The fact that both blue and red states alike have recently considered increasing oversight of homeschooling in response to horrendous cases of abused homeschooled children should tell you there is a problem in American homeschooling policy. Homeschooled children keep being abused and neglected, year after year, in the same exact ways and yet no one does anything about it. No one can do anything about it, because in most states, homeschooling policy intentionally has no mechanisms for distinguishing between loving, safe homeschooling families and abusive homeschooling families.
However, reading rightwing media about these handful of bipartisan state efforts to protect homeschooled children might give you the impression that there is a formidable, powerful, and well-funded group of shadowy figures in the United States trying to ban homeschooling and imprison homeschooling parents. Rightwing media has portrayed these bipartisan efforts in an exaggerated and violent light: “Illinois Democrats bully homeschool families,” the Washington Examiner complained. “Illinois Homeschoolers Brace for Assault on Parental Freedom,” warned National Review. “The Anti-Homeschool Movement Wants Control of Our Children,” declared Focus on the Family.
There is just one problem:
There is no anti-homeschooling movement or lobby in the United States.
Yes, you read that right. I will repeat it:
There is no anti-homeschooling movement or lobby in the United States.
What exists, instead, is a ragtag group of homeschool alumni and child protection professionals who promote what is called “responsible homeschooling.” Responsible homeschooling is homeschooling policies that include basic, built-in safety measures to ensure children’s rights to quality education in safe and nurturing environments are respected. For example, public school teachers are mandatory reporters—people who are legally required to report known or suspected child abuse to the proper authorities. But homeschooling teachers are not required by law in many states to be mandatory reporters or to even take a basic class on understanding child abuse. Responsible homeschooling advocates might argue we should change our homeschooling policies such that all teachers—whether public, private, or home—are mandatory reporters who receive training on awareness and prevention. But they would never argue for a ban on homeschooling. That would not only be a political disaster, it also would not true to their deep affection for homeschooling’s possibilities when done well.
To support responsible homeschooling is not anti-homeschooling—unless your idea of homeschooling involves actual child abuse or neglect. What is truly anti-homeschooling is tolerating and doing nothing about these evils. Because the longer homeschool leaders and homeschooling parents ignore and deny the existence of these evils, the greater the problem will become—until it gets so large the general public might very well clamor for a ban.
I know all this because I lived it. A decade ago, I helped found two national non-profit organizations to advocate for homeschooled children and homeschool alumni: the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) in 2013 and Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) in 2014. Both organizations have, at various points, been labeled as “the greatest threat to homeschooling” by the very real pro-homeschooling movement and lobby. If anyone or any group was at the forefront of an anti-homeschooling movement or lobby in the United States, it would have been me, my homeschooled friends and colleagues, and our organizations.
For over a decade we have fought to elevate the voices of people who actually experienced being homeschooled, convince the pro-homeschooling movement and lobby to take our experiences as well as child abuse and neglect in homeschooling seriously, and do something—anything!—to address this pressing issue.
All we got was a few half-hearted and half-baked pages on child abuse awareness and prevention on the website of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). After over a decade of advocacy and pleading by alumni, HSLDA and state homeschool organizations still, to this day, have made no significant efforts to develop the most basic of self-policing measures. HSLDA has invested none of their 17-million-dollar annual budget towards community awareness and educational campaigns.
If anyone should be anti-homeschool, we should be. We have screamed ourselves hoarse and yet no one does anything.
But here’s the truth: I have never opposed homeschooling. Neither did the two organizations I helped found, CRHE and HARO. Both organizations went out of their way to not only declare they support homeschooling, but also to try partnering with and developing resources for homeschooling communities. We were summarily rejected.
In short, we tried internal reform. We tried to encourage self-policing. We tried everything that is not government oversight and yet the pro-homeschooling movement and lobby were still entirely disinterested. This is because this movement and lobby lack imagination. They cannot imagine outside of their black-and-white, Manichean thinking—their belief that any and every form of community or government intervention in their home affairs is evil. This leaves homeschooling almost entirely unregulated.
I would actually go so far as to say the efforts of homeschool alumni for the past decade, while brave and brilliant and full of energy, were perhaps too conciliatory and polite towards the pro-homeschooling movement and lobby. We mistakenly thought homeschool leaders and homeschooling parents would listen to us if we just used the right phrasing or couched our points with the right Bible verses.
We were wrong. It didn’t work.
Over a decade later, it still hasn’t worked.
Of course, movements take time and organizations like CRHE are continuing the hard work of organizing alumni to help current homeschooled children. But the fact remains that the pro-homeschooling movement and lobby—led by HSLDA and their 17-million-dollar annual budget—faces no comparable opposition. HARO shut down in 2017. At its peak, our bank account never had more than a few thousand dollars. CRHE still exists but, just like when I was involved, it is run primarily by volunteers—homeschool alumni who experienced abuse and neglect and have very few resources to dedicate to community organizing and political lobbying. CRHE’s budget in 2023 was $58,825, a mere 0.35% of HSLDA’s budget. That HARO and CRHE were both called “the greatest threat to homeschooling” (and CRHE also called the “number one adversary” of HSLDA) is a huge compliment to these organizations and what they accomplished with very little.
But again, CRHE and HARO were never anti-homeschooling. They merely opposed the United States’s model of completely unregulated homeschooling. And there are no other organizations that advocate for homeschooled children and homeschool alumni. This means there are no organizations that advocate for homeschooled children and homeschool alumni by supporting a ban on homeschooling.
If there is no actual anti-homeschooling movement or lobby in the United States, why do rightwing media and homeschool apologists claim there is? This is an important question. The answer is twofold: First, while there is no anti-homeschooling movement or lobby in the United States, there are individuals like Harvard Professor Elizabeth Bartholet who support limited bans. But Bartholet and a few other professors do not equal a movement or lobby. This does not stop rightwing media and homeschool apologists, however, from claiming these individuals are a powerful opposition force making threatening changes to homeschooling culture or policies.
Second, rightwing media and homeschool apologists are so religiously opposed to any government oversight of homeschooling, that they see even the smallest, most reasonable oversight measures as inherently tyrannical. As noted by Robert Kunzman in Write These Laws On Your Children, “The right of parents to raise and educate their children—and the complete lack of government authority in that regard—is perhaps the foundational conviction in homeschooling. For conservative Christian homeschoolers, this clearly has theological underpinnings” (p. 181).
This foundational conviction of homeschoolers—that community or government should play no role whatsoever in homeschooling, or really, families in general—transcends conservative evangelical and Catholic homeschoolers. As I wrote for Religion Dispatches in 2021, “Homeschoolers of all stripes react strongly to any attempts by any governmental body to protect children’s rights in the context of homeschooling.” One of the most outspoken opponents of Illinois’s recent effort to protect homeschooled children was Illinois State Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Black Democrat who called the effort a “pipeline to the criminal justice system for parents.”
While these attacks against responsible homeschooling advocates use exaggerated and inaccurate rhetoric, they do raise an interesting question: Should there be an anti-homeschooling movement in the United States?
If you asked me 10 years ago while we were launching HARO and CRHE, I would have said “No!” emphatically. Seeking to ban homeschooling wastes time and energy because (1) it would just send all the homeschoolers underground and (2) it is not politically feasible. However, I feel somewhat different today. While I still oppose homeschooling bans because I really do support homeschooling as an educational option, today I see potential value in an opposition movement that pushes for more extreme measures. It could certainly help move the Overton Window such that basic oversight is no longer seen as extreme.
I think, however, that homeschool alumni and other responsible homeschooling advocates must, at the very least, become more confrontational about the realities of child abuse and neglect in homeschooling. It’s time to interrupt, inconvenience, and confront homeschoolers with the wages of their sins. Instead of applying to speak at evangelical homeschool conventions and getting rejected, perhaps we need to employ direct action like protesting outside those conventions and directly challenging homeschool leaders and homeschooling parents in person, on their turf.
After a decade of alumni attempts to work with and partner with the pro-homeschooling movement and lobby, homeschool leaders and homeschooling parents still have zero collective will to make changes. Self-policing is clearly not just an impossibility, but also an impossibility that is the direct, intentional result of the movement and lobby’s leadership as well as members. Loving, kind, and patient critiques from alumni have their place, but they have proven insufficient in moving the needle towards protecting homeschooled children. If it takes an anti-homeschooling movement to change that, I am becoming less and less opposed.