Instead of tackling their crumbling public schools, Illinois lawmakers are pushing a bill to crack down on parents who escape the system through homeschooling. Passed in late March through the Illinois House Education Policy Committee in a party-line vote, the Illinois Homeschool Act would impose a bevy of new requirements and oversight for homeschool families. According to Rep. Terra Costa Howard (D), the bill will ensure that homeschooled children receive a “safe and sufficient education,” reducing the potential for abuse or neglect.
The bill, which could soon become law, will require parents to submit an annual “Homeschool Declaration Form” to the principal of the local public school, maintain and submit educational portfolios, endure at-home inspections, and provide documentation of immunizations and health examinations for children who wish to participate in public school activities.
“We cannot turn a blind eye to children who are not being educated,” Costa Howard recently told Capitol News Illinois.
It is, of course, ironic for Illinois Democrats to complain about children “not being educated” in reference to anything but their own failing public school students. But the targeting of homeschoolers is particularly laughable since homeschoolers significantly outperform their public school counterparts on learning achievement and have better social, emotional, and psychological outcomes. This discrepancy is notably large among black homeschool students, who score 23 to 42 percentile points higher than black students in public schools. The percentage of black homeschooled students reflects these results.
State Rep. La Shawn Ford, whose district includes parts of Chicago, said at a rally last week, “And finally, we’ve seen, since the pandemic, the growth in homeschooling. It has increased across all demographics, but specifically in the Black community, from 3.3% to almost 17% of Black people use homeschooling in this state.”
The bill has faced fervent opposition, with over 90,000 witness slips filed against the bill compared to fewer than 1,000 in support. This is, of course, no surprise. Illinois students are often at the bottom of the ranking among states nationwide. The 2023 Illinois Report Card revealed that only 26.7% of Illinois 11th graders statewide met or exceeded math standards, and 31.6% met reading standards on the SAT. In Chicago Public Schools, the high school numbers were even bleaker, with just 21% of 11th graders proficient in math and 23% in reading.
Worse, many parents in CPS are faced with sending their children to zero-proficiency schools – schools in which no students met grade-level standards in math or reading on state assessments. In 2023, 53 CPS schools had zero students proficient in math, and 30 had zero proficient in reading. This is out of a total of 649 schools in the district.
Poor academic performance isn’t the only reason parents might prefer to homeschool their children in Illinois. Illinois schools have been among the most aggressive in pushing radical progressive ideology on its students. In February of 2021, the Illinois State Board of Education adopted Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards, which introduced woke ideology into schools by requiring teachers to undergo a set of “culturally responsive teaching and leading” trainings.
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CPS, in particular, was a forerunner for many woke innovations experienced in schools throughout the nation in the early 2020s. It was among the first districts to adopt the widely discredited 1619 Project and among the most fervent in mandating access to bathroom facilities based on gender identity as opposed to biological sex. Its efforts to implement “restorative justice” over traditional discipline created a consequence-free environment in an environment already rotten with bouts of severe violence.
It’s not surprising that the number of parents opting to homeschool their children is on the rise in Illinois and nationally. What is surprising — though perhaps it shouldn’t be — is that Democratic lawmakers are bent on keeping families trapped in failing schools, depriving families of the opportunity to provide a decent education to their children, which is their constitutional right.