A nonprofit legal organization has filed a civil rights suit
against New York City Public schools for ‘systematic mistreatment of
homeschooling families.’
February 4, 2017
New York City mother Tanya Acevedo received
a home visit from Child Protective Services at 7 p.m. this winter. They were
investigating her for “educational neglect” because she had legally withdrawn
her child from the public system to homeschool.
After Tanya let them in, a CPS investigator
insisted that they interview her child in private, and inspected their
apartment, including a look inside Tanya’s refrigerator—standard practice for a
home under investigation for “neglect.” The officer left Tanya with stern
instructions to produce documents and her child the next day at the CPS office.
Tanya called the Home School Legal Defense
Association (HSLDA) for help. After many calls navigating the New York Public
School District’s bureaucracy—and another visit from CPS—her case was closed.
She had followed all the applicable laws to withdraw her son from public
schools and begin homeschooling. The school district had not recorded the
paperwork she’d filed, so her son began accruing “absences” that eventually
triggered the CPS investigation.
“Even though the school knew that Tanya had
filed a notice of intent to homeschool, it reported her to CPS for ‘educational
neglect’ because its policy required it to do so after so many ‘absences’ had
accrued,” writes Jim Mason,
HSLDA’s vice president of litigation.
Tanya’s case prompted Mason to look into
the city’s treatment of homeschooling families in general. He found it was
common for the district to not file families’ homeschool notices, then report
them to CPS. So, on December 5, HSLDA filed a civil
rights suit against New York City Public schools for “systematic
mistreatment of homeschooling families.”
“What happened to Tanya was the last
straw,” Mason said in an interview. “Before this, there had been a string of
what seemed to be bureaucratic oversights: people would fail to receive
responses to their requests or letters, or else they wouldn’t receive their
metro benefits. But this invasion of Tanya’s privacy was beyond the pale.”
If You Don’t School With Us, We Report You
New York has some of the oldest
home-schooling laws in the country. Once parents withdraw their children from
the public system, they have 14 days to notify the district that they have
begun a home instruction program. Although the child is not “absent” and is
being instructed elsewhere, often the school will continue to mark them so,
which is why Child Protective Service gets involved.
“Tanya both withdrew her child and
gave the district notice on the same day. Everyone was on the same page,” Mason
said. “You don’t have to wait or give the district permission. They have no
cause to investigate you or even mark your child absent.”
In other words, families who were fully
complying with the laws about homeschooling have been finding themselves
subject to investigations of child abuse merely because the school district has
not properly filed their paperwork.
“New York Public Schools believe that you
need to have their permission to withdraw your student from their system and
begin home-schooling. That’s entirely contrary to the law,” Mason said.
Many homeschoolers face high regulations
and arbitrary treatment like this despite their stellar academic and social
track record, says Dr. Brian D. Ray, president of the National Home Education
Research Institute (NHERI). He has been studying and collecting the research on
home-educated students for three decades.
“People forget that being schooled at home
was the norm for most of human history,” he says. “It’s important to remember
that institutionalized schooling with educational professionals didn’t become
the norm until about 1900. Along comes back home education, revived in the
1980s, and people don’t know what to make of it. It can and does work.”
Who Cares About Kids More: Parents or
Government?
Ray points to academic research that shows
homeschooled students are at least equal to and often better than
public-schooled counterparts in academics and social and emotional adjustment.
One of Ray’s reports
demonstrates that more homeschool regulation does not correlate with
higher academic achievement.
In this study, researchers ranked each
state’s education system as a low, medium, or highly regulated. They then compared
a state’s ranking to its student test scores, and found no correlation: states
with high regulation were not consistently the top achievers, which means there
is no causal relationship.
“It’s absurd to assume that governmental
authorities care more about our children than we do as their parents,” said
Lenore Skenazy, a writer who espouses “free-range parenting” and tracks
government parenting policies. “It’s surreal the way the government seeks to
interrupt our lives and assume the parenting role instead of us.”
It’s fine if parents want to be more
hands-on with their kids than she prefers, but Skenazy says parents and
government both need to respect other parents’ choices about how to manage
their kids and families.
“I do resist a helicopter government that
tries to monitor every aspect of how we raise our kids. Barring any egregious,
immediate, obvious and statistically likely harm, the government should stay
out of family life,” she said.
To elude unwarranted unpleasant encounters
with government agencies like Child Protective Services, Ray advises they
familiarize themselves with state homeschooling laws and join HSLDA.
Alexandra
Hudson is a graduate of the London School of Economics, where she completed her
masters in international comparative social policy as a Rotary Global Grant
Scholar. She has held posts with the American Enterprise Institute and the
Federalist Society, and most recently was lead education policy analyst at the
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
