Homeschooling is becoming more popular in Arizona and across the country. This is for a lot of reasons — from the pandemic to the rise of school choice and school vouchers to the advent of parents’ rights and a new sense that people want to have a hand in what their kids learn.
In fact, homeschooling has increased at a rate of more than 5% across the country in the last year, according to research from Johns Hopkins — that’s nearly three times the pre-pandemic rate of around 2%.
Last month on The Show, we heard from Queen Creek mom of four Brooke Bentley about her experience homeschooling her kids as a progressive parent. Bentley, who runs a secular homeschool enrichment group, said support programs for homeschoolers like ESA school vouchers have been a net positive for parents seeking more individualized learning for their kids.
“At PATH, a good chunk of them are homeschooling because they have a neurodivergent child. And if that’s not the case, a lot of them are homeschooling because they want the family time,” Bentley said.
“They want more time with their kids. We send our kids to public school, and they come home and they do their extracurriculars and it’s dinner and bedtime. And I think parents are just kind of feeling like they’re missing out on a large chunk of their kids’ childhood. And then always more individualized learning.”
Next, The Show talked with someone who sees this issue differently. Tess Ulrey is executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. She was homeschooled herself — and didn’t have a bad experience.
But today, she’s a public school mom — and advocates for oversight of homeschooling, especially as it’s gaining steam.
Full conversation
TESS ULREY: Homeschooling is growing as an education modality across the country and for all sorts of different reasons. I think when we think about historic homeschooling, we assume white, religious, kind of religiously motivated homeschoolers. And that is changing. The face of homeschooling is changing.
So I think as families realize — and frankly, COVID changed a lot of stuff for a lot of us. Even when we got more flexible with education there.
Now people are accessing homeschooling for all sorts of different reasons. Sometimes it’s for neurodivergency, sometimes it’s because they’re dissatisfied with what’s happening in the public school system or those kind of traditional motivations still exist as well.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so let’s talk about some of the oversight that your organization advocates for. Give us some examples of some of the policies you think are important to have in place when and especially right now, as we’re seeing homeschooling grow.
ULREY: Absolutely. I think that we need to look at policy in sort of two buckets. We like to look at policy from a kind of a child safety component. So some of the things that we advocate for are more interaction for homeschool children with mandated reporters, as well as some safety requirements for who is homeschooling them.
The other piece of advocacy that we do is for resources. Arizona does a great job of making sure that homeschoolers can access things through the public school system, but that is not the case across the country.
So it’s important to us to talk about the resources side of it, too, for homeschoolers to be able to participate just like other kids do. But also things like standardized tests, AP classes, that’s all important for a well rounded student.
GILGER: You think that homeschooling kids should be required to take those same kind of tests so that we know what they’re learning, if they’re meeting benchmarks, that kind of thing?
ULREY: Yeah, our organization’s a big fan of that, of that benchmarking. And that comes from, of course, a larger educational lens. But also we’re an alumni-founded and an alumni-powered organization.
We know that as alumni ourselves and the alumni we work with now, especially when children are outside of the public school system or that traditional school system, it’s really important for us to know: How do we measure up with our peers? What can be our next steps?
And so we definitely advocate for that benchmarking, whether that’s standardized tests or portfolio reviews, but some way to know that we’re on track.
GILGER: You mentioned cases of abuse, things like making sure that kids are around mandatory reporters once in a while. What do those kind of policies look like from your point of view?
ULREY: From our point of view, there is not a state that does enough to take some kind of common sense steps towards preventing abuse and neglect within the homeschool community.
Right now in Arizona, an individual convicted of violent crimes against children is actually allowed to homeschool their own children. For us, those kind of things are a red flag when we’re thinking about basic child safety measures.
GILGER: That’s interesting. So there’s not a law that regulates that. Have we seen that happen before? Is that a problem?
ULREY: So that’s difficult to answer because there are cases across the country where an unsafe individual — and you know, kind of deemed unsafe by the court system — has seriously abused a homeschooled child. It’s hard for us to say, yes, that happened in Arizona and it’s happening in Arizona, but we know across the country that it has.
GILGER: So talk about the ESA system here. This is the kind of universal school voucher program. It is the most robust in the country. It’s a boon to homeschooling, you think, right?
ULREY: I think it is. I think what it does is open up some access for families who may not be able to homeschool. Frankly, a lot of homeschooling is rooted in a certain amount of privilege. For me, I actually never considered even homeschooling my own children because I was a single mom, so I needed to work. Homeschooling was never going to be an option for me, right?
But when we, when we start thinking about community supports and things like ESAs, now some of the financial pressure’s off. And maybe that would be the best fit for a child. So I think it gives families kind of that additional lever that’s so important when we all just want to find the best way for our own child to learn.
GILGER: So do we require testing or benchmarks of homeschooled kids in our state, though?
ULREY: Loosely, is probably the best way to answer that. When people are involved in the ESA program, there’s some of that natural accountability that comes back and forth. However, participation in ESA is by no means required.
So there are families in Arizona — plenty of families in Arizona — who choose not to access the ESA program because they don’t want that oversight and that accountability.
What we would like to see is the state look holistically at all homeschooled children, whether or not they’re accessing some of those ESA programs, and put some of those assessments and benchmarks into place.
GILGER: I’m sure you know the politics around this are heated, especially in a state like Arizona that’s been such a pioneer in school choice. I think whenever regulations, oversight, that kind of language is used around something like homeschooling, people are going to prickle.
ULREY: Absolutely. I think one of the strongest voices in this is the parents’ rights movement. You know, it’s parents’ right to educate their however they see fit. We actually approach this work from a child-centered lens.
So we talk a lot about a children’s right to education, a children’s right to a safe home. And the reality is that some of these legislative safeguards need to be in place for that to happen equitably across all children.
GILGER: Let me ask you a question about that idea of testing and standardized tests for kids who are homeschooled. I spoke with a mom on our show recently who is a homeschooling parent and kind of runs a collective for progressive homeschooling parents here in the Valley. And she said most of the students in their program are there because they’re neurodivergent.
And she used this phrase a lot, that one-size-fits-all education just doesn’t work for a lot of kids. When it comes to that kind of population. Like, do you think it’s fair to require the same kinds of standards for them?
ULREY: So we actually would prefer something called a portfolio review, because I think that speaks a little bit better to the how and the why of homeschooling. It’s a unique education system. A lot of these children are learning in different ways. But in the states that have a successful portfolio review, it allows the homeschooled children to maybe show a writing sample, talk to a teacher.
It’s one of those things that might meet the needs a little bit better than standardized testing. The piece of standardized testing for us that we know comes in strongly is especially when homeschoolers want to access college or secondary education.
GILGER: Right. So it sounds like you’re not, when you say you’re not anti-homeschooling, you understand that it can be really valuable for a lot of parents. It doesn’t even sound like your anti-school vouchers. You think that can be valuable for a lot of these families.
What I wonder is how you strike some sort of middle ground for folks in this kind of very hotly debated political moment in which homeschooling and parents’ rights and school choice and all of these phrases are really kind of nuclear sometimes.
Do you think there’s a way to regulate these things that doesn’t feel like an infringement on parental rights?
ULREY: Yeah. There’s a couple things that need to happen. I think there needs to be a better understanding from the public about what homeschooling is and who homeschoolers are. For me and for a lot of other alumni, sometimes we are the most keenly aware of some of the stereotypes around homeschooling. So I think there’s an amount of education that is needed to sort of break some of those stereotypes.
And at the same time, homeschool population needs to become a little bit more realistic about what the public school system is like, too. There’s a lot of fear on both sides of this conversation that can be addressed.
Those are absolutely challenging conversations. And the other piece that I think is important to bring into this is homeschooling became legal really in like the mid-’90s. I’ll date myself a little bit. I’m 37 years old. So I was first homeschooled when it became legal in the state of Michigan in 1996.
And so now there is a bulk of alumni, and our voices need to count in this as well. It’s great there’s so many parents that want to homeschool, but we can be such a resource in that to make sure that it’s successful because we lived through it.
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