Godless: The Rise and Regulation of Homeschooling

Katherine Manz

Edited by Eshal Charolia, Kira Small, Sahith Mocharla, and Roohie Sheikh

“From bullying and indoctrination that led to depression, to godlessness and false propaganda passed off as ‘education,’ to handcuffed teachers who must obey the system amid the chaos, the family was already very worried” [1]. 

So began a quote from right-wing magazine The New American, discussing the public education system in 2020, before they removed their children from public school. Over half of adults in 2024 believed that public education was going in the wrong direction, including two-thirds of Republicans [2]. These skewed numbers indicate a modern homeschooling movement that has become intensely political. And, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, more parents than ever are choosing homeschooling—from 3.7% of school-age children in the 2018-19 school year to 5.2% in 2022-23 [3]. 

Homeschooling was the norm for centuries before the advent of public schools. Communities created their own schools—often church-sponsored and decidedly local—and their own standards for education. These independent schooling systems created massive disparities. While wealthy families sent children to prestigious boarding schools, rural communities––especially in the South––relied on scattered private tutors and rudimentary schooling [4]. Despite independent state advancement of education, public schooling did not take hold nationally until the 1830’s “common school” movement [5]. The proportion of children ages five to fourteen enrolled in public schools rose sharply, from 55% in 1830 to an estimated 78% in 1870, and with it rose literacy rates and class mobility [6]. By 1918, all states had passed legislation mandating school attendance [7]. Homeschooling now persisted primarily in poor, sparsely populated rural areas. 

The definition of compulsory school, though, remained legally in flux. It was disputed as early as 1893 with Commonwealth v. Roberts, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court held that the sending of a child to a private day school approved by the school committee would comply with the state’s compulsory attendance law [8]. A decade later, the Indiana Appellate Court pointed to Commonwealth in its decision in State v. Peterman (1904), upholding a judgment that allowed the defendant, Clarence Peterman, to employ a private tutor rather than send his child to public school [9]. These early cases established one of the earliest legal principles of compulsory schooling laws: “the object and purpose of a compulsory education law is that all the children shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in any particular way” [10]. 

A flurry of Supreme Court cases in the 1920s further expanded the liberties of both parent and educator within compulsory education. The Court struck down laws in Nebraska and Hawaii restricting or banning the teaching of foreign languages in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Farrington v. Tokushige (1927) [11] [12]. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the Court established  national precedent for parents’ choice of schooling, unanimously striking down an Oregon law mandating public school attendance for children ages six to eight [13]. Citing the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court held that the state did not have the power or justification to “standardize its children by forcing them to accept” arbitrary requirements of education [14]. In sum, these early cases rejected state dominion over education in favor of the parents’ right to direct the education of their children, posing it as an individual choice first and foremost.

Legal Precedent: Never Unified, But Substantial

With the public schooling system firmly entrenched, the 1950s and 60s saw criticism of it amplified. On top of concerns about the efficacy of standardized teaching methods came several controversial Supreme Court rulings, including the desegregation of schools and an end to public school-sponsored prayer. One of the most outspoken critics of the system, John Caldwell Holt, criticized the rigor and mentality associated with schoolwork, advocating instead a “deschooled community in which learning is not separated from but is integrated with the rest of life” [15]. Holt, a former elementary school teacher, wrote books including How Children Fail and Teach Your Own, as well as a home education newsletter called Growing Without Schooling. His works formed much of the basis for the non-religious homeschooling movement.

The national legal precedent for homeschooling as a protected act is piecewise, largely formed through arguments in state and local courts. The exception is a religious case, Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), concerning three Amish families that sought under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to withdraw their children from school following the eighth grade [16]. The families were locally convicted and fined a nominal five dollars each, although the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned this conviction upon appeal from the Circuit. Upon Wisconsin’s appeal to the United States Supreme Court, the question became how states may balance free religious exercise with a compelling interest in universal education.

Within the specifics of the case, the Court held that the Amish had demonstrated a sincere belief that conflicted with the state’s compulsory attendance law, and that enforcement of the law would “gravely endanger, if not destroy” their way of life [17]. The case therefore met the standards for free exercise, although this was not disputed by the state. Rather, Wisconsin argued that its law mandating school attendance through age sixteen was necessary to the child’s place in society. The Amish community also provided vocational training and education beyond eighth grade, ensuring economic self-sufficiency. These internal standards created a broadly successful social unit, capable of sustaining its members, with little attrition. With these prospects in mind, the Court found dubious Wisconsin’s argument that the forgoing of an additional one to two years of school would “impair the physical or mental health of the child, or result in an inability to be self-supporting or to discharge the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, or in any other way materially detract from the welfare of society” [18]. It noted specifically that Wisconsin’s concern for the capability of children to potentially exit Amish society was largely unfounded in precedent, and that in any case hypotheticals of children’s religious freedom did not supersede the immediate issue of parents’ free exercise [19]. 

While Wisconsin was landmark in extension, as well as in its explicit permittance of homeschooling, its focus on the religious isolation of the Amish community greatly limited the scope of its application. Indeed, evocation of the Free Exercise Clause in opposition to compulsory attendance laws has been largely unsuccessful. The case’s impact, though, lies in the foundation it laid for the educational cases of the 1920s, particularly Meyer v. Nebraska, where the Supreme Court established fundamental rights for parents including “establish[ing] a home and bring[ing] up children” and “worship[ping] God according to the dictates of [their] own conscience” [20]. The association of homeschooling with said fundamental rights elevated homeschooling to the level of strict scrutiny that free religious practice also receives. The burden of evidence for laws restricting homeschooling would now lie on the state, who would have to prove these laws’ absolute necessity. In practice, this has often meant that the state has the burden of proof when accusing homeschooling parents of falling below educational standards. While Wisconsin certainly had a profound impact, though, explicit affirmation of parents’ right to homeschool their children relies largely on precedents set in Pierce v. Society of Sisters and mentioned in Wisconsin: that homeschooling must meet certain standards of the state’s interest to promote education, or else meet them in large part and raise a compelling reason otherwise. 

Enforcement of these ideas falls on the state and local levels, and as a result the legal normalization and codification of homeschooling came about largely through local change. Perchemlides v. Frizzle (1978), for instance, never reached the Massachusetts Supreme Court, but tied the right to homeschooling with the Ninth Amendment implied right to privacy [21]. The Perchemlides parents, who were well-educated and had previously homeschooled two of their sons, decided to withdraw their youngest from school after finding that he became “shy, unsure, self-conscious, and discouraged over academic achievement” [22]. When the district rejected their request, citing the authors’ lack of appropriate training and curriculum sequencing, the Perchemlideses raised a successful legal complaint focused on the question of ‘equivalency’ between a public and private education that had determined the dismissal. Under strict scrutiny, the judge determined that the right to privacy superseded the unclear standard of ‘equivalency,’ noting that “institutional standards in a non-institutional setting cannot be literally insisted upon” [23]. Meanwhile, in states like Texas, lawsuits like Texas Educational Agency v. Leeper (1994) codified homeschooling by including it under private education—and holding it to the same standards [24]. In any case, by the late twentieth century, there was ample case law supporting and regulating homeschooling across the States. 

Building The Infrastructure Of Homeschooling

In response to both growing legal precedent and criticisms like those of John Holt, the homeschooling movement gained its legs in the 1980s and 90s. Holt’s Teach Your Own, one of the earliest modern homeschool manuals, was published in 1981, around the time of the emergence of other thinkers such as Dr. Raymond Moore, who promoted a religion-based approach with a balance of “academics, work, and service” [25]. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) was formed in 1983 [26]. By 1992, independent legal efforts had yielded the recognition of homeschooling as an option in all fifty states. A year later, the Clinton administration codified the strict scrutiny that characterized Wisconsin v. Yoder with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which aimed to “[ensure] that interests in religious freedom are protected” [27]. The Act countered a 1990 Supreme Court decision—Employment Division v. Smith—which held that neutral, generally applicable laws that burdened religious practice do not inherently violate the First Amendment right to free exercise. With this infrastructure in place, homeschooling took off. The number of children being homeschooled in the United States leapt from around 50,000 in 1985 to between 500,000 and 750,000 in 1995 [28]. 

This growing economy of homeschooling soon bred concern about the standards being placed on it. The actual education being provided was the foremost compelling interest of the state. As a result, whether states included home schools in their regulations for private schools or classified them separately, there were long legal disputes over—as in Perchemlides v. Frizzle—which standards were fair to impose. In one such case, Murphy v. Arkansas (1988), the Murphys (an evangelical family) challenged the Arkansas Home School Act, alleging that its requirement for achievement tests violated their rights to free exercise, due process, and privacy—each of the constitutional grounds upon which homeschooling had historically triumphed [29]. Given the decades of precedent for education representing a compelling state interest, the primary question of the case was whether standardized testing was the least restrictive means of promoting that interest. The court held that Arkansas, in allowing parent-chosen and parent-administered testing, allowed parents “vast responsibility and accountability in terms of their children’s education,” and exerted fewer restrictions than other laws that had been legally upheld, like an Iowa law that required teaching certifications and prescribed curriculum [30]. Tests like Murphy were continually used in the twenty-first century. The California Supreme Court ruled only in 2008 that homeschooling was counted under the state’s compulsory attendance law as a form of private schooling, exempting it from teacher certification requirements [31]. Murphy v. Arkansas, along with cases in nearly every state and territory, tested and established unique homeschooling standards that still stand today.

These standards vary significantly by state. Most states require an application for homeschooling, but eight, including states like Texas and Michigan, do not [32]. Twenty-six states, accounting for barely half of the country, require any type of assessment or evaluation [33]. All require continued schooling through the age of at least sixteen, but subject requirements range from nonexistent (Alabama, Delaware, Utah, etc.) to curricula like that of Vermont, which requires instruction in “basic communication, including reading, writing, and the use of numbers; citizenship, history, and government in Vermont and the United States; physical education and comprehensive health education; English, American, and other literature; the natural sciences; and the fine arts” [34]. In essence, although the limits of regulation have been outlined by the courts, the minimums of education rely heavily on state law. 

Modern Movements And The “Era Of Homeschooling”

With the establishment of homeschooling parameters and new motivations to teach at home, homeschooling has continued to grow in the twenty-first century, jumping from an estimated 300,000 children in 1990 to nearly 2 million in 2012 [35]. Estimates of current homeschooling populations range from 2.5 million to 3.7 million, making up 7-10% of school-age households, and the number of homeschool students rose a reported 51% between 2017 and 2023 [36] [37]. The recent jump stems from a range of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, pushback against institutionalized racism by Black parents, and the growing power of far-right Christian fundamentalist movements. 

Homeschooling has been strongly connected with the “pro-freedom and antigovernment ideological thrust of the conservative movement” since the 1980s, particularly its devout Christian branches [38]. Leaders of the movement in the 90s went so far as to call their children the “Joshua Generation,” evoking Moses leaving the Egypt of “godless public schools,” and that image prevails today, reinforced by growing right-wing rhetoric and the idea of a culture war against ‘wokeness’ [39]. Returning to The New American yields an understanding of the mindset of modern far-right proponents of homeschooling: 

“The Deep State's propaganda organs, far-left governors, the United Nations, the education establishment, and the sexual revolutionaries obsessed with sexualizing children have all been less than enthusiastic at the thought of countless millions becoming homeschoolers almost overnight. Some globalist groups such as UNESCO and the OECD are even trying to hijack the moment” [40]. 

Yet, while this right-wing movement largely remains the face of homeschooling, liberal and identity-based movements have also begun to emerge, particularly centered around disability, race, and queer identity. Around a third of homeschooling families report disability as a primary reason for their choice, based on material concerns about children’s wellbeing in an environment standardized for non-disabled children [41]. The share of Black homeschooling households also jumped from 3.3% in the spring of 2020 to 16.1% in the fall, and while the onset of COVID-19 doubtless inflated these numbers in the short-term, Black parents have increasingly sought to avert the harms of systemic racism and the “pseudo-universalism of the European experience” by taking personal control of their children’s education [42]. This approach means to avoid racial bullying and racist teachings, such as the treatment of slavery by many Southern history classes. In the broader homeschooling landscape, liberal organizations like the Coalition for Responsible Home Education also raise awareness of the potential dangers of homeschooling, including isolation and ideological indoctrination, while providing information and resources to homeschooling families. 

Regardless of motivation, homeschooling is growing, and with it, the necessity to reevaluate state standards. States like Alaska, Tennessee, and West Virginia now homeschool as great a proportion as 12.6% of their school-age population [43]. 

Impacts And Conclusions

Comprehensive and unbiased empirical evidence on the impacts of homeschooling is sparse to nonexistent. Many surveys used to support homeschooling methods survey parents, sample limited and self-selective groups, and don’t compare their responses to those of other children. Keeping those caveats in mind, existing literature from the late 1990s and 2000s largely purports that homeschooled children “almost always do as well as children in public schools and generally a good deal better,” when measuring academic success by means of standardized testing [44]. Homeschooling also appears to mitigate the impacts of parental education and income, as the homeschooled children of low-income and low-education households significantly outperformed their public-school peers [45]. This same correlation can be seen with the impact of race. Meanwhile, community engagement, social skills, and self-image did not seem to falter, although homeschooled students seemed to perform worse in math. 

Does this mean that current homeschooling regulations have been successful in fomenting a sturdy academic and social environment for its students? It’s difficult to tell. For obvious reasons, data arrives primarily from states that require periodic academic assessments, and assessed populations therefore reflect those of more regulated states. Additionally, just 10-20% of homeschooled children reportedly take the SAT before graduating, as compared to roughly 53% of their public-school peers—a figure that raises concerns about the rates at which homeschoolers are pursuing higher education [46]. Given the limited sample sizes and the opacity of homeschooling, though, the greatest concern is the fate of students left unmonitored. The Kentucky Office of Education Accountability, for instance, reports that as many as a third of homeschooled students were absent 20% or more of their public or private school days before withdrawing, supporting a conclusion that parents may initiate homeschooling simply to avoid truancy charges [47]. Approximately half of districts in its investigation disagreed that they had the practical ability to enforce compulsory attendance, given their “limited authority to monitor the education being provided” [48]. 

More concerning even than educational lapses, minimally-supervised withdrawal from school can allow guardians to isolate their children from society and abuse them without repercussions. One 2023 case in Connecticut saw police incidentally discover a starving, beaten ten-year-old boy, who had been held in a room without a bed for months [49]. The boy’s mother admitted that she had withdrawn him from school to evade suspicions of abuse. While these individual incidents aren’t often identified, they are in all likelihood much more prevalent than they seem—a 2018 report from the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate found that 36% of a group of 380 students who had been withdrawn from public schools had at least one prior report for suspected neglect or abuse [50]. With this scope of precedent for abuse, it’s shocking that homeschooling lacks significant guard rails in most states. 

In absence of concrete and reliable data on homeschooling, particularly from the nearly half of states that do not require any type of regular assessment, lawmakers must regard what is known. The homeschooling phenomenon, protected by legal precedent, is growing at sometimes spectacular rates. Officials intended to supervise homeschooling and prevent abuses often do not have the necessary powers to do so, which can lead to educational neglect and stunting. And in states that lack assessment criteria, or even registration, it is all too easy for a child to be neglected, abused, or even killed by their household—all without awareness or intervention on the authorities’ parts. While homeschooling can have positive effects, even mitigating the impact of pervasive social issues, positive results from small samples should not discourage lawmakers from implementing standards for home education to the fullest extent allowable, as well as making public-school resources available to other groups of children. While the state interest in education may not subsume the religious and personal rights of the parent, it remains compelling enough to be promoted by the courts, particularly alongside childrens’ basic rights of life and liberty. Amid a new ‘era of homeschooling,’ the state bears a responsibility to protect its children—ideally, to the furthest extent of legal allowability.

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[1] Joseph F. Murphy, Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement (Corwin 2012). 

[2] Rachel Minkin, About Half of Americans Say Public K-12 Education Is Going in the Wrong Direction, Pew Research Center (Apr. 4, 2024), https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/04/about-half-of-americans-say-public-k-12-education-is-going-in-the-wrong-direction/.

[3] Press Release - A Higher Percentage of K–12 Students Are Receiving Academic Instruction at Home - September 17, 2024, https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/9_17_2024.asp (last visited Sep. 25, 2025).

[4] Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Education in Colonial Virginia: Part II, Private Schools and Tutors, 6 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Jul. 1897, at 1, https://doi.org/10.2307/1914792.

[5] Nancy Kober & Diane Stark Rentner, History and Evolution of Public Education in the US (Ctr. on Educ. Pol’y, George Wash. Univ., 2020), https://www.cep-dc.org/

[6] Johann N. Neem, Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America 177 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 2017).

[7] Michael S. Katz, A History of Compulsory Education Laws. Fastback Series, No. 75. Bicentennial Series(1976), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED119389.

[8] Com. v. Roberts, vLex, https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/com-v-roberts-906438439 (last visited Sep. 25, 2025).

[9] State v. Peterman (Indiana Court of Appeals 1904).

[10] See [9]

[11] Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).

[12] Farrington v. Tokushige, 273 U.S. 284 (1927)

[13] Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925)

[14] See [13] 

[15] Who Was John Holt?, John Holt GWS, https://www.johnholtgws.com/who-was-john-holt (last visited Sep. 25, 2025).

[16] Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972)

[17] see [16]

[18] see [16]

[19] see [16]

[20] see [11] 

[21] Richard A. Bumstead, Educating Your Child at Home: The Perchemlides Case, 61 Phi Delta Kappa International 97 (1979), https://www.jstor.org/stable/20299660.

[22] see [21] 

[23] see [21] 

[24] Texas Educ. Agency v. Leeper, 893 S.W.2d 432 (Tex. 1995).

[25] Home, https://www.moorefoundation.com/ (last visited Sep. 25, 2025).

[26] Northgate Academy, The History Of Homeschooling In The United States - Northgate Academy, (Jan. 12, 2022), https://www.northgateacademy.com/blog/the-history-of-homeschooling-in-the-united-states/.

[27] Charles E. Schumer, Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, (1993), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-107/pdf/STATUTE-107-Pg1488.pdf.

[28] see [27] 

[29] Murphy v. State of Arkansas, 127 F.3d 750 (8th Cir. 1997)

[30] see [29] 

[31] RE: RACHEL L. et Al. (Court of Appeal, Second District, Division 3, California 2008).

[32] U.S. Dep’t of Educ., Homeschool: Comparison Chart (pdf) (last reviewed Jan. 24, 2025) (on file with U.S. Dep’t of Educ.).

[33] see [32]

[34] Homeschool Laws by State | Homeschool .Com, (Jul. 28, 2023), https://www.homeschool.com/articles/state-homeschooling-laws/.

[35] John Scott Gray, Dewey and the American Movement to Homeschooling, 46 Education 3-13 441 (2018), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03004279.2018.1445481.

[36] Elizabeth Winterhalter, How Homeschooling Evolved from Subversive to Mainstream, JSTOR Daily (Sep. 8, 2021), https://daily.jstor.org/how-homeschooling-evolved-from-subversive-to-mainstream/.

[37] Mitchell Atencio, Homeschooling Is Outgrowing Far-Right, Christian Fundamentalism, Sojourners (Mar. 18, 2024), https://sojo.net/articles/reconstruct/homeschooling-outgrowing-far-right-christian-fundamentalism.

[38] Heath Brown, 3. DESIGN OF HOMESCHOOL AND CHARTER SCHOOL POLICY, in Homeschooling the Right81 (2021), https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7312/brow18880-004/html.

[39] see [38] 

[40] see [1] 

[41] Homeschooling & Disabilities, Coalition for Responsible Home Education (Feb. 12, 2021), https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/guides/resources-for-homeschool-parents/disabilities/.

[42] Ama Mazama & Garvey Lundy, African American Homeschooling as Racial Protectionism, 43 Sage Publications 723 (2012), https://www.jstor.org/stable/23414694?sid=primo&seq=2.

[43] Genevieve Smith Watson Angela R., New U.S. Census Bureau Data Confirm Growth in Homeschooling Amid Pandemic, Education Next (Jun. 10, 2024), https://www.educationnext.org/new-u-s-census-bureau-data-confirm-growth-in-homeschooling-amid-pandemic/.

[44] See [1]

[45] see [44]

[46] Should We Be Concerned about Low Homeschool SAT-Taking?, Coalition for Responsible Home Education (Nov. 14, 2016), https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/should-we-be-concerned-about-low-homeschool-sat-taking/.

[47] David Wickersham, Homeschooling In Kentucky (2018), https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/lrc/publications/ResearchReports/RR454.pdf.

[48] see [47] 

[49] Waterbury Man Captive in CT Homeschooling Regulations, CT Insider (Mar. 28, 2023), https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/waterbury-man-captive-ct-homeschooling-regulations-20229888.php

[50] Examining Connecticut’s Safety Net for Children Withdrawn from School for the Purpose of Homeschooling—Supplemental Investigation To OCA’s December 12 2017 Report Regarding the Death of Matthew Tirado(2018), https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/oca/ocamemohomeschooling4252018pdf.pdf?rev=d703350ee81f4fae9ee651225c4c038f.