Americans Are Skipping School

Editors’ Note: This is an excerpt from Dixie Dillon Lane’s new book, Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream, which will be released on June 18 with Eerdmans.

As pandemic schooling reminded us, all schooling is subject to the changing winds of politics and public policies (not to mention epidemiology and pedagogy). This includes homeschooling, and it is certainly possible that public opinion could once again turn decisively against the practice.

But as long as American public schools remain both underperforming and managed from above, this seems unlikely to happen on a large scale. Too many Americans now see homeschooling as both reasonable and something that they might themselves be willing to try, given the right circumstances. Too many American parents believe once again in parental influence in education for homeschooling to cease being a strong presence. As long as American public schooling overall continues to prioritize consolidation, to eviscerate curricula, and to enable bureaucratic micromanagement of classrooms, significant numbers of parents are likely to continue to seek parent-directed alternatives, and homeschooling will likely continue to grow in both size and importance.

That is, it will continue to grow in such a context as long as homeschooling itself remains a practice within which parents can retain significant authority. This is the perennial question, as we’ve discussed: Who has primary authority over a particular child’s education, the child’s parent or the government? Efforts to regulate homeschooling may lead to reasonable compromises that fulfill the responsibilities of both the family and the state, of course, and I hope that they will. But they also may and sometimes do lead to homeschooling being restricted or remade in ways that minimize the flexibility and parental authority that are hallmarks of the practice. Governments can and sometimes do decide to regulate homeschooling in ways that make it nearly unrecognizable.

No family’s story represents the vulnerability of homeschooling to government intervention so well as that of the Romeikes. In 2006, two years after Cady Heron returned to America for the first time, German parents Uwe and Hannelore Romeike began homeschooling the eldest of their five children in the town of Bissingen, Germany, in apparent violation of German law (which forbade virtually all homeschooling). Soon, the Romeikes found themselves receiving repeated visits and phone calls from local school, child welfare, law enforcement, and elected officials demanding that the Romeike children be enrolled in the local school. In one tense incident that October, police officers entered the Romeike home and, without a written order, physically removed the children and took them to the local school (after which the children were soon returned to their parents). Officers then attempted to repeat the removal on the following Monday, but sympathetic friends and neighbors gathered in front of the home to protest, resulting in the officers leaving without the children.

Following these events, government officials temporarily allowed the children to remain out of school based on a doctor’s letter stating that forcibly removing the children could cause them psychological harm. (As the HSLDA brief on the case noted, however, this decision “alarmed Mr. and Mrs. Romeike, as such reasons have been used in other cases in Germany to force homeschooled children into a psychiatric clinic and to take children away from their parents.”) The family was eventually fined the equivalent of over $15,000 for their children’s continuing nonattendance.

While protesting these fines in court, Uwe and Hannelore became concerned that the government would take action to seize their home as a collection method. Rather than wait and see, the Romeikes left Germany in 2008 and flew to the United States, settling temporarily in Tennessee. As visitors, they had the right to remain in the country for three months. Fearing that they would lose custody of their children if they returned to Germany, however, the Romeikes hoped to remain in the United States indefinitely. As a result, they filed for political asylum later that year.

To be granted asylum, the family would need to prove that if they returned to their home country, they would be subject to persecution because of their “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” according to widely accepted United Nations policy. Upon hearing of the case, HSLDA agreed to represent the family. HSLDA attorneys argued in court that the Romeikes had indeed already suffered persecution because of their political opinions about education, their religious and conscience-based motivations for homeschooling, and their membership in an unwelcome social group (homeschoolers). A Memphis immigration court judge granted the request for asylum in early 2010.

A month later, however, Immigration and Customs Enforcement filed an appeal of this decision, arguing that any government (explicitly including the United States) had the right to regulate or prohibit homeschooling and to prosecute those disobeying such a law. The earlier ruling was then repealed, withdrawing the family’s refugee status. This ruling stated that the Romeikes did not face persecution in Germany, but only prosecution according to valid German laws, and that homeschoolers did not constitute a protected social group. A qualifying social group, in the government’s definition of a refugee, must be joined by a shared characteristic that either cannot be changed or should not be required to be changed, and the ruling argued that homeschoolers could change themselves into conventional schoolers at any time (and so did not qualify).

In other words, the ruling suggested that homeschooling was not a parental right but a mutable parental choice, and therefore the Romeikes could return to Germany without any infringement on their rights. The right of the state to regulate schooling trumped the potential right of parents to choose how their children were educated. This ruling not only threatened the Romeikes’ status but demonstrated yet again how differently homeschooling could be interpreted by different American courts. The fundamental conflict between the court and the Romeikes (and HSLDA) lay in differing interpretations of rights and influences in both families and in education.

Unsurprisingly, HSLDA quickly moved with the Romeikes to appeal this decision in the federal courts. In 2013, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals sus-tained the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals that the Romeikes not be granted asylum. Finally, HSLDA attorneys filed one more appeal, Romeike v. Holder, this time with the United States Supreme Court—but the court declined to hear the case. It seemed that the Romeikes would have to return to Germany. The next day, however, the Department of Homeland Security inexplicably informed the Romeikes that they would not in fact be deported but would be granted the right to reside in the United States under supervision, with year-by-year renewals. There is no information available regarding the reasoning behind this sudden reversal; it simply happened, and whatever caused the change was not made known to the public, nor to the Romeikes or their lawyers.

However confusing, this change was good news for the Romeikes, of course, but it brought little comfort to American homeschoolers overall. Legally, the immigration officers of the Obama administration and a federal appeals court had both stated that parents did not have an unalienable right to homeschool—even for religious reasons—and that governments could reasonably force homeschooled children to attend public schools. This seemed to homeschoolers to increase the danger to homeschooling in the United States. As HSLDA chairman Michael Farris wrote to the organization’s members, “If our government contends that Germany did not violate the principles of religious freedom when it banned homeschooling in order to gain philosophical control over children, then it implies that it would not violate religious freedom or parental rights if the United States decided to ban homeschooling for the same purpose.”

Still, the Romeikes expected to be left to live and to homeschool in America in peace from then on. And one might have thought, given the growth in size, acceptance, and diversity of homeschooling in the years to come, that they would be. Yet in 2023, nine years after the previous decision, the Romeikes’ status was suddenly revoked without explanation; they were given four weeks to obtain German passports before deportation. The family was caught completely off guard; by this time, their children had lived for most (or all) of their childhoods as Americans, and two were American citizens. Two now-grown children had married Americans, and one American grandchild had been born; deportation would break up three nuclear families. HSLDA jumped once more to the family’s defense, however, and the Romeikes were soon granted a one-year delay of their pending deportation. Following further lobbying, the family was once again told it could remain in the United States for another year.

In the end, then—or for now—the Romeikes were not deported. But why was the Romeikes’ status so suddenly changed in 2023? No explanation was ever given.

The Romeike case illustrates the reality that even in the third decade of the twenty-first century, American governments and school districts cannot make up their minds about homeschooling. Homeschooling remains a contested practice politically and educationally even as it forms part of the American educational mainstream. As time goes on, governments and schools will have to figure out more permanently how to wrangle with homeschooling’s size, familiarity, and widespread social acceptance, but that calculus is not yet complete.

Yet while governments and school systems are still torn, that is not the case for American families. As the recent history of homeschooling has shown, increasing numbers of American families can make up their minds about homeschooling. There is ample evidence that ordinary Americans are increasingly friendly toward homeschooling and that more and more of them are willing to try it out each year. This seems likely to continue, even as regulations, restrictions, legislation, and even asylum status of families like the Romeikes will continue to be formally contested.

Homeschool research will remain contested, too. The number of researchers paying attention to homeschooling is growing alongside homeschooling itself in this postpandemic period, and along with this growth comes considerable disagreement about best practices, as well as research conclusions. NHERI continues to conduct studies, although ICHER seems to have wound to a close; the federal government continues to include homeschooling in its NCES research; and the US Census continues to take the “Pulse” of home-schooling through its surveys. Mainstream media from the Washington Post to Fox News will continue to cover the topic from various angles and perhaps, like the Post, will sponsor their own research initiatives into homeschooling. Other websites, journals, think tanks, and magazines, from Public Discourse to Slate to Education Next, will also hopefully continue publishing on the topic.

Homeschoolers themselves will also keep writing for each other and publishing memoirs and how-tos, including some that are critical (like Westover’s). States and legislators considering ESAs or homeschool regulations will continue to ask homeschooling lobbying groups for statistical data while also seeking outsider perspectives like those of Shawn Peters, James Dwyer, and Kate Henley Averett as well as radically oppositional perspectives like that of Elizabeth Bartholet. New centers for research or its promulgation, such as the Johns Hopkins Homeschool Hub, are also likely to emerge at universities. Some researchers and institutions, including the Johns Hopkins Hub, will look at homeschooling from the outside in; and others, like NHERI or HSLDA, will look from the inside out.

For the best insights on homeschooling America, I hope we can combine these approaches, appreciating the richness of variety in research without neglecting either scholarly rigor or attention to the particularities of homeschooling and of studying homeschoolers. I have tried to do something like this here, and I hope that other research will draw on what I have argued, even if critically. Holding different viewpoints in tension should be key to any effort to approach an accurate understanding of homeschooling’s role in American life.

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.