In the early 1990s, when Stefan Merrill Block was in fourth grade, he began complaining to his mom about his new school, with its pointless rules and mean teachers. He, his parents, and his brother had recently moved to the Dallas suburb of Plano from Indianapolis, and Block, a perceptive and sensitive child, could tell that his mother was unhappy in their new home, too. Together, they made a “lovely picnic” of their anger, as he describes it in his new memoir, Homeschooled. His mother pulled him out of the classroom and into a life of shapeless days, setting Block on a strange, yearslong journey as her only pupil, only friend, and at times, it seems, only hope.
Block’s memoir is timely; homeschooling has grown rapidly in recent years. Although people regarded Block as an oddity in his youth—“The boy should be in school!” his visiting grandma exclaimed at one point—now more than 3 percent of school-age kids in the United States, or about 2 million children, are homeschooled.
Under his mother’s warped version of homeschooling, Block was largely left to pursue his own “interests,” which included reading novels, drawing comics, and watching Oprah. In Block’s telling, his father, a busy psychologist, mostly turned a blind eye to these aimless afternoons. As days of unstructured exploration stretched out before him, Block writes, he realized that “the longer I stay here, the further I will fall behind, and the harder it will be ever to go back.”
He was right to be concerned. When Block finally returned to school for ninth grade, he earned grades in the C to F range. He recalls thinking that “the Civil War was thus named because, despite all the bloodshed, Americans exhibited remarkably good etiquette.” It took him cutting down to four or five hours of sleep a night and going, as he puts it, “sporadically psychotic” to catch up on his studies.
Block’s experience sounds extreme and readers of the book may wonder how this was allowed to happen to him. In the years that Block was homeschooled, why was he never assessed, or even checked on? The answer is that homeschooling was wildly under-regulated when Block was a boy—a situation that has not changed much since then. About half of states, Texas among them, do not require homeschoolers to be evaluated, and not all states require an intervention if a student is found to be failing, according to Jonah Stewart, the director of programs at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), which advocates for stricter homeschooling regulations. In some of the states with testing mandates, parents can circumvent the rule by registering with an “umbrella school,” many of which offer real support for homeschoolers, and others of which exist largely as shells to help parents evade requirements. Or students can take their exams at home—which raises the question of how reliable the scores are. Only two states, New York and Pennsylvania, require the homeschooler to take a test with a qualified proctor, Stewart told me. Tess Ulrey, CRHE’s executive director, told me, “For a lot of homeschooled students, the first time they’re going to take a standardized test is maybe the SAT, the ACT.”
Because not every homeschool student takes reliable tests, knowing how well they are doing academically is difficult. Some research, much of it conducted by homeschooling advocates, has found that homeschool students tend to perform well. But other homeschooling researchers have argued that these studies mask substantial variation in the quality of homeschooling because they don’t rely on representative samples.
And some research provides cause for concern: One series of large surveys found that homeschoolers earned worse SAT scores and ended up in lower-paying jobs than traditionally schooled kids. When controlling for demographics, one study found that homeschoolers were two to three times more likely to be behind their expected grade level than their traditionally schooled peers. A 2020 review of many studies found that homeschoolers generally excel in reading but lag in math, perhaps because, as some researchers theorize, homeschooling families tend to emphasize reading over math. For the student population at large, the average SAT math score is also lower than the average reading score, though only slightly.
Beyond the academic considerations, under-regulated homeschooling can also make some kids vulnerable to abuse. Though most homeschool parents are responsible and well-intentioned, some child-abuse experts say that a small percentage mistreat their children. Multiple stories of children who were abused in supposed homeschooling environments have surfaced in recent years. (Some of the parents have pleaded not guilty.) A 2014 paper examining the cases of 28 severely abused children from various states found that eight of the 17 school-age victims had been withdrawn from traditional school for homeschooling. A report from Connecticut found that from 2013 to 2016, 36 percent of families in the state who began homeschooling had been the subject of at least one prior abuse or neglect report. Nationally, the CRHE has documented nearly 200 deaths of homeschooled kids from abuse or neglect since 2000. Although traditionally schooled kids are also abused and neglected, they at least regularly see adults outside their immediate family, which opens up the possibility of their reaching out for help. With homeschoolers, however, a lack of contact between families and the authorities can cause abuse to go unnoticed: About a dozen states do not require parents to notify the state that they are homeschooling their children, according to Stewart.
Robert Kunzman, an education professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has studied homeschooling, recommends three regulatory reforms that he believes would limit much of the abuse and educational neglect within homeschooling while preserving parents’ rights to educate their own children: Parents should notify the state that they are homeschooling, adults convicted of child abuse should not be allowed to homeschool, and homeschooled children should take an annual basic-skills test.
The Home School Legal Defense Association, a prominent pro-homeschooling advocacy group, opposes these ideas. The group’s president, Jim Mason, told me that “parents who homeschool are fully subject to the same criminal, child-protection, and neglect laws as every other parent.” He pointed to a study in the Journal of School Choice, co-authored by a researcher whose organization has received support from homeschooling groups, that found “a lack of evidence for disproportionately associating homeschooling with child abuse and neglect.”
The association and other groups like it have significant political power and tend to rally to defeat state bills that would require inspections or other forms of oversight. Even high-profile reports of abused homeschooled children rarely result in stronger regulations. In 2018, after news broke that the California couple David and Louise Turpin had imprisoned and tortured their 13 “homeschooled” children for decades, California Assemblymember Jose Medina introduced legislation that would have directed the fire marshal to inspect all homeschools in the state. After an outcry from hundreds of homeschool parents, the bill died in committee. The story is much the same in Texas: The Texas Home School Coalition employs lobbyists it calls “watchmen,” after a Bible verse that says, “I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night.” With the coalition’s backing, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed three new bills supporting homeschool rights just this past summer.
As for Block: Despite his challenging childhood, he has built an impressive life for himself. He graduated from a top-tier college and now has a family, has written several books, and co-owns a skating rink. Still, in his author’s note, Block writes that although he does not oppose homeschooling in general, he does think that “the lack of proper homeschooling oversight has become a crisis.”
In a time of school shootings, classroom bullying, culture wars over curricula, and faltering test scores, the impulse of some parents to take over their child’s education is understandable. But as Block’s story illustrates, allowing parents to isolate their kids at home with little accountability can be incredibly harmful. If homeschool parents are so certain that they are giving their kids a good education in a safe environment, they could reasonably be expected to show it.
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