Tag: homeschooling

National Parental Rights Group Founder: Homeschooling ‘One Of The Last Remaining Spaces Where Parents Maintain Full Autonomy Over Children’s Education

Connecticut Democrats’ attempt to gain control of homeschooling reveals a desire to “force homeschoolers into alignment with the same ideological materials and standardized assessments that have already sparked controversy in government schools,” Sheri Few, founder and president of United States Parents Involved in Education, wrote in an op-ed at The Hill last week.

The national parental rights leader observed that Connecticut’s HB 5468 represents “a troubling pattern emerging whereby government agencies fail in their most basic responsibilities and lawmakers find someone else to blame.”

Few referred to state Democrats’ attempt to regulate homeschooling after their own government systems failed to attend to “repeated warnings in tragic child-abuse cases.”

“It is hard not to see this as a political sleight of hand,” she asserted. “A crisis exposes government negligence, yet instead of holding those agencies accountable, lawmakers pivot to regulate an entirely unrelated group.”

Rather than celebrate the Connecticut parents who choose to homeschool, sacrificing, for their children, their time and perhaps an opportunity for additional employment income, Democrat lawmakers want to require them to notify the government of their curriculum and be subjected to screening by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and the Department of Education.

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Home Education Must Be “Equivalent” to Public School: Lawmakers

Home educators in Connecticut are officially in the government’s crosshairs. In fact, under a new bill moving through the legislature, parents will need approval from child protection services to homeschool. And they will have to prove to bureaucrats that they are providing “equivalent instruction” to that offered by the government-school system.  Only about a third of children in the state’s public schools are even “proficient” in reading or math, federal data show. Suicide, mental problems, and other issues are off the charts and rising among government-educated children, too. So, it was not immediately clear why anyone would want homeschoolers to be subjected to “equivalent instruction.” 

The bill purports to require that every parent must send their child to a government school. The only exception is if the parent or guardian can “show that the child is elsewhere receiving equivalent instruction in the studies taught in the public schools,” the text of the Connecticut legislation declares. 

Lawmakers lambasted the provision. “What is equivalent instruction? Is it equivalent to Prospect’s education, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Greenwich, Darien, East Haddam? I don’t know,” argued Ranking Member Rep. Lezlye Zupkus, a Republican. Democrats on the committee dismissed the concerns.

To prove that parents are giving their children “equivalent instruction,” the statute purports to require that they keep records for three years. They are also required to provide a demonstration of their child’s work to government. Ultimately, the state Department of Education will provide “guidance” regarding what all of it means. 

Senator Heather Somers, also a Republican, warned this was a scheme to force homeschool families to do the same thing as government schools. “By homeschooling being evaluated and really being pushed to public school standards, this bill is pressuring families to mirror the public school system,” she explained, echoing other critics. 

The demands are especially ironic considering how well homeschoolers tend to do compared to their government-schooled peers. “Every single homeschooler that I’ve had the privilege of meeting, their kids are smarter,” Sen. Somers said. “They’re graduating early from high school. Some of them are taking college courses or actually getting two years of college before they even turn 18.”

The elephant in the room — the fact that the government is horrifically failing the children already in its school system — did not escape notice. “People are withdrawing their kids, they’re quitting their jobs, because they don’t feel their kids are safe in public school,” observed Representative Tina Courpas, a Republican. “To me, that is so basic.” 

Lawmakers should focus on fixing the government’s schools. “If this committee did nothing else for the next two years other than make our public school safe, that would be a big win,” the lawmaker continued. “But this bill doesn’t address that problem. Instead, it cuts off people’s options to solve a problem that this state has created for them.”

Under the new legislation that has already cleared several important hurdles, the homeschooling community in the state would also need to be cleared by Child Protective Services (CPS) to obtain permission to homeschool. The Home School Legal Defense Association says this is a major change.

“One of the most troubling aspects of the proposal is the idea that parents could need permission from a child welfare agency before teaching their own children at home,” noted Ralph Rodriguez, associate attorney for HSLDA. “That represents a significant shift in how homeschooling families are treated under the law.”

Lawmakers, too, were perplexed by the decision to get the CPS involved in approving homeschooling. “The child advocate … stated publicly yesterday to me in a hearing that she agrees the real cause of these tragic events is a catastrophic failure of the Department of Children and Families,” said Education Committee Ranking Member Sen. Eric Berthel, referring to two tragic cases in which children died despite child-welfare officials being involved.

“All of this begs the question: Why would we want DCF to be involved at all in the monitoring or regulation of homeschoolers when the agency has demonstrated they cannot handle the cases they are already monitoring?” added Sen. Berthel. Other critics suggested the bill against homeschoolers was an effort to blame innocent people for the failures of government.  

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Ghost Funding Scandal: Connecticut Homeschoolers Push Audit Before Regulatory Showdown

Connecticut’s children’s agency failed to protect 11 year old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres García, then helped turn her death into the emotional engine for a bill to regulate families who homeschool instead of fixing its own system.

AbleChild submitted emergency testimony to defeat the bill based on Mimi.  It laid out that DCF already had extensive involvement with Mimi’s family, the courts, and mandated reporters, and still allowed a faked Zoom “welfare check” to stand in for real protection. Now, as lawmakers head into a Thursday floor debate on HB 5468, homeschoolers have gone on offense, backed by a formal legal demand to follow the money.

Attorney Deborah G. Stevenson, on behalf of National Home Education Legal Defense, LLC (NHELD) and Connecticut taxpayers, has filed a complaint and request for an immediate investigation and audit of the State’s “School Fund” and Education Cost Sharing (ECS) monies. She explains that NHELD has “reason to believe that certain monies in the ‘School Fund’ have been used to pay public school districts per pupil funding for students who are no longer enrolled in the public school system,” a practice “euphemistically called ‘double funding’.” In plain language, districts may be receiving ghost per pupil funding, money for children who have already left public school, at the same time the state is trying to build a system to track and report those very families once they’re gone.

Stevenson’s filing links this practice directly to the pending legislation. She notes that double funding has been happening in the past, “is going on currently, and is planned to continue in the future, as well, due to pending legislation in at least two bills about which we are aware – SB6 and HB5468.” Fiscal notes on those bills show that hundreds of thousands of dollars per year would not go to classroom instruction, but to hiring new staff and building a regulatory framework to process withdrawal forms, contact families no longer enrolled in public schools, report them to various state agencies, track their data, and run records checks on them with DCF. The audit request asks a simple question, how much of that money is coming from funds that, under the Connecticut Constitution, are supposed to be “inviolably” used only to support public schools, not to finance a tracking regime aimed at families who have left.

The constitutional stakes are explicit. The Connecticut Constitution’s “School Fund” provisions say that the fund must remain perpetual, that its interest “shall be inviolably appropriated to the support and encouragement of the public schools,” and that “no law shall ever be made” that diverts that fund to any other use. Stevenson’s complaint asks the State Auditors to determine, among other things, whether there is a clearly identifiable School Fund, how much is in it, how its interest is handled, whether ECS per pupil payments come from that interest, whether public schools are being paid for students who are no longer enrolled “in case” they return, and whether money from that fund or ECS is being used to hire staff and build systems that identify, process, report to DCF, correspond with, and data track families who are no longer in the public school system. If misuse is found, the filing calls for all responsible parties to be held fully accountable, civilly or criminally, so that public funds are truly safeguarded.

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Homeschooling Families Push Back on Proposed Regulations in Connecticut

When Gina Stewart began homeschooling her oldest child 30 years ago, there were no regulations requiring her to notify the state if, how, or what she was teaching her son in their house.

Stewart, in the years that followed, informed her local district annually, as a courtesy, that her boys wouldn’t be enrolled in public schools.

One son later became a plumber, one enrolled in community college before he was even old enough to drive, and one will attend a police academy after he turns 21.

The youngest, 15, is still completing his high school curriculum, including pre-calculus.

Stewart recently began homeschooling her grandchild, but she said she fears that the educational freedom her family enjoyed for decades is under threat.

A proposed Connecticut state law would require homeschooling parents to provide their local school districts with proof of “equivalent” instruction annually.

It also requires school districts to notify the Department of Children and Families if a child is removed from public schools.

“I don’t want their curriculum,” Stewart, who attended Connecticut public schools and previously taught at a Catholic school, told The Epoch Times.

“I never originally intended to homeschool my kids. But I don’t think the schools are preparing kids to become productive citizens.”

Stewart was among hundreds of concerned parents who attended a legislative committee hearing last week on the proposed legislation.

The hearing went for about 19 hours, during which more than 300 people testified and 3,000-plus provided written opinions, a vast majority against the bill.

“I’d say it’s about 99-to-one against the bill,” Ralph Rodriguez, an attorney with the Home School Legal Defense Association, who also attended the hearing, told The Epoch Times.

“No regulation is acceptable. Today’s check-in can very easily encroach on other freedoms.”

The check-in and notification to the Department of Children and Families regulations are in response to the recent murder of an 11-year-old girl whose mother attempted to cover up the death by telling the local district that she was homeschooling her daughter.

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Connecticut Citizens Break the State: Midnight Revolt on Guns, Vaccines, and Homeschooling Sends Public Health Committee Scrambling to Lawyers

In the early hours of Thursday, March 12, 2026, the Public Health Committee paused after midnight as members left their seats to consult with lawyers regarding the earlier rule requiring hearings to close at 12:15 a.m as more citizens lined up to testify. Despite the consultation, the attorneys could not seem to unwind the earlier vote that ended public testimony at that time. A point of order was called to request an extension, but the vote had already run out the clock for the public. Those who remained sat quietly to hear the final outcome, as the discussion turned back to the attorneys. In effect, the public broke them.  A public filibuster!

An electric revolt hit the Connecticut Capitol as 6,000+ parents, homeschoolers, and citizens packed the building and forced lawmakers to sit until midnight, unleashing hours of blistering testimony on guns, vaccines, homeschooling, and state overreach. At the center was the Public Health Committee, overwhelmed by citizens demanding informed consent, the right to refuse vaccines, and the right not to feed their children into a failed Department of Children and Families that has already shattered too many families.

Parents and homeschoolers warned that proposals tying homeschooling to DCF oversight presume guilt and hand more power to an agency with a long record of missed abuse and wrongful interference. They described homeschooling as a lifeline from failing schools, bullying, and ideological agendas, not an evasion of responsibility, and asked why families seeking to educate their children at home should be treated as suspects instead of partners. AbleChild submitted testimony highlighting the horrific murder of a child under DCF care and a mother who was herself a product of the same system—as a stark warning of what this failed agency is already producing.

Again and again, ordinary people invoked God and the Constitution, insisting that children belong first to their families, not the state, and that medical decisions and education are matters of conscience, not government coercion. Many tied gun rights into the same struggle, arguing that a government that cannot safeguard children in its own systems has no moral authority to disarm responsible citizens or force medical interventions on unwilling families.

By midnight it was clear this was no routine hearing but a public vote of no confidence in Connecticut’s Democrat‑run system. Whether the bills advance or not, lawmakers were put on notice: families are done being managed from above, and they are willing to show up, stay late, and speak out to defend their children and their God‑given rights. AbleChild was thrilled to see parents finally stand up to the Democrat supermajority and refuse to surrender their children, their conscience, or their God‑given rights. At the same time, Republican Party Chairman Ben Proto must be held accountable for failing to secure any real balance in Connecticut’s elections, helping entrench a political class now openly at war with the families it is supposed to serve.

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Homeschooling Hits Record Numbers

Whether called homeschooling or DIY education, family-directed learning has been growing in popularity for years in the U.S. alongside disappointment in the rigidity, politicization, and flat-out poor results of traditional public schools. That growth was supercharged during the COVID-19 pandemic when extended closures and bumbled remote learning drove many families to experiment with teaching their own kids. The big question was whether the end of public health controls would also curtail interest in homeschooling. We know now that it didn’t. Americans’ taste for DIY education is on the rise.

Homeschooling Grows at Triple the Pre-Pandemic Rate

“In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%,” Angela Watson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Homeschool Hub wrote earlier this month. “This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%.” She added that more than a third of the states from which data is available report their highest homeschooling numbers ever, even exceeding the peaks reached when many public and private schools were closed during the pandemic.

After COVID-19 public health measures were suspended, there was a brief drop in homeschooling as parents and families returned to old habits. That didn’t last long. Homeschooling began surging again in the 2023-2024 school year, with that growth continuing last year. Based on numbers from 22 states (not all states have released data, and many don’t track homeschoolers), four report declines in the ranks of homeschooled children—Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, and Tennessee—while the others report growth from around 1 percent (Florida and Louisiana) to as high as 21.5 percent (South Carolina).

The latest figures likely underestimate growth in homeschooling since not all DIY families abide by registration requirements where they exist, and because families who use the portable funding available through increasingly popular Education Savings Accounts to pay for homeschooling costs are not counted as homeschoolers in several states, Florida included. As a result, adds Watson, “we consider these counts as the minimum number of homeschooled students in each state.”

Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic. Continued growth necessarily means the share of DIY-educated students is increasing. That’s quite a change for an education approach that was decidedly not mainstream just a generation ago.

“This isn’t a pandemic hangover; it’s a fundamental shift in how American families are thinking about education,” comments Watson.

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United Nations Finally Recognizes Homeschooling — By Demanding Government Ruin It

For decades, families around the world have fought for the freedom to homeschool their children, often against hostile laws, heavy-handed bureaucracies, and, in some cases, outright persecution. I’ve walked alongside many of these families as a global advocate for homeschooling rights, challenging oppressive regimes and urging governments and international institutions to recognize what should be obvious: Parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children.

That’s why UNESCO’s new report, “Homeschooling Through a Human Rights Lens,” is significant. For the first time, a major United Nations agency has taken homeschooling seriously — not merely as an educational alternative, but as a legitimate expression of the human right to direct the upbringing of one’s children. As a member of the report’s panel of experts, I can attest to the thoughtful and at times tense dialogue that shaped the final document.

While I commend UNESCO for the report, I reject its unwarranted recommendation that calls on governments to register homeschooling families and evaluate them according to state-imposed standards. This recommendation is antithetical to the principles of liberty upon which the United States, and even the United Nations itself, was founded. American homeschoolers are rightly skeptical of any report that calls for greater regulation, but because international policymakers are influenced by international human rights notions, this report has the potential to help families who live in countries where parental freedom in education is not favored.

Millions of families have demonstrated across every continent and culture that homeschooling works — and it works well. To its credit, the UNESCO report acknowledges the diversity of homeschooling approaches, the growing body of research supporting its efficacy, and the sincere motivations of parents who choose this path. It even cautions against assuming that homeschoolers are outliers or abusers. That acknowledgment matters. For decades, the homeschooling movement, even here in the United States, has fought against statist and misbegotten assumptions. At the international level, this report marks an important shift in that conversation.

For all its positive acknowledgments, its recommendation reveals a strong assumption of state supremacy. But families are not wards of the state; they are the primary and natural educators of their children. The oldest of the United Nations’ declarations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), itself acknowledges in Article 26.3 that parents have a “prior right” to decide how their children are educated, and Article 16.3 describes the family as “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”

Far from being a threat to educational quality or child welfare, homeschooling is often a lifeline for families seeking safety, excellence, or authenticity in education. When parents take responsibility for their children’s education, they are exercising freedom in its purest form: the freedom to order their lives according to conscience and conviction. Homeschooling reflects the principle of self-governance at the heart of our American experiment, and these basic truths are articulated in the UDHR.

While refuting Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s fringe view that homeschooling should be banned, I have explained that the U.N.’s “statist” worldview is rooted in a “positive rights” mindset, which sees government not merely as a protector of liberty but as the central actor in nearly every aspect of human life. Under this paradigm, rights are granted and fulfilled by government, and education becomes a public utility — monitored, managed, and molded by the state.

The dangerous assumptions here are that freedom requires supervision, parents can’t be trusted, and kids are just future workers, or worse, weapons in a war for cultural domination via compelled government indoctrination. However, our Constitution and Declaration of Independence reflect the opposite idea: that rights should limit government power. The First Amendment does not grant the right to speak; it prohibits the government from infringing on it. The Second Amendment doesn’t create a right to bear arms; it forbids the government from restricting it. Our concept of liberty assumes rights come from our Creator and governments are instituted to secure them, not to create them.

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UN Targets Homeschooling

The United Nations just put a giant target on the backs of homeschoolers worldwide.

Under the guise of “human rights,” the U.N.’s controversial “education” bureaucracy is officially demanding that all governments regulate and control home education—if they allow it at all.

The U.N.’s demands include “education standards” for homeschooling, as well as “accountability” to government.

The outfit is also demanding mandatory registration, forced “evaluations” of homeschoolers by authorities, compulsory “home visits,” and much more.

In fact, the agency is even calling for U.N.-approved values and attitudes to be imposed on children across a wide array of issues, with U.N. control of “education content.”

The new U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report on home education, titled “Homeschooling through a human rights lens,” lays out the most draconian global assault on home education in history.

The powerful global agency, long dominated by card-carrying communists, claims governments must bring homeschooling under their thumb—for the benefit of the children, of course.

Unsurprisingly, the top U.N. official involved in the push comes from the “Democratic People’s Republic” of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea.

According to the report’s acknowledgements, it was prepared under the “supervision” of Gwang-Chol Chang, chief of the UNESCO Section of Education Policy.

Before joining the U.N. to help transform education globally, Chang worked for the mass-murdering North Korean Communist regime’s “Education Ministry.” The agency operates among the most comprehensive communist brainwashing systems in human history.

And yet, with no sense of the irony, the government controls being demanded by Chang and his minions are said to be necessary to uphold what the global body describes as “international human rights.” Yes, seriously.

If the U.N. agenda is not stopped, parents and even private schools that refuse to comply with the U.N.’s outrageous demands will be accused of violating the “human rights” of children.

The calls for total control are clear—and portrayed as mandatory. “Governments must implement oversight mechanisms such as registration and evaluations,” the report declares (emphasis added), demanding more “regulatory capacity.”

“As homeschooling continues to evolve, adopting a rights-based approach becomes crucial,” the report continues, touting the “need for quality education” as defined by the U.N. through “established minimum education standards and accountability.”

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One American town takes war against homeschooling to enraging extremes

Homeschooling and homeschoolers have been under attack across America in a number of ways over recent years.

Despite those barrages, the industry is growing hugely.

But there have been special exams demanded, invasive interviews, physical exams, odd requirements for homeschool teachers and much more at times. In one case state officials rejected a college diploma submitted by a homeschool teacher because it was written in Latin.

Now one Maine town is going to an extreme – an attempt to bar those connected with homeschooling from serving on a local public board, the school board.

According to the Institute for Justice, “Town officials in Dexter, Maine are considering a proposal that bars homeschool co-op leaders and private-school employees from serving on the local school board.”

While supporters for the barrier claim it would prevent conflicts of interest, the IJ reported it actually is “retaliatory.”

The IJ noted that last summer, Dexter voters recalled school board member Alisha Ames, leader of the town’s only homeschool co-op, Power Source Ministries.

“The recall came after a campaign by the Facebook group ‘Stop the Power Trip,’ which accused her of putting the co-op ahead of public schools,” the IJ noted. “Even if the recall of Ames was warranted, the proposed ordinance goes much further. Instead of addressing one individual, it would bar homeschool co-op leaders and private-school employees from serving on the school board, shutting out many other residents from their right to serve their community.”

The backlash already has begun. State Rep. Heidi Sampson, of the Maine Education Initiative, warned town officials in a letter they are refusing to abide by First Amendment precedents, and that “exposes the town to significant liability.”

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New Jersey Democrats Want to Force DEI and Wellness Checks on Homeschooled Children

Democrats in New Jersey are being accused of trying to mandate DEI instruction for students who are homeschooled because parents want to escape the state’s mandated brainwashing.

In an article for The Daily Economy, Corey DeAngelis said that there is more than meets the eye to some proposed state legislation.

DeAngelis said Assembly Bill 5825, which purports to ensure “oversight of home education programs,” is actually “a power grab that threatens the very foundation of parental rights.”

“The parent or guardian shall submit a copy of the curriculum that will be utilized in the home education program, which shall be aligned with the New Jersey Student Learning Standards,” the bill reads.

The catch, he noted, was that diversity, equity, and inclusion curriculum is as integral a part of state standards as reading, writing and arithmetic.

Assembly Bill 5796 calls for a child who is homeschooled to be inspected annually by an official of the school district in which that child’s family lives and undergo “a general health and wellness check.” The bill says the individual inspecting the child should be a counselor, social worker, or nurse.

DeAngelis said that putting parents under the thumb of the very educators they have sought to distance themselves from is an attempt to drag “homeschoolers into the same ideological quagmire they sought to avoid.”

“Parents who’ve chosen to educate children independently often do so to avoid the heavily political worldviews imposed in government classrooms. By effectively compelling homeschooling families to parrot political narratives on race, gender, and identity, such mandates confirm the odd ownership many Democrats feel over people’s kids,” he wrote.

Tethering homeschooling families to the schools they fled suggests New Jersey Democrats believe “government school administrators, not parents, hold ultimate authority over a child’s upbringing.”

“The Democrats are inserting the government as a wedge between children and their families,” DeAngelis wrote.

Will Estrada, senior counsel at the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, said to Reason that no states force homeschoolers to align with public school curriculum.

He noted that the curriculum imposed by a state is often the reason parents opt for homeschooling.

Estrada also said that “public schools are there to educate children enrolled in the public school, not to do health and wellness checks on children in the community at large.”

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