Making It Legal

Abstract

One of the greatest achievements of the homeschooling movement was the legalization of homeschooling in the 1980s and early 1990s in every state in the country. Yet this very important story has seldom been told outside the annals of homeschoolers’ own publications. It is a difficult story to tell, for two reasons. First, since U.S. education law is predominantly a state affair and not a federal one, there are actually fifty stories to tell. These fifty stories interface in complicated ways as well: court cases in one state are cited in others, legislative trends become contagious, and national organizations often exert significant influence on local politics. Secondly, the sharp division between closed and open communion homeschoolers we chronicled in the last chapter has left a strong imprint on the way various homeschooling groups themselves have described what happened. If one reads the closed communion memoirs and artifacts, one might learn that “the modern homeschool movement was started through a miraculous moving of the Holy Spirit” that began around 1983, prior to which time homeschooling was legal “in only five states,” or perhaps was banned “in all but three states.” It “was treated as a crime in almost every state” and parents who homeschooled “frequently faced jail terms and the loss of their children to foster care.”