HOMESCHOOLING IN THE UNITED STATES: A Critique of Advocacy Research and Individualism

Record: T. Jameson Brewer and Christopher Lubienski, “Homeschooling in the United States: Examining the Rationales for Individualizing Education” in Pro-Posições 28, no. 2 (May/August 2017): 21-38.  [Available Here]

Summary: Brewer teaches in the education department at the University of North Georgia and is perhaps best known for his book offering a withering critique of Teach For America by aggregating first person narratives from disgruntled alumni of the program.  Lubienski, who teaches educational policy at Indiana University, is a longtime critic of privatization reform efforts and of unregulated homeschooling.  The two authors have worked together on several projects for the National Education Policy Center, and they collaborated in 2013 on an article that, like the present one, criticizes the empirical claims of advocacy-based homeschooling researchers.

This article begins with a general introduction to homeschooling in the United States, noting its historical development and especially its legal grounding in the Supreme Court’s  Meyer and Pierce decisions in the mid 1920s that found that the State did not have the right to require all children to attend public schools only.

It then reiterates arguments Brewer and Lubienski made in their 2013 article against  claims that homeschoolers outperform public schoolers on standardized tests.  Basically, advocacy researchers have not controlled for parent background variables.  Of course wealthy, white children from stable two-parent homes whose parents are college-educated are going to outperform the national average.  They would do that regardless of where they went to school.

Next, Brewer and Lubienski reiterate their refutation of the advocates’ claims that homeschooling save taxpayers money and is cheaper than institutional schooling.  As in their 2013 article, they note, first of all, that homeschoolers do in fact use a lot of public money (through the local public library, charter schooling, education savings accounts, etc.).  Secondly, public schools do not usually see the savings claimed, for removal of one or two children from a classroom doesn’t change the fundamental costs of running a school.  Finally, homeschooling costs a lot more than advocates claim it does, because advocates have not calculated the cost of the stay-at-home parent’s labor.  If a mother foregoes a career so she can stay at home to educate her children, the cost of homeschooling balloons into the tens of thousands per year.

The paper concludes with a final section critiquing the individualistic assumptions underlying homeschooling ideology.  Homeschooling, like other school choice initiatives, elevates “the individual over the collective good.” (p. 33)  Be they religious conservatives, child-centered liberals, or pragmatists, parents who choose homeschooling turn their backs on the longstanding American “belief in education for the public and common good.” (p.34)

Appraisal:  The first thing to note about this article is that, especially compared to the 2013 piece from which it cribs much of its content, it is not very well written.  My summary makes it sound more coherent than it is.  The text itself contains a number of asides and tangents that suggest a hasty, undisciplined construction.

In terms of content, readers of this blog will know that I agree completely with Brewer and Lubienski’s arguments about the empirical research for academic achievement and for fiscal effect.  I do not, however, think that they are entirely correct in their association of homeschooling with neoliberal individualism.

It is true that many if not most homeschooling families do not think much about the common good.  But in this they are only reflecting the dominant trend in American culture since the mid-1960s.  It’s not just the homeschoolers who are Bowling Alone.  In fact, I think homeschooling could easily be read as an effort to fight against the very individualism Brewer and Lubienski critique.  Homeschoolers are famous for their social networking with other homeschoolers and their remarkably effective political mobilization when their interests are at stake.

There are other ways to think of the common good than to envision, as Brewer and Lubienski seem to do, a homogeneous mass all attending the same institution and receiving the same socialization.  It is one of the truisms of evolutionary biology that diversity of the gene pool is a boon to long-range survival of the group.  One could argue that homeschooling likewise serves the common good by keeping alive dissenting, alternative communities of people, allowing them to flourish in all their diversity and to preserve minority cultural memes for the future.

Homeschooling provides space for eccentrics and nonconformists to flourish.  True enough, as Brewer and Lubienski point out, some of those eccentrics end up abusing children in horrific ways.  Common-sense regulations should be put in place to help identify such families and protect their children.  But much more often homeschooling provides a space for children to grow up different.  In an age that wants so badly to promote diversity, this attribute of homeschooling should be celebrated.

Milton Gaither

Messiah College