Homeschooling Went From Legal Gray Zone to Legal in Fifty States by 1993

Folks, here is a story the experts did not predict, the foundations did not fund, and no federal agency planned. A few thousand ordinary American families decided to teach their own children at the kitchen table, and the government responded by sending a truant officer. Twenty years later, those families had changed the law in all fifty states. No marching band, no national office, no billionaire. Just moms, dads, lawyers who took cases at a discount, and a stubborn belief that a child belongs first to the people who love him.

If you want a feel-good account of how citizens beat a bureaucracy, this is it. It is also a lesson in how you do it, and the lesson is useful for whatever you are trying to change in your own town.

Start with the definitions

Homeschooling means that parents, rather than a public or private school, take primary responsibility for a child's education, at home or with a community of other families. Compulsory attendance laws require children of certain ages to be in school, and every state had them by the early twentieth century. Truancy is the offense of a child being absent from school without a lawful excuse. The problem for early homeschoolers was this: in many states, the statute defined lawful education as attendance at a public school or an approved private school, and a kitchen table was neither.

So a mother who taught her seven-year-old to read at home, and did a good job of it, might find herself charged with neglect, or with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, because the school district said her child was truant. That was the legal landscape: not a prohibition on homeschooling, exactly, but a gray zone in which the enforcement depended on who your local superintendent was and how he felt that week.

A word on the ground the Founders left

Before the history, an anchor. The Constitution does not mention education, and the Tenth Amendment reserves to the states and the people the powers not delegated to Washington. The Supreme Court spoke clearly on parents' role in 1925. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters it held unconstitutional an Oregon law that required children to attend public schools, and it said that the child "is not the mere creature of the State." Almost half a century later, in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), it held that Amish parents could not be forced to send children to school past eighth grade against their religious convictions (see Wisconsin v. Yoder and the Amish Fathers Who Stopped School at Eighth Grade). Neither case said "you may homeschool." But together they supplied the principle that the homeschooling families would use for twenty years: the parent's right to direct the upbringing of the child is older than the school and does not disappear when the child turns five.

The intellectual spark: a left-leaning critic of schools

Here is a part that surprises people. The first big voice for teaching children at home in the modern era was not a conservative at all. John Holt was a teacher who wrote How Children Fail in 1964, a book of observations about how school made children fearful and strategic rather than curious. He was no friend of the traditional right. But as his disillusionment with schools deepened, he turned to the idea of taking children out of them, and in 1977 he began publishing a newsletter, Growing Without Schooling, for families who were doing it. It linked isolated parents to one another and told them that other people were doing the same thing. Holt later wrote Teach Your Own, published in 1981.

Notice what that means. The movement began as a coalition of unlikely allies: secular libertarians and back-to-the-landers on one side, and devout Christian families on the other, each with a different reason and the same conclusion. The coalition of the unlikely is, in my experience, the only kind that wins.

The other root: Raymond and Dorothy Moore

The second strand came from educators with a different concern. Raymond and Dorothy Moore, a married pair with professional backgrounds in education, argued from child-development research that formal schooling begun too early could do more harm than good, and that home was the best place for the early years. Their books include Better Late Than Early and Home Grown Kids. They spoke to church groups and to parents, many of them religious, who liked both the research and the conclusion. They gave families something valuable: permission and confidence.

I will not claim every argument in those books has stood the test of time. Child-development research changes. What matters here is the social effect: two strands of the movement, one secular and one religious, were both telling parents the same practical thing, which was that you can do this, and you are not alone.

The legal wall, and the lawyers who climbed it

Confidence is not a license. Families needed lawyers, and in 1983 they got an institution built for that purpose. Michael Farris and Michael Smith founded the Home School Legal Defense Association, a membership organization that pooled the dues of families to pay for legal defense and to lobby legislatures. For a small annual fee, a family got a lawyer on call if the school district came knocking.

That is a beautiful piece of American civic design, and I want you to see how it worked. It is insurance, built by the people it protects, requiring no permission from government. It converted a thousand isolated, frightened families into a national bargaining position. When a district superintendent threatened a single mother in a rural county, he was suddenly threatening an organization with lawyers and with a mailing list.

Two cases, two states

Two court decisions illustrate how the fight went state by state.

Texas. In Leeper v. Arlington Independent School District, a class action brought on behalf of homeschooling families in Texas, a state district court in 1987 held that homeschools qualified as private schools under the Texas compulsory-attendance statute. The state appealed, and in the years that followed the Texas appellate courts upheld the ruling, with the Texas Supreme Court's decision in the matter coming in 1994 in the case styled Texas Education Agency v. Leeper. The Texas approach turned on a point of statutory interpretation: the state's law exempted private schools from the attendance requirement, and the court held that a home school could be a private school. That reading gave Texas one of the most hospitable regimes in the country.

Michigan. In People v. DeJonge (1993), the Michigan Supreme Court held that the state's requirement that homeschool instruction be provided by a certified teacher violated the free exercise of religion of a family that educated its children at home for religious reasons. The court applied a demanding standard to the state's certification rule and found the state's interest insufficient to override the family's religious convictions. That decision is often cited as the one that completed the national picture, since by most accounts, by 1993 every state recognized some lawful way to teach children at home.

Do not misread that. "Legal in all fifty states" does not mean the same rules in all fifty states. States still differ, sometimes sharply, on notification, testing, record-keeping and subjects. Some require almost nothing; some require annual evaluations. The point is that the question had changed from "is this allowed?" to "what is the paperwork?"

The legislative harvest

Courts were half the story. The other half was the plain, unglamorous work of lobbying. State by state, homeschooling families and their allies appeared before legislatures, filled hearing rooms, and asked for statutes that said, in terms, that home education was lawful. Some states passed laws recognizing home instruction as an option. Others amended definitions of "private school" or "equivalent instruction." The details varied, and I will not pretend to recount every statute; your own state's education code, on your legislature's website, tells you what yours says.

What I can tell you is the pattern: a few families lose, or are threatened; a lawyer arrives; a legislator hears the case; a bill is introduced; ordinary people show up. Then another state does the same, and a third. When the thing is done, nobody remembers that it was ever a question.

Why a conservative should celebrate this, and where to be careful

Why does this story belong on a conservative site? Four reasons, which I will give as a short argument.

1. It is subsidiarity in action. The unit closest to the child, the family, solved a problem without a program, a grant or a czar.
2. It is civil society beating the administrative state. Families built an insurer, a network and a lobby on their own initiative. The rival theory says only government can do such a thing.
3. It defends the principle of Pierce. The child is not the creature of the state. The history of homeschooling is, in effect, that principle applied in kitchens and courtrooms.
4. It produced an alternative the system had to compete with. See Seven Myths About Homeschooled Kids, From Socialization to College for how the common objections have fared, and Your First Year of Homeschooling, a Practical Playbook for Parents if you are thinking about trying it.

Now the care. A conservative who loves liberty should also keep two things in mind. First, the families who homeschool have chosen a heavy responsibility; the win in the law is not the same as a win in the child's education. Second, the movement's own history is a warning against complacency. A law that was won can be rewritten, and the regulations that follow a freedom are often the way it is narrowed. Reading the notification and testing rules in your state is not optional for someone who values the freedom.

The best objection, fairly stated

A fair-minded superintendent in 1980 would have raised a real concern, and the movement had to answer it. It goes like this: compulsory attendance exists because some children have been neglected, and a state that simply takes a parent's word that "we do school at home" has no way to know whether a child is learning anything. Some parents will be excellent. Some will not be. The child in the second category has no voice, and the state is the only party positioned to protect him.

That objection has weight, and the founding families of the movement did not dismiss it. Their answer came in three parts.

First, a legitimate state interest in a child's basic education does not require the state to be the teacher. It can be met by modest accountability that stops short of control: a notice of intent, a record of attendance, a portfolio, or a periodic assessment. Many states settled on some version of this, and it is a trade the movement mostly accepted.

Second, the state already has tools for a truly neglected child, in its child-protection and neglect statutes. A child who is not being taught anything is a neglect case, and it should be handled as one, with evidence and due process, rather than by treating every family who teaches at home as a presumptive truant.

Third, the burden of proof matters. In American law the default runs in favor of the parent, and the state must show cause. A regime that begins by assuming homeschoolers are guilty until they produce a certificate has reversed that default, and Pierce says the Constitution does not permit the reversal.

You can see in that exchange the shape of a good compromise: accountability without control. It is also a reminder that the best defense of a liberty is a reasonable account of how it can be used responsibly.

What the coverage missed

Here is my small complaint with how this story is usually told. The standard account, when there is one, treats homeschooling as a curiosity that appeared out of nowhere in the 1990s, a kind of cultural weather. It is rarely framed as what it was: a civil-rights movement in the old sense, a defense of a liberty against an agency that did not believe it existed. The families were not asking for a handout. They were asking to be left alone, and they kept at it until they were.

I notice that nobody has ever put it on a postage stamp. A press that celebrates every other movement that took on a bureaucracy and won seems to lose its enthusiasm when the plaintiffs are in denim jumpers and the cause is a mother with a phonics book. That is a story the coverage will not tell you, so I will tell it. It is better than most of what you will read about on a Sunday.

Lessons for anyone trying to change something

Take the pattern and use it.

• Find allies who disagree with you about everything else. Holt and the Moores shared a conclusion and little else.
• Build the institution before the crisis. HSLDA was founded before most of the cases that made it famous.
• Win in court and in legislature. Judges can say what the law means. Legislators can change it. Do both.
• Be exact. The families who won were careful with paperwork and respectful with officials. A tidy record beats a loud one.
• Be patient. The arc from John Holt's newsletter in 1977 to the DeJonge decision in 1993 is sixteen years. Sixteen years of kitchen tables and long drives to the statehouse.

The case in brief

1. In the 1970s homeschooling parents could face truancy or neglect charges, because many statutes recognized only public or approved private schools.
2. The movement drew from John Holt's Growing Without Schooling (1977), the Moores' writings and a wave of religious and secular families, and it gained a legal engine in the Home School Legal Defense Association (1983).
3. Court victories such as Leeper in Texas and People v. DeJonge in Michigan (1993), plus patient legislative work, brought recognition in every state by 1993.
4. The history vindicates Pierce: the child is not the creature of the state, and families can build what government will not.
5. Rules still vary by state, so the freedom must be defended in the details.

What you can do: read your state's homeschool statute on your legislature's website, and write down its notification, testing and record-keeping rules so you know exactly what it asks of families.