The Homeschool Choice. Kate Henley Averett
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
Homeschool instruction is itself a spectrum. On one end is what many refer to as the “school-at-home” model, in which things look pretty similar to a public school, just with far fewer students and (usually) mom in the place of the teacher.27 Some families I interviewed who follow this model have a dedicated “school room” or school space (a table, a desk or two) within a room. These families usually follow a structured, purchased, comprehensive curriculum, and while children may “work ahead” in some subjects (for example, by completing two grade levels of math in a single year), their parents usually keep track of the grade level at which they are currently working in each subject. These families often have a regular daily schedule for “doing school,” such that school time and play time are kept separate.28
On the other end of the spectrum is unschooling, or “child-led” learning, in which children follow their own inclinations to learn about the world, primarily (at least for younger children) through play and exploration. Unschooling parents may put opportunities (books, musical instruments, other instructional materials) into their children’s environment to encourage them toward certain topics—a practice some of the parents I interviewed referred to as “strewing”—but the choice of what to do is the child’s. In unschooling, the line between learning, play, and the rest of life is blurry, if not completely nonexistent.29 In states where there is greater regulation of homeschooling, such as requiring the submission of specific curricula and other materials, unschooling can be much more difficult to do. Several of the unschooling parents I interviewed wondered aloud to me how parents in more restrictive states manage, and noted that they appreciated not having to force their children to fit into somebody else’s predetermined idea of what education should look like.
Though unschoolers tend to avoid prepackaged curricula, this does not necessarily mean that unschoolers avoid any kind of curricular materials or activities that outsiders might see as more “traditional” forms of learning. Several of the unschooling parents I interviewed talked about their children’s use of online resources like Khan Academy and YouTube tutorials to learn any number of subjects, like math or coding. Others talked about their children being fascinated by science and picking up science textbooks at the library and reading them cover to cover. Several also took part in weekly homeschool co-ops, in which a group of families gathers weekly and parents volunteer to teach classes on topics of interest to the children. Several unschoolers with high school–age