The Home Education Choice

Last night the Black Students Association, Concilio Latino and the Harvard Republican Club sponsored a debate about school choice. Whether it involves interdistrict transfer, vouchers or charter schools, “school choice” is increasingly popular with minority parents otherwise unable to escape decrepit government schools in Cleveland, Detroit and other large cities. While the 14 years since Milwaukee first attempted a voucher system have seen such milestones as the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which stated that vouchers could be used at religious schools, and this year’s federal government program to provide vouchers to students in failing D.C. schools, there has really been more heat than light. Though there are less than 50,000 students currently receiving them, vouchers have consumed much space in the educational public policy debate. On the other hand, home educators—who now teach 40 times that many students—get little attention from government, and what attention they do get is generally bad.

Home education became associated in the 1980s with Christian families who used it as a way of opting out of government schools that they could no longer academically or culturally affect on the local level. Numbered at 345,000 students by the U.S. Department of Education in 1994, home education has expanded to more than 2 million students, as reported by Congress’ Homeschool Non-Discrimination Act last July. With that expansion, the stereotype of home educators as reclusive, right-wing Christian fundamentalists has been left in the dust. Today’s home educators include self-proclaimed secularists and Muslim immigrants, traditional Catholics and homosexual partners, Ivy League grad students as well as Bostonians convinced that government schools will never teach history except from a “white Anglo-Saxon perspective.”

While vouchers could make education more affordable to some, those who home educate have always had to pay twice for education—funding the government schools in their area as well as the educational resources their children use. In addition, home-educating families usually rely on the income of a single breadwinner, while the other spouse stays home to instruct the children.

Teachers’ unions often do not like home educators because the government schools lose thousands of dollars of state and federal aid per student when home educators opt out—the National Education Association (NEA) annually passes a resolution condemning home education. School boards and parent-teacher associations regret the loss of some of the most involved parents from their midst. Social services case-workers, though great people in almost any other context, frequently distrust home educators or are unaware of state laws regarding home education and so harass those who practice it, including—full disclosure—this author’s family.

Officeholders, even those who wish to be friendly to home educators, have difficulty understanding that the most they can hope to do is get out of the way. Many home educators would never seek vouchers because we know that the flow of government money is followed by the creep of government regulation. We want government brought back to the local level, where families can influence it, not insulated away in state capitals or Washington.

Acceptable government policies that complement home education are the same ones that are favorable to families with children in general. First, let us keep our incomes to support our families. Second, allow us to keep—for the educational expenses of our children—the money that would be taken from us to sponsor government schools. Third, call off the government hounds of harassment.

In 1948, when Congress first equalized the federal income tax to remove the “single’s tax,” the personal exemption (then $600) was equal to 41 percent of average per capita income. Incomes and taxes have rapidly inflated since then, but the exemption has not kept pace and is now only about 10 percent of average per capita income. While the Earned Income Tax Credit has made up some of the slack, a much greater tax burden is borne by home educating families than should be. The personal exemption should be returned to its original efficacy and be increased to $12,941.

Where government schools are supported by property taxes or similar measures, home educators’ expenses should be counted against their tax obligation on a one-to-one basis, up to the level of per pupil spending in local government schools.

Most importantly—and what government is most capable of achieving—we should be left alone. The NEA annually calls for the imposition of state licensing as well as one-size-fits-all curricula on home educators. This notion should be emphatically rejected. Home education produces superior results precisely because of its flexible nature and freedom from outmoded educational theories. Centralized bureaucrats must not legislate these benefits away.

Home educators show the lie of teachers’ unions by producing great results with limited financial resources. Insofar as government is able, home educators should not be harassed, nor should their financial resources distributed toward the government’s schooling of others.

Paul C. Schultz ’04, a Crimson editor, is an economics concentrator in Quincy House.