CV NEWS FEED // Scientific American released a newsletter Monday calling for federal government “oversight” and “regulations” to be imposed on families who homeschool.
An entry in the magazine‘s “Today in Science” newsletter stated: “Homeschooling should be subject to some basic federal mandates, write the editors of Scientific American in the June issue.”
The entry also called for parents who homeschool their children to “be required to undergo a background check – the same as K-12 teachers.”
“Additionally, homeschool instructors could be required to submit documents every year to their local school district or to a state agency to show that their children are learning,” the newsletter added.
The entry also claimed that
most states don’t require the same assessment of homeschooled kids that are required for their public school peers. Parents are not requited to have an education themselves to direct instruction, and in most states no one checks to see that children are receiving an education at all.
“In the worst cases, homeschooling can hide abuse,” Scientific American alleged.
However, the newsletter did acknowledge that homeschooling has resulted in better optimal outcomes for many students, stating: “Homeschooled children have gone on to win national spelling bees and famed Hungarian mathemetician Paul Erdős was homeschooled by his mathematician mother.”
The op-ed by the magazine’s editors was published one month ago.
In addition to making similar points to those conveyed in the newsletter entry, the Scientific American editors gave several extreme anecdotal examples of how “homeschooling hides abuse.”
The editors wrote:
In 2020 an 11-year-old boy in Michigan was found dead after his stepmother used homeschooling to conceal years of torture. A small study of children who had been seriously abused found that eight of 17 school-age victims were ostensibly being homeschooled. In these cases, homeschooling was a farce—a hole in children’s social safety net for abusers to exploit.
“Not one state checks with Child Protective Services to determine whether the parents of children being homeschooled have a history of abuse or neglect,” the editors stated.
Several observers on X (formerly Twitter) criticized the magazine’s arguments.
“They provide concrete examples of kids excelling scholastically, and then hypothesize that home schooling can ‘hide abuse,’” wrote writer and podcaster Lydia Leitermann. “[B]oy howdy, let me tell you a little factoid about abuse in public education!”
Former public high school history teacher Frank McCormick confronted Scientific American’s claim that “No one checks to see that children are receiving an education at all.”
“That perfectly describes my experience in public education,” he wrote.
In 2021, McCormick notably exposed tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) that were being taught in the public school system.
Homeschooling mother Heather Hunter pointed to the anecdotal nature of much of the magazine’s argument.
“This is an article written by people looking at homeschooling from the outside looking in,” Hunter wrote on X. “They selectively picked extreme examples for every anti-homeschooling argument.”
To counter Scientific American’s claim that “homeschooling hides abuse,” Hunter stated:
Many parents are taking their kids out of school because their child is getting abused/bullying and schools are doing nothing. There have been numerous examples in just the past year of students ending up in critical condition in the hospital because of other students beating them so severely. People forget that there is also negative socialization. The vast majority of homeschool parents are loving and going above and beyond in their child’s education.
“How about we fix the public schools first before going after homeschoolers?” the mother asked.
Finally, an X user simply stated: “Requiring a mom to get a background check to teach her own kids in her own home is next-level evil.”
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