A recent article published by ProPublica and Slate scrutinizes, among other things, the role of the Home School Legal Defense Association in pushing back against attempts to place new regulations on home education. Early on, the piece highlights one such battle where the association was successful, as it often is, at defeating such an attempt:
After the story of the emaciated boys appeared in national newspapers, New Jersey Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg was moved to introduce new legislation. “My question was, how does someone fall off the face of the earth so that no one knows they exist? I was told it was because he was homeschooled,” she said.
Her bill, introduced in 2004, would’ve required parents, for the first time, to notify the state that their children were being homeschooled, have them complete the same annual tests as public school students, and submit proof of annual medical tests.
Soon afterward, a small group of homeschooling parents began following Weinberg around the capitol. The barrage of phone calls from homeschooling advocates so jammed her office phone lines that staffers had to use their private cellphones to conduct business. “You would have thought I’d recommended the end of the world as we know it,” said Weinberg. “Our office was besieged.”
Florida has seen its own debates over home school regulations, often brought on similarly by well-intended efforts to protect children from abuse.
Home schooling rules came under scrutiny after the death of Nubia Barahona, whose parents pulled her from public school. The case was unspeakably horrific. But it came amid a major, systemic breakdown in the state’s child-protection system that began while the victims were still in school.
So did the case justify new scrutiny for home schooling, or new regulations? Or was that beside the point?
Similar questions arose during Florida’s most recent debate over home school regulations, which arose amid efforts to retool the state’s adoption laws last legislative session. The News Service of Florida reported some advocates proposed barring parents from teaching their newly adopted children at home.
Sen. Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican and sponsor of the Senate version of the bill, said he had asked the Department of Children and Families whether home-schooling families “are more inclined to abuse or neglect children than anybody else. And of course, there was absolutely no evidence … that would support discriminating against home-schooling families.”
Gaetz said there are 900 children in the state foster-care system who are legally available for adoption, with many being older children or having special needs. “They’re typically hard to place,” he said.
But some children’s advocates say the question is not whether home-schooling families are more likely to abuse children, but that home-schooling removes the possibility that teachers or school personnel will notice a child in jeopardy.
“Children who are home-schooled are isolated, not socializing with other children, and are not a part of the greater community,” said Cindy Lederman, a dependency court judge in Miami-Dade County’s 11th Judicial Circuit with 20 years experience. “In virtually every case in my courtroom where the parents claimed the children were being home-schooled, the children were not receiving education, they were not being taught by qualified people and they were not learning. It was just a clever way to hide the abuse and neglect.”
The ProPublica piece raises a similar point.
Milton Gaither, a professor of education at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and the author of “Homeschool: An American History,” pointed out that private schools, by their nature, also fulfill a need homeschooling does not: to have eyes other than the parents’ observing the child.
According to the News Service, Gaetz explained why the Florida Legislature opted not to restrict home schooling for adoptive parents.
“I’m going to choose a loving family every time,” he said. “And when you consider the fact that the president of the Senate, Andy Gardiner, and his wife Camille home-school their three children, how can public policy in our state say that Andy Gardiner and Camille Gardiner couldn’t adopt a child?”
Sen. Nancy Detert, a Venice Republican known for sponsoring legislation aimed at improving conditions in foster care, said she “wholeheartedly supports” the bill’s goal of finding permanent homes for the children.
As to the home-schooling provision, she said, “That’s a more complex issue. If you are a foster parent, we don’t allow you to home-school because schools have to report abuse. And so the more eyes we have on a child, the safer the child is. (But) once you adopt, it’s a different story, because that child is now yours.”
In other words, if home schooling families are no more likely to commit abuse than parents who make other educational choices, why should the state place new restrictions on the parents who teach their children at home, and do so responsibly? This and other harmful stereotypes — like the trope about home-school children lacking “socialization” — keep resurfacing, even as home education becomes increasingly mainstream. And those stereotypes get cited to justify attempts to place new regulations or restrictions on home schooling.
Some people might disagree with the rhetoric or positions of the HSLDA. We’ve aired views on this blog that might be at odds with theirs. But the group isn’t wrong to worry that parents who teach their children at home could become the subject of unjustified suspicion. At some point, whether children go to public school, private school, or their own living room to learn, their parents are responsible for deciding what works for their children. From time to time, that principle needs defenders.
