A bill in Springfield could land parents in jail if they don’t fill out paperwork properly.
It sounds outlandish, but that’s one of the components of House Bill 2827, referred to as the Homeschool Act.
Proponents sell it as legislation to properly regulate homeschooling in Illinois. “Homeschooling is currently the fastest growing form of education in the United States. The true number of homeschooled children is likely to remain unknown without adequate notification and oversight,” legislation authors wrote.
Sponsored by Democratic Rep. Terra Costa Howard, D-Lombard, the bill is in response to an investigation by ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois that spotlighted Illinois’ lack of homeschool oversight compared with most other states. Nearly 4,500 Illinois children were recorded as withdrawn from public school for homeschooling in 2022, according to that investigation.
Aspects of this measure make sense to us. It would be helpful to see basic enrollment information in order to understand how many kids are in public vs. private school, as well as homeschools. This data would be instructive for education policymakers and families alike.
If that were all the bill required, we don’t think it would be controversial. But there’s much more to the measure, provisions that make it unreasonable and overly intrusive.
If parents failed to fill out homeschool paperwork properly or give local education authorities timely notice of their intent to homeschool, they could be charged with a Class C misdemeanor, an offense punishable by up to 30 days in jail. That paperwork would include a yet-to-be-created form including detailed personal information on homeschool students.
The bill outlines a minimum set of information requirements — things like student date of birth, address and names of parents and guardians — but there are no restrictions on what additional data could be mandated, meaning its scope could easily expand. We dislike the open-ended nature of this information-collection regimen.
State bureaucrats also could demand that parents provide information on what they’re teaching, as well as detailed information on student progress, and there’s little in the bill on what would prompt such a review. It’s understandable to want to combat neglect, but it’s unclear from the legislation what would prompt a curriculum and progress review, making this provision prone to misunderstandings and allowing bureaucrats to substitute their judgment for parents’. The cure in this case easily could be worse than the problem.
Making matters worse, the Homeschool Act isn’t just about homeschooling. It also creates new rules and information-sharing requirements for private schools.
Why are private schools getting roped into the Homeschool Act? If passed, the act would give the state vastly more oversight not just for homeschooling families, but also private school families, mandating that private schools would be subject to these same information-sharing requirements, which “violates a basic trust between the school and the family,” as the Catholic Conference of Illinois put it. It would be much more reasonable to simply ask private schools to give enrollment numbers and test scores. Most private schools across the state operate on tight budgets, with limited staffing to handle administrative tasks. New bureaucratic requirements are an unfunded state mandate that would strain these schools.
Is that unintentional? Maybe, but this wouldn’t be the first time state legislation has taken aim at non-public education. A 2021 bill sought to impose tougher standards and penalties on private schools during the COVID lockdown period when those schools opened back up well before their public counterparts, a point of contention with public-school teacher unions. Like now, parents revolted against this proposal, seeing it as an attempt to weaken private schools and impede their ability to operate.
Why, we ask, are politicians focusing so much attention on homeschooling and private school accountability when, statewide, only 30% of fourth-graders in the public school system can read at grade level?
What’s the sales pitch? “Come to public school, where there’s a 30% chance you might learn to read”? We wish our lawmakers were spending more of their time pursuing ideas to improve our public schools instead of impeding private ones.
One of the reasons more students are opting out of public school is that COVID and remote learning forced many parents to be more hands-on with their children’s educational instruction — and they chose to stick with that arrangement because it worked for them.
The bottom line is this: Instead of asking why so many people are leaving public schools and seeking to address those issues, some politicians instead want to make it more difficult to leave in the first place.
No wonder the Homeschool Act has stiff opposition. Over 1,000 people joined a protest against the measure last week. More than 21,000 people filed witness slips in opposition to the bill, with fewer than 500 slipping in support as of writing. We’re not surprised by this reaction. The Homeschool Act is scheduled for a committee hearing soon. We hope it does not advance.
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