The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett

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СКАЧАТЬ from institutionalized schools.5 These progressive reformers believed that education should be flexible and should cater to the needs of the individual child—something they did not see happening in public schools. They were also concerned that public schools ended up quashing children’s innate curiosity, and argued that children would learn most of what they need to know if left in charge of their own education. This critique was part of a larger critique in the 1960s of institutions in general, which many on the Left saw as being conservative, overly bureaucratic, and designed to maintain the status quo of racial, gender, and class inequalities. In this vein, education reformers argued that schools were preparing students for routinized, industrial careers rather than to be independent thinkers.6 This system may have served the interests of elites, but, education reformers argued, it certainly did not serve the interests of most children.

      At around the same time, homeschooling also began to be advocated and practiced by some in the religious Right. Seventh Day Adventists Raymond and Dorothy Moore are generally credited with being the first conservative Christians in the United States to publicly advocate for homeschooling. The Moores were critical both of the secular nature of education and of the way a formal curriculum was being pushed onto children at younger and younger ages.7 They became frequent guests on James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio show, and Dobson’s endorsement of homeschooling is credited with its rapid growth among conservative Evangelical Christians.8

      For many conservative Christians, homeschooling was a way for their families to resist what they saw as the increasing encroachment of secular culture into their—and their children’s—lives.9 The US Supreme Court rulings in the early 1960s that ended the practices of school prayer and Bible reading in public schools played an important role in catalyzing the religious Right against public schools (and continue, to this day, to motivate some parents—more than a few of the parents I interviewed brought up the end of school prayer as an important turning point in what they saw as the downward spiral of American public education).10 Some research has also suggested that school desegregation played a role in the rise of homeschooling among the religious Right, and that early Christian homeschooling can be understood as a form of “white flight” from integrated school districts.11

      In the early decades of the modern homeschooling movement, there was a fair amount of cooperation between progressives and conservative religious homeschoolers. While they had somewhat different motivations for advocating homeschooling, movement leaders such as John Holt, on the left, and Raymond and Dorothy Moore, on the right, had in common their belief in the importance of child-centered pedagogical approaches.12 However, historians of the movement argue that, as the religious Right gained broad political momentum and an increasing number of conservative Protestants took up the practice of homeschooling in the 1980s, religious homeschoolers increasingly critiqued these pedagogical approaches, and thus began distancing themselves from the secular wing of the homeschooling movement.13 Scholars point to the founding in 1983 of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), an explicitly (fundamentalist) Christian organization, as one of the pivotal moments in the eventual division of the movement.14 This trend away from cooperation between the two wings was further cemented by the legislative success of the movement.

      Controversy and Legalization

      Even as homeschooling was being established as an alternative to public schooling during the 1970s and 1980s, the practice was still illegal in most states. Despite their very different political and religious orientations, the religious Right and the progressive education reformers of the Left worked together to mobilize politically to get pro-homeschooling legislation passed in each state. Scholars note that several US Supreme Court cases pertaining to parental rights paved the way for the success of homeschoolers’ legislative efforts, including Meyers v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Seven Sisters (1925), which established parents’ fundamental authority over their children’s upbringing, including their education, and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which argued that, in certain cases, parents’ religious freedom could trump compulsory education laws.15

      Homeschoolers took a two-pronged approach of litigation and lobbying—targeting both the courts and state legislatures—in almost all states, in order both to make homeschooling legal and, once it was legal, to attempt to strip away some of the more obtrusive regulation of the practice. This effort was quite successful; by 1993, homeschooling was legal—with varying degrees of regulation—in all fifty US states.16 In Texas, where I carried out the research for this book, the legality of homeschooling was decided in 1987 via the Leeper v. Arlington Independent School District class action case, which ruled that homeschools count as private schools under Texas law. The decision was appealed by the state twice but was upheld both times, in 1991 by a district appeals court and in 1994 by the Texas Supreme Court.17 (Interestingly, Texas is one of the only states where litigation, rather than lobbying the state legislature, was the primary means of achieving legality of homeschooling.)18 Once this legislative agenda was accomplished in every state, there was less need for cooperation between the left and right wings of the movement, and from this point, the movement became quite bifurcated.19

      Current Homeschooling Regulations

      Over the course of just a few decades, then, homeschooling in the United States went from being a deviant, often illegal, practice to one that is increasingly normalized.20 Homeschooling is now seen by many as an acceptable alternative to public education; however, because homeschooling, like all other forms of education, is overseen by states rather than the federal government, the degree of regulation of homeschooling varies widely across the United States.

      Texas falls on the less-regulated side of the spectrum—while a handful of states are as unregulated, none are more unregulated.21 Homeschool parents are not required to register with the state, and because homeschools are considered private schools under Texas law, they are subject to the same (lack of) regulation as other private schools.22 Many of the homeschoolers I spoke with over the course of my research took great pride in Texas’s lack of regulation. I even acquired a bit of “conference swag” at one of the Texas Home School Coalition conferences that I attended that allowed me to partake in the national “bragging rights” of the state’s homeschoolers: a bright red, reusable shopping bag emblazoned with the Texas flag and the words “I homeschool in Texas, where people are FREE.”

      On the other end of the spectrum, with high levels of regulation, are states like New York. Parents who homeschool in New York must submit a yearly notice of intent to their local school district superintendent, submit a yearly “Individualized Home Instruction Plan,” file quarterly reports on the child’s progress, including grades or narrative evaluations for each subject, and assess the child through standardized tests (yearly in grades 1–3 and 9–12, and every other year in grades 4–8).23 Other states fall somewhere between the two, requiring registration with the state and/or some form of assessment or reporting, though few states require quite as rigorous reporting as New York.24

      Homeschoolers themselves are far from being of one mind about the question of state regulation of homeschooling, and what the “right” degree of regulation should be.25 While some of the parents I interviewed expressed concern about the lack of oversight of homeschooling in Texas, others—including parents on both the political Right and the political Left—expressed a deep appreciation for being able to homeschool without the government telling them what to do. This debate has occasionally reached the mainstream, often arising when cases of child abuse by homeschooling parents make headlines. It is important to note that while there is no evidence that homeschooling families are more likely to abuse their children, some critics argue that homeschooling—particularly in states with little to no oversight—is a tool that abusive parents can use to hide abuse from the outside world through limiting their children’s interactions with institutions and adults who are mandated reporters.26

      Homeschooling Instruction

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