The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [16]
State Homeschooling Laws
Although the federal government definitely plays a role in American education today, particularly in the strings attached to the funds it distributes to states and to local school districts, the specific rules regulating school attendance are the province of each individual state. States generally require students to attend public school between the ages of seven and sixteen, unless they fall into one of several exempt categories. The upper and lower ages vary somewhat from state to state and are often tinkered with by legislatures, although no state requires school attendance beyond the age of eighteen. The exempt categories typically include private school attendance, private tutoring by a credentialed teacher, and sometimes physical or mental disabilities that make attendance impossible. Successful completion of high school usually also exempts students from school attendance, although some states require children younger than fourteen or fifteen to continue some sort of school attendance or regular instruction.
State education statutes also regulate details of public school operations such as the number of days of instruction, the qualifications of teachers, and the course of study that must be provided. Some states apply some of these regulations to private school programs as well; other states leave private schools relatively free from state oversight. What the rules are and how they affect homeschoolers varies considerably across the country, and we’ll look at those next.
Originally, I had planned to include an appendix giving basic information about the homeschooling laws of each state, but I quickly realized that such summaries would be more misleading than helpful. Many states’ laws are quite complex, with several options to choose from. Often living with a particular law is much different from what a common sense reading of the applicable statutes would lead you to expect, and how laws are enforced can depend on who is doing the enforcing in any given year. Rather than risk giving you misleading or incomplete information about the homeschooling laws of your state, I’ll describe some typical statutes and how they work. Later on, I’ll tell you where to find information for your state and how to determine its accuracy.
Homeschooling Statutes
Most individuals new to homeschooling assume that living in a state that explicitly recognizes homeschooling as a permissible educational option would be preferable to living in a state that does not. This is not necessarily the case. One basic lesson to be learned in looking at home education statutes is that when words such as homeschooling or home education are defined in legislation, somebody in the government suddenly has the power to regulate. Once homeschooling is recognized in the law, the state can define, evaluate, restrict, and otherwise involve itself in determining what homeschoolers are and aren’t permitted to do. Whether a homeschooling statute is more or less restrictive has a lot to do with the relative strengths of the mainstream education lobbies and homeschooling organizations, the numbers of homeschoolers, and the general social traditions of the state in question.
Let’s start our look at some examples of homeschooling statutes with a relatively bureaucratic one, and then move on to some of the less intimidating statutes.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania’s homeschool statute, enacted in 1986, is one of the more complicated and detailed sets of homeschooling regulations in the United States. Unless a parent holds a valid Pennsylvania teacher credential, in which case she need only file a copy of her teaching certificate and a criminal history record with the local school district, she’s in for a great deal of paperwork. Specifically, the supervisor of a home education program (the