Homeschooling regulation is the next frontier. And it's a minefield.
Last week, parents showed up in Trenton to oppose S1796, a bill that would require every homeschool family in New Jersey to file a letter with their public school superintendent expressing their intent to homeschool their children.
They earned something of a victory when the bill was pulled last minute, but only after parents and others had taken time out of their busy schedules to show up to oppose the bill, and just in time to silence their testimony.
This is fairly typical of parental rights advocacy in New Jersey.
Essentially, homeschooling parents have bought some time. Parents can take a moment to catch their breath, but the battle is far from over. New Jersey is quickly transforming from Garden State to Surveillance State and they’re not likely to let homeschoolers slip under the radar.
Yes, it’s a victory. But those who have been paying attention to NJ politics (and politics in general) recognize this as a “wait until fewer people are paying attention” approach to getting unpopular laws passed.
Better yet, they’ll seek out some obscure and isolated example of irresponsible homeschooling, flood mainstream and social media with narratives about why new laws are “needed” and THEN repost the bill.
In other words, they’re waiting for an opportunity to sneak this through.
Lo and behold…
On the same day that S1796 was pulled, a new, arguably worse, homeschooling bill was quietly introduced.
NJ’s S4589, sponsored by Senators John Burzichelli and Paul Moriarty, “requires child in home education program and parents to meet annually with representative of resident school district.”
A child in a home education program and the child’s parent or guardian shall meet annually with a person from the resident school district who has been designated by the superintendent of the school district. The designated person shall be a school counselor, school nurse, or school social worker employed by the school district. The purpose of the meeting shall be for the parent or guardian to have an opportunity to request support from the school district for the home education program and for the person designated by the superintendent to conduct a general health and wellness check of the child.
Many people will see all of this and wonder what all the fuss is about. To most, the changes seem benign enough.
This is the essence of the totalitarian tiptoe.
Tyranny has been creeping into New Jersey and other states, bill by bill, one small precedent at a time. You can think of it like sneaking in a bomb - benign part by benign part - so the threat goes through undetected…
As a weapon of the totalitarian tiptoe, legislation is a means of cultural and behavioral shifting as it shapes our views around justifiable and criminal behavior. Legislators regularly propose bills that piggyback agendas onto the legitimate concerns of citizens and it’s critical that we, as citizens, learn to distinguish a bill’s stated purpose from its underlying goal.
So I will reassert the concerns I brought to Senator Joe Vitale when he campaigned to lower the age of consent for behavioral health care.
“We can’t assume the worst of one group of people and not be concerned that we might put kids in the hands of another group of people that might be equally neglectful, predatory, criminal. I just think it’s something to think about.”
“Like a social worker?” Senator Vitale snarked.
Yes. Like a social worker.
An Iowa social worker has been charged with perjury for delivering false testimony that helped convince a judge to remove four children from their parents, investigators said Tuesday.
Former Department of Human Services employee Chelsie Gray is charged with knowingly giving false information during a December 2017 hearing in which she recommended a judge terminate the parental rights of a mother and father
…Despite the ruling, Gray continued to work for DHS…
It is therefore critical that we ask our legislators to look beyond the stated purpose of the laws they propose and examine the ways government intervention can be exploited and abused.
Redefining Risks and Roles
As Home School Legal Defense Association’s (HSLDA) Scott Woodruff points out, there is currently no definition of health and wellness check within New Jersey statutes or regulations.
This means that what school officials are being mandated to do and homeschool parents and children are being mandated to comply with is not defined. That means every official is in effect going to have a blank slate blank check to make up their own requirements.
…This bill is not really there to solve a problem. It’s there to propagate a myth that homeschoolers are child abusers.
I’m sure you’ve seen stories in the media that can amplify really tragic stories of abuse and neglect. There are folks out there who would like to take those incredibly rare events and use those to characterize our entire movement. In other words, take one or two people who are probably criminals and use them as a paintbrush to paint the thousands of families who homeschool in New Jersey.
NJ legislators have demonstrated a pattern of using tactics to characterize parents as potential threats to their own children as they propose legislation that erodes parental rights and the need for increasing government oversight and minor consent.
Keep in mind that these are the same legislators who created the so-called Freedom to Read Act, which gave school “library media specialists” immunity from criminal and civil liability arising from “good faith actions” that may involve curating sexually explicit content for kids while also granting librarians “civil cause of action for emotional distress, defamation, libel, slander, damage to reputation, or any other relevant tort, against any person who harasses the school library media specialist.”
The Micromanagement Grid
Our government doesn’t trust us. It has created rules about whether we can collect rainwater or raise backyard chickens. It wants to track our vegetable gardens, seeks to ban bird feeders and use eminent domain to seize private farm land. And it wants to impose homeschooling regulations because it worries that some parents might use homeschooling as an opportunity to abuse, neglect or misinform their children.
But what has the government done to earn OUR trust as it scrutinizes a population of parents?
What Kennedy shares about HHS (and ultimately CPS) is extremely troubling. Yet mainstream media seeks only to debunk these claims, even as they are forced to acknowledge some of the serious problems linked to government oversight of children.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s Elizabeth Bartholet characterizes homeschooling as “an unregulated regime.” and she’d like to see an end to it.
Yet Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children - and society - in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s rights to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.
(You can read HSLDA’s response to Bartholet’s claims here.)
And here’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver maligning HSLDA.
Origins of Narrative Shape-Shifting
Homeschooling, for those who can manage it, has become a refuge for families who seek to preserve their own values and tailor curriculums to match their educational priorities. Many families abandoned the public school system specifically because of legislation that has gradually allowed for ideology and political agendas to bleed into curriculums or funneled children into an increasingly toxic medical pipeline. The concern now for many of these families is that homeschooling legislation is being used to funnel those children back into the same medical/indoctrination pipeline they sought to avoid. And their fears are often confirmed when they hear from the legislators and organizations that seek to regulate homeschooling.
I won’t pretend homeschooling is perfect or that problems don’t exist. But if you pay attention to the problems that are amplified, you’re likely to discover a pattern of solutions that restrict the freedom and choices of citizens and give the government more control.
Heading the charge for homeschool intervention are organizations like Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), an advocacy group organized around the premise that children need to be protected from “parents rights extremists.”
According to the CRHE website:
We know that children benefit when they have the chance to explore different ideas, make their own decisions, and be their own people. But there’s a movement sweeping through the U.S. that’s trying to prevent children from doing any of those things. At CRHE, we call that movement “parental-rights extremism.”…
Parental-rights extremism is the driving force behind policies that ban books, punish LGBTQ+ children for expressing themselves, and deny children access to health care…
For decades, they’ve deregulated homeschooling, taking away all of homeschooled children’s protections from educational neglect, isolation, and abuse. This deregulation made it easy for these extremists to teach their children regressive ideas and misinformation.
Proposed homeschooling regulations from an organization with this perspective is concerning. But they align nicely with the state-sanctioned narrative.
Here is how CRHE frames its concerns about medical neglect among homeschoolers:
Some homeschooling parents deprive their children of needed medical care or reject modern medicine altogether. In some cases, parents may believe in faith healing, or practice unassisted home births. The results can be fatal. While children who attend public school may in some cases have parents who believe in natural healing or in forgoing medical care, every state requires parents to submit proof of well-child visits or vaccinations (note that obtaining an exemption to this latter requirement often includes a signature from a doctor, ensuring at least some contact with medical professionals). However, when a child is homeschooled, there is no school to request medical records, and thus nothing to ensure that they ever visit a doctor, and some may go their entire childhoods without once being examined by a medical professional. In some cases, children may reach adulthood with fatal conditions that could have been treated while they were children. Most states do not require homeschooling parents to submit their children’s immunization records, and some homeschooling communities have recently seen measles or whooping cough outbreaks.
Here is CRHE’s Bill of Rights for Home Schooled Children, which says that children have “the right to be a child, without being infantilized.” But what does that mean? And who decides?
It’s telling that the CDC’s concerns about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) focuses on “potentially traumatic events” that occur within the home environment and that it’s first strategic goal for preventing ACEs is to “support ACEs surveillance and data innovation.”
And when I look at CRHE’s origin story and members of the CHRE team, I get a troubling glimpse of the narratives that are likely to be confirmed… and used to justify the kind of surveillance that is now being proposed legislatively.
CHRE Co-founder Kieryn Darkwater’s passion around homeschooling is driven by a decidedly negative experience that has created a very particular bias. (In general, I think the entire country seems to be immersed in a lot of trauma-based activism.)
CHRE board member Eve Ettinger co-hosts a podcast with Darkwater about Christian fundamentalism and current events called Kitchen Table Cult, which says on it’s landing page:
We’re not surprised about the rise of Trump, Christian fascism, or evangelical white women voting for someone like Mike Pence, and we want to take you back through the beginning of it all to explain why.
CHRE Co-founder Rachel Coleman does research for Homeschooling’s Invisible Children (HIC) and worked with Homeschoolers Anonymous to on a project entitled “When Homeschoolers Turn Violent.”
CHRE board member Jane Wettach is a recently retired Clinical Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law who wrote A Proposal to Protect Homeschooled Children in North Carolina from Educational Neglect, which seeks to, among other things, add “emotional neglect” to the definition of neglect.
It’s not that addressing this issues and doing this research is inherently bad. It isn’t. These people likely care deeply about the welfare of children and they bring up some legitimate issues, but I believe their genuine concerns are being exploited and weaponized by politicians and organizations with broader agendas that involve the removal of our rights and indoctrination of our children. I also suspect these folks are encouraged (and funded) to root deeper into a limited world view, which only identifies the threats that homeschooling can pose and NOT the threats posed by giving the government the ability to decide what constitutes medical, educational or emotional neglect.
And there’s a pattern of thinking that bleeds into the recommendations this organizations makes. And it looks something like this:
Parental-rights activists and Trump have much in common beyond their hatred for LGBT people. They both share an authoritarian tendency.
That’s some pretty toxic seed planting.
Articles like this sound an awful lot like CRHE’s Parental Rights Extremism Messaging Guide:
For decades, Christian fundamentalists in the United States have worked to enact their regressive ideas about gender and race by using homeschooling to isolate and abuse their own children. Now, having honed their tactics, they are moving on to enact those ideas on society as a whole. As homeschool alumni who were raised in these regressive systems and persecuted for marginalized identities, we at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education want to share our deep understanding of parental-rights extremists.
Here are some of their recommended sample messages:
On Homeschooling: For decades, homeschooled children in Christian fundamentalist communities have been the testing grounds for parental-rights extremism.
On Civil Rights: Parental-rights extremists want absolute power over children and to limit their access to information in order to control the kind of adults they grow into, but every person has the right to information about the world that prepares them for a free and open future.
On Religious Freedom: A powerful few politicians and lobbyists want to divide us and trample over children’s rights to hold onto and grow their power and reshape U.S. society.
On Child Safety: Denying children access to opportunity, autonomy, self-determination, and information is the first step to denying those things to us all.
On Identity: Children of all races, backgrounds, and genders, including LGBTQ+ children, and BIPOC children are harmed by parental-rights extremism.
It’s the building of “evidence-based” narratives to justify loopholes around parental rights on one hand and the creation of plausible deniability on the other (ie. vaccine injury, EMF exposure) that gives me pause. The collection and amplification of horror stories among homeschoolers is government subsidized whereas horror stories related to, say, vaccine injuries or missing children on the government’s watch are buried, suppressed and denied. This is ultimately cultural and behavioral-shifting work.
Following the Money
As its annual report confirms, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education is shaping the narrative. This work is funded by organizations like World Childhood Foundation USA, founded by Her Majesty Queen Silvia of Sweden, which proposes AI tracking of financial transactions to protect children from child sexual abuse that is streamed online.
From the WCF’s Follow the Money report:
The study aimed to explore the utility of using financial data from known facilitators of child sexual abuse online to identify additional or previously unknown online perpetrators, who may also be purchasing child sexual abuse online from other currently unidentified facilitators…
The research finds that while this type of analysis is feasible, several factors hinder stake-holders—including banks, MSBs, financial regulators, and law enforcement—from effectively identifying additional online perpetrators and facilitators using financial data. Key obstacles include limited collaboration across both private and public sectors and significant data constraints linked to a lack of active data sharing. These issues affect both responsive measures, such as intercepting and disrupting payments, and proactive approaches, such as financial reporting and in-depth analysis.
(The globalists could save so many children if it wasn’t for pesky financial regulations, law enforcement and data constraints.)
It’s frustrating. While there are real problems, and many of the people seeking change are earnest, there’s a pattern to the proposed solutions. They’re all geared towards stripping away privacy and the protected rights of ordinary citizens. And people often fail to see this problem because most find it impossible to believe that anyone would use exploitation and abuse as a means of justifying exploitation and abuse of power.
But we all have to start seeing it. Because Keiryn Darkwater and CRHE board members are not our enemy. It’s the people/organizations who encourage Darkwater, and all of us really, to see each other as dangerous enemies that we need to acknowledge and identify so that we can work together. Ultimately I suspect that globalists are using traumatized people as both human shields and weapons to carry out agendas that will ultimately hurt everyone. And even if I’m completely wrong, it will always serve us to stop and look outside the stated purpose of any proposed legislative solution and consider how its applications could go sideways.
Poorly considered “solutions” seed new problems, which tend to hurt ordinary people while making way for more laws and more lucrative “solutions.” Let’s do better.