{"id":1436,"date":"2014-11-22T14:01:32","date_gmt":"2014-11-22T14:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=1436"},"modified":"2014-11-29T17:42:06","modified_gmt":"2014-11-29T17:42:06","slug":"the-politics-of-homschools-culture-wars-and-state-regulations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=1436","title":{"rendered":"THE POLITICS OF HOMESCHOOLS: Culture Wars and State Regulations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record: <\/strong>Andrea Vieux, “The Politics of Homeschools: Religious Conservatives and Regulation Requirements” in The Social Science Journal<\/em> (9 July, 2014).\u00a0 [Abstract Here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Summary:<\/strong> Vieux, a Political Science professor<\/a> at the University of Central Florida, here provides quantitative data to try to determine the degree to which a state’s percentage of religious conservatives correlates with its level of homeschooling regulation.<\/p>\n

Vieux begins with a cursory history of the homeschooling movement, emphasizing the growing secularization of public education that has prompted religious conservatives to turn increasingly to homeschooling.\u00a0 She suggests that homeschooling policy could be an area where James Davison Hunter’s famous “culture war” theory could apply.\u00a0 Hunter had argued in a very influential 1991 book<\/a>\"\" that the United States was increasingly divided into two separate and hostile cultures of religious conservatives (who identify with the Republican party) and secular liberals (who identify with the Democratic party).\u00a0 Vieux notes that the homeschooling movement, most noticeably the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), is carefully allied with the broader religious right movement discussed by Hunter and many others.\u00a0 One of the central purposes of the religious right is to try to influence government to pass legislation consistent with its values.\u00a0 Given this commitment, and given conservative Christian homeschoolers’ animus against government oversight of what they believe to be their God-ordained responsibility for their children, it is plausible that the more conservative Christians in a state, the looser that state’s homeschooling regulations will be.\u00a0 Is it true?<\/p>\n

To find out Vieux obtained data from the year 2000 from the Glenmary Research Center pertaining to percentage of Evangelical Protestants in a state’s population.\u00a0 Her analysis included variables that tried to control for possible counter-explanations for a state’s lax or strict laws, including percentage of state population that is rural, strength of teacher unions in the state, state’s quality of public schools, state expenditures on public education, the level of professionalization in a state’s legislature, and citizen ideology.<\/p>\n

Her dependent variable that stands for level of regulation is whether or not a state requires that homeschoolers notify the government of their intent, using 2009 data on state laws.\u00a0 When she ran her data she did indeed find that states with higher percentages of Evangelicals were more likely to have no registration requirement.\u00a0 Other significant variables include Republican control of legislatures (more Republican meant less likely to have a registration requirement) and level of professionalism (more professional legislatures are less likely to want to require registration because they want to avoid controversies over homeschooling).\u00a0 When she ran her numbers while controlling for citizen ideology, the same variables remained predictive, suggesting that “in some cases–particularly education policy-making–religiosity is more relevant than ideology.” (p. 6)<\/p>\n

Vieux concludes with a few speculations about future policy directions.\u00a0 In states that permit vouchers and where homeschoolers are allowed to register as private schools, it is possible that in the future public money in the form of vouchers could be used to pay for homeschooling, even religious homeschooling (as the Supreme Court’s 2002 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris<\/em><\/a> decision permitted).\u00a0 She also wonders aloud about the history of homeschooling regulations.\u00a0 Have they grown steadily less restrictive over the years or has it been a back-and-forth sort of thing?<\/p>\n

Appraisal<\/strong>:<\/strong>\u00a0 This article is intriguing in that it uses a very complicated methodology to try to prove something that I’m not sure it actually proves.\u00a0 There are 11 states that do not require registration.\u00a0 Here they are:\u00a0 Alaska, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Texas.\u00a0 In 2000, which is the year Vieux uses for her data on percentage of Evangelicals, 5 of those states’ Electoral votes went to Al Gore (the Democrat) and 6 of them went to George W. Bush (the Republican).\u00a0 To me that just doesn’t square with what she claims to have found in her data.\u00a0 If it’s really true that percentage of religious conservatives in a state predicts whether or not that state has a registration requirement, you’d expect the regulation map to line up with religiosity maps<\/a>, but it doesn’t.\u00a0 Bible belt states like Arkansas, Tennessee, and the Carolinas have more restrictive regulations than Connecticut, Michigan, and New Jersey.\u00a0 What’s going on?<\/p>\n

A lot more than this article is able to address.\u00a0 To really answer a question like “why does a given state have the law it has” one cannot simply tabulate a few statistics.\u00a0 As long-time observers and participants of homeschooling know, each state’s story is unique.\u00a0 Michigan, for example, had the most restrictive law in the country until 1993, when a Michigan Supreme Court Decision<\/a> declared the Michigan requirement that homeschooling parents be certified to teach unconstitutional.\u00a0 This had nothing to do with percentage of Evangelicals, Republican control of state legislatures, level of legislature professionalism, or any of the other variables Vieux considers.\u00a0 Her methodology is just not the right approach to answer the question she poses.<\/p>\n

A second and less significant concern I have with her methodology is its reliance on data from 2000.\u00a0 The Culture War thesis has been much debated since Hunter wrote his book, and it is generally agreed that 2000 was about the pinnacle<\/a>\"\" of the influence of the Religious Right.\u00a0 Since then religious conservatism has been in a slow and steady decline<\/a>, not only in terms of its political influence but in terms of its percentage of adherents in the population.\u00a0 This article’s thesis would have made more sense a decade ago, but the culture wars paradigm is less and less plausible and the nation grows ever more religiously pluralistic.\u00a0 Having said that, homeschooling laws haven’t changed all that much since 2000, so were her analysis correct for then it would remain largely correct by simple historical inertia today.\u00a0 But as I noted above, I just don’t think she’s right.\u00a0 She compiled a lot of data from sources she cobbled together from all sorts of disparate places, but all you have to do is look at the states that do or don’t have the registration requirement to know that she’s just not correct.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of\u00a0Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 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: Andrea Vieux, “The Politics of Homeschools: Religious Conservatives and Regulation Requirements” in The Social Science Journal (9 July, 2014).\u00a0 [Abstract Here] Summary: Vieux, a Political Science professor at the University of Central Florida, here provides quantitative data to try … 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":[9,12,15,891],"tags":[1202,1203,1204,1206,1205],"class_list":["post-1436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-policyregulation","category-religion","category-research-methodology","tag-andrea-vieux","tag-culture-wars","tag-james-davison-hunter","tag-social-science-journal","tag-university-of-central-florida"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1436"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1454,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions\/1454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}