A Note from the Executive Director

CRHE was featured in a Slate article by Jessica Huseman on August 27th. See The Frightening Power of the Home-School Lobby. This month, each section of our newsletter will draw on Jessica's article.

CRHE’s Rachel Coleman did a radio interview with Tommy Tucker of WWL First News in New Orleans on August 31st.

The current lack of homeschool oversight makes it extraordinarily difficult to do good research on homeschooling, but few realize just how hard. In her article, Jessica Huseman not only noted the lack of good research on homeschooled students’ academic performance and the rate of abuse and neglect within homeschooling communities but also quoted Stanford researcher Rob Reich calling for legislatures to pass laws to gather data on homeschooling. Is good research on homeschooling really so hard to do that it actually would require passing a law to gather data for a study? In a word, yes.

Eight states require all homeschooled students to take standardized tests either annually or during certain grades. However, three of these do not require parents to send their students’ scores to state or local educational officials, and the remaining five do not collect the test scores at the state level. Until this year, one state, Arkansas, required all students to be tested and gathered the scores into an annual report. Unfortunately, Arkansas’ reports do not show the distribution of students, offering only an overall average for each grade in each subject, and do not include information about students’ poverty level or their parents’ educational background. These omissions severely limit the analytical value of the data. Further, Arkansas’ testing requirement was repealed in the last legislative session.

Why does the lack of state-level testing data for homeschoolers make conducting research so difficult? Put simply, attempts to study homeschooled students’ academic performance by asking parents to submit their students’ scores will only capture the scores of students whose parents chose both to have their children tested and to submit their children’s scores to such a study. Such studies will not and cannot gather a random sample that would enable them to speak more authoritatively about how homeschooled students perform on average. Instead, these sorts of studies tend to show only how well middle and upper-middle class homeschooled students with well-educated and involved parents perform.

At CRHE, we are doing what we can with the data we have available to us, but Prof. Reich is correct that conducting good research on homeschooling without laws mandating testing and data collection will remain extraordinarily difficult.

Homeschool parents often become very antsy when we discuss homeschooling and abuse in the same sentence. On some level this is understandable. In the early days of homeschooling, the practice was often viewed with a great deal of suspicion, and for some, discussions of homeschooling and child abuse reawaken that spector. Unfortunately, those fears can get in the way of addressing a very real problem: what happens when an abusive parent uses homeschooling to hide or indensify their abuse?

Jessica Huseman wrote about a study by child abuse specialist Barbara Knox, in which Knox and her colleagues examined 38 cases of child torture and found that nearly 50% of the cases involved homeschooling. Similarly, in collecting preliminary data on child abuse and neglect fatalities among homeschooled children, we have found enough data to suggest that such fatalities may be higher among homeschooled students than among students who attend school. These findings are not surprising given the relative amount of control homeschooling parents have over their children’s lives. As Knox put it, the lack of oversight for homeschooling “makes it easier [for abusive parents] to disenroll children from public school to further isolate them and escalate abuse to the point of reaching torture.”

Homeschooling parents who are concerned about homeschooling becoming associated with child abuse---and understandably so---would do well to advocate for laws that provide safeguards to protect homeschooled children and to prevent abusive parents from using homeschooling to hide (and escalate) their abuse. For more information, take a look at some of the stories listed on the Homeschooling’s Invisible Children database.

In her article, Jessica Huseman wrote that “When Farris established the HSLDA in the mid-1980s, home schooling was illegal across the country.” This is a common misperception held by many journalists and even some scholars, largely because it is the story currently told by HSLDA and other homeschool advocates in that organization’s circles. However, this story is largely a myth. As education historian Milton Gaither explains it in his book book, Homeschool: An American History:

"If one reads the closed communion memories and artifacts, one might learn that “the modern homeschool movement was started through a miraculous moving of the Holy Spirit” that began around 1983, prior to which time homeschooling was legal “in only five states,” or perhaps was banned “in all but three states.” It “was treated as a crime in almost every state” and parents who homeschooled “frequently faced jail terms and the loss of their children to foster care.” But “because of HSLDA, which has won virtually every legal battle it has fought, and because of the warm support of Republican legislatures, home schooling is now legal in all 50 states.”

"If you read HSLDA’s critics, on the other hand, you get the impression that, while there were some problems, on the whole homeschooling has always been fairly easy to do in most places so long as homeschoolers were civil, and in those places where it was not easy, the heavy lifting had been done before HSLDA even came on the scene."

You can read more about the complex and varied history of homeschooling on our state histories of homeschooling page or learn more about the early history of homeschooling by reading through the Growing Without Schooling archives. Growing Without Schooling, a newsletter for early homeschoolers, was founded by John Holt in 1977.