Sharon and David Williams once viewed their children as Christian missionaries to their public-school system.
Yet in 1982, Sharon, herself a former public-school teacher, re-evaluated that stance in light of her children’s three hours daily on a school bus, inadequate instruction, harmful peer influences, and, in one case, a sexually explicit film in French class.
After considering a private Christian school, the Williamses deemed the $500 per month for four children as unaffordable. Sharon Williams, looking at the alternatives, eventually determined to educate her children herself. Today, 13 years later, those children have completed high school and are in college, trade school, or the work force. Another seven Williams children are learning in their Lombard, Illinois, home.
Initially, David Williams says he struggled with whether his wife could handle teaching and whether the children would still adapt to society. “It’s an incredible stress on the mother,” he says. “But we wanted to move in the direction of our convictions.”
MOVEMENT GOES MAINSTREAM: While an estimated 80 percent of the one million home-educated students in the United States are Christian, reasons for opting out of public education now extend beyond religion.
As doubts about the effectiveness of public education have grown, home schoolers have, by default, found themselves at the forefront of educational innovation. They have been busy in the home classroom experimenting with fresh teaching methods, integrating computer technology, partnering with colleges, and, in some cases, imparting religious instruction.
Home schooling has become a far more manageable exercise with new curriculums on the market, greater access to public-school programs, and a boom in affordable home-computer technology.
A decade ago, home schoolers engaged in brutal fights with local school districts and state lawmakers for the right to exist (CT, Sept. 2, 1983, p. 18). Now home education is legal in every state.
Some 30 states have standardized testing requirements for home-educated children, and only ten states require parents to have a high-school diploma to teach their own children at home. About three-dozen states require home schoolers to register with the local public school, while five states require formal “approval” from local school boards or superintendents.
Patricia Lines, policy analyst with the U.S. Department of Education, says few public-school officials see home schooling as a threat, because the movement involves less than 2 percent of the nation’s 50 million school-age children. Home schooling does not influence real estate taxes, a principal source of income for public education. Also, many states now count home-schooled children in public-educational, per-student funding formulas.
“For a determined [home-schooling] family, there’s really nothing they can’t accomplish,” Lines says. “We certify [public-school] teachers to learn how to establish discipline and how to teach to a group. I’ve seen no evidence that a teaching certificate would enhance a one-on-one situation.”
August Steinhilber, general counsel for the 16,000-member National School Boards Association in Alexandria, Virginia, also sounds a conciliatory note. “Most parents are qualified because they know what’s best for their children,” Steinhilber says. “The only drawback is when the parent doesn’t take the responsibility seriously.”
Academically, home-schooled students are frequently top achievers, scoring higher than the national average on standardized achievement tests. Researcher Brian D. Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Oregon, found in an analysis last year that 16,000 home schoolers ranked in the seventy-seventh percentile of Iowa Tests of Basic Skills basic battery scores.
Also, a 1993 University of Michigan study by J. Gary Knowles revealed home schoolers to be well-adjusted socially, participating in sports leagues, community activities, and computer networks. Home schoolers have gained entry to elite universities, including Harvard, Yale, the University of California- Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In fact, college admission officers now recruit at home-school conventions and conferences.
In the early years, many home-schooling teachers simply followed the rote workbook approach stressed by some textbook publishers. “Now it’s a huge, huge business,” says Michael P. Farris, 43-year-old founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in Purcellville, Virginia. “If you go to a home-school book fair, there are probably 150 exhibitors.” Research by Ray indicates the average family spends $489 annually to home educate a child, creating a multimillion-dollar market for supplies.
HERE COME THE CLASSICS: Now that home-schooling families have won the battle for legitimacy, they are shifting their emphasis toward redefining educational excellence. And, in some cases, they are going beyond “back to basics” to a more classical model of instruction.
Douglas Jones, coauthor of “Classical Education and the Home School” (Canon Press, 1995), argues that removing a child from public school has no educational benefit in itself. “Many Christian parents who had initially just reacted to the godlessness of the government schools are now seeing the shallowness of that kind of Christian response,” says Jones, a philosophy teacher at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho.
Jones has cowritten a classical education series that emphasizes mastering language disciplines, especially Latin and rhetoric. “We’ve often bought the modern lie that children will only learn if the subject is fun and thrilling,” Jones says. “But education is a discipline, and it should involve hard work.” His recommended reading list includes such heavyweight classics as Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” Augustine’s “The City of God,” and Dante’s “The Inferno.”
Parents who expect to home school on a budget may find that at-home education can be nearly as costly as some private schools. Along with most home-schooling mothers, Sharon Williams has grown consumer savvy. While using materials from Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Books (the two biggest Christian textbook publishers) for the three R’s, she no longer limits her pupils to textbooks. They have read novels such as “The Yearling” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” and beginning in September, Williams plans to teach Latin.
Learning goes beyond books. “Home economics becomes very real. We have to eat the meals they cook,” Williams says. “You get a lot of biology when you cut up a whole chicken.”
BEYOND THE PEER GROUP: Many home-schooling families have moved education out of the classroom and into real-world settings, setting up educational situations that would be the envy of any school administrator.
With the Williams family, for example, children have participated in sports through the YMCA, church, and park district programs. They have joined a public-school orchestra and enrolled at a nearby community college for computer and chemistry classes. In addition, one 12-year-old operated a breadmaking business, a 13-year-old sold woodwork, and a 15-year-old worked as a candy striper.
“They’re being prepared to function in interpersonal relationships in an adult world,” Sharon Williams says. “Public schools only prepare you to deal with a peer group.”
Nevertheless, there are still doubts about the social skills of home schoolers. An evangelical publishing house in Wheaton, Illinois, almost did not hire one of the Williams children, Teren, who is now 24, because of her home education. “They told me they didn’t think my social skills would be strong enough,” she says. Now Teren is senior customer representative at the company.
Many home schoolers, including the Williams family, gather one day a week with other children. For the past six years, the Williamses have met with three other home-schooling families for field trips and classes on subjects such as music theory, debate, and Spanish.
Many such support groups are church-affiliated. Gateway Christian Church in Fair Oaks, California, a charismatic fellowship of 900, had so many home schoolers—around 120-that it established a weekly “enrichment day” for drama, theater, band, speech, art, typing, yearbook, and field trips. Four different groups meet, with 13 parents teaching in their areas of expertise.
“Enrichment day is not designed to replace parents, but to do the things they can’t do at home,” says Sherie Bluemel, administrator of the Gateway home-school group.
A 1990 survey by Ray of 1,516 HSLDA families found that 68 percent had three or more children, and mothers did the primary teaching 88 percent of the time. In the study, 27 percent identified themselves as independent fundamentalist/ evangelical, 18 percent as Baptist, 15 percent as independent charismatics, and 8 percent Assemblies of God. No other group—primarily Catholic, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Reformed, and Adventist—had more than 4 percent.
“These families have made a decision that in order to home school, they’re going to have to live on one income,” Farris says.
GROWING CLOUT: Although modern home-schooling families initially earned a reputation for being countercultural and separatistic, there is growing evidence such families are in the minority today.
Mark Weston, state services coordinator with the Education Commission of the States in Denver, a nonprofit, bipartisan interstate compact that serves state policymakers, has found that home schoolers are not unplugging from the culture at large but rather may be early adopters of new trends and technology.
“Home schoolers are no longer dropping out of society,” Weston says. “These people are very plugged in—with computers, accessing the Internet, and networking with other home schoolers.”
Weston advocates cooperation among public and private schools and the home-schooling community. Eventually, one-third of home-school students return to traditional schools, typically during high school.
In some cases, Christian schools are cooperating with home schoolers. Alexis Crow, 48, legal coordinator for the Rutherford Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia, notes that when home schoolers pay a fee to participate in a science lab or on a basketball team, they benefit academically and socially while the private school benefits financially.
The potent political clout of the home- schooling movement was demonstrated nationally last year.
On short notice, home schoolers mobilized to oppose a federal education bill that would have required teachers to be state certified in each subject taught. Eventually, the House voted 424 to 1 to repeal that amendment (CT, April 4, 1994, p. 76).
Other conflicts still occur at the local level. “We are in court a lot on child abuse and neglect charges, which swirl around the home-schooling lifestyle,” says HSLDA’s Farris, whose 12-year-old organization represents 45,000 families who pay $100 annually for “legal defense for families who choose to exercise their God-given and constitutional right to teach their children at home.” HSLDA has a $4 million annual budget.
Once a home-schooling matter involves criminal charges, most often it is the Rutherford Institute that provides legal assistance, at no charge. Crow, coauthor of “Home Education: Rights and Reasons” (Crossway Books, 1993), cites separate cases in Hale, Michigan, and Nevada City, California, during the past two years in which mothers were arrested for truancy before charges were dropped.
In 1993, Michigan became the last state to drop a requirement that one parent be a college graduate in order to teach at home. Nowadays, Crow says, home schoolers are doing the suing, to gain access to public-school services and benefits. In a federal suit filed this year in Oklahoma against the Guthrie School Board, home-schooling mother Annie Swanson maintained that because she is a taxpayer, her child should have access to public-school band, athletics, and classes.
Crow herself is a home-schooling mother. Her 14-year-old daughter, Maggie, also has a tutor for French and algebra, and attends a college-level chemistry class at the University of Virginia. According to Crow, one of the reasons exact figures for home schoolers are difficult to determine is because a minority of antigovernment parents stay underground. They do not want their children to be registered with the local school district, and they do not want their children taking standardized tests.
“Some mainstream home schoolers are now saying, ‘Don’t send your kid to college,’ ” Crow says. “Our view has always been to get into the best schools, get into the power centers, and affect the culture positively. You just can’t run out and hide in the hills.”
L. B. Gallien, Jr., Wheaton College education professor, fears home schooling may further isolate Christians from the culture. “Public schools are increasingly bereft of Christian students who positively contribute to the future stabilization of American society,” Gallien says.
If Christians form their own private and home schools, they will lose a voice in the growing multiculturalism that is a reality in the United States, Gallien says. “Some prominent evangelical leaders have convinced scores of evangelicals that public schools are overwhelmingly godless, valueless, and dangerous.”
Based on recent questions from parents to Rutherford, Crow anticipates that an emerging concern is the legality of one parent teaching students from several families at home. Crow believes the issue will wind up in litigation soon because some may interpret such an arrangement as a private school, which is subject to more stringent regulation. But, Crow says, “If they have the right to home school their child, they have the right to delegate that authority to someone else as they see fit.”
Such is the message of the Parental Rights and Responsibility Act, introduced in Congress June 28. The proposed legislation would ensure that parents’ providing for the education of their child is a fundamental right.
Although Farris sees the number of home-schooling converts from public and Christian schools plateauing, he nevertheless predicts continued growth. “I don’t know if there’s any stopping the movement, because home schoolers have a ton of kids who are starting to come of age,” says Farris, himself the father of nine.
Sharon Williams’s first grandchild, three-month-old Micah, already is being groomed for home schooling. Micah’s mother, 22-year-old Trudie Wentzlaff, says, “Parents are responsible for training up children, and I really don’t want someone else doing it.”
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