The magazine displays a common and basic mistrust of parents, a disdain for liberty, and an ignorance of homeschooling institutions.
The magazine displays a common and basic mistrust of parents, a disdain for liberty, and an ignorance of homeschooling institutions.
T he editors of Scientific American are calling for the federal regulation of homeschooling. Why? Because, as the title of their recent editorial claims, “children deserve uniform standards in homeschooling.”
Beginning with the title, there is much that is wrongheaded about the editorial — but nothing new. The steady drumbeat of calls from certain quarters to increase regulation of homeschooling — or even ban it outright — have increased as homeschooling has become more accessible to many more families, leading to an exodus from public schools (especially post-Covid).
What these calls share is a basic mistrust of parents, a disdain for liberty, and an ignorance of the private, civic institutions that have grown up organically around the freedom to homeschool since the late 1970s.
In 1979, Congress separated education from what had been the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and made it a stand-alone, cabinet-level department. President Carter nominated the first secretary of education in 1980. This federal expansion of the education bureaucracy coincided neatly with the emergence of the embryonic homeschooling movement. In 1980, everyone apparently agreed that public education was not living up to its promise. But while politicians in D.C. threw more tax money at the problem, a small number of parents blazed a new trail in the spirit of Daniel Boone and the great American frontier tradition.
Since 1980, Congress has become more and more involved in elementary and secondary public education in the states. Congress, by exercising its spending-clause power, dodges the fact that education is not one of its enumerated powers in the Constitution. That is, Congress makes pots of federal money available to the states if they promise to jump through federal hoops regarding education. States could lawfully avoid the mandates by refusing the money, but “free” money is hard to resist.
This is one of the more glaring mistakes of the editors of Scientific American: There is no general federal power to regulate homeschooling. One might hope that even a journal devoted to science could get basic constitutional principles right, but then one is left to wonder why the editors of a scientific journal would bestir themselves at all to address a nonscientific issue, unless they’re motivated by an ideological agenda unrelated to science.
A dizzying array of federal spending-clause laws, all touted to make public schools better, have been passed and signed by presidents of both parties since 1980. In 1994, President Clinton adopted Goals 2000: Educate America Act. Federal education spending increased dramatically under George W. Bush and the No Child Left Behind Act and Barack Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Act.
The year 2000 has come and gone, its goals, alas, unmet. Millions of children in public schools are sadly still left behind. Passing cheerily titled laws, it seems, does not automatically lead to every student in fact succeeding. This is the second glaring problem with Scientific American’s editorial: Federal spending-clause mandates for uniform standards have not served children in America’s public schools well, so there is no reason to think they would serve homeschooled children well.
Instead, uniform standards for homeschooling would lead to another great intrusion of the federal government into what should be left to parents, local communities, and the 50 states — which leads to the third major problem of the Scientific American editorial. It laments that a “dizzying maze of laws and legal precedents governs parents’ ability to homeschool, and the rules differ in each state.” But that dizzying maze is not a bug; it is a feature of the American federalist system.
From the lofty perch of the Scientific American boardroom in midtown Manhattan (not that there’s anything wrong with magazines based in Manhattan), understanding 50 different approaches to one subject may be difficult.
But who better to decide Ohio’s homeschooling laws than the people of Ohio? Or the people, in each case, of Vermont, South Dakota, or New Hampshire — the states mentioned in the editorial for having recently modernized homeschooling laws? The Ohio legislature passed a statute in 2023 to replace a 1980s administrative regulation that was promulgated before most of us had even heard of the internet or email. That prehistoric regulation led to irregular, sometimes arbitrary, enforcement by school districts around the state, prompting the updated statute.
Vermont’s 2023 statutory improvement was supported by the state’s department of education. The previous statute, dated 1987, had created mindless bureaucratic entanglement that did neither children nor bureaucrats any good. (I once represented a Vermont family in an administrative hearing in which the issue was whether their notice of intent to homeschool had been received by the state on the Friday before the Labor Day deadline or on the Tuesday following, proving once again that Mr. Bumble was right.)
The editorial also decries the civic involvement of homeschoolers in the legislative process. Civic involvement is in the DNA of homeschoolers for very good reason. When homeschooling first emerged in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was illegal in some states, incorrectly prosecuted as illegal in others, and greatly disfavored in all the rest. Homeschoolers became active, vocal citizens from necessity.
The editorial says, “This year Michigan’s Education Department proposed a registry of homeschooled students and was met with fierce pushback.” By “pushback” the editors presumably mean citizen-constituents’ actively engaging with legislators and other state officials, letting them know what they thought about the proposal.
That active civic involvement today is in part because Michigan homeschoolers have a long memory. Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, hundreds of homeschooling parents in Michigan were prosecuted or threatened with prosecution.
Mark and Chris DeJonge were two such parents, convicted in 1988. According to court records, “the prosecution never questioned the adequacy of the DeJonges’ instruction or the education the children received.” The only issue was that they lacked a teaching certificate. The conviction was upheld by the court of appeals, and then, in a narrow 4–3 decision, the supreme court of Michigan in 1993 reversed the DeJonges’ convictions, holding that the teacher-certification requirement violated their rights under the free-exercise clauses of the United States and Michigan constitutions. (Disclosure: The organization I head, the Home School Legal Defense Association, represented the DeJonges throughout those proceedings.) Meanwhile, in a companion case heard the same day, the supreme court of Michigan held that the Bennetts, who had not claimed religious motivation to homeschool, would not receive protection under a parental-rights theory standing alone. (The Bennetts’ convictions were overturned, however, based on a procedural irregularity. HSLDA also represented them at the supreme court.) Shortly thereafter, the Michigan legislature adopted a statute that applied to all parents, whether religious or not, to lawfully homeschool without a teaching certificate.
Scientific American presents the current proposal for a homeschool “registry” in Michigan as modest and reasonable. But homeschoolers know that “modest” proposals can end in long ordeals faced by ordinary families like the DeJonges and the Bennetts. As James Madison wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments in 1785, “it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.” Liberty is not always lost in one fell swoop; it is often eroded by small degrees, with those first “modest” proposals as their harbingers.
To support their call for federal homeschooling regulations, the editors point to the case of a Michigan boy who died in 2020 as the result of horrific abuse by his father and stepmother, after the family had moved to California. Child abuse is ever and always to be condemned — and prosecuted and punished. But blaming homeschooling laws misses the point. According to the Washington Post, the child’s extended family reported his condition to state child-protection agencies as early as 2016, yet no investigation apparently took place.
That some parents who claim to homeschool would abuse a child is horrible. But the question is whether all parents who choose to homeschool — and do so in a moral and lawful manner — should be subjected to increased state scrutiny because of some parents’ bad acts.
In 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court suggested the answer to that question is generally no. Beginning with a fundamental principle, the court said, “The law’s concept of the family rests on a presumption that parents possess what a child lacks in maturity, experience, and capacity for judgment required for making life’s difficult decisions. More important, historically it has recognized that natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children.” Addressing the problem of child abuse, the court continued:
As with so many other legal presumptions, experience and reality may rebut what the law accepts as a starting point; the incidence of child neglect and abuse cases attests to this. That some parents may at times be acting against the interests of their children, creates a basis for caution, but is hardly a reason to discard wholesale those pages of human experience that teach that parents generally do act in the child’s best interests. [Cleaned up; emphasis added.]
The court concluded, “The statist notion that governmental power should supersede parental authority in all cases because some parents abuse and neglect children is repugnant to American tradition.”
Additionally, there is simply no evidence that children are more likely to be abused or neglected based on their educational setting, including homeschooling. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but some parents commit evil acts against their children. While there is much we can do to improve the ability of agencies charged with protecting children to reach children in need, attempts to justify banning homeschooling, as Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet did, or vilifying all homeschoolers by spinning a false narrative, must be resisted.
What began from the educational fringe 50 years ago evolved into a social movement and has today become a mainstream educational and lifestyle institution. Homeschoolers did this by wresting control over the education of their children away from the state monopoly through litigation, legislation, and the dogged determination of ordinary moms and dads all over America, sometimes against daunting opposition.
Generations of families have proven that homeschooling works. As with any human institution, homeschooling is not without its flaws. But I leave you with this: Since 1980, which has done more to improve the lives and education of children, the U.S. Department of Education or the modern homeschooling movement?