Chapter 9: Why Home Schooling Should be Regulated

Everyone now knows that homeschooling has gone mainstream in the United States. Once a fringe phenomenon, homeschooling is legal in every one of the fifty states and is widely considered the fastest growing sector of K–12 schooling. Because education in the United States is a matter delegated to the fifty states— the U.S. Constitution does not mention education—each state has different provisions for regulating homeschooling. This patchwork regulatory environment shows a clear trend across the country; however, regulations that thirty years ago either forbade or strictly regulated homeschooling have been lifted or eased.

According to the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), an advocacy group for homeschooling that has been instrumental in getting more permissive home school legislation passed in many states, twenty-five of the fifty states have no regulations governing homeschooling except a requirement that parents notify a local public authority that they have set up a home school. Ten of these twenty-five states do not even require parental notification (Klicka, 2004). Very how we want to justify the book