish to provide religious instruction. Almost all resent the suggestion that their educational standards need to be brought up to snuff. Don’t bother us, they like to say, and we won’t bother you.
This oppositional attitude and a handful of Supreme Court rulings have led the federal government to leave homeschooling entirely to the states, which has resulted in a policy quagmire.
To homeschool a child in Tennessee, as I was, parents or legal guardians are only required to have a high school diploma or “equivalent credential,” to submit a notice of intent to homeschool, and to have students sit for state standardized testing in grades five, seven, and nine. In Minnesota, parents must hold a bachelor’s degree or teaching license, teach required subjects, and test children annually using a “nationally norm-referenced standardized test.” In New Jersey, you don’t even have to notify the state before pulling your kid out of school.
Homeschool advocates like to point out that homeschoolers apparently perform 15 to 25 percentage points better on standardized tests than their counterparts, but I argue this is a case of selection bias. Only a handful of states require standardized testing for homeschoolers — we have no way to evaluate the educational achievement of students who’ve never seen a scantron sheet.
This is the darker side of homeschooling — we don’t know what we don’t know. I’m sure many of these homeschoolers are perfectly fine, but many aren’t. Schools are full of mandatory reporters who are trained to catch cases of abuse and neglect. No such system exists for homeschooling, and the lack of oversight has had horrific results. A project called Homeschooling’s Invisible Children has catalogued 500 cases of child abuse among homeschoolers, 230 of which resulted in death. Stories of children being locked in barns, starved, tortured, or even killed appear seemingly biannually, and who knows how many more are out there? Forty-nine states allow caregivers to homeschool children during an active child abuse investigation. Forty-eight allow homeschooling even if a member of the household is convicted of violent offenses against children.
But even if there’s no abuse and the education a child receives is on par with that of a traditional school, the social cost of homeschooling shouldn’t be ignored. Kids bond over shared experiences, and no amount of soccer games or organized field trips can make up for missing the 7 hours a day, 180 days a year of social development and camaraderie school provides.
Change doesn’t happen in a day, but we seem to be turning a corner in some states. Recent abuse cases in Connecticut have prompted lawmakers to pass legislation, now headed to the governor to sign, that would require homeschool parents to provide proof of “equivalent instruction” every year. Lawmakers believe this will deter abusive parents from using homeschooling as a guise to remove children from society.
But we should set our sights higher. Homeschool environments should be subject to the same education and safety standards as public schools, with yearly standardized tests and regular home inspections as the minimum.
Pennsylvania is an excellent example of standards that should be adopted nationwide. In addition to requiring parents to submit education objectives and immunization records, maintain a portfolio of student work, and sign an affidavit, the state also requires a licensed psychologist or experienced teacher to review that portfolio annually and a certification that supervisory adults and others in the home “have not been convicted of certain criminal offenses within the past five years.” These requirements aim to ensure a high level of education for homeschooled children and their safety.
That said, it’s difficult to imagine change at the national level under the current administration, given the recent gutting of the Department of Education. But if the federal government is going to continue to support homeschooling, they are morally responsible for providing a more standardized approach — if not to iron out educational inconsistencies, then at least to ensure no child suffers from decades of abuse that could’ve been prevented with a simple background check on the parents.
That mom was right — I am a great example of what can happen through homeschooling. I owe that to my parents, who held my education and themselves to a standard well beyond what the state required. But my success story should not outshine the risk to kids’ education created by the absence of strong and consistent regulations, nor the cases of abuse. The cost of such an unregulated venture is too high for states — and the federal government — to leave as is. Parents too should consider the multiple costs more carefully before pulling their child out of school. And for those like me with no other educational choice, the least the government can do is make sure homeschooling is safe.
