Homeschooling and Child Safety: Are Kids Safer at Home

ABSTRACT

Safety remains a key concern for parents and education policy makers. Homeschooling opponents argue that child abusers use homeschooling to isolate and harm their children while public school teachers and administrators, as mandatory reporters, reduce child maltreatment. Supporters of homeschooling argue that public schools expose children to bullying from their peers and that some school employees also mistreat children. In the 1980s and 1990s, most states adopted legislation clarifying a legal path for homeschooling. I conduct two-way fixed effects and event study analyses of the effect of homeschool rules on measures of child safety. Although most estimates are not statistically significant, some specifications find a statistically significant increase in child homicide rates in the years following homeschool legislation. Better understanding how a variety of educational options affect children’s safety continues to be a pressing aspect of education policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Homeschool
• child maltreatment
• school choice
• violence
• homicide

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For example, see O’Donnell (2020) and response by McDonald (2020).

2. See the Coalition for Responsible Home Education for recent legislative history: https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/an-outline-of-homeschooling-legislation/. For example, Hawaii SB 2323 (2018) proposed requiring a background check for child abuse and neglect before being allowed to homeschool; Iowa HF 272 (2019) proposed quarterly home visits to check on the health of homeschooled children. To date, no state has passed a law with these types of restrictions.

3. Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111–320), 42 U.S.C. § 5101, Note (§ 3).

4. Charles-Warner (2019) compares rates of children with a Child Protection Plan as the measure of child abuse. This is most similar to substantiated cases as a measure in the U.S.

5. Thank you to a referee for bringing my attention to this memo.

6. See the Turpin case outside of Los Angeles (https://www.nbclosangeles.com/local-2/sisters-rescued-from-california-house-of-horrors-speak-of-family-tragedy-in-new-interview/2754151/) and others detailed here https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-coleman-brightbill-turpin-homeschool-abuse-20180117-story.html.

7. Thank you to referee #6 for bringing this and other studies to my attention.

8. Charles-Warner provides a few anecdotes that suggests that the higher rates of reports for homeschooled children are, at least in part, reports of educational neglect with the community reporter attempting to provide social services a way in to review the home (p. 19–20).

9. Note, too, that school employees fail to report a large fraction of incidents: one estimate is that, of incidents known by school employees, only 5% of school employee sexual misconduct incidents end up reported to the appropriate authorities (Grant, Wilkerson, deKoven Pelton, Cosby, & Henschel, 2017).

10. CAPTA Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111–320), 42 U.S.C. § 5101.

11. These states are Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Note that all states have compulsory schooling laws. The educational neglect clauses of each state’s statute can be found here: https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/current-policy/educational-neglect-statutes/.

12. In results not reported here, I use only the legislated dates to estimate the effects of homeschooling. The results are qualitatively similar and available upon request.

13. These dates come from NHLDA, cross-checked with information from the Coalition for Responsible Home Schooling, and state legislation history.

14. Massachusetts General Law Title XII, Chapter 76, Section 1: “ … or of a child who is being otherwise instructed in a manner approved in advance by the superintendent or the school committee.”

15. 399 Mass. 324 (1987).

16. Missouri Revised Statutes Title XI § 167.042.

17. More recent legislation in Missouri sets minimum hours of instruction and delineates subjects that must be taught. MO Rev Stat § 167.031.

18. Minnesota adopted the first charter school law in 1991 and Florida adopted the first voucher program for students with an IEP in 1999; for outcomes only available in the 1980s such as violent deaths, there is no sample variation in these variables.

19. Accidental deaths include the following ICD-9 codes guided by the research from Schnitzer et al. (2011) on codes likely for child abuse: E850-E858 Accidental poisonings by drugs, medicinal substances, biologicals; E860-E869 Accidental poisonings by other solid and liquid substances; E880-E888 Accidental falls; E890-E899 Accidents caused by fire and flames; E900-E909 Accidents due to natural and environmental factors; E910-E915 Accidents caused by submersion, suffocation, foreign bodies; E916-E928 other accidents; E929 Late effects of accidental injury; E980-E989 injury undetermined whether accidentally or purposefully inflicted.

20. NCANDS defines substitutes care providers as “A person providing out-of-home care to children, such as a foster parent or residential facility staff.”

21. Dwyer (1996) outlines an argument under the equal protection clause to protect children from the consequences parents’ religious objections toward medical treatment. The law review article provides interesting parallels for religious exemptions to education laws applicable for some homeschoolers.

22. Although the NCANDS sample is too unbalanced to use the Goodman-Bacon decomposition, I apply this decomposition to the deaths data. The Goodman-Bacon decomposition is consistent with the TWFE and event study estimates in that the pairwise comparison’s estimates are both positive and negative.

23. Kunzman and Gaither (2020) provide an overview of the evidence on homeschooling and its effects.