The state of Illinois has, at present, a very unregulated approach to homeschooling: you want to homeschool your child, you can. But there is currently a bill (with two of its sponsors being my “hometown” state representatives) which intends to make rather significant changes, and which has homeschool families up in arms, so I decided to see what the actual legislation has to say. Is this the “final product” which will come up for a vote? Illinois, which has a supermajority of Democrats, tends to let bills sit until the last minute, when they come up for a vote if party leaders so choose, potentially with last minute amendments, or with a wholly-new bill inserted as an amendment into the shell of one on an entirely different subject. To be rather cynical, I don’t believe that any of the “participative democracy” endeavors such as contacting your representatives or filling out “witness slips” (it’s a whole thing in Illinois though I don’t know if it exists elsewhere, to just go online and fill out a form to state your support or objection to a bill) actually make a difference. If the party leadership wants a bill passed, it’ll be passed. If they don’t, it’ll never come up for a vote. And honestly, I have no idea whether this particular bill is the sort which will be pushed through by the party leadership or not, but, again, there are a large number of homeschool advocates who are very concerned so I figure it merits some attention.
That being said, here’s what I see when I read the bill:
- If the bill passes, the Illinois State Board of Education will create a document to be called a Homeschool Declaration Form which a parent will be required to fill out and submit to the principal of the local public school or to the local school district, on an annual basis, to avoid penalties for truancy. The form will minimally contain basic information such as the child’s name, birth date, grade level, home address, and the same information for the parent.
- Homeschooling parents will also be required to have a high school diploma or its equivalent, and to submit proof if requested, again with the risk of truancy penalties otherwise.
- If a parent wishes for their child to participate in public school activities or enroll part-time, they must submit proof of immunization (or a Certificate of Religious Exemption) in the same manner as is required of a full-time student. (Defenders of the bill in various Facebook groups have claimed that this provision requires that public schools open up their extracurriculars to homeschooled students, but there is no such provision.)
- A homeschool is required to provide instruction in specific subjects: language arts, math, science, social studies, fine arts, PE and health. A homeschooling parent must also keep records, called an Educational Portfolio, documenting the child’s instruction, including a log of curriculum, samples of work, and notes on academic progress. This portfolio must be provided to school district officials upon request, under the penalty of being considered truant otherwise.
- Individuals convicted of certain crimes may not be a homeschooling parent.
Honestly, this sounds fairly harmless if taken at face value. But here’s the catch: Section 905. “Rules. The State Board of Education may adopt any rules necessary to implement and administer this Act.”
The Educational Portfolio requirement could be a basic check to confirm that a child is learning the basics of the 3 R, or it could be a burdensome demand, even enforced arbitrarily, if a particular school district does the math and determines they gain more in outside per-student funding than they spend in marginal costs, or if they assess the likely test scores of homeschooling families and want to push them into the school system in order to get “credit” for a one-time test score “boost” — or even if a teacher’s union simply wants to push up its membership by increasing the number of school students. And children with special needs would likely be an added focus of the “rules” implemented to enforce the law, with a battle between public school administrators who believe that a classroom is the only way to meet the needs of students who score poorly on a standardized test or have a low level of “sample” work, and parents who believe the public schools have failed or would fail them if enrolled there.
Even the section describing the Homeschool Declaration Form is vague about the form, stating that the basic demographic/contact information is not all that will be on the form: it “shall include, but not be limited to” these items. What else would the form require? From my read of the law, the rule-writers would be empowered to ask anything at all, and parents would be obliged to comply under penalty of a truancy enforcement.
Now, maybe there exists an overarching principle that state agencies can’t be burdensome in their rules, but it seems to me there’s a wide range of rules the ISBE could adopt and still nominally be within the range of what the literal text of the law permits.
And that’s the bigger issue, isn’t it?
I presume that at least some of the supporters of the bill simply want to do the right thing and avoid those cases, however rare, in which a nominally homeschooled child is never actually given any meaningful education. After all, the book Educated by Tara Westover caused quite a stir, when the author detailed her childhood in an “off the grid” family in Idaho. It was on the curriculum in English class one of one of my sons, for one of his high school years, and was on multiple Summer Reading Lists. In some cases, these are ultra-conservative religious families; in other cases, “hippie” families who have adopted the idea of “unschooling” which promotes the idea of children being wholly “in charge” of their own learning, even going as far as not teaching the “3 Rs” at all or only to the extent the child requests it. There’s even a subreddit called HomeschoolRecovery in which people talk about their unhappiness.
But the question at hand for Illinoisans fundamentally is this: can the state government be trusted to implement regulations in a moderate, sensible way faithful to the intent of the law and the legislators?
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