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Created by homeschool lobbyist and parent Rodger Williams, Homeschooling Backgrounder is one of the newest tools deployed by homeschooling leaders and parents to ignore or discredit alumni concerns. Here’s what to know about the astroturfing project.
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Child abuse and neglect in homeschooling communities is a serious problem requiring serious solutions. For the last decade and a half, adult homeschool alumni have done everything they can to raise awareness and bring attention to this problem and to advocate for responsible homeschooling. And for each and every one of those years, homeschooling leaders and parents have done everything they can to ignore or discredit the very children they raised or inspired simply because the children refuse to pretend any longer that child abuse and neglect in homeschooling communities is insignificant.
One of the newest tools deployed by homeschooling leaders and parents to ignore or discredit alumni concerns is a website called Homeschooling Backgrounder. Created by Oregon homeschool lobbyist and homeschooling parent Rodger Williams, Homeschooling Backgrounder attempts to criticize homeschool alumni stories and claims and push back against efforts to protect homeschooled children from abuse and neglect. The website most frequently targets the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), a national nonprofit organization created by homeschool alumni to champion the rights of homeschooled children. (Full disclosure: I am a founding board member of CRHE, though I have not been involved with the organization since 2017.) In fact, at least 40% of Homeschooling Backgrounder’s content directly or indirectly focuses on CRHE’s work.
While Homeschooling Backgrounder is actually not new (it was created between 2017 and 2019), it only recently became the go-to source for attacking the work of homeschool alumni. This embrace of Homeschooling Backgrounder has clearly been coordinated among the highest power structures in homeschooling over the last few years. Nearly every Christian homeschool organization now either prominently links to Homeschooling Backgrounder on their website or has one or more pages on their website featuring Homeschooling Backgrounder’s claims about abuse and neglect in homeschooling (see examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
The National Alliance of Christian Home Education Leadership (also called simply “The Alliance”), a national support group for statewide homeschool organizations that adhere to evangelical beliefs and practices, promotes and partners with Homeschooling Backgrounder as well. In fact, Alliance board member Tara Bentley also serves as current Backgrounder staff. Other national homeschool organizations, such as Michael Farris’s Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and Brian D. Ray’s National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), similarly promote, cite, or outright partner with Homeschooling Backgrounder.
In short, Homeschooling Backgrounder is not a grassroots project by any means. It is being proactively promoted by, partnered with, and run by the most powerful figures within the evangelical Christian homeschooling movement. It is, therefore, more accurate to describe Homeschooling Backgrounder as a form of astroturfing. Astroturfing, which refers to the fake grass used to line sports arenas, is defined as “corporations or political parties using hired agents to create the impression that a view they wish to promote has widespread public support.” In the case of Homeschooling Backgrounder, it is a project disseminated by and run by homeschooling leaders and lobbyists who cite the project as if it was an independent, neutral authority on homeschool research.
But it’s not.
The Man Behind the Curtain: Rodger Williams
The Homeschooling Backgrounder website was launched in July 2019, though it was first registered in December 2017. At the time of its launch, it was primarily a project of one individual: Rodger Williams. Though the project claimed to also involve “a contributing team of Canadian and U.S. homeschool advocates,” only Williams authored articles for it on its original website. Williams, who describes himself as “an Oregon homeschool advocate turned researcher,” is a homeschooling parent who became a board member and legislative coordinator and lobbyist for the Oregon statewide Christian homeschooling organization Oregon Christian Home Education Network (OCEANetwork).
In an interview of Williams by OCEANetwork, Williams explains that he was inspired to tell his wife to homeschool their child several decades ago after hearing evangelical parenting teacher and animal abuse proponent James Dobson speak about homeschooling on his Focus on the Family radio show. Williams, at the time a political activist, and his wife ultimately homeschooled all four of their children through high school graduation in Portland, Oregon. While homeschooling in Oregon, Williams got on the mailing list for OCEANetwork in its early days and was soon asked to join the organization’s board.
For Williams, homeschooling—and defending parents’ ability to homeschool—is a religious calling: “For Christians, homeschooling is a tool to disciple your children, to provide a safe environment… The Lord lets me do this! This is my assignment! And I’m somewhat good at it and I think it’s important that I continue as long as I can.”
Williams believes his calling is more than merely religiously themed, however. He also sees it as spiritual warfare. In his OCEANetwork interview, Williams says, “I’ll give you one example of a time when I believe we encountered spiritual warfare. And there have been several.” He then recounts how, “Ten years ago a bill was presented to lower the compulsory attendance age, and there was a hearing on it. We had told the Department of Education we strongly objected to it because we had been promised during the hearings that homeschoolers would not be affected.” On the way to the hearing, Williams says, he experienced “bad angels messing with MapQuest” and was late. Fortunately, the hearing itself was running late as well because of a “good angel interfering with the recording machine so that they had to get a new one.” “Some might say that was a bunch of coincidences,” Williams concludes, “but I don’t think so because I’ve seen other similar things and it all adds up that there is spiritual warfare going on… You can just follow the back and forth going on in the spiritual realm.”
While passionate, Williams does not appear to have a background or any credentials in research or statistics. He has no declared professional degrees. His “research” is not peer-reviewed and has never been published in academic or scientific journals. He has never conducted his own studies of homeschooled children or alumni. Instead, as CRHE already noted back in 2018, he is merely “a former homeschool father and a lobbyist” who “posts his own statistical analysis on a website.” “Website” is generous, though; it is more a halfhearted blog.
Williams’ experience with homeschooling, in other words, is simply being a homeschooling parent and an attack dog of sorts for OCEANetwork. As OCEANetwork details, Williams is deployed to confront “ESDs and school districts when they go beyond their authority in their dealings with homeschool families” in Oregon and “also does research on homeschool student outcomes”—a reference to Williams’ Homeschooling Backgrounder project. “He has produced important evidence that homeschool leaders in other states are using to defend homeschool freedoms there,” they explain. “His research topics include homeschool academic achievement and child abuse/fatalities vs. the public school track record.”
Through his lobbying efforts with OCEANetwork, Williams also has a track record of opposing common sense legislative solutions that could help homeschooled children experiencing abuse or neglect. For example, in 2012, the Oregon legislature considered House Bill 4016, an effort to require volunteers who work with public or private organizations that deal with children to be mandatory reporters of child abuse and neglect. Speaking on behalf of OCEANetwork, Williams told Oregon Live that the bill “would undermine the ability of organizations across the state to utilize volunteers to better our society.”
The Purpose of Homeschooling Backgrounder
Homeschooling Backgrounder’s initial purpose was to “counterbalance current public criticisms of homeschooling that are based primarily on speculation, presuppositions, and opinions” and thereby be a “resource for policy makers and journalists.” “We support the use of the scientific method,” its website claimed upon its launch in 2019, “when investigating homeschooling outcomes. This includes gathering systematic data as much as possible, rather than citing anecdotes.”
While the above purpose might seem innocuous or even helpful at face value, you need to read between the lines to understand what is really going on here. “Counterbalance current public criticisms of homeschooling” refers to the growing mass of homeschool alumni who criticize the almost-entirely deregulated state of homeschool policy in the United States. Many of these alumni have created networks to connect with and support one another as they publicly share their personal stories of abuse and neglect. These personal stories are the “anecdotes” that Homeschooling Backgrounder mentions.
While current homeschool alumni organizations like CRHE (and former organizations like Homeschoolers Anonymous and Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out) have conducted their own systematic research, they have—for various reasons—focused significantly on sharing alumni stories. Some of these stories have garnered widespread coverage in mainstream media. To counter these narratives and the publicity they have received, Homeschooling Backgrounder was created. In short, the goal of Homeschooling Backgrounder is to keep policymakers and journalists from believing homeschool alumni’s claims that there is newsworthy abuse and neglect occurring in homeschooling communities.
One way the project does this is by making visual graphics to compare homeschool student fatalities with other child fatalities. The implication of the graphics is that we should ignore homeschool student fatalities because the number of other fatalities is higher. Here are a few examples of these graphics:
As you can see, the graphics are nearly identical: they all argue (erroneously) that focusing on murdered homeschooled children somehow renders other murdered children “nameless and forgotten.” There is one curious difference, however: the graphics for the states of Michigan, Utah, and West Virginia are all credited to Rodger Williams, but the graphic for Connecticut—which is otherwise identical to the others—is credited to the National Home Education Research Institute. This suggests not merely close partnership between Homeschooling Backgrounder and NHERI, but also active collaboration.
Growth and Coordination
While Homeschooling Backgrounder began in 2017 with Rodger Williams, as of 2026 the project has added several more staff members, including: the aforementioned Tara Bentley, board member of the Alliance and the Executive Director of the Indiana Association of Home Educators (IAHE); Pam Lucashu, Legislative Liaison Emerita for the Education Association of Christian Homeschoolers of Connecticut (TEACH CT); Carolyn Martin, Director of Government Relations for the Christian Home Educators of Colorado (CHEC); Tauna Meyer, Digital Communications Manager for OCEANetwork; and Linda Patchin, Chairperson of Homeschool Idaho (HSI). And, while he is not listed as a staff member, notorious homeschool apologist researcher and accused child abuser Brian D. Ray—founder of the National Home Education Research Institute—has written multiple pieces for Homeschooling Backgrounder and Ray’s flawed research is featured prominently throughout the project.
HSLDA, the largest homeschool lobbying organization in the world, cites Williams and the Backgrounder to justify their mission of completely removing all forms of oversight over homeschooling. See, for example, how HSLDA attorney T.J. Schmidt uses Williams to downplay the seriousness of abuse and neglect in homeschooling, writing in 2020 that, “One researcher, Rodger Williams, reviewed reports from the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Education to calculate that ‘legally homeschooled students are 40% less likely to die by child abuse or neglect than the average student nationally.’” HSLDA does not mention who Williams is or what his credentials are, merely that he is a “researcher.” Schmidt, a homeschool alum who received his law degree from an unaccredited, online law school for homeschoolers founded by disgraced homeschool leader and accused sexual predator Bill Gothard, infamously defended the Nauglers, homeschooling parents accused of physical and sexual abuse by their own child.
NHERI similarly and frequently cites Williams and the Backgrounder. For example, in Brian D. Ray’s 2018 article, “The Relationship Between the Degree of State Regulation of Homeschooling and the Abuse of Homeschool Children (Students),” Ray claims that, “There have been some indications of a lower incidence of abuse and neglect of home-educated children than those in the general public (Ray, 2018; Williams, 2017). That is, a comparison of homeschool abuse versus public school abuse or private school abuse suggests less abuse, if anything, of homeschool students.” To prove that homeschool students experience “less abuse,” as you can see, Ray cites “Williams, 2017,” which he describes later in his article as “empirical research that has addressed the abuse or neglect rates of homeschool children (students) as compared to the abuse or neglect of students in public schools and private schools.” But when you look at the citation, it is not an actual peer-reviewed, published study. It is nothing more than a blog post written by Williams and the blog post itself cites Ray. With such circular citations, Ray and Williams are engaging in sloppy propaganda, not “empirical research.”
This is not the only time Ray does this. In his 2022 article “Homeschool Abuse and Neglect Research: How Many Homeschooled Kids Are Abused?,” Ray creates a list of academic, scientific studies of homeschooling published in peer-reviewed journals and slips the aforementioned 2017 blog post by Williams in this list.
This appears intentionally deceptive by Ray. Quoting someone with no research credentials and whose website contains a plethora of blog posts by Ray himself is not a best practice in research. Ray should disclose his involvement and collaboration with Homeschooling Backgrounder if he is going to cite the website as authoritative for his own research. He also should not misconstrue and launder Williams’ claims as if they are the equivalent of academic or scientific research.
Conclusion
I think it’s revelatory that, instead of creating child protection policies and public awareness campaigns to prevent future child abuse and neglect, homeschooling leaders and parents decided to put all their time and energy into responding to homeschool alumni activism with the Homeschooling Backgrounder website. This is a perfect example of why the homeschooling movement will never be able to self-police. It has the resources to do so, but not the will. The will does not exist because, in order to self-police, the movement must first admit there is a problem—and admitting abuse and neglect happens in homeschooling communities is anathema to the movement’s core tenet of superiority. Thus, they marshal their resources to “shoot the messenger” (alumni) instead of addressing the core issue (child abuse and neglect).
Homeschooling leaders and parents are so dedicated to their superiority narrative that they apparently are willing to publicly astroturf their own defense. It would be one thing if Rodger Williams was just a homeschooling parent with nothing better to do than attack online homeschool alumni and had no connection to homeschooling power structures. However, he is a professional lobbyist for and a board member of the most influential homeschool organization in Oregon. Passing himself off as a professional researcher despite having neither professional credentials in research nor professional experience as a peer-reviewed or published researcher is deceptive at best. Yet the most powerful homeschooling leaders and organizations in the United States are playing along and collaborating with this facade.
And all this, because they refuse to listen to homeschool alumni.
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Author note: I attempted to reach Rodger Williams and Homeschooling Backgrounder several times to comment on this piece. They never responded.