John Oliver took on the unregulated legal landscape of homeschooling in the US on Last Week Tonight, as more and more children are taught outside of formal schools. The US homeschooling community is “much broader than just rightwing parents afraid of hypothetical third-grade lube demonstrations”, he started – one estimate has 2 million children homeschooled in the US for reasons from social or health issues to fears of school safety to Black families avoiding whitewashed curricula.
“The ceiling of how good homeschooling can be is admittedly very high,” Oliver explained, “but the floor of how bad it can get is basically nonexistent” because of how unregulated homeschooling is in parts of the country.
Oliver started with what we don’t know – how many kids are being homeschooled and what they are learning, because numerous states do not require parents to notify school districts that their kids are being homeschooled, or have no further check in when they are.
Which could be useful, as many parents do not have the time or resources to develop their own at-home curricula. Oliver focused on the three major publishers of homeschooling textbooks and materials, all Christian companies who purport to help learning through a “Biblical filter”.
“It is absolutely a parent’s right to educate their children with religion if they so choose,” said Oliver. “But the quality of some of these books can be troubling.” He pointed to one history book that claimed that the early 20th century witnesses “a cultural breakdown that threatened to destroy the very roots of western civilization” because of liberalism; another workbook by the company Ace celebrated the Confederate general Robert E Lee as a “devoted Christian who practiced his Christianity in all his dealings with others”. Several biology textbooks purported evidence that dinosaurs and mankind existed at the same time.
“While all of that is pretty troubling, the truth is in many states, the rules and oversight can be so lax parents ultimately don’t have to teach their kids anything at all,” said Oliver, such as group called “dissident-homeschooling”, founded by a woman who had a “rough time finding Nazi-approved material” for her homeschooled children.
“And you know what? Good! That probably shouldn’t be an easy Google,” Oliver exclaimed. “If you search for that, it should probably auto-correct to ‘did you mean how do I take myself to jail?’”
How was this in compliance with the law? The main answer, said Oliver, was the powerful homeschooling lobby led by the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association. The HSLDA, Oliver conceded, grew out of an environment in the 1970s and 80s where homeschooling was over-regulated, and in some places banned. But over four decades, it has grown into a powerful, hardline lobbying group with a conservative Christian bent.
“The HSLDA have made themselves so powerful, many parents keep working with them even if they don’t agree with everything they stand for,” Oliver explained. “It’s a dilemma otherwise known as the Tom Cruise conundrum – on the one hand, a billion dollars at the box office. On the other, a billion-year contract to an alien mafia. It’s tricky!”
The group has been “astonishingly successful” at rolling back laws regulating homeschool in state after state. “The argument they will always make against any regulation is you’re just punishing all the parents doing things right to address a handful who are doing it wrong,” Oliver noted. “In theory, sure. But when you have some parents running the Homeschool Institute of Dishwashing and others running Lil Nazis R Us, it seems maybe the reins have gotten a little too loose.”
Most concerning, an unregulated system allows abusive parents to hide behind the banner of homeschooling, and for many victims to slip between the cracks. “Deregulating homeschooling doesn’t just eliminate safeguards against parents who are bad teachers,” Oliver argued. “It also eliminates them against parents who are bad people.”
Oliver noted that most states don’t even screen homeschool parents for red flags; 48 states have no background check process for parents who choose to homeschool. The HSLDA even defeated a West Virginia measure called Raylee’s Law, named for an eight-year-old child who died of neglect weeks after being withdrawn from school by a father reported for abuse. The law would’ve have prevented a child from being taken out of school while there was a pending abuse or neglect investigation. “That seems pretty reasonable,” said Oliver. “And if the HSLDA thinks trying to protect kids taken out of school by people convicted of child abuse is an attack on homeschooling, they’re saying quite a bit about what they believe homeschooling to be.”
“At a certain point, it starts to feel like the HSLDA is the homeschooling equivalent of the NRA – an extremely powerful organization that, while it represents a large number of people, pursues an outermost fringe version of their agenda,” he added.
Oliver argued that, at a bare minimum, states should require parents to register a child as homeschooled, so “there’s a record that they exist. That is how low the bar is here – at the earth’s core, which I’m sure according to at least one homeschooling textbook somewhere between soil and the fiery bowels of hell.”
Beyond that, he advocated for basic childhood safety protections, such as Raylee’s law or similar measures. Though he was ambivalent about involving social services and the government in people’s personal lives, especially for those who aren’t wealthy or white, “it does seem like giving parents a get out of all scrutiny free no questions asked card just isn’t the answer here,” Oliver said. “Because being a parent doesn’t automatically make someone moral. And being with a parent doesn’t automatically make a child safe.
“Basic reforms here just shouldn’t be controversial, because after all, this is about child welfare,” he concluded. “This isn’t rocket science … all of this is just basic common sense.”
