The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett
you know, very much—although she’s [physically] developed, and she looks like a teenager at this point, she is very much still looking out of her own eyes. I’m pleased about that.” Homeschooling allowed Maura to keep Merri in a peer environment with far less pressure to fit in. It also afforded her the opportunity to talk in some depth with her daughter about her perspective on feminism; she even bought Merri a feminist reader and discussed some of the essays with her.
In contrast to both Sharon and Maura, Alma Garcia spoke in largely positive terms about public education. Alma lived in southeast Austin with her husband, Joe, and their sons, Matthew, age fifteen, and Andrew, age thirteen. Alma and Joe were each the first in their family to attend college, and they both came from large, tight-knit, Mexican American families who felt strongly about the importance of public education. Despite being raised in this context, however, Alma began homeschooling her sons shortly after Matthew began middle school. Alma had been very involved at Matthew’s elementary school, in part because Matthew was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), but she found herself being shut out once he began middle school. Describing the relationship between parents and the school as “a great divide,” Alma recounted, “If I had a question or a concern, the answer that I continuously got was, ‘Well we’ve already discussed that with your child.’ Well, I’m not asking you to discuss it with my child, I’m asking you to discuss it with me.” Alma had an increasingly hard time accessing Matthew’s teachers to find out how concepts were being taught, which made it next to impossible for her to help Matthew when he was struggling with his homework. After a particularly frustrating day of meeting with a team of Matthew’s teachers and administrators, Alma reached her breaking point. “I thought, ‘Wait a second. They don’t want me involved. This is not the way to teach a kid. Why am I here?’ And we never went back.”
How did these three women, with their contrasting perspectives on public schools, all end up homeschooling? In a climate of deep political polarization, an outside observer might not expect that Sharon, Maura, and Alma would be able to find common ground about much of anything. Why do they all agree on homeschooling?
Sharon, Maura, and Alma are three of the forty-six homeschooling parents whom I interviewed for this book, and their children are among the almost two million US children who are currently homeschooled.1 Between August 2013 and May 2016, I conducted a survey of over six hundred homeschooling parents, interviewed forty-six of those parents, and attended five homeschooling conferences and conventions across the state of Texas. I did this research in response to what I saw as a fascinating paradox: that parents with varying stances in terms of politics and religiosity—and particularly, with distinct perspectives on childhood gender and sexuality—could all come to the same practice of homeschooling their children. When I was growing up, the only families I knew who homeschooled were conservative Christians, like Sharon Bennett and her family, who held strong beliefs about sex, marriage, and the “traditional” (heterosexual) family. But a few years before beginning this research, I began to notice an interesting trend: people on social media, who were self-identified liberals and progressives, feminists, and queer parents, talking about homeschooling, often in discussions about the negative experiences of LGBTQ+ youth in schools or critiques of abstinence-only sex education. In such an adamantly politically divided society, especially about topics related to sexuality and gender, how do these parents find themselves in similar positions, opting to homeschool their children? I suspected that parents with different views might have very different motivations for homeschooling, and I wanted to know: what are these motivations?
In the chapters that follow, I show that parents’ motivations for homeschooling are, in fact, quite varied. Some parents’ motivations, like Sharon’s and Maura’s, are grounded in an incompatibility between the parent’s understanding of what schooling and childhood should look like, and how public-school students experience schooling and childhood. These parents can find a misalignment between their ideals and the practices of schools from more conservative or more progressive perspectives. Nowhere are these political differences more evident than in their critiques of gender and sexuality in American public schools. One critique sees schools as overly sexual spaces that are a threat to the sexual innocence of children. Parents who feel this way—largely, but not entirely, conservative and religious parents—see homeschooling as a way to protect their children from the influence of peers, the school curriculum, and a perceived broader liberal agenda in public schools. The other critique sees schools as promoting a narrow understanding of gender and sexuality, in which the heterosexual and/or traditionally gendered space of the school forces children to adhere to a model of gender and sexuality that is, at best, constraining and, at worst, dangerous. The parents who express this critique tend to see homeschooling as a way to avoid the forced conforming of their children to a narrow expression of gender and sexuality.
For other parents, like Alma, motivations for homeschooling are grounded less in an ideological critique of education than in specific negative experiences with public schools. I spoke with many parents over the course of this research who recounted stories of long, drawn-out conflicts with their children’s public (and, in a few cases, private) schools that they came to see as unresolvable. These included conflicts over the quality of education; over accommodation for disabilities, special needs, health issues, and giftedness; and over the handling of bullying and peer conflict. Many of these parents had never considered homeschooling before, but they came to see it as their only choice when they felt their children’s schools were not able to offer what their children needed.
The existence of ideological diversity in the homeschooling community is, of course, not new. In his groundbreaking 2001 book on the American homeschooling movement, sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens details the ways in which liberal and conservative forces have shaped modern homeschooling from the beginning.2 However, in the two decades since Stevens’s book was published, this diversity has increased, as religion is no longer the most-cited motivation for parents’ decision to homeschool. In more recent years, it has not been ideological critiques of public education at all but rather concerns about the environment of these schools that have been the most-cited motivation of these parents.3
Other things about the homeschooling movement have changed in the last two decades as well, including a near doubling in the number of homeschooled students, as well as changes in the broader context of public education in the United States. For this reason, the scope of this book extends far beyond the answer to why parents homeschool. Rather, I use the narratives of homeschooling parents to understand the rising popularity of homeschooling and what this trend indicates about broader cultural beliefs about childhood, parenting, and education. Contemporary homeschooling gives us insight into three important areas of social concern: (1) the shifting relationships among the state, public schools, and families, especially in light of the increased privatization of both education and social reproduction, (2) changing beliefs about childhood gender and sexuality, and (3) the implications of intensive mothering for children’s education and for gender inequality more broadly.
In The Homeschool Choice, I demonstrate that these three theoretical conversations—about school choice, childhood gender and sexuality, and intensive mothering—are not, in fact, separate conversations, but that, in the context of homeschooling, they are intimately linked. I show that beliefs about childhood, particularly as they pertain to gender and sexuality, are central to parents’ narratives about why they choose to homeschool. I argue that this is due to the fact that school choice is presented as a free-market solution to moral and religious debates about gender and sexuality, such as debates about teaching sex education and LGBT-inclusive content in schools. In these debates, parents—particularly mothers, who are seen as responsible for their children’s education as well as their moral upbringing—are framed as consumers of educational services, who can opt out of the public school system if it comes into conflict with their beliefs about, for example, the acceptability of same-sex relationships or the existence and normalization of transgender identities.
School Choice and the Privatization of Education
Education in the United States is moving away from the common-school model of education and toward a marketplace or “school-choice” model.4 In the common-school model, the ideal is that all children be provided with a similar educational