Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey

When Crunchy Con columnist Rod Dreher blogged that Sarah Palin was a homeschooler, bloggers on the left fit it all together – homeschooling meant creationism, conservatism, and of course, Republicanism, all to be abhorred. Dan Brown wrote in The Huffingon Post, “her radical choice to homeschool her kids terrifies (and fascinates) me.“

Granted, the Republican platform explicitly endorses homeschooling, saying, “”We recognize and appreciate the importance of innovative education environments, particularly homeschooling, for stimulating academic achievement.” Also granted, there’s no mention of homeschooling in the Democratic platform. “It’s not on the radar,” Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, told me. So commentators like Dan Brown might be excused for thinking that homeschooling is solidly red.

But some of the biggest battleground states in this election are also among the biggest homeschooling states, such as Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. So, it’s probably worth noting that a lot of homeschoolers are liberal Democrats, and their party is kissing them off.

“It infuriates me that the Democrats are so much in the pocket of teachers’ unions – and I used to be a member of the teachers’ union,” says Ann Zeise when I interviewed her. Ann is a registered Democrat and webmaster of A to Z Home’s Cool, one of the most popular homeschool information sites. The Democratic party ignores homeschoolers at all levels, it seems. In fact, when a neighbor ran for the state assembly on the Democratic ticket, Zeise offered to drum up support for him among homeschoolers. But he turned her down, explaining that he couldn’t take the risk of being associated with homeschoolers because “a huge amount of my funding is coming from the teachers’ union.”

Teachers’ unions have long opposed homeschooling. When a California appellate court ruled in February of this year that parents in the state had no right to homeschool, the teachers’ union cheered the ruling. In the face of a public outcry and criticism from the governor and the state superintendent of instruction, the court vacated the ruling a few weeks later and agreed to rehear the case. The teachers’ union submitted an amicus brief arguing that allowing people to homeschool would result in “educational anarchy”. (In August, the court reversed its ruling, and affirmed the right to homeschool in California.)

But the relationship of homeschooling to the public school system is something like the relationship of the free market to the defunct socialist planned economies. People are voting with their feet in favor of “educational anarchy” because it works so much better than the alternative.  Liberal Democrats often choose to homeschool for the same reasons that conservatives do: quality of education, and values. Different values, of course. For example, in some parts of the country, schools teach intelligent design, aka creationism, and liberal Democratic homeschoolers may want to avoid that.

Although their numbers are small relative to the public school system, and although they don’t throw money into political campaigns on the scale of the teachers’ unions, homeschoolers can use their know-how, networks and technology very effectively in the political arena. Governor Mike Huckabee won the Republican primary in Iowa in large part because of the strength of his support among homeschoolers. Homeschoolers reportedly accounted for at least a quarter of Huckabee’s Iowa volunteers, and homeschoolers brought Huckabee and Chuck Norris together.

Liberal Democratic homeschoolers could put the same kind of energy to work for the Democratic candidates in this election – if the Democrats would have them. Contrary to the stereotype of homeschooling as a purely conservative thing, the modern homeschooling movement has some deep roots in the counterculture of the 1960s.

Sarah Palin’s wouldn’t even be the first homeschooling family on this year’s presidential campaign trail. Liberal Democrat Elizabeth Edwards chose to homeschool her young children through the primaries.

Yet Democratic politicians respond to liberal Democratic homeschoolers as if they were a species of unclassifiable marsupials: a Democratic constituency that doesn’t want anything from government except the right to be left alone! Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform told me, “I’m not sure what homeschoolers are asking for from government.” When Zeise and other liberal Democrats went to the California legislature for help in the wake of the court decision threatening homeschooling rights this year, the legislators were scratching their heads about the fact that homeschoolers weren’t asking for money

In what looks to be a close election, the Republican party will be getting ardent support from conservative, Christian homeschoolers in battleground states. Democrats seem comfortable ignoring the potential to generate similarly ardent support from organized, tech-savvy, liberal, secular Democratic homeschoolers. Maybe their lead is comfortable enough that they just won’t need those votes.

( Greg)

Share/Save