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education and schooling folly general freedom

School Choice Reform at Last

public school, home schooling, radicalize children, nanny state, education

How to get school choice reform? Keep fighting.

Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, worked with families and school choice activists to pass school-choice legislation.

SB1 would have given parents who want to take their kids from public to private schools $8,000 a year for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses: taxpayer money that parents would have been able to spend as they saw fit instead of being forced to let public schools get it regardless of performance.

The educrats and their allies were opposed. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Period,” was the comprehensive argument of the Texas Democratic Party chairman.

With his own party constituting a majority of lawmakers in each legislative chamber, it seemed that Governor Abbott and families could have won anyway. The state senate did pass school-choice legislation. As it turned out, though, too many Republican lawmaker in the house were on the anti-choice team.

Which Republicans? The ones that Abbott and other friends of school choice targeted in this year’s primaries. They spent millions of dollars backing challengers who support school choice. And the governor appeared at campaign events to criticize incumbent Republicans who oppose it.

The net result? Of the current 21 anti-school-choice GOP representatives, only six to ten will be returning to the legislature in 2025. (The exact number won’t be known until runoffs on May 28.)

The elections may thus bring enough of a change in the state legislature to let school choice happen for parents and their students in Texas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Homeschooling Surge

home school, education

Although homeschooling had once been common in the United States, by the 1970s few families taught their kids at home.

This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s. Researcher Brian Day estimates that by 2019, some 2,300,000 children were being homeschooled.

During the recent pandemic, even more parents gave homeschooling a try. But the trend had already been intensifying for decades. Not coincidentally, of course, because public schools continued to get lousy report cards, with the quality of government-provided education demonstrably in steep decline.

In a recent article on the growth of homeschooling, The Washington Post concludes that it has become “America’s fastest-growing form of education” as families “embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.”

Apparently, now even normal people are rescuing their kids from the educrats (unlike back in the day, when only fringe parents like my wife and I did so).

Looking at data from some 7,000 school districts, the Post concludes:

  • The number of homeschooled kids has increased by 373 percent in Anderson, South Carolina. It increased by 358 percent in one Bronx district.
  • In 390 districts, for every ten children being taught in public schools in the 2020–2021 academic year, one child was homeschooled.
  • The Post estimates that between 1.9 million and 2.7 million kids are currently being homeschooled in this country.

Post-lockdowns, the practice is still going strong. In most districts for which data is available on the 2022–2023 school year, homeschooling “dropped from its pandemic peak. . . . Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.”

That’s good. For the children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Explosion in Alternatives

home school, student, education

“Across the country, we’re in the midst of an unprecedented explosion in homeschooling and alternative education,” Sharyl Attkinson reported last Sunday on her weekly news program, Full Measure, citing a “mass exodus from America’s public schools.”

And it’s not just about pandemic measures like mask mandates. In February, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly recalled three school board members over their fixation on wokeness to the exclusion of in-person education. And the school board’s antics in liberal Loudoun County, Virginia, turned last year’s race for governor into a referendum on whether parents have any say-so at all. 

They do, apparently. 

Though I have covered the enormous growth of alternative education during the pandemic — here and here, for instance — I have been looking for more specifics. 

“Relative to pre-pandemic levels,” Corey DeAngelis with the American Federation for Children told Attkisson, “homeschooling has at least doubled,” and now accounts for “closer to 4 million students.”

Too good to be true? I double-checked. The U.S. Census Bureau used the same language as Attkisson and DeAngelis: “the global COVID-19 pandemic has sparked new interest in homeschooling and the appeal of alternative school arrangements has suddenly exploded.”

At the end of the 2019-2020 school year, “about 5.4% of U.S. households with school-aged children reported homeschooling,” according to their Household Pulse Survey. “By fall, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling.”

The increase was five-fold for “respondents identified as Black or African American,” with 16.1% homeschooling.

“Still more students have left for religious schools,” reminds DeAngelis, “or other private schools.”

Attkisson also pointed to a jump in support for school choice.

Parents of the world unite. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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End Educational Freedom Now!

home schooling, education, Harvard, authoritarianism,

“A rapidly increasing number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school,” Erin O’Donnell informs in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, “choosing instead to educate them at home.” 

Yippee! Thanks for the great news — right?

Not to O’Donnell, or to Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet. O’Donnell’s article is something of a friendly regurgitation of Bartholet’s Arizona Law Review article, entitled, “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection.”

Bartholet “recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling.” Why? Because, as O’Donnell offers, it “violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse . . .”

Her evidence? Professor Bartholet offers none. Harvard Magazine does not need any.

Avoided, perhaps, because research shows students educated at home significantly outperform public school students on standardized tests. 

As for the specter of homeschooling as massive smokescreen enabling vicious child predators? “The limited evidence available shows that homeschooled children are abused at a lower rate than are those in the general public,” Dr. Brian Ray reported in 2018, adding that “an estimated 10% (or more) of public and private schoolchildren experience sexual maltreatment at the hands of school personnel.”

So, what is going on here? 

Perhaps O’Donnell provides the explanation, writing that “surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families . . . are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.” 

Oh, my, can that be permitted? Should people choose their own religious and cultural beliefs? May parents freely educate their kids?

Bartholet calls that “essentially authoritarian control,” which is “dangerous.”

There, she is correct. Homeschooling is dangerous . . . to experts hell-bent on telling us what to think.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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home schooling, education, Harvard, authoritarianism,

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