Overview of Homeschooling in the United States

Homeschooling in the United States has deep roots reaching back to the first families arriving on the eastern shore. Often children provided significant contributions to the family’s survival, working on farms or in factories, and, with the scarcity of schools, parents were left on their own to provide what education they could manage. Sometimes the family bible was the only book in the home. However, this type of schooling was a far cry from modern day homeschooling.

The nature of home education shifted when states began passing compulsory schooling laws. In 1837, Massachusetts made the first attempts requiring children to attend school. The passage of these early laws originally linked a desire to promote education and combat child labor. The sentiments underlying these laws were largely a desire to protect children from the dangers of factory work and create citizens for the expanding nation. But they also reflected a growing belief that parents were negligent in the care of their children, and the government needed to assume responsibility for their health, education, and overall well-being. Conceivably the most significant impact of the laws was this; that they shifted control of children from parents to the state!

By 1918, forty-eight states – all that were part of the United States at the time – had passed compulsory education laws. However, states were slow to enact and enforce these laws because there was substantial resistance from both factory owners and parents. But as the laws gained backing and spread to other states, keeping your children home – what is now referred to as homeschooling – stood on shaky ground.

Educational institutions evolved across the country slowly in a stilted, haphazard way. Academic protocol, instructional approaches, curriculum, teacher requirements, and certification among other factors, were left up to each state, which had little to no history on which to base their models. With the government now exercising control over their children’s attendance at school and the questionable quality of the experience, parents began to protest and complain.

The resurgence of homeschooling as a legitimate and legal educational option can mostly be attributed to the efforts of two influential forces: John Holt, an advocate from the liberal left, and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), representing Christian conservative interests. Together, they helped establish homeschooling as a credible educational alternative in the United States, while occupying the two opposite ends of a political homeschooling spectrum.

John Holt is widely credited with initiating the modern homeschooling movement. His criticisms of public schools were described in his books How Children Learn (Holt, 1967) and How Children Fail (Holt, 1964). Peters describes Holt’s views of schooling in the ‘60s, “They [schools] stifle learning by trapping children in regimented and repressive environments…A bleak educational landscape in which fearful children mainly learn to obey orders and are all but barred from thinking for themselves.” (Dwyer & Peters, 2019, p. 41)

Holt’s initial efforts were aimed at reforming schools – turning them into efficient sites of learning. He watched children closely and observed the strategies, schemes, and methods they used to learn, and strove to transition these stratagems into public schools. His early efforts were aimed at helping schools improve, but eventually he believed schools were too broken to be helped, and his journey led him beyond fixing schools to – why not take your children out of school and teach them at home?

Over time, Holt criticized public schools and the mechanical and institutionalized methods they used: organizing children into grades, assessing and labeling them, giving grades, administering standardized testing, etc. He encouraged learning more in sync with each individual child and eventually supported more child-led learning – a much looser approach to learning that ultimately was labeled unschooling. Eventually, his magazine, Growing Without Schooling, became an iconic symbol of unschooling, which falls near the end of the homeschooling spectrum, the more liberal limit.

Meanwhile, the other force supporting homeschooling was the conservative religious community. Raymond Moore can be credited with growing and strengthening homeschooling and providing a strong religious foundation. His research in the late 1960s concluded that young children were better off at home than school, segueing into – might as well stay home in the warm embrace of their parents, where academic success was more easily achieved than in institutionalized schooling. He claimed, “No schoolroom can match the simplicity and power of the home in providing three-dimensional, firsthand education.” (Moore & Moore, 1975)

Disillusioned with what public schools could offer and caring deeply about instilling their religious values and beliefs, many parents turned to homeschooling. What really grew homeschooling in the United States was most likely Christian parents wanting a religious rather than secular education for their children. Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which defines itself as a Christian organization, was founded by Michael Farris in 1983 for the purpose of defending homeschooling families. It is a United States based organization to promote the freedom of families to homeschool their children. HSLDA’s full-throated defense of homeschooling families and their legislative lobbying efforts played a large part in establishing the legalization of homeschooling in the United States.

HSLDA won court cases for homeschooling families around the country basically making homeschooling legal in each state. Joseph Murphy (2012) reported that homeschooling was illegal in most states early in the 1980s. However, during that decade, twenty-seven states passed laws making it legal. By the mid 1990s, it was legal in all fifty states. However, states were then responsible for dictating what sorts of regulation would govern homeschooling and not only were there huge variations among states concerning what that oversight would comprise, but the rules changed over time. What level of control should states exercise? HSLDA’s website (hslda.org) offers data on every state’s regulations and keeps them updated. The requirements in place range from states where nothing is required – not even notifying the state or school district that you are homeschooling – to a state where you must keep attendance, turn in yearly objectives, keep a portfolio of student work, have students take standardized tests, and have an outside evaluator send in a written report.

The nature of homeschooling makes studying it difficult. Quantitative research is especially hard as the data is so unreliable. According to Joseph Murphy (2012), the field of homeschooling research remains underdeveloped. He describes the current body of work as “immature and poorly formed,” especially when compared to the more robust and systematic research conducted on public and charter schools. This lack of rigorous investigation raises concerns among researchers, policymakers, educators, and parents. Several factors contribute to this problem, including difficulty in accurately counting homeschoolers, the variation in regulations across states, and the highly individualized nature of each home school – all of which present significant challenges to understanding the homeschooling phenomenon. More empirical research is needed to fill this gap, and Homeschooling Voices [my book] provides a thick description drawn from ten years of gathering data from fourteen homeschooling families. [Chapter 1 from Homeschooling Voices]