Multiple Democrat states are targeting homeschooling families with draconian new laws and policies, raising alarm among advocates of parental rights and educational freedom. The escalating attacks on home education are part of a growing and coordinated movement to control, undermine, and eventually end homeschooling, experts warned.
From Minnesota and Illinois to Connecticut and beyond, lawmakers have in recent months been exploiting extremely rare incidents of abuse or neglect as a pretext to target the millions of parents who provide a world-class education for their children outside of state control. It is part of a strategy to bring all children and families under government control.
Just this week, thousands of parents were forced to descend on the state Capitol in Hartford to push back against a major assault. Following a state report calling for more government “protection” of homeschooled children — as if they needed protection from their parents — lawmakers held an “informational hearing” designed to demonize home education.
No legislation has been formally proposed, yet. But bureaucrats, activists, and far-left media outlets such as NBC News seized on the story of a stepmom in Waterbury who allegedly held her stepson captive for two decades to push for more government oversight. Apparently, the stepmother offered “several explanations” to school officials about why she was withdrawing the then-11-year-old victim, including a mention of homeschooling.
The state’s “Office of the Child Advocate” (OCA) released a report this week calling for more control. Among the policy recommendations: “that the parent and child appear annually to provide enrollment documentation, that the child be independently evaluated annually for academic progress, and that the parent provide initial and periodic assurances that the child is in good health.”
State Senator Ceci Maher, who leads the legislature’s “Committee on Children,” argued it was just about keeping children safe. “What we’re looking at is, how do we thread this needle of keeping children safe and supporting homeschooling,” she was quoted as saying in news reports, with no reference to the appalling conditions faced by so many victims of government schools.
Gov. Ned Lamont, also a Democrat, has echoed calls for more government control of homeschool families. “I’d like to talk with the legislature about ways we can stay in better communication – make sure those kids are being well protected, not just in school, but at homeschool as well,” he said.
Republican lawmakers, though, blasted the exploitation of the highly unusual case as a pretext to regulate all innocent homeschool families. “To respond [to the Waterbury case] by targeting the 40,000 law-abiding families who successfully educate their children at home is misguided, unjust and unfair,” argued State Sen. Jeff Gordon.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Steve Harding lambasted the OCA’s proposals for more control and how they were released the same morning as they were going to be discussed in the legislature. “What a disgrace, what a disgrace — what a spit in the face it is to people in this room,” he said.
Separately, homeschoolers in Minnesota are under attack as well. On April 24, the Minnesota Senate approved an amendment that the Home School Legal Defense Association warned would “fundamentally alter the state’s homeschool law.” The new restrictions would be among the “most onerous in the nation,” HSLDA added.
Among the restrictions included in Minnesota’s Senate File 1740 is a provision to restrict who can educate the children to just parents or legal guardians. Many homeschooling families also include grandparents, uncles, aunts, and other extended family members in the process. The scheme also prohibits homeschooling by a parent convicted of a broad list of crimes, including misdemeanors.
Also alarming is that the measure would restrict home education to a “primary address” in Minnesota. “As any homeschooling parent knows, homeschooling does not exclusively take place at home,” said HSLDA, which represents hundreds of thousands of homeschooling families nationwide. “It can happen on the road, at grandma’s house, at your co-op, or at the park.”
“Limiting homeschooling to a residential address is an antiquated understanding of how homeschooling works, and it eliminates much of the flexibility that makes homeschooling so great,” continued the advocacy group. “This bill would prevent families from taking advantage of that flexibility.” It would also restrict coops, online classes, dual enrollment, and many other options that homeschool families frequently use.
Because it was adopted as an amendment in the Senate, parents did not even have an opportunity to testify. Urging members to push back against the effort with their representatives, HSLDA said there were numerous ways the scheme could be adopted — even if the House does not take it up. One way would be for it to be approved would be in a conference committee.
As The Newman Report documented in March, lawmakers in Illinois are also pushing hard to impose draconian restrictions on homeschooling families. Under the proposed “Homeschool Act,” homeschool families would be forced to register and provide detailed information to government. Bureaucrats would also be free to investigate parents on a whim, even jailing those who refuse to comply.
And yet, despite the hysteria manufactured by well-funded activists and far-left media outlets, the peer-reviewed research shows homeschooled children are safer than children in government school. Indeed, massive amounts of research and data now exist showing that home-educated children do better on every metric, from safety and academics to socialization and tolerance.
Unfortunately, even in Republican states, homeschooling is in the crosshairs. The attacks are not as blatant, of course. But as government-funded “school choice” programs proliferate, regulation and controls are following. Even strong Republican states with supermajorities such as Florida are facing more and more efforts to impose control on tax-funded homeschoolers and private schools.
At the national level, multiple totalitarian-minded “child advocates” are openly pushing to end home education altogether. Leading the charge is Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet with the “Child Advocacy Project.” In an article for the Arizona Law Review, she openly called for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling.
Her sidekick James Dwyer at William and Mary Law School, meanwhile, has sought to “debunk” the idea of parental rights. Yes, seriously. “The reason that parent-child relationship exists is because the state confers legal parenthood on people through its paternity and maternity laws,” he claimed, apparently oblivious to how that sounds to normal people.
Beyond the powerful but fringe advocates seeking a total assault on the rights of parents to control the education and upbringing of their children, there are also less obvious threats. The “Coalition for Responsible Home Education” (CRHE), for instance, presents itself as a more moderate group merely seeking to “protect” homeschooled children from their parents. But in reality, parents are virtually always the best protectors of children.
There is a dangerous and powerful effort to have the state usurp all control and responsibility over children from parents — the very people who most love the children, and those who the Bible says are responsible for their upbringing. It is not new, of course. From Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists to Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party or Joseph Stalin and his Soviet regime, the goal is always the same. And the results are always horrific.
Parents must resist this evil like everything depends on stopping it — because it does.
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