Homeschoolers are right to worry about regulation. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that some families were threatened, and even criminally charged, for educating their children at home. More recently, calls for increased homeschooling regulation have come from a range of sources, including a Harvard professor, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and some state legislatures.
Despite these regulatory rah-rahs, the trend in recent years has fortunately been toward more deregulation of homeschooling, and greater educational freedom for families in general.
This deregulatory trend in homeschooling has occurred as school-choice policies expand nationwide, enabling more families to apply a portion of state-allocated education funding toward the learning environment that works best for their children—including, in some places, homeschooling programs and curricula. While homeschoolers should always be on the lookout for regulatory threats, and should fight back against regulation, as my FEE colleague Nasiyah Isra-Ul recently urged, data suggest that homeschooling families should not fear the expansion of school-choice policies.
A recent paper by Johns Hopkins University professor Angela Watson and Jeremy Newman of the Texas Home School Coalition sheds further light on the compatibility between greater homeschooling freedoms and more school choice. Specifically, the authors found that policies enabling homeschooled students to participate in various classes or activities offered by local public schools did not lead to more homeschool regulation, nor did the growth of private school-choice policies, such as education savings accounts (ESAs).
“We find that there is no evidence of any increase in homeschool regulation despite a history of adjacent policy changes,” the researchers wrote. “Increasing access does not appear to have negatively impacted homeschool regulation. The growth of school choice and the rise of ESAs also does not appear to have negatively impacted homeschool regulation. In fact, homeschool regulation has decreased rather than increased over time.”
It is worth noting that some of the states with the strictest regulation of homeschooling have no private school-choice policies or general policies that allow homeschoolers to participate in public school programs, while states with these expansive policies often have the least amount of homeschooling regulation. Take my state of Massachusetts, where I have been a homeschooling mom for more than a decade. The Bay State has zero private school-choice programs and only allows homeschoolers to participate in public school activities on an individual basis at the discretion of each school district. Yet, Massachusetts is one of the Top 5 most heavily regulated US states for homeschooling. This is in stark contrast to states such as Florida, Arizona, and Utah that have robust school-choice policies, to which homeschoolers have access, and yet have very low regulation of homeschooling.
Homeschoolers should perhaps be more concerned about regulation in states without private school-choice policies than those with these policies, as choice-friendly states may have a greater respect for parental choice in education overall. Wyoming provides an ideal example of this. Last month, the Equality State removed existing homeschooling regulations, freeing homeschooling families from having to report to the government about their homeschooling plans or progress. It is now the 12th US state to enjoy this highest level of homeschooling freedom.
Less than a week after Wyoming deregulated homeschooling, it became the 15th state to enact a universal school-choice program, enabling all K-12 students in the state to be eligible for an ESA of up to $7,000 a year to use toward the school or setting that is best for them.
“When it comes to homeschooling and universal choice, real-world policy actions trump scary hypotheticals,” said Ben DeGrow, Senior Policy Director, Education Choice at ExcelinEd, a nonprofit education advocacy organization. “Wyoming gives us fresh evidence that there’s a strong constituency for both. Families in the same state can choose these different paths and find opportunities for their children to thrive,” said DeGrow, who, along with his wife, has homeschooled his three daughters in Michigan for the past nine years. In a recent X thread, DeGrow explained that “robust #SchoolChoice and homeschool freedom can and do coexist, and not just coincidentally,” reinforcing the idea that decreasing regulations on homeschoolers while increasing educational options for more families through school-choice policies can go hand in hand.
As homeschooling families, we must always remain vigilant and push back against efforts to constrain our freedom to educate our children as we choose. But we should notice that these efforts frequently appear in states with limited or no private school-choice policies, such as we’ve seen recently in Virginia and Illinois. The best protection for homeschooling freedoms may be broader policies that expand education choice to more families, fostering a strong culture in which all parents are at the helm of how, what, and where their children learn.
For more content like this, sign up here for Kerry’s weekly LiberatED email newsletter, and check out the LiberatED podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
