The state legislature is considering a bill that would subject homeschool parents to unfounded suspicion and excessive oversight.
The state legislature is considering a bill that would subject homeschool parents to unfounded suspicion and excessive oversight.
T he Illinois House of Representatives is considering a bill that would impose new, burdensome regulations on parents who homeschool their children. In a radical innovation, the bill would enable the state to send homeschooling parents to jail over late paperwork.
If adopted, the Homeschool Act would burden families with outdated red tape that many states have discarded. (See Vermont in 2023 and Wyoming in 2025). Through vague statutory language, the bill would also empower bureaucrats to circumvent the legislative process and add even more regulations in the future.
The Homeschool Act has garnered national media attention due to the magnitude of the opposition it has generated. Thousands packed the Capitol in Springfield during a committee hearing in March, and more than 50,000 people filed witness slips in opposition to the bill. Only about 500 filed in favor.
“Too often we do not trust parents to take the lead in their children’s education, especially when those parents are Black and brown, and especially when those parents are poor,” said Aziza Butler, a Chicagoland homeschool leader who testified against the bill, to the Chicago Tribune. “This bill targets homeschool parents and treats us as criminals, guilty until proven innocent,” she continued.
A lot must still happen before the bill becomes law — it has only passed out of committee — but it is important to understand, “Why now?”
The fingerprints on the Illinois bill may be traced back to the time of Covid-19 school closures in 2020, almost exactly five years ago. As we were all “flattening curves” and learning new phrases like “social distancing,” Harvard Magazine profiled law professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s anti-homeschooling advocacy in an article titled “The Risks of Homeschooling.”
Bartholet had penned an influential law-review article that same year: “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection. “Bartholet proposes reforms and calls for the radical rethinking of homeschooling and the constitutional rights of children,” said the announcement on Harvard’s website introducing the law-review article.
One of those radically rethought “reforms” would be to ban homeschooling as we know it today. “The new regime should deny the right to homeschool, subject to carefully delineated exceptions for situations in which homeschooling is needed and appropriate,” Bartholet wrote. “Parents should have a significant burden of justification for a requested exception.”
I did not learn about the Harvard Magazine article through my professional channels. Instead, on a fateful night in April of 2020, my youngest child, who was then 17 (you may be surprised to learn that she was homeschooled), thrust her smart phone into my face and said, “Can you even believe this?”
She then proceeded to scroll through the article to read juicy tidbits like, “Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.” Or this: “Bartholet notes that some of these parents are ‘extreme religious ideologues’ who question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy.”
In keeping with those early Covid days, the Harvard Magazine article went viral, prompting “a tsunami of critical responses” and unusually intense scrutiny of the law-review article by scholars who study education and homeschooling. In one such article, scholars wrote, “[W]e conclude that it suffers from contradictions, factual errors, statements of stereotyping, and a failure seriously to consider that the alternative to homeschooling — public schooling — shares the problems that she attributes to home education.”
“We are all homeschoolers now, by government decree,” they concluded. “That development appears to have left Professor Bartholet, well, schooled.”
We could not have known then, in the spring of 2020, that public schools in much of the country would remain closed for the next two years. Homeschooling became an oasis for many parents who would not have considered it but for the pandemic. And many remained homeschoolers after schools reopened in the fall of 2022. By some estimates, after decades of slow, steady growth, the number of children being homeschooled has about doubled since 2020. Growth has been even more rapid among Black and Hispanic parents.
After schools reopened, several media outlets began producing unflattering portrayals of homeschooling and homeschoolers. So much so that in December of 2023, Matthew Hennessey wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The knives are out for homeschooling . . . Somebody somewhere has decided this experiment in liberty has gone on long enough.”
A group of activists called the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), whose co-founder is acknowledged in professor Bartholet’s 2020 law-review article, published a “Parental-rights extremism messaging guide.” Echoes of professor Bartholet’s article appear throughout.
“For decades, Christian fundamentalists in the United States have worked to enact their regressive ideas about race and gender by using homeschooling to isolate and abuse their own children,” the guide reads. “Now having honed their tactics, they are moving to enact those ideas on society as a whole.”
In the summer of 2024, CRHE published a model bill called the Make Homeschool Safe Act, which is premised on the false notion that homeschooled children are at greater risk from caregivers than their publicly educated counterparts. The data do not support that assumption. See, for example, Ray and Shakeel’s 2023 study, “Demographics are Predictive of Child Abuse and Neglect but Homeschool Versus Conventional School is a Non-issue: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Survey,” or Dills’s 2022 study, “Homeschooling and Child Safety: Are Kids Safer at Home?”
In just one, extraordinarily wrongheaded example, CRHE’s model bill would ban any parent from withdrawing their child from public school if they had been the subject of a CPS investigation in the past three years — “regardless of the outcome of the investigation” — unless the parents agree to monthly risk assessments for a year.
One does not need to be a legal scholar to detect the due process infirmities in this proposal. The attempt to restrict a fundamental legal right — that parents can choose how to raise their own children — on such flimsy grounds speaks volumes about the worldview of its proponents.
In February, the CRHE activists briefed Illinois legislators about the “Parental-Rights Extremism movement.” They also announced that the Illinois Homeschool Act “draws from the Make Homeschool Safe Act.”
Follow the breadcrumbs. (1) Bartholet’s parental-rights absolutism to (2) CRHE’s assertion of parental-rights extremism to (3) their Make Homeschool Safe Act to (4) the Illinois Homeschool Act.
As a former parole and probation officer, I have seen child abuse up close. My heart grieves when I read about child abuse, and I believe that caregivers who violate their sacred trust with a child should be prosecuted. But I also agree with the Supreme Court of the United States: “The statist notion that governmental power should supersede parental authority in all cases because some parents abuse and neglect children is repugnant to American tradition.”
Supporters of bills like the Illinois Homeschool Act believe otherwise. For example, Dr. Veena Ramaiah, a board-certified child abuse pediatrician at the University of Chicago, said, “I would hope that the safety of even one child would trump the minimal effect on parental rights that more oversight would provide.”
In a nutshell, therein lies the clash of worldviews. Are we a nation that, as the Supreme Court has said, “recognizes that natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children?” Or should we treat all parents with suspicion and subject them all to oversight because some of them choose to abuse their children?
As a homeschooling dad and an advocate for homeschooling with the Home School Legal Defense Association, I believe that homeschooling is good for children, families, and for society. No system of education is perfect. But treating homeschooling as a “system” since its rise in the 1980s and comparing it to the public-school system over the same period demonstrates that home education deserves full recognition as a bona fide educational and lifestyle choice. Artificial barriers that prevent entry and full participation should be rolled back where they exist and opposed when they are introduced.