No place like home school

Insight on the News, Sept 8, 1997 by David Wagner

Homeschooling is mainstream. It is legal in all 50 states, subject to varying regulations, most of which are not onerous. Though still representing only a small fraction of families, homeschooling firmly is on the map of alternatives to the public-school system, taking its place alongside private, religious and parochial schools and microschools.

Organizations representing the interests of public-school personnel predictably are opposed. The National Education Association, or NEA, the nation's leading public-school teachers' union, has an official resolution stating that "homeschooling programs cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience" and advocating a requirement that only "persons licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency" be allowed to homeschool.

Marcia Stein, a spokeswoman for the NEA, tells Insight her organization believes "all teachers should be licensed" but says the NEA is "not now and has never been involved in any kind of advocacy efforts regarding licensing requirements for homeschooling parents."

Rich Shipes, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association, or HSLDA, tells Insight: "Local NEA members sometimes spring up in opposition to things we do, but homeschooling is not their main target. They're not in much of a position to slam homeschoolers. If they were to campaign against it actively, the first reply would be, `Well, they're doing a good job and you're not.'"

For many on the political left, homeschoolers are an icon of right-wing weirdness. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a recent fund-raising letter from EMILY's List, a liberal feminist political-action committee, urged recipients to oppose the Senate candidacy of Rep. Linda Smith, a Washington Republican, on the grounds that Smith is "supported by homeschooling and pro-gun groups." Calls placed by Insight to the telephone number for EMILY's List in the nation's capital were not returned.

Twenty years ago, homeschoolers would have been more likely to stick flowers in a gun than to support the right to own one. The rise of the homeschooling/community-schooling movement originally was the work not of right-wing fundamentalists but of left-wing counterculturalists.

"When I worked for an educational-freedom organization about 15 years ago," recalls Douglas Alexander, director of higher education for the Seton Home Study School in Front Royal, Va., "I went up to New Hampshire to visit one of those community schools. The adults and the kids would sit in a circle and vote on everything. No status distinctions: If your blood was above room temperature and you could raise at least one hand, you had a vote. Not exactly fundamentalists, but they supported vouchers, homeschooling and anything else that would enhance their ability to educate their children in line with their values."

Later a second wave of families discovered homeschooling: conservative Christians. "The public schools became less congenial to people who had previously seen them as their proper home," says Alexander. Hence, the surveys showing that homeschooling parents are more likely than the general population to vote Republican and attend church regularly; hence, the demonization of homeschoolers in political screeds such as the EMILY's List fund-raising letter.

The third wave of homeschoolers consists of the "homeschooling-for-excellence" movement, led by parents with advanced degrees who see no point in delegating their children's education to others.

Increasingly, the Department of Education, or DOE, regards homeschooling as an accepted part of the landscape. A recent DOE working paper Homeschooling: An Overview for Education Policymakers, while noting that the necessary data-gathering for a comprehensive comparison has not been performed and may be prohibitively costly, nonetheless finds that "virtually all the available data show that those groups of homeschooling children for whom test scores are available are above average."

As for "socialization," the No. 1 debating point of homeschooling opponents, the DOE working paper notes: "Homeschooling children spend less time with same-aged children and more time with adults and children of different ages. They often participate in homeschool support groups, scouting groups, churches and other associations and have ample opportunity to learn to work with others outside their families. Most homeschooling families believe that it is preferable for children to spend more time with adults and they often express concern about the ill effects of peer pressure on a campus."

As the mainstreaming of home education advances, opportunities for contact with the public-school establishment will increase, leading to the question of whether offers of help from the government really are that -- or the camel's nose of crippling regulation.

The public-school district in Des Moines, Iowa, has a program that provides public-school resources to homeschoolers. Leslie Dahm, director of this program, explains it to Insight: