{"id":29,"date":"2012-08-30T18:25:43","date_gmt":"2012-08-30T18:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=29"},"modified":"2012-09-17T21:22:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T21:22:00","slug":"education-off-the-grid-a-law-professor-advocates-for-increasing-homeschooling-regulations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=29","title":{"rendered":"EDUCATION OFF THE GRID: A Law Professor Advocates for Increasing Homeschooling Regulations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Kimberly A. Yuracko, \u201cEducation off the Grid: Constitutional Constraints on Homeschooling\u201d in California Law Review<\/em> 96, no. 1 (Feb. 2008): 123-184.<\/p>\n

Summary:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yuracko, a law professor at Northwestern University here makes the case that state statutes and the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution require that states have a responsibility to regulate homeschooling in certain respects.<\/p>\n

She begins with an anecdote that most homeschoolers would find highly objectionable: \u201cAnn and Bob Smith are a devoutly religious couple who choose to homeschool their seven-year-old twins Susan and Sam.\u00a0 In accordance with their religious beliefs, they teach their children only religious doctrine, refusing to provide their children with a basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Her point, however, is not that people like the Smiths actually exist, but that given existing law in many states, they could.\u00a0 Drawing on the Home School Legal Defense Association\u2019s (HSLDA) own data, Yuracko notes that ten states have no regulation of homeschooling at all\u2013not even requiring homeschoolers to notify the state that they are homeschooling.\u00a0 Yuracko is concerned that while political theorists have devoted much attention to dealing with such illiberal practices as polygamy, child marriage, and clitoridectomy, they have not heretofore investigated the potential of homeschooling to be a shield used by \u201creligiously fundamentalist families\u201d against such liberal values as \u201csex equality, gender role fluidity, and critical rationality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yuracko claims that under current federal and state law states must regulate homeschooling families to ensure that they are offering \u201ca basic constitutionally mandated minimum education\u201d and must \u201ccheck rampant forms of sexism in homeschooling so as to prevent the severe under-education of girls by homeschooling parents who believe in female subordination.\u201d<\/p>\n

First the minimum education argument.\u00a0 Yuracko notes that all of the studies showing homeschoolers to perform so well are based on self-selecting, nonrepresentative samples.\u00a0 She then cites several anecdotes of horrific behavior to children by parents who used homeschooling as a cloak for their neglect or abuse, concluding that the leniency given homeschoolers means that we \u201ccannot know for sure how rare such occurrences are\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Breaking state educaion clauses into four categories and summarizing judicial interpretation, Yuracko explains that all state laws require \u201can adequate education in basic skills.\u201d\u00a0 Furthermore, Yuracko argues, a child\u2019s right to a basic minimum education ought be seen as a fundamental right protected by the 14th Amendment\u2019s Due Process clause (though she acknowledges that this claim has not been tested by the Supreme Court).\u00a0 Yuracko concludes that just as homeowners\u2019 associations and company towns must obey state law, so must homeschooling parents, and states violate their own statutes (and possibly the U.S. Constitution) when they do not hold such parents accountable for basic minimum education.<\/p>\n

Now for the gender equality argument.\u00a0 Yuracko begins by noting that a number of prominent homeschool curricula \u201cemphasize that girls should be subordinant to their fathers and later their husbands.\u201d\u00a0 She cites several examples of inequitable thinking about females, the most arresting being an article on the Vision Forum Ministries <\/a>website asserting that\u00a0\u201dGod does not allow women to vote\u201d and the popular book So Much More<\/a>\"\", wherein two homeschooled sisters argue that college is\u00a0\u201ddangerous for young\u00a0women because it diverts them from their God-ordained role as helpmeets for their fathers and husbands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yuracko acknowledges that it is a leap to claim that attitudes like this lead to inferior education provided to girls, but she worries that this may be happening in today\u2019s unregulated environment.\u00a0 She asserts that the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from discriminating against protected group members, and females are protected.\u00a0 But does the Equal Protection Clause apply to individual families?\u00a0 Yuracko claims that \u201cthere are some forms of private conduct which a state simply cannot with constitutional impunity authorize and enforce,\u201d and she cites many cases to that effect, most of them dealing with racial segregation in\u00a0private organizations.\u00a0 Yuracko offers a careful and nuanced discussion of several important Supreme Court decisions on this topic to argue that education ought be seen as a domain wherein private action must be held accountable to Equal Protection rights.\u00a0 Thus homeschooling families who give their boys a better education than they give their girls are violating the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n

Finally, Yuracko offers her suggestions for\u00a0how\u00a0states ought to regulate homeschoolers to ensure that all are receiving a basic minimum education and that families do not discriminate against their girls.\u00a0 After canvassing a number of options, she concludes that\u00a0\u201dprobably the most\u00a0efficient and least invasive way for a state to ensure a basic education is through some form of required testing.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Ensuring gender equity\u00a0is more\u00a0difficult, and Yuracko doesn\u2019t really have a tidy policy recommendation.\u00a0 But she hopes that\u00a0her\u00a0legal arguments here will at least \u201chelp ensure that the most extreme forms of illiberal homeschooling are simply and appropriately taken off the table and out of the political debate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Appraisal:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yuracko’s evident animus against Conservative Christians is very apparent in this piece.\u00a0 It is not clear why Christians should be singled out as uniquely likely to abuse their children, as Yuracko does here.\u00a0 This bias unfortunately obscures what is otherwise a very compelling argument about the responsibility of the states to ensure that all children are receiving an adequate education.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College<\/p>\n

Disclaimer:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: Kimberly A. Yuracko, \u201cEducation off the Grid: Constitutional Constraints on Homeschooling\u201d in California Law Review 96, no. 1 (Feb. 2008): 123-184. Summary: Yuracko, a law professor at Northwestern University here makes the case that state statutes and the Equal … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[26,24,25,28,27],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal","category-policyregulation","tag-gender-equity","tag-kimberly-yuracko","tag-minimum-education","tag-so-much-more","tag-vision-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/38"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}