Homeschooling is booming, but state policymakers are increasingly looking to regulate what parents can do. While Illinois is one of only 12 states with total freedom for homeschoolers, House Bill 2827 (HB 2827) proposes new mandates, including annual registration, teacher qualification standards, and giving local education officials broad authority to assess student learning. Everyone can agree that kids should be protected from abuse and neglect. However, this Illinois proposal to regulate homeschoolers won’t help accomplish this aim and will only worsen things for students and families.
“Thirty-eight states have regulations. Illinois is an outlier. This is not something we want to be an outlier on,” said Illinois State Rep. Terra Costa Howard, the bill’s sponsor.
The state’s House Education Policy Committee recently voted in favor of HB 2827, which now heads to the House floor.
The push for greater oversight stems partly from ProPublica and Capital News Illinois reporting, including a story detailing a horrifying account of a boy referred to as “L.J.”
In 2021, when L.J.’s public school informed his mother, Ashley White, and her boyfriend, Brian Anderson, that he’d have to repeat the third grade, they unenrolled the nine-year-old. The couple claimed they were homeschooling but were doing nothing of the sort—they physically and emotionally abused L.J., who received little or no education at all for over a year.
The story is gut-wrenching, and the reporters suggest that the state’s lax homeschooling laws are to blame. “No oversight also means children schooled at home lose the protections schools provide, including teachers, counselors, coaches, and bus drivers — school personnel legally bound to report suspected child abuse and neglect,” wrote Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer, who brought the story to light.
However, the regulations proposed by HB 2827 likely would not have made a difference for L.J. and could make successful homeschooling more difficult for thousands of other kids. Soon after he was pulled from school, White and Anderson were reported to the state’s Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), which conducted multiple investigations before finally removing him in December 2022. DCFS had the couple on their radar, and it was their responsibility to address the alleged abuse regardless of whether homeschool regulations were in place. This was a DCFS failure, not a homeschooling failure.
The unfortunate fact is that regulating homeschools won’t protect children from abuse. Research indicates that homeschoolers are no more likely to be abused at home than public school students, with at least one study finding no relationship between the amount of homeschool regulations and the frequency of homeschool abuse.
And while school officials are mandated to report suspected incidences of abuse, less than one-quarter of referrals to child welfare agencies in 2023 came from education personnel, according to a report published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Additionally, many of these referrals aren’t reliable. A study published by the journal Child Abuse and Neglect found that education personnel had the lowest substantiation rates of professional reporters at only 12.7%, ranking well below rates for law enforcement (39.4%), medical personnel (34.9%), social services staff (28.7%), and others.
Still, educational neglect is often cited as a reason for greater state oversight of homeschoolers, with some fearing that they won’t keep up with their public school peers or learn the right content. But Illinois House Bill 2827 would give public school officials broad authority to demand things like curricula, work samples, and other learning materials from parents. Not only is this ripe for abuse—all homeschoolers would be subject to investigation at any time—but it also infringes on families’ diverse approaches to homeschooling that have been shown to work.
For instance, some homeschool families take an unconventional approach called unschooling, also known as self-directed learning. The general idea is that students learn best when pursuing their interests, free from the rigid curricula and other constraints typically found in public school classrooms. Unschooling “is the act of fusing living and learning, of seeing them as one and the same,” writes homeschooling expert Kerry McDonald.
While unschooling isn’t for everyone, McDonald’s research details numerous homeschooled families (including her own) who have successfully adopted this approach. Under HB 2827, parents like McDonald and others could face truancy charges or worse if a hostile school official doesn’t like how they educate their kids.
The regulations proposed by Illinois lawmakers will not help the kids they are intended to help. Instead, this bill would interfere with the thousands of homeschool parents deeply invested in seeing their children succeed.
At a time when 41% of the state’s 4th graders aren’t reading at a basic level, policymakers in Illinois and around the country should turn their attention to improving public schools.
A version of this column first appeared at RealClearEducation.