Posted on 07/10/2024 6:06:58 PM PDT by DoodleBob
The number of children being educated at home has been growing for the past few decades. No one knows by how much, and that is part of the problem. Homeschooling is barely tracked or regulated in the U.S. But children deserve a safe and robust education, whether they attend a traditional school or are educated at home.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that by last count, in 2019, nearly 3 percent of U.S. children—1.5 million—were being homeschooled. This number, calculated from a nationwide survey, is surely an undercount because the homeschooling population is notoriously hard to survey, and more children have been homeschooled since the COVID pandemic began. Eleven states do not require parents to inform anyone that they are homeschooling a child, and in most of the country, once a child has exited the traditional schoolroom environment, no one checks to ensure they are receiving an education at all.
Homeschooled students have won the National Spelling Bee; one was the most prolific mathematician in history. Many are well-rounded and well-adjusted children who go on to thrive as adults. But others do not receive a meaningful education—and too many have suffered horrific abuse. The federal government must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in homeschooling across the country.
When a traditional classroom setting cannot meet the educational, social or emotional needs of a child, homeschooling can allow parents to take over. For children facing bullying or gun violence or who need more challenging or more advanced schoolwork, a homeschooling environment may be best.
But many parents are attracted to homeschooling because they want to have more say in what their child learns and what they do not. Nearly 60 percent of homeschool parents who responded to the 2019 NCES survey said that religious instruction was a motivation in their decision to educate at home. Some Christian homeschooling curricula teach Young Earth Creationism instead of evolution. Other curricula describe slavery as “Black immigration” or extol the virtues of Nazism.
Some children may not be receiving any instruction at all. Most states don’t require homeschooled kids to be assessed on specific topics the way their classroom-based peers are. This practice enables educational neglect that can have long-lasting consequences for a child’s development.
In the worst cases, homeschooling hides abuse. In 2020 an 11-year-old boy in Michigan was found dead after his stepmother used homeschooling to conceal years of torture. A small study of children who had been seriously abused found that eight of 17 school-age victims were ostensibly being homeschooled. In these cases, homeschooling was a farce—a hole in children’s social safety net for abusers to exploit.
Although it’s impossible to say how commonly homeschooling conceals abuse, data from Connecticut paint a concerning picture. Following the abuse and 2017 death of an autistic teenager whose mother had removed him from school, Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate found that 36 percent of children withdrawn from six nearby districts to be homeschooled lived in homes that had been subject to at least one report of suspected abuse or neglect. Not one state checks with Child Protective Services to determine whether the parents of children being homeschooled have a history of abuse or neglect.
Homeschooling advocacy organizations promote studies that claim to show equal or higher levels of academic achievement among homeschooled students. But these studies often are conducted by homeschooling advocates and are methodologically flawed. It’s difficult for social scientists to recruit representative samples for more rigorous research because of lax reporting requirements and the underground nature of homeschooling, making the kind of sweeping comparison between homeschooling and nonhomeschooling students that some groups report impossible. Still, studies of different homeschooled populations have shown that children’s success depends heavily on their parents’ education background. Despite this, in 40 states parents do not need to have even a high school–level education to educate their children at home.
The federal government usually leaves issues of education for states to decide, and homeschooling is no exception. A dizzying maze of laws and legal precedents governs parents’ ability to homeschool, and the rules differ in each state and sometimes even differ between school districts. Whenever a piece of state legislation is suggested or introduced to regulate some aspect of homeschooling, advocacy organizations such as the Homeschool Legal Defense Association fight back. This year Michigan’s Education Department proposed a registry of homeschooled students in the state and was met with fierce pushback. In 2023 Ohio removed all assessment requirements for homeschooled students. South Dakota, Vermont and New Hampshire have also removed some oversight requirements in the past few years.
It is clear that homeschooling will continue to lack accountability for outcomes or even basic safety in most states. But federal mandates for reporting and assessment to protect children don’t need to be onerous. For example, homeschool parents could be required to pass an initial background check, as every state requires for all K–12 teachers. Homeschool instructors could be required to submit documents every year to their local school district or to a state agency to show that their children are learning.
Education is a basic human right. We need to make sure kids have chances to investigate what makes them curious, study history and science and reading, and ask questions and learn from others. We want them to reach adulthood ready to take on the world.
Most abusive parents start out with babies and toddlers. Notice the authors aren't calling for background checks before school age.
In pretty much every "homeschooling-child abuse" case I've ever read, the children were failed by everyone - CPS, law enforcement, the court system, and their school.
For example, the authors mention this horrific case:
-"In 2020 an 11-year-old boy in Michigan was found dead after his stepmother used homeschooling to conceal years of torture."-
What the authors don't mention is that the boy's biological mother tried fighting in court to see her son, but the father kept moving; that the father of the stepmother's biological children fought for custody for years; and that, in 2016, the stepmother's own sister called CPS multiple times about the boy, but no action was ever taken, even though he was still in school at that time.
-"A small study of children who had been seriously abused found that eight of 17 school-age victims were ostensibly being homeschooled."-
The authors link to a study. WARNING - don't look at it! It's horrible. But, that study says the 8 "homeschooled" children started out IN SCHOOL and were removed "typically after closure of a CPS case." Again, CPS failed them.
The other 9 of the 17 were school students. In one case, the adoptive mother told the school the children had a life-threatening condition that required restriction from food and water, and CPS even bought her a lock to keep the children from food and water. WTH?
And 17...? ONE teacher in ONE local school was arrested for molesting the same number of children. A single pervert in one school has access to everyone's children.
I once called CPS on a family because the parents were drug dealers, the kids ran the street late at night, and the stepmother was seen punching one kid. You know what CPS told me? Nothing they could do, unless the kids were literally starving, beaten severely, or not going to school. But, those kids were in school. Mine weren't.
It has been obvious for at least 25 years that DoEd is a massive failure and needs to be done away with.
If a government schooled kid is failing should his parents be forced to homeschool? ( Just wondering.) /s
If a government schooled kid is failing should his parents be forced to homeschool? ( Just wondering.) /s
Kids aren't students.
They are just the grist for Deep State's diploma mills.
“Uniform”?
As in Lets make homeschooled kids as stupid and brainwashed as the kids we teach?
And they are able to get along with people in many different age ranges - something that public school kids have a tough time with because they are forced to primarily associate with other kids their own ages.
Because uniform standards work so well now in government schools!
We do have uniform standards - everyone knows the homeschool uniform is pajamas.
Agreed: “Standards” are most likely an attempt to incrementally control the curriculum, and encroach on parental rights.
I am opposed to these “standards”, even if that means a few kids don’t get good schooling. (And Public school would probably be worse anyway.)
+1
+1
Also, “science” actually changes. There are hardly any respected specialists today that believe Charles Darwin’s _original_ theory, unmodified.
So why prescribe “correct” ideas instead of letting ideas compete?
+1
Agreed.
(But there will always be a rare few bad cases somewhere that will be held up as reasons for “standards” and government control.)
:-D
There is a high school right down the road from where I live with a state-of-art facility. They publish a happy bulletin with fantastic smiling programs--but their "graduates' fall short of state standards. 50% below basic state math standards. Like the rest of the nation, half of them can't read.
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