“I’ve never seen a lobby more powerful and scary. They make the anti-vaxxers seem rational.” http://t.co/WOaO4SMi2M pic.twitter.com/X1SHQIAb3B
— Slate (@Slate) September 19, 2015
In the fall of 2003, police in New Jersey received a call from a concerned neighbor who’d found a young man rummaging in her garbage, looking for food. He was 19 years old but was 4 feet tall and weighed just 45 pounds. Investigators soon learned that the young man’s three younger brothers were also severely malnourished. The family was known to social workers, but the children were being home-schooled and thus were cut off from the one place where their condition could have gotten daily scrutiny—a classroom.
Among the things that those on the far right end of the political spectrum hold to be sacred, two of the most prized are parental rights and religious freedom. Put those two things together, and more likely than not what you’ll have on your hands are home-schooling parents who believe society has no right to scrutinize their education and treatment of children. In theory, the idea of home schooling can be noble and be quite workable. In reality, home schooling is too often a recipe for disaster, with children often abused with impunity. Forty states don’t require home-school educators to have even a high-school diploma, even if they plan on educating children through the 12th-grade. Forty-eight states require no background checks for adults who choose to home-school. Less than half of the states have any sort of evaluation system in place, meaning there’s no way to determine if children are being educated. Public schools are saddled with numerous testing requirements, but home schools get a free pass. Even here in Oregon, home-schooling parents are required to submit test scores only if their loal school district requests them.
The lack of standardized expectations of home schools is as disturbing as it is dangerous. In most of America, it’s possible a student could “graduate” without receiving anything even faintly resembling an education. This system remains in place largely because of a rabid, vocal, and well-organized lobbying group called the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). Though HSLDA represents itself as defending the rights of parents who wish to home-school their children, the reality is that it’s a lobbying group that makes the anti-vaccine lobby look sane and reasonable by comparison. In resisting virtually all attempts to introduce accountability and oversight into the home-schooling process, HSLDA has actually made it easier for hold abusers to fly under radar and evade detection. It’s a process which affords home-schooled children no rights and even less protection…and Conservatives nationwide have been complicit in maintaining the status quo in order to placate the Rabid Religious Right. It seems “religious freedom” trumps the safety and well-being of children…who have no voice since they can’t vote.
After the story of the emaciated boys appeared in national newspapers, New Jersey Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg was moved to introduce new legislation. “My question was: How does someone fall off the face of the earth so that no one knows they exist? I was told it was because he was home-schooled,” she said.
Her bill, introduced in 2004, would’ve required parents, for the first time, to notify the state that their children were being home-schooled, have them complete the same annual tests as public school students, and submit proof of annual medical tests.
Soon afterward, a small group of home-schooling parents began following Weinberg around the capitol. The barrage of phone calls from home-schooling advocates so jammed her office phone lines that staffers had to use their private cellphones to conduct business. “You would have thought I’d recommended the end of the world as we know it,” said Weinberg. “Our office was besieged.”
HSLDA founder Michael Farris has presided over lobbying efforts resisting virtually every effort at reform nationwide. Even efforts designed to protect the safety and well-being of children have been vigorously opposed - and ultimately defeated by HSLDA. Though they represent only about 15% of the nation’s estimated 1.5 million home-schooled children, their rabid, vocal, and energetic lobbying efforts have given them power and influence far beyond their minority status.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that my own family has been involved in home schooling. My youngest brother and his wife home-schooled their four children at their farm in rural southeastern Minnesota. I’ve always been adamantly opposed to home-schooling, but to their credit, my brother and sister-in-law took their responsibility seriously, and their children, while growing up in an exceedingly isolated and sheltered environment, are all responsible, well-adjusted adults. If all home-schoolers were like my brother and sister-in-law, I’d have no problem with the idea…and I suspect few others would, either.
The problem, though, is that home-schoolers have almost no oversight by government or local school districts…or anyone else. There’s even less accountability. In most states, children can be beaten and abused in the name of ” religious education,” and no one would be the wiser. There’s no system in place for protecting children or for ensuring that they’re actually receiving an education.
We hold our public schools up to intense scrutiny, with testing requirements and (appropriately) significant public oversight…yet home-schooling parents are allowed to operate with virtually no accountability or supervision. Thousands upon thousands of children are subjected to physical and verbal abuse, along with receiving an education that falls far short of the expectations society places on public schools. Even worse is that HSLDA and the committed home-schooling parents they can muster oppose “virtually all” attempts at creating reform and accountability.
Who’s looking out for the children? The answer, of course, is no one. This is why I believe that- absent a system guaranteeing accountability and protection- home schooling should be outlawed. Or do we really believe that those claiming the mantle of “religious freedom” should have license to abuse children with no oversight or accountability?
