My Response to “The Harms of Homeschooling”
December 20th, 2009
For those of you who haven’t seen this doozy of an anti-homeschooling piece yet, check out University of Maryland’s Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, Volume 29, Number 3/4. Click on the current issue and then scroll to page seven of the .pdf file to read “The Harms of Homeschooling” by Ms. Robin West of Georgetown’s Law Center. Then feel free to click on back here to read my response to her. Also, please consider sending your own elloquent, well-crafted reponse to her to enlighten her about modern American non-religious homeschoolers. Her email is included at the end of the article.
******************************************
Dear Ms. West,
I am writing to you in response to your article, “The Harms of Homeschooling.” I have grave concerns about the manner in which you present your own opinions about home education and those who engage in it as verified fact, when you have no data to back up your claims. By perpetuating aging stereotypes about home educating families, it is you who is actually doing harm. I have a large amount of feedback about the information you present in your article and will attempt to address them in the same order they occur in the piece.
Your thesis lacks evidence from the very beginning of the article. You claim that the majority of homeschoolers are fundamentalist Protestants choosing to home educate only because of their faith. In fact, the trend is turning away from homeschooling primarily for faith based reasons. In the most recent data released by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal entity, only 36% of home educating families surveyed chose religion as their primary reason for homeschooling. The other 64%, the majority, chose a mixture of other reasons directly related to dissatisfaction with the increasingly poor options in public education. We are an example of a non-Christian, non-conservative, home educating family who chose homeschooling for myriad complex reasons, none of which have anything to do with religion. We also participate locally in a large secular home educating community. There is no shortage of us. Secular home education related email listservs have high memberships across the nation. Non-religious homeschooling is growing dramatically as public education continues to decline.
You also claim that home education was illegal in all 50 states 30 years ago. This belies a lack of legal research on your part. I cannot speak to all states, but I can discuss our home state with you. In Texas, home education has never been illegal. The very first compulsory education laws allowed for it, and not in select cases, but as the prerogative of any family who chose that route. You also assert that there is no case law that confirms the validity of home education and protects a family’s right to choose to home educate. This is also inaccurate in the state of Texas. The Leeper case was a legal challenge to the parental right to home educate and that right was confirmed by the Texas Supreme Court. This example of case law is the primary provision currently cited to guarantee the freedom to home educate in Texas.
I also find troubling your assertion that education is a “core state responsibility.” This is a modern notion that only came into effect in this country during the Industrial Revolution. The primary reason for emulating the Prussian model of state education was to protect children from being forced into dangerous child labor conditions and to keep the children of industrial working parents occupied until they were safely old enough to join the labor force. Our system has not evolved with our society and is now clearly failing us and our children as we fall further and further behind the rest of the developed world. Our education system has never been a model designed to develop free-thinking, active and responsible citizens that are capable of moving this country forward. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, education was primarily a responsibility of families. The modern home education movement is returning to reclaim this responsibility as opposed to “abdicating” their primary responsibility for the upbringing of their offspring. In this country, the state is not responsible for our children. We are. And if more parents took full responsibility for their children, just imagine what an effect that could have nationwide. We could become a country that takes responsibility for our actions.
You also make the assumption that home educating families need to be monitored closely for child abuse, yet you, again, have no data to support your claim. Using the same reasoning, I could argue that perhaps 95% of reports of child abuse come from classroom teachers because families who send their children to public school are more prone to abuse their children than home educating families. That claim is equally absurd. The proposal that home educating families should be required to submit to home inspections is inflammatory and discriminatory as no such requirement exists for families sending their children to institutional schools.
Again, your lack of research undermines your argument when you attempt to label homeschooling families as a public health risk. First, every state in the country has a provision for parents to file a waiver of some sort and be exempt from state vaccination requirements, regardless of how they choose to educate their children. Children who are attending public school have their waivers filed with the school system and still attend school unhindered. Records kept by the CDC on outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases in childhood usually trend to show that Patient Zero is most often a vaccinated child in whom the vaccine failed. This child is usually also a public school student and most of those affected by the outbreak are fellow students who have been living most of their days in a confined environment with Patient Zero. In addition, you have no data to support the implied claim that all homeschooling families do not vaccinate while all public school families do. The actual picture is much more complex than that, with families choosing a mixture of different educational practices and different stances on the childhood vaccine issue.
As far as your claim that “The ideal teacher cares about the child as an individual, a learner, an actively curious person,” you are absolutely correct. But once again, you offer no evidence that proves parents are incapable of approaching their children’s education from this standpoint. You also offer no proof that a majority of public school teachers do either. All you offer is merely your opinion based on a limited amount of exposure through a biased lens, judging from your source list at the end of the article, to the home educating community. There is a large body of evidence available to illustrate that public education is not doing so well in our country. Why should homeschoolers have to adjust their educational programs to such a low standard? The claim that children who are home educated are not well educated or literate is also unfounded. Is there evidence of falling adult literacy rates directly attributable to those adults’ home education? No. There is not. If anything, those illiterate, uneducated adults were failed by a public system that shoved them through the human mass production machine as quickly as possible and spit them out on the other side woefully unprepared to be an active, responsible, well socialized citizen.
In all honesty, I find your claims that home education damages the economy to be downright insulting. Again, I ask, where is the empirical evidence that a majority of the home educating community, as you imply, lives under tarps in parking lots? Recently a Canadian study looked at home educated adults and examined the question of whether or not they had grown into happy, healthy, socially productive citizens. The resounding answer produced by the data was yes. Home educated children and adults are positively contributing to their societies and economies wherever they are found.
You also ignored evidence regarding whether or not regulation has improved outcomes for home educated children. The Ray study, released this year, showed that standardized test scores were statistically unaffected by the level of regulation in the state in which the child was educated. States with heavy regulation and states with virtually no regulation produced children who scored equally well on commonly used standardized tests. Requiring standardized testing in our country’s public school systems has not improved the system. Classroom teachers bemoan the time and creativity lost in the classroom when they are required to spend more than half the year engaging in test prep, as opposed to presenting dynamic content not necessarily included in the test materials that would truly engage their students. This is often a concern expressed by parents choosing to home educate, that they object to this heavy emphasis on testing. If this is a reason that public schools are not producing and a reason that parents are opting out of public education, why would we want to cause the same damage to our home education programs with required testing? Standardized test results are not proof of a creative, dynamic education. They are proof of memorization of material and good test taking skills.
Curricular reviews, in addition to being seriously expensive for states to provide an increasing homeschooling population, would be detrimental to one of the strengths of home education. Home education is designed to provide a custom education to each child. This educational method, in my opinion, has the potential to increase the diversity of thinking in the adult community as each child develops uniquely, as opposed to a population of adults who have been indoctrinated with the exact same material. I believe this is one of the reasons major universities across the country are beginning to court homeschoolers, often employing admissions staff assigned to handle only homeschool applications. Feedback from college professors are showing that they appreciate having home educated students as these students often demonstrate high levels of self-discipline and personal responsibility for their educations. Requiring home educators to simply reproduce the state’s minimum education requirements at home undermines this potential.
There will always be that small population of citizens who abuse freedoms and seek to take advantage for their own self-serving reasons, but do not mistake those individuals for the majority of the home educating population. Your entire piece is based on negative personal opinions of a premise rooted in a stereotype that is falling away. The modern American secular homeschooling population, which continues to grow dramatically, is dynamic, diverse, and highly intelligent and we will be heard. We will not allow these sorts of negative opinion pieces to go unnoticed. We are changing the face of American homeschooling and as we grow we will change cultural perceptions of us, as well.
Sincerely,
A Very Vocal Non-religious Homeschooling Mother
Hear hear!
She shoudl come visit my province, where the literacy rate is SIXTY percent. SIXTY.
Yeah, our school system is working really well.
Great job answering the issues presented in the article point by point! Our little school system in NH is doing such a great job with our students only 26% tested proficient or better in math skills, 67% in reading, and 54% in writing on the New England Assessment. Pathetic. With those scores they were able to get off the No Child Left Behind list. And at least 75% of each grade gets listed on the Honor Roll each quarter. Talk about grade elevation.Thank you for your response.
Thanks for an intelligent, well-researched, well thought out and well written response. I read another response to the author on a different homeschool group. It was, sadly, an affirmation of the illiteracy which the author bemoans….
GREAT response!
Thank you all for the positive feedback. I have already received a response from Ms. West and she is willing to engage in a continuing dialog with me. If I can I secure her permission, I will share the specifics of our follow-up in another post.
Thank you for writing such a well crafted and researched response. It is truly a benefit to the homeschooling community to have responses like yours sent to the author instead of angry or poorly written ones. I am curious as to how the author responds. I also find it odd that a law professor would turn into print such a poorly researched piece knowing there are always rebuttals.
Thank you for this wonderful response. It clearly articulates your (our) position, is supported by evidence, is polite and lets the author know in no uncertain terms that her “research” is merely opinion. Thanks again for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully.
Very thorough and clearly written response. I’m glad to hear that you are in communication with Robin West.
We are secular homeschoolers here as well. We’re both registered Democrats, and we support public school.
I used to think we were in the minority, too, before we became involved in the community. Now, we see that there are lots and lots of us. We’re just not as organized and hyper focused, so we are scattered and not and easy to spot.
In fact, I bet Ms. West knows several secular homeschoolers in her community, and doesn’t even know it!
Good luck with your exchange.
Tammy
fantastic response! I’m so glad you had stats to back you up. Here Robin goes on and on about the Fundamentalists Protestants and yet she uses their (HSLDA and NHERI’s) data — to the degree she uses any data, which is very little.
I really tried to read her article, but the opening page was alarmist and emotional and then she makes a rather bland statement that her thesis is about regulation.
I am not a Fundamentalist Protestant but she clearly has an ax to grind against them – but even her concerns make no sense. On the one hand, they can raise a political army, on the other hand, they are uneducated and lack skills. Which is it? Are they a potent enemy to reckon with, or hapless and ignorant?
She wonders why no one is worried about the looming scourge of homeschooling. Well, maybe because it’s not a looming scourge? Maybe what’s going on in the public schools is of greater concern? Maybe people are worried about health care or the war on drugs, whether homosexuals can marry, international foreign policy, or anything other than whether or not the local homeschoolers are teaching creationism. Honestly, I’m not a creationist but I really can’t see why anyone cares so much as to whether people believe in evolution. Maybe I feel this way because I’m not a scientist, but it’s just not had a huge impact on my life.
I’m also wary of anyone who wants to start and us vs. them with homeschoolers. Oh, you liberal types, you’re okay, it’s THEM we’re worried about. Well, freedom is freedom, no matter what anyone’s personal, political, and religious views are.
Oh, and can someone please explain to me why the critics love to carp on teaching credentials? What do they actually do, teach classroom management techniques? Tell you how to get a large, diverse group of students with different learning abilities interested in a subject? Someone please explain to me how a certification which helps teachers teach classrooms of kids is necessary in a homeschooling environment. But then she lobs “over-educated” at us — which is it? Can we teach our kids or not? Or is it just that she thinks we should be doing something else (like contributing to the sexist media machine, consumer-driven culture by having more spending power with the money we earn at jobs that are more deserving of our time than our own children)?
Thanks for the forum! and thanks for your posts and the dialog you’ve begun with Robin.
Homeschool on! Ever seen that t-shirt “The Revolutionaries will be homeschooled!”? I love it, except that it drives me nuts because shouldn’t it be “The Revolutionaries will have been homeschooled.” Opps, must be showing my over-education!
[...] http://diosadotada.homeschooljournal.net/2009/12/20/my-response-to-the-harms-of-homeschooling/ and also http://diosadotada.homeschooljournal.net/2009/12/22/an-update-on-the-continuing-dialog/ from a secular homeschooler. [...]
[...] Crunchy Mamma: Uno y dos [...]
Thank you thank you thank you! My husband and I are well-educated people with degrees in IT and English from well-respected Northeast universities. We are spiritual rather than religious. We have a six-figure income, and do not live, as you say, in trailers, tents, or mobile homes, but we do not look down upon those who do when these economic times make it so precarious that we are but one step away from that ourselves. However, I do not even remotely understand Ms. West’s argument that by keeping my children home I am somehow hurting the economy. Quite to the contrary, we pay the bulk of our ridiculously high and onerous property taxes towards support of a public school system that we despair of enrolling our children in. With such high amounts being handed over, it is not we who should be accountable to the public school system – it is they who should be accountable to US. Why am I paying approximately $6000 a year to a system that is failing us to the extent that I prefer to keep my children home rather than risk exposure to indifferent teachers, boring content, endless testing, bullying, and children who are at age 6 already discussing things we find inappropriate for young children? This is money I would gladly use to send my children to the private school in the area, but we are not that flush to do so. And so, we keep them home, all the while paying. It is like paying $6000 a year to my local supermarket despite not feeling confident about shopping there. Lovely.
I am so happy you crafted a response that showed that secular, intelligent homeschooling is prevalent. As long as people persist in thinking that homeschooling is the domain of religious fundamentalists, they can continue to ignore the facts, which are that our public school system is FAILING OUR CHILDREN, that we are woefully behind on the global field, and that our current way of educating needs a radical overhaul, including rewarding teachers based on merit rather than merely “time served”. And merit itself needs to redefined – the teacher who should be well regarded is the teacher who can truly engage her charges, not cram facts into their heads just so they can pass a test.
I cannot wait to read her response. I am surprised that her article was even published in anything representing itself as scholarly, since it showed a surprising lack of data and statistics. Then again, perhaps that is in itself a testament to the decline in overall education that we’re complaining about.
Bravo!
[...] well-researched, thoughtful and comprehensive rebuttal was submitted by a homeschooling parent (here), and the follow-up response (here) as well as a comment by a homeschool legal scholar [...]
I am so grateful to folks like you who can convey a message with meaning and eloquence. I hope that Ms. West does some research or just pro-ports that her writings are simply one person’s opinion. Oh and for her information, at least in the state of VA, private schools are completely unregulated as well! I started one where the students play all day with zero testing.
Thanks for bringing to our attention what is written up as fact in a University publication.
Sincerely,
Gleamer Sullivan (who homeschooled last year and now runs a “school” where homeschoolers learn together)
HI, I am a homeschooling mother who graduated from Georgetown Law myself (and practiced law for ten years, something Ms. West has never done!) I think Ms. West deserves a written response from me as well.
Gee…the lack of factual solidity in this article which masquerades as a scholarly piece looks to me like evidence of a sorely lacking education. (The author must not have been home schooled!) I’m glad others were capable of writing thoughtful, fact-based rebuttals. All I could do was laugh. I’ve heard these same inaccurate assessments of homeschooling for over 25 years. I guess no matter what the issue, some folks don’t seem to be able to reckon with reality when it flies in the face of adamantly held, albeit unwarranted, biases. Too bad. It only makes them look ever so foolish.
Like all these others I appreciate your well thought out and intelligent response to the anit-homeschooling article. Clearly there is a lot of education that needs to happen around homeschooling.
The one piece that I feel is left out in all this, though, is that while fundamentalist Protestants are not often my favorite folks, I do think that even they have the right to educate thier children the way they see fit. There seems to be and us/them, secular/religious dichotomy that is happening in the discussions about homeschooling. As if steeping your children in your religion is abusive and heaven forbid that any of us liberals should be mistaken for crazy religous folks.
My family is deeply religious, deeply spiritual and deeply open minded. All three things can exist together. And within this frame work I take issue with Ms. West’s prejudice against religous people (whether or not they are open minded). Isn’t THAT a core value of our United States?
Thank you for such an intelligent, thoughtful, response to “The Harms of Homeschooling” — one I felt was far more well-reasoned and non-inflammatory than the source to which you were responding. Your use of data and research clearly exposed the regrettable degree to which the author’s views were ill-founded.
We also are homeschoolers, but unlike the picture of the “typical” homeschooler depicted in the article, we are not fundamentalist Christians, nor are we particularly religious. The dominant reason why we chose to homeschool, though I myself am a public school teacher of over a decade’s experience and come from a family of educators, is quite simply this: we can do a far better job with our child at every level than the school can. Our district is particularly poor in the fundamentals of mathematics and English; by contrast, we use one of the world’s best mathematics programs and both of us have master’s degreees in English. Our district essentially refuses to accommodate the education to the child; by contrast, every day is an IEP at the Baudelaire School for a Girl.
I would like to add that our familial structure is not especially authoritarian and that our child has received all her vaccines.
Thank you so much for your well-written rebuttal.
Ms. West’s article is full of hypocrisy. On one hand, the rights of the individual are far more important than the general good. We should throw the liberties of homeschoolers out the window so that we can catch the child abusers, probable cause be darned!
On the other hand, the general good is far more important than the rights of the individual. Its a much better idea to make all the parents follow vaccination laws (which all allow for exemptions) than to let them homeschool.
Personally, I don’t abuse my kid, and vaccination laws had nothing to do with my decision to homeschool. Somehow I think putting him in an enclosed space with thirty other kids all day, makes him more likely to spread diseases. I don’t homeschool because I thought the public schools would restrict our free practice of religion. In fact I strongly believe they would restrict my child’s free use of his mind. We don’t happen to be trying to perpetuate a narrow, authoritarian point of view. We believe that developing our own perspectives, and allowing others to do the same, is the absolute cornerstone of our democracy and the principle for which many of our forefathers have fought and died. Let’s not forget that our nation was founded largely by colonists who wanted to escape religious persecution. They include my ancestors. We’re not impoverished (although if we were, I should certainly think the free lunches at public school would be rather tempting). I would hasten to point out that public school teachers are actively discouraged from forming close personal relationships with their students, and expecting them to do so, especially while trying to teach 30 kids at once, is obnoxious. So Ms. West’s article unfortunately did not help me see the error of my ways.
What a shame that she should be given such a respectable platform for her ignorant rant.
JJ-
Thank you for highlighting this important point in the discussion. It is often difficult to address every aspect of this complicated issue, but I wanted to comment on the fact that I do agree with you. Fundamentalist Protestants, Buddhists, Catholics, Atheists, Pagans, Muslims, and those who walk any or no other spiritual path should all be acknowledged as having the same rights to direct the education their children how they see fit. I may have strong opinions about the content a family chooses to teach their children, but not about their right to teach it.
I tend to highlight the fact that we are what I would consider a secular (non-Christian, non-conservative) homeschooling family in order to enforce the understanding that stereotyping the entire home educating population as being of one political and religious mind is an stereotype that needs to die. To fully explain my family’s spiritual path would be quite complicated as we are highly eclectic. But we are not an atheist or agnostic family by any means. To explain my political beliefs (and my husband’s– which sometimes agree and sometimes do not) would be equally complex as I cannot find a single politcal party I would feel comfortable with using as a simple way to describe them. It is easier for me to directly address the specific character traits that are being ascribed to me just because we home educate by placing a convenient “non-” in front of them.
As an attorney, I am astounded that someone associated with the Georgetown Law Center would publish an article so utterly devoid of support for its assertions, which amount almost entirely to innuendo and the repetition of unsubstantiated stereotypes. I could spend all day debunking the myriad inaccuracies in this piece.
Thanks for your response, Crunchy Mama! I’m sure we’re on the same page. I just got so riled up by Ms. West’s article it was nice to have a place to vent. Oh, and I love your head-wreath! – JJ
A fabulous response; I must simply “ditto” what others have already said. Thank you so much for responding to this ridiculous article!
An intelligent, well-research response. Like many of your other commenters, my husband and I are well-educated people (I have a master’s degree) who choose to secularly home educate our children due to failures of the public school system. My oldest son ended up in therapy due to the bullying from his third grade teacher, despite the fact that our county’s public school system is considered to be quite good and the school he was attending was a “high performing” school.
Hi:
It’s a good response. We are a Chilean couple that will start homeschooling our teens in March. We are both Education PhD candidates, former school teachers and now working as schollars in the field of education.
We both are christians but our decission has nothing to do with faith and a lot to do with shools being of a bad quality and violents in the ways they treat people.
We want a more liberal, open minded aproach to knowledge and not the controlling, reproductive thing they offer in chileans school.
We don’t think schools are demons but we do believe in
Great letter! I would be very interested to hear Ms. West’s response. One poster, Marjorie, made an excellent point that bears repeating:
“I’m also wary of anyone who wants to start and us vs. them with homeschoolers. Oh, you liberal types, you’re okay, it’s THEM we’re worried about. Well, freedom is freedom, no matter what anyone’s personal, political, and religious views are.”
I whole-heartedly agree!! It’s the fastest way to divide homeschoolers which will in turn give critics the upper hand.
What a ridiculous piece of drivel!!!!!!! Crunchy Mama, you have my kudos as well, for such a well-written, reasonable response to Ms. West’s “slightly opinionated” article.
We are a Christian family, but religion was not the primary reason for removing our daughter from the public school system to begin home education. The poor content, lowered standards, and emphasis placed on “teaching to the test”, in hopes of securing additional funding through results of standardized testing, was.
Choosing to homeschool was one of the best decisions that we have ever made – the benefits – past, presnt, and future, are virtually boundless!!
Ah, so it’s not only the UK with educational wingnuts on the loose then. We’ve got one called Graham Badman, with the downside that he was working for the government and they’re now trying to push through new laws. Put “badman review” into Google for more information, and you’ll see that there are a lot of similarities in what they’re trying to do.
Dave– Graham Badman is exactly why I felt responding to Robin West in a public forum was important, especially when she disclosed the fact that she’s working on a larger project with the same basic thesis. The timing of a Georgetown Law professor publishing and giving lectures on the necessity of strict regulation of home education is just too coincidental given what UK home educators are now going through. In the next day or so, I’ll try to work up a post here to give more US homeschoolers a good current events lesson on what you all are dealing with now.
Yes, her article really annoyed me. I am a very low-income single mother and feminist and I home school my child because I refuse to institutionalize my child for the majority of her days and I absolutely think that education is the responsibility of the family (which absolutely does not have to be a nuclear, patriarchal family) and community and State run school don’t look like community or family to me. You give up your rights to your child for the entire day and you give up the right to determine how they are educated.
[...] For those of you who have stuck around since the crazy amount of traffic this blog got when I engaged Professor West in a little educational dialog about what American homeschooling is really al… I’ve published a piece in with Home Education Magazine this month that follows up on that [...]