What Does a Homeschooler Know About Education?

Should a homeschooler be trusted with setting policy and standards for a state’s public schools?

That’s the question being asked in Texas, where Republican governor Greg Abbott recently appointed Donna Bahorich chairman of the state board of education. Bahorich homeschooled her three now-grown sons from kindergarten through eighth grade.

Progressives have been both predictable and vicious in their criticism. Despite Bahorich’s decade of work in Texas politics, a Texas Public Radio headline derisively dubbed her a “home-school mom.” The Austin Chronicle labeled her positions “extreme” and criticized her as “a vocal advocate” for “right-wing friendly curriculum standards.”

“If you only look at the superficial, perhaps there’s not a straight line connecting homeschooling and public schooling,” Bahorich told me in an interview last week. “I understand people are confused. To pretend that I’m not ‘out of the box’ would be crazy. All I can say is I didn’t get this job for no reason — it’s based on my track record.”

So what is her track record? Long active as a volunteer in local Republican politics, Bahorich graduated to managing the 2005 state-senate campaign of talk-radio host Dan Patrick. Patrick won, and Bahorich served at various times as his legislative director, communications manager, and campaign treasurer. (Patrick is currently lieutenant governor of Texas.)

In 2012, Bahorich won election in her own right to the state board of education against an opponent, Traci Jensen, who was both a former classroom teacher and an education professor with a doctorate in curriculum and instruction. Evidently, the 1.7 million residents of the state board of education’s District Six liked Bahorich’s policy credentials just fine.

For the last two years, Bahorich has served as chair of the board’s committee on school initiatives as well as its liaison to the state education commissioner on charter-school issues. She is also a member of the board’s ad hoc committee on the long-range plan for public education.

Is that enough experience to serve as chairman of a state board of education? The Texas Freedom Network doesn’t think so. The lefty advocacy group issued a statement calling Bahorich an “ideologue.” It’s worth noting that TFN was founded by Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and is run by a former public-affairs director for Planned Parenthood Federation of Austin.

In 2014, TFN zealously supported Abbott’s Democratic opponent (you might remember her name). But Abbott won that election with a crushing 60 percent of the vote. There’s a fair case to be made that Governor Abbott has a better sense of what Texans want from their education system than does the laughably named Texas Freedom Network.

National progressives noticed Bahorich’s appointment, too. From the fortified redoubts of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, Slate’s Amanda Marcotte offered her two cents: “Texas is bent on undermining public schools, not fixing them. This appointment only serves as further proof.”

This view of homeschooling is endemic on the progressive Left, which has long fetishized compulsory public education as the most exalted expression of democratic values and civic commitment. Homeschooling, by contrast, is viewed by leftist panjandrums as a social illness fueled by class privilege and leading inevitably to theocracy.

For her part, Bahorich rejects the characterization that she is intent on tearing down the public-education system. “The governor has a vision to make public education in Texas the best it can be,” she says. “I share that vision 100 percent.”

If that’s the case, why didn’t she send her kids to public schools?

Her son learned to read in no time, and Bahorich found herself enjoying the unexpected challenge of educating him in the home.

“It was an accident,” she insists. Bahorich knew her family would have to move the year her youngest son entered kindergarten. Rather than pulling him from school and plopping him down in a new one in midyear, Bahorich decided to try teaching him herself at home. She remembers wondering: “How badly could I screw up kindergarten?”

Not at all, it turned out. Her son learned to read in no time, and Bahorich found herself enjoying the unexpected challenge of educating him in the home. “I had the freedom to homeschool, I had the choice, and it was working, so I kept on doing it. That’s all there was to it.”

All three of Bahorich’s sons eventually attended a private high school in the Houston area, where the youngest became a National Merit Scholar. And all three ultimately became engineers — one mechanical, one chemical, and one petroleum. Not a theocrat among them. That’s a pretty good track record for an accidental homeschooler.

The Texas state board of education meets next week for its first full public meeting with Bahorich as chairman. She knows the mud-slinging is likely to continue until she has served long enough to establish herself in the position. Once she has actually made some decisions, she says, people should feel free to criticize her.

But critics, whether in Fort Worth or Fort Greene, need not worry that she’s going to shutter the public schools and force Texans to homeschool. “I’m not one of those types who goes around preaching homeschooling to people,” she says. “It’s a deeply personal decision and you have to come to it on your own.”

That seems like something the ladies of the Texas Freedom Foundation and Planned Parenthood ought to be able to wrap their heads around.