Story by Peter Jamison, Laura Meckler | The Washington Post | December 28, 2023

When Melanie Elsey stepped up to the lectern at the Ohio Statehouse in April, it looked like a triumphant season for home-schoolers.

Lawmakers would soon roll back what little oversight the state exercised over its booming population of home educators. Now they were discussing what should have been an equally welcome policy. As part of an expansive school-choice bill, Republican legislators wanted to offer home-schoolers thousands of dollars in taxpayer funding each year.

Yet Elsey, a former home-school mom representing Christian Home Educators of Ohio — the state’s oldest and most influential home-schooling association — delivered a surprising message to members of a House education committee: Home-schoolers didn’t want the money.

“These families value their freedom to direct and provide educational opportunities for their children,” she said. Ohio home-schooling leaders worried that if they accepted government funding they would also be forced to accept government regulation of the kind that the home-schooling movement had spent decades dismantling.

The situation in Ohio illustrates the extraordinary moment at which America’s home-schooling movement finds itself after nearly a half-century of activism.

Few causes have enjoyed more success. In the 1980s, it was illegal in most of the United States for parents who weren’t trained educators to teach their children at home.

Today home schooling is not only legal for parents without teaching credentials; many states don’t require them to have graduated from high school. In much of the country, oversight of home educators is scant, or nonexistent.

After an Ohio couple was exposed running a Nazi home-schooling network earlier this year, state officials promised to investigate but eventually declared themselves powerless to do anything. And five months later, state lawmakers eliminated a decades-old requirement that home-school parents submit assessments of their children’s academic progress to school districts.

Only three states impose mandatory testing on most home-schooled children. A majority of states don’t require any form of academic assessment — and even in those that do, the results are often ignored. Over the summer, Vermont Education Agency officials persuaded legislators to end a requirement that home-schoolers send instructional plans and assessment results to the state, saying it lacked the staff to review them.

The number of families in this largely unmonitored educational landscape has soared, growing at a rate far faster than the population of public or private schools. A Washington Post analysis estimated there could be as many as 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, up from about 1.5 million before the pandemic.

But there are signs that the mainstream may be a less comfortable place than the margins for the activists who shaped America’s hands-off approach to home education.

Surprised and, at times, alarmed by the explosion of interest in home schooling, legislators and education officials in some states are talking about reviving oversight measures that home-schooling advocates have worked to erase. In South Dakota, public school officials are making the case for better tracking of a home-school population that nearly doubled over six years.

Greater oversight is likewise on the agenda in Michigan, one of 11 states where home schooling is essentially unregulated — and where parents do not even have to report that they are withdrawing a child from school, let alone demonstrate any academic progress. State legislators there are poised to take up a regulatory bill in 2024 following a Post story about the torture and murder of a home-schooled 11-year-old from Michigan and the emergence of new abuse cases.

But home-school advocates are also facing pressure from an unlikely source: the school-choice movement, which pushes for families’ access to tax dollars for private education. Although both movements believe public schools are failing America’s children, school-choice advocates are more open to accountability measures, such as standardized tests, in exchange for public funding.

After years of pushing vouchers for private-school tuition, those advocates are now championing more flexible spending accounts that could be used by home-schoolers, too. But the proposals have divided America’s home educators, with many arguing that accepting government money and oversight is a surrender of the liberties the movement worked for 40 years to achieve.

The conflict was on display in Florida earlier this year when a mammoth expansion of the state’s school-choice program included new eligibility for home-schoolers. Those families can claim up to $8,500 per year in taxpayer money as long as they submit instructional plans and standardized test results to program administrators.

The state’s leading home-school advocates insisted on a carve-out that places publicly funded home schooling in a separate legal category from traditional home-schoolers, sparing them new oversight measures. Yet many of Florida’s home-school parents rushed to sign up for the money, hitting the program’s first-year cap of 20,000 participants and leaving others on the wait list.

Fearful of increased academic oversight, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the nation’s largest home-school advocacy organization, is now devoting much of its time to opposing school-choice bills, which make up the biggest category of legislation the group is tracking, according to its website. Its president, Jim Mason, has called the proposals “poisonous to the home-schooling movement.”

Founded in 1983, the group has been at the forefront of the statehouse and courtroom battles that led to home schooling’s widespread acceptance.

Its success has set the stage for a different kind of fight.

“We may be kind of in a season of being more reactive,” Mason said in a recent interview, “to proposals that would roll back the freedoms that we’ve gained.”

‘Inexorably chipping away’

Until the 1970s, home schooling didn’t exist on a broad scale in the modern era of compulsory education. Isolated cases were handled according to the judgment of local officials, according to Milton Gaither, author of “Homeschool: An American History.”

That changed as home education was embraced by parents on the radical left — who wanted to liberate kids from the structure of formal education — and the religious right, who sought to rescue children from the secular influence of public schools. By the 1980s, conservative Christians had come to dominate the movement, battling with school and law enforcement officials who dismissed home schooling as truancy or educational neglect.

Their campaign was successful, and by the 1990s states either allowed home schooling or tolerated it under the statutes that govern private schools. But activists didn’t stop there.

“The movement has been concerned with gradually and inexorably chipping away at every type of regulation to make more and more states like the ones that don’t really regulate at all,” Gaither said. “And they have been incredibly successful.”

One key to that success, he added, is the patient approach that home-schooling activists have adopted in pushing their interests in state capitols.

“They come back year after year. If it doesn’t work this year, they come back another year,” Gaither said. “If they don’t have the right person in the governor’s office one year, they’ll wait for the next person.”

South Dakota exemplifies that erosion — and the burgeoning push to reverse it.

In 1993, the state repealed a mandate that school district officials visit the homes of families practicing what was called “alternative instruction,” according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which lobbies for increased oversight. Three years later home educators were granted greater leeway in selecting the standardized tests used to assess their children. In 2011, a requirement that home schools receive approval from local school boards was dropped. In 2021, legislators eliminated any standardized testing for home-schooled kids and got rid of their parents’ annual obligation to notify school district officials that they are home-schooling. The law also made home-schoolers eligible to play sports on public school teams.

Just 30 years ago South Dakota home educators were still required to open their houses to inspections by school administrators. Today, their only remaining regulatory burden is a one-time notice to those administrators that they intend to home-school their kids.

But as home education surges in South Dakota, growing 94 percent between the 2017-2018 and 2022-2023 academic years, public school leaders are pushing back. At a school board meeting this month, Pierre School District Superintendent Kelly Glodt said he hopes state lawmakers will restore at least some home-schooling regulations.

“One of my charges as a superintendent is to make sure that every kid in our school district is getting a good education,” Glodt told The Post. “With no accountability, that’s impossible to do.”

Families for Alternative Instruction Rights in South Dakota, a home-schooling advocacy group, put out an action alert this month warning home-school parents that they “will be facing hostile legislation in Pierre coming from bureaucrats who think they own the kids.”

Jennifer Beving, a former attorney and home-school mom who volunteers with the group, said the state’s home educators expect new regulatory proposals in 2024 — and are preparing to fight them.

“I don’t want to overstate it, but people are up in arms,” Beving said. “You feel like it’s a slap in the face. We just want to educate our kids. We’re not asking for anything.”

A fight is also brewing in Michigan, where legislators say they are preparing a bill that would require parents to notify the state that they are home-schooling. The policy is meant to make it harder for parents who home-school to hide child abuse.

The HSLDA sent an alert to its Michigan members asking them to call, email and meet in person with state legislators to express their opposition, providing talking points on why registration of home-schoolers won’t prevent child abuse.

“Feel free to bring well-behaved children,” the group advised.

Activists followed a similar strategy in 2015, killing a regulatory bill proposed by state Rep. Stephanie Chang (D) after the discovery of two children’s bodies in their home-schooling mother’s deep freezer. But Chang, now a state senator, said she thinks the ground has shifted.

It isn’t just that greater power is now wielded in the capitol by her fellow Democrats, who are more open to moderate forms of regulation, she said. Newer home-schoolers may be as well.

“I know friends who started home-schooling during the pandemic and kept going,” Chang said. “And I know they’re responsible people who would support this regulation.”

Parents who began home-schooling since the pandemic are as a group less conservative and religious than other home educators, according to a Post-Schar School poll, and some say they do not share earlier generations’ instinctive distrust of regulation.

Nowhere is the post-pandemic split over government involvement in home schooling more evident than in the growing debate over whether home educators should accept tax dollars.

Two movements collide

The trajectory of school choice in some ways parallels that of home schooling: Both movements began to take off in the 1980s and 1990s, propelled by skepticism of public schools. But it was not until the last few years that activists from both camps found themselves in the same hearings for the same bills, forced together by new policies that are changing home schooling for tens of thousands of American children.

The debate is over state-funded Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs. Unlike vouchers, which only cover private-school tuition, ESA money can be used for a wide range of expenses. Parents have used them not only for textbooks and tutors, but trampolines and theme park tickets.

The accounts are gaining ground in Republican-controlled legislatures, despite resistance from critics who decry them as a waste of taxpayer money and a drain on the public education system. Thirteen states have created ESAs, according to EdChoice, a research and advocacy group.

Their proponents set out to maximize parents’ ability to use public money outside public schools. But in practice, home educators have stood to gain the most financially, since they were ineligible for existing voucher programs.

Yet as states create or expand the accounts, it has become clear that powerful home-schooling organizations are leery.

Home-education activists “created this zone of liberty where parents have a lot more say in the education of their children, and bringing public money into the equation does run the risk of eroding that,” said Mason, the legal defense association president. “From a practical standpoint, when large sums of tax money are involved, that just creates a whole different dynamic between individuals and the state.”

Brenda Dickinson, who has lobbied for home-schooling families in Florida since 1984, said there was deep unease among home educators earlier this year when they learned they were on track to be included in the state’s ESA legislation.

“There are home-schoolers who don’t want money,” Dickinson recalled telling state lawmakers, explaining that “they don’t want any more oversight than they already have.”

She worked with legislators on a solution: Home educators who signed up to get public funds would technically give up their status under the state’s home-schooling statute, joining a new category of what the state calls “personalized education programs.”

More than 20,000 families signed up for the program, which requires annual standardized testing and the submission of instruction plans, according to Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up for Students, which administers the state’s ESA programs. The demand created a wait list.

“There’s more home-school kids who want to get in than we have money,” Tuthill said.

He predicted that as the program grows — there will be no limit on how many of Florida’s 154,000 home-schooled students can participate by 2027 — so too will its acceptance. Parents receive $7,500 to $8,500 per year for each student they home-school.

“It’s quite a sacrifice financially not to participate,” Tuthill said.

In addition to Florida, Arkansas, Arizona, Utah, New Hampshire and West Virginia have made home-schooled students eligible for ESAs. Florida and Arkansas require those students to take standardized tests. Arizona does not, while New Hampshire, West Virginia and Utah mandate either tests or other assessments, such as evaluation by a certified teacher or submission of student work samples.

It is unclear what route Ohio would have taken, because the savings account program opposed by the state’s home-schooling leaders never became law. Instead, officials there moved ahead with a large expansion of the state’s existing voucher program, bringing its cost to $1 billion a year.

Marilyn John, a Republican state representative who co-sponsored the ESA bill, said she still hopes that it will advance, ideally building on the popularity of the growing voucher system. John said she has spoken to home educators who want access to tax dollars, as well as those who don’t, and thinks they should be included.

She said she doesn’t yet have a firm opinion on standardized testing for publicly funded home schooling.

“When it comes to public dollars, I do believe that there should be accountability,” John said, adding that oversight measures should be “a part of the discussion.”

It is a discussion that at least some home-schoolers in Ohio are now willing to have.

Alisa Queen, a financial systems analyst for the U.S. Treasury Department, is in her second year of home-schooling her 17-year-old grandson from their home in Coolville, in southeast Ohio.

Queen, 57, said she would eagerly sign up for money from the state — even if it meant standardized testing or other regulations.

“It would not bother me,” Queen said. “Not at all.”

Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

Story editing by Lynda Robinson, photo editing by Mark Miller, copy editing by Susan Doyle, project editing by Jay Wang, design by Agnes Lee.