Can homeschool laws provide a safe harbor for abusive parents?

No two homeschooling parents are alike. Some homeschool to better serve gifted children or children with special needs. Others do it to raise their children in accordance with their philosophical or religious beliefs. And some parents homeschool their children to shelter them from bullying or violence. Elizabeth Watkins’s mother had her own reason: she homeschooled her children so that no one would know she was hurting them.

Watkins’s mother had always been abusive. But away from the prying eyes of teachers and school staff, the violence intensified. Watkins’s mother would punch her and beat her with a length of copper pipe or a two-by-four. And because she had no classmates or school friends, Watkins had no one to turn to when the beatings intensified.

“There was no one around who knew us who could have possibly known that anything was terribly wrong in our house,” Watkins wrote in an essay published on the Coalition for Responsible Home Education’s webpage. “We were very isolated.”

Watkins believes that this was her mother’s way of retaliating after one of her other children told a teacher about the abuse, leading to her arrest on charges of child endangerment nine months earlier.

“Homeschooling was the first step my mom took to make sure no one could get involved through children’s loose tongues ever again,” Watkins continued.

Watkins’s mother’s tactic is not unheard of. The news earlier this year was filled with stories of horrific child abuse, obscured by parents who claimed to be homeschooling. Most notorious was the case of David and Louise Turpin, a California couple who were discovered in January to have starved and imprisoned their 13 homeschooled children. And in March, after a fatal crash that killed Jennifer Hart, her wife Sarah Hart, and at least four of their adopted children, it was revealed that the women had withdrawn the children from school following several brushes with child welfare officials.

In both cases, the fact that the children were homeschooled meant that they rarely encountered adults who could recognize the signs of abuse. And while the Harts were not following the homeschooling laws of their home state, the Turpins’ homeschool setup was perfectly legal according to California state law. Their stories reveal gaping holes in many states’ homeschooling laws—holes which can enable and obscure child abuse.

The reason for these gaps, said Rachel Coleman, founder of the Coalition for Responsible Homeschool Education, is that homeschool laws have traditionally focused on educational requirements rather than child safety.

“In most states, the homeschool law was not designed to prevent homeschooling from hiding abuse and neglect,” Coleman said. “Even in states with oversight, that oversight was designed to prevent educational neglect, not other forms of abuse.”

So even stringent state homeschool laws, such as those mandating regular state testing, are focused more on whether students are being assessed than by whom. More specifically, many states that mandate regular assessment allow those assessments to be carried out by a parent, instead of by an unrelated adult who could report suspected abuse to Child Protective Services. Or, they allow for student portfolio reviews to be conducted without the student present, taking away another opportunity for an abused child to be spotted by a helpful adult.

Kieryn Darkwater, a homeschool alumnus living in the Bay Area, experienced this firsthand. While being homeschooled in Florida, Darkwater, who uses they/them pronouns, would put together a portfolio of their schoolwork in accordance with state law. But because the law didn’t specify that portfolio reviewers should not be relatives of the student, Darkwater’s mother simply sent their portfolio to their grandfather, who happened to have an unexpired teaching credential.

“He didn’t even really look at my portfolio,” Darkwater said. “He just signed off on it.”

Because of this lax review process, no one noticed that Darkwater’s math education had stalled at pre-algebra after their mother gave up on teaching them and threw a textbook at their head.

Indeed, homeschool law can end up severely limiting the number of mandated reporters that a child must be exposed to. Laws around vaccinations and assessments in particular affect students’ access to two crucial classes of mandated reporters: doctors and teachers.

According to data from the Center for Responsible Home Education, only four states require homeschool parents to submit proof of immunization. In other words, in the other 46 states, a homeschooled child could theoretically go their whole childhood without seeing a mandated reporter in the medical field.

Other CRHE data show that only two states require a teacher to administer in-person assessment, be it a standardized test or a portfolio review. Homeschooled students in the other 48 states could complete a full battery of assessments without ever interacting with an adult who isn’t a parent.

“Homeschool law isn’t set up to ensure that kids to receive contact with mandated reporters,” Coleman said, using the term for a professional who’s obligated by law to report suspected child abuse to Child Protective Services. “[The law] allows abusive parents a way to remove their children from mandated reporter contact in the school system and isolate their children completely.”

One striking fact about Elizabeth Watkins’s story is that her mother started homeschooling her and her siblings after she’d served jail time for child endangerment. The Harts had some run-ins with the law, too: both parents received allegations of child abuse in the years leading up to the children’s withdrawal from school. In both cases, parents were allowed to begin homeschooling, despite having legal histories that would likely disqualify them from teaching public school.

This state of affairs is, for the most part, perfectly legal. Only one state, Pennsylvania, has a law that forbids parents from homeschooling if they’ve been convicted of a felony in the last five years. And only in Arkansas are parents forbidden from homeschooling in households inhabited by a registered sex offender.

Contrast these laws with those governing public school teachers. While requirements vary from state to state, it’s either extremely difficult or impossible in most states for someone with a felony conviction to obtain a teaching license. Public school teachers must generally also be fingerprinted and pass a state or federal background check.

What’s more, all states require that public school teachers have at least a Bachelor’s degree, plus additional instruction through an accredited teacher preparation program. Meanwhile, only a handful of states require that homeschooling parents have a high school diploma or its equivalent.

So in most states, almost anyone can become a homeschool teacher—even people who, like Elizabeth Watkins’s mother, served jail time for child endangerment.

Rachel Coleman and the CRHE believe that state homeschooling laws must be changed to close these loopholes. Specifically, they’d like to see in-person, teacher-conducted assessments become required for all homeschooling parents so as to expose them to mandated reporters. They’d also like to see widespread adoption of Pennsylvania’s law forbidding recently convicted felons from homeschooling.

Homeschooling advocacy groups, like the Homeschool Legal Defense Fund, disagree, arguing that self-policing is more effective and that more regulation would infringe on the freedom and flexibility that made homeschooling desirable in the first place.

“We want to see child abuse eradicated as much as possible,” said Darren Jones, a staff attorney for the HSLDA. “But we don’t think that the way to do that is to enact more regulations on homeschoolers. There are other, better ways for the state to spend its money than paying for social workers to make visits to homeschooling families.”

“One of the reasons that homeschooling has been so successful is that parents have had the flexibility to homeschool in a variety of ways,” he continued. “Less regulation on homeschooling leads to less regulation on the homeschool family and a better opportunity to give an education to a particular child.”

Instead of regulations, Jones said, the HSLDA recommended that every homeschooling family join a homeschool cooperative, and that every cooperative have a robust child abuse prevention policy. Those policies might include training on recognizing the signs of abuse and background checks for outside instructors, he said.

Based on their own experience, Kieryn Darkwater, the homeschool alum who graduated without learning algebra, doesn’t have much faith in this approach.

“We’ve had over 30 years to self police; over 30 years for people to say we won’t accept or tolerate child abuse,” they said. “Nobody has done that in the entire time that we’ve been homeschooling. So something obviously has to change.”

One thing that both advocates and opponents agree on is that proper homeschooling and homeschooling-enabled child abuse are two totally different entities, and that coming down hard on the latter shouldn’t be construed as an attack on the former.

“We hate the idea that people are hiding behind homeschooling, pretending to do it, in order to abuse their kids,” Jones said.

“This is not about parents who are homeschooling because they want to provide a positive educational experience,” Coleman said. “This is about a system that is open to abuse.”