Homeschooling under fire

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: the growing homeschool crackdown.

Since the pandemic, the homeschooling movement has surged in popularity across the US and the UK. But some lawmakers believe that when more children are taught at home, there’s a greater risk of abuse.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: They’re proposing tighter rules ostensibly to “protect children.” But what does that mean for the freedom to homeschool?

MAST: Here's Paul Butler with the story, reported and written by Bekah McCallum.

PAUL BUTLER: Pushback on homeschooling is nothing new. Decades ago, some argued that parents couldn’t provide a quality education without a teaching degree. Then opponents focused on claims that homeschooled students lack socialization. Today, regulators have another concern: neglect and abuse.

High-profile abuse cases have fueled legislation in places like West Virginia, Illinois, and in the U.K. In January, some members of parliament pointed to the death of 10-year-old Sara Sharif. Liberal MP Will Forster:

WILL FORSTER: Her father and stepmother used this loophole in homeschooling to withdraw the child from school, because the signs were being noticed and this new legislation could have protected her and should protect others.

Concerns about child abuse are not unfounded. Last year, the U.S.-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education reported 423 cases of “abuse and neglect in homeschool environments” over the last 25 years. By comparison, a study in 2000 estimated that in the 1990s alone, roughly 290,000 students nationwide experienced some sort of physical or sexual abuse while at public school.

Even so, the concerns over abuse in homeschooling shouldn’t merely be brushed aside. According to HSLDA international director Kevin Boden, the possibility of abuse could go up as homeschooling becomes more common..

KEVIN BODEN: If you have 6 million kids that are educated at home versus 2 million, the chance of something happening if there's 6 million to it versus 2, that’s just a numbers game.

But recent research suggests the problem isn’t really homeschooling. Brian Ray is president of the National Home Education Research Institute—based in Salem, Oregon. In a 2022 study, Ray found that, after controlling things like parent education level, household income, years in foster care, and ethnicity, the data is clear:

BRIAN RAY: There’s no difference in the abuse and neglect rates between the institutionally schooled and the homeschooled.

Still, some advocacy groups claim that stricter homeschooling laws are crucial for better protecting children.

For instance, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill currently being debated by the UK parliament would require—among other things—for home educating parents to provide local authorities with extensive details. Each time a parent veers off course by enrolling a child in a new sport or hiring a new tutor, they would have to notify authorities within 15 days. That’s not the only reporting the bill requires.

Wendy Charles-Warner is chairwoman of Education Otherwise, a home education advocacy group.

WENDY CHARLES-WARNER: The bill requires the parent to declare how many hours each parent spends with the child and that includes out of school hours, weekends and holidays, because they're educating. So the level of intrusiveness into the family privacy is extreme.

In this country, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education released a model bill last July called the Make Homeschool Safe Act. That legislation called for local registrations, minimum teacher qualifications or educator oversight, student immunization records, and a catalog of other regulations that many argued would make homeschooling more difficult. The thinking seemed to be: by requiring more transparency about their homeschool plans, it would result in better and safer education.

But National Home Education Research Institute’s Brian Ray maintains that there’s no data that supports that claim.

RAY: The simple answer is we have no empirical evidence that that's true. So if you want to use research evidence as a way to control policy, there is none, okay?

To back that up, Ray pointed to another 2022 study, this one by Angela Dills, a professor of economics and a fellow with EdChoice, a nonprofit advocating for educational freedom.

Dills’ research, published in the Journal of School Choice, looked at child abuse-related deaths from 1979 to 2008. During that time frame, many states made legal provisions for homeschooling.

ANGELA DILLS: I can look at the effect of those laws that led to an increase in homeschooling and see if there’s a change in child fatalities during that period. And mostly, what I see is not a whole lot.

She insists that homeschooling on its own does not create an environment for abuse.

DILLS: I think empirically it’s a claim that’s just not substantiated with research.

Child abuse is rightly troubling. Everyone WORLD spoke to for this story shares a common belief that children must be protected. Brian Ray of NHERI says the difference is in how that’s accomplished.

RAY: For them, it basically comes down to philosophy … that they think that the civil government should control all of us more to somehow try to reduce bad behavior.

Restrictions do aim at the real problem of child abuse. But HSLDA’s Kevin Boden says that by targeting homeschooling, law-abiding families may get caught in the crossfire. And restricting homeschooling may do very little to protect at-risk children.

BODEN: Let's do the right thing, which is the hard work of some deal with a child neglect case as a child neglect case under the child neglect laws of the state of which every state has them, and so let's follow them. Let's deal with known risk factors and not punt to homeschooling because we think that that's the that's how we can win, or because it's somehow more available to us.

For WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.

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