From he Washington Post: Home-schoolers dismantled state oversight. Now they fear pushback.

More on one of the reserved powers of the states.

If you take state money, the state will want to regulate how you spend it. 

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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.

“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.