Homeschooling the Right by Heath Brown

Author:Heath Brown [Brown, Heath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL042040, Political Science/Political Ideologies/Radicalism, POL031000, Political Science/Political Ideologies/Nationalism & Patriotism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2021-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

State and Local Organizations

While national organizations, like those analyzed in the last chapter, have a single federal policy central to their agenda, state and local education rules dictate much of education in the United States, including in homeschooling and charter schooling. As chapter 3 showed, there are great differences in school choice policy for homeschooling and charter schooling: some states require little oversight of those who opt in, while in others those who opt in are bound by policy to existing regulations such as mandatory testing, obligatory data reporting, and required teaching qualifications. Homeschooling policy is designed outside of existing institutions: public resources do not transfer to the homeschool, and rules on teaching and learning are almost always strictly limited. Charter school policies bind their operators, students, and parents within existing institutions, including public programs for finance, curriculum, and assessment.

These differences create what we might call disparate state and local policy environments, with each offering distinct incentives for individuals to participate and interest groups to organize. These are examples of policy feedback. The last chapter showed how national organizations framed each policy issue, with homeschooling groups focusing on freedom and liberty and charter school organizations focusing on efficiency and the market. But the politics of each policy has not played out exclusively at the national level. State and local politics are central to all education policies, and these two policies are no exception. This chapter investigates the state and local organizations associated with homeschool and charter school policy: the organizations that provide services and associations that mobilize to lobby for policy change. As the board member who opened this chapter implied, the prevalence of state and local homeschooling organizations is a form of positive policy feedback, and investigating these associations allows us to view the underappreciated politics of homeschooling.

As we’ve seen, the design of homeschool policy has given considerable freedom and autonomy to families who choose to educate at home. With that freedom comes almost no public financial support and often limited connections to public institutions, like access to textbooks used in public schools, public school facilities, and public school athletics.6 As a homeschool leader from the South told me, “There is no support from local public schools…. Homeschool parents are the sole administrator of their schools. There is no ‘outside’ support.”7

Families, presumably, begin educating at home knowing these rules, but they are still in need of support. Over time, the wall between homeschools and public schools has come down partially in many parts of the country, but homeschool policy design means that many divisions persist, as do many parental needs.

The predicted effect of this design has been a set of strong incentives to develop parallel institutions that can provide these missing services. And this has been the case. In summarizing much of what is known about homeschooling, education researcher Kurt Bauman concluded that “the concomitant entry of new educational organizations into the field” has been one of the most notable aspects and effects of homeschooling policy.8

But the new organizations that formed have not been restricted to educational and extracurricular organizations.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.