Home-Schooling

How many children are home-schooled in Illinois, I asked a school official, to answer an inquiry made of me from a reader?

“We don’t know,” she responded.

“You don’t know?” I said, surprised.

The school official explained that our state is one of maybe a dozen that do not require parents who educate their children at home to let the state know as much. So we don’t know who is being home-schooled or, much worse, maybe not being schooled at all.

I called an education expert. He said a few years ago a new state senator in Illinois introduced a bill that would have required home schooling parents to register, so there could be some way of telling a home-schooler from a truant.

The expert recalled that thousands of home school parents descended on the state capitol to protest against the proposal, crowding the broad corridors under the capitol dome, singing hymns to punctuate their cause.

The astounded newbie senator dropped the bill like a blistering hot potato. “No one wants to do or say anything that would draw their (the home schoolers) attention,” my expert friend says, adding, “By the way, don’t use my name. Seriously.”

I am not opposed to home schooling. I know a couple in my community who have done marvelous jobs educating their seven children at home, all of whom have graduated from college.

Yet effective home schooling takes skill, discipline and much hard work. I worry that some parents may do a lousy job, or no job at all.

I was told that Iowa once had what another school friend said was a model law. Iowa home-school families registered. Their children received an annual evaluation and took a test each year to see that progress was being made. The state education agency even offered assistance to home school parents to help them do their job.

Then in 2013, the Iowa legislature, prompted by several lawmakers who were home schooling advocates, agreed to drop all that and make the state a non-registration state. I talked with Margaret Buckton, a veteran lobbyist for a group of 17 of the larger school districts in Iowa.

“Every one of my superintendents has told me,” she says, “of parents who were in trouble over the chronic truancy of their children. After 2013, the parents learned to tell the superintendents, in effect, ‘Bug off, I’m home-schooling my children.’”

A central Illinoi school superintendent tells me, “We have had some previously home schooled students enroll at our schools in the past. Some of those students have been well prepared, and some have had little or no preparation for the grade they are entering.” [Very brief history:

[Imbued with the values of The Enlightenment that all people should be educated, in 1785 our Founding Fathers set aside the 16th section of every 36-section township in the Northwest Territory (the Midwest basically) to support public education.

[Horace Mann led the public school movement in the 1800s, and soon Americans had come to cherish their own public schools.

[In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the first in a series of decisions that in effect bans prayer in public schools. I am guessing this germinated the home schooling movement by conservative Christians.]

The National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2012 that 3 percent of America’s children are home-schooled, more than a million youngsters (how do they that know, I wonder?). The number is increasing, according to a home school acquaintance, “as dissatisfaction with the public schools grows.”

I contacted the Home School Legal Defense Association in D.C., to ask for their take on the matter of registration. They haven’t responded, but I think I know their position. The group’s website has a national map of home school regulations by state.

Illinois plus the rest of Midwestern states and Texas all appear to be no-registration states.

States in the Northeast, at the other end of the spectrum, appear to have regulations similar to those Iowa had before 2013.

This issue poses, I think, a conundrum between the freedom to educate one’s children as one wishes versus the obligation of citizenship that all children be adequately educated. How to balance the two?

I understand the home school parents’ fear that the government wants to regulate them somehow. Otherwise, why require them to register?

But if the parents are doing a bang-up job of education at home, what’s the worry?

On balance, if registration would somehow help identify those who are not otherwise educating their children at home well, or at all, then registration makes sense.