AHA Citizen Journal

Looking ahead in 2005

First, thank you – American Homeschool Association – for this wonderful opportunity for our individual voices to be heard.

With this New Year, I find myself looking back to where homeschooling has been and forward to where homeschooling is going. Among the issues facing homeschoolers today are several which were unthinkable in 1980. For example, charter schools, public school programs calling themselves homeschooling, and increased legislative calls for monitoring and accountability of hard-won freedoms.

I believe we have won the battle, but perhaps lost the war. While homeschooling is now legal in every state and accepted by the public as a legitimate alternative to public or private schools, we also have increased regulation and the eye of public officials on us. Where homeschoolers knew our children could be better educated at home, we are now expected – not just to prove it – but to ‘out test’ the public schools. We’ve traded being truant for a list of core subjects in some states and with registration and monitoring in others. It seems that with each 2 steps forward we take one backward.

Charter schools were romanticized in the early days as wonderful educational experiments where parents and teachers would come together and, without the usual crippling public school regulations, create a learning environment where children could blossom. Instead we have a parallel public school system run by large for-profit corporations using inexperienced, poorly paid teachers that produce poor educational results. The only ideal that seems to have survived is the absence of regulation and accountability to the taxpayer.

Virtual charter schools enroll children being taught at home, and receive the funding that would have gone to the local school district if the child had been enrolled there. Those families are now a burden to the local economy. The old untruth about homeschoolers harming the local public schools financially has become truth.

Twenty-five years ago public schools would do almost anything to keep a family from homeschooling. A few homeschoolers did go to jail, others had to battle their way through the courts trying to explain their children were not truant; that they were receiving an education. Now families in many public school districts can enroll their children in the public school, use the public resources and educate their children at home. Families enroll their children, are accountable to the school district, participate in district programs, use secular curriculum approved by the district and prove their children are learning through achievement testing. These families are nothing more than adjunct public schools, yet they tell themselves they are homeschoolers. They endanger the freedom of those who do not want to be part of these programs and foreshadow the day when all parents who want to educate their children at home will have to be enrolled in the public school. They are the proverbial ‘frog in a pot of water’.

In state after state, homeschoolers have settled for being monitored in exchange for not being truant, trading one yoke for another. In some states homeschoolers accepted standardized testing or portfolio reviews, in others registration with their local school district and in others homeschoolers go begging for permission to educate their children. I often wonder if what has been touted as ‘legislative gains’ really are. Does it really matter WHERE the shackles are applied? They are still shackles. Even states were homeschoolers are free to make their own family decisions often see annual attempts by their legislators to impose restrictions on them.

In this past year, the press has turned on homeschoolers. The annual ‘life-styles page’ articles about nice homeschooling families has turned into an unprecedented, front page attack calling for homeschoolers to be monitored to prevent child abuse, kidnapping and a laundry list of horrors the press now seems to believe are prevalent in our community. Is this the backlash against homeschoolers touting success and independence?

I believe homeschooling is no longer evolving, that it has come full circle. It will not be very long before parents who want to educate their children themselves will either have to enroll their children in a public program or face the same kind of prejudice and legal threats that early homeschoolers faced when removing their children from the public schools.

Unless homeschoolers are willing to refuse the efforts to those who want to domesticate them.

Will they? I don’t know. All I can do is look at the trends and suggest that 2005 will be a year of increased efforts to legislate homeschooling, increased demands for children to be enrolled in public school programs, increased advertising and pressure on parents to enroll in virtual charter schools in those states where they exist, more press coverage portraying homeschoolers negatively, and increased pressure for homeschoolers to fit the carefully conceived religious and political image 25 years of public relations, surveys and manipulation by our self-appointed lobbyist has created.

Thanks again, AHA, for this opportunity to expound upon my thoughts. Perhaps with this opportunity for some of the more independent homeschoolers to express opinions, parents will begin to realize the water is getting very hot in that pot and start to say ‘no’ to all these trends.

Mary McCarthy