Ms. Barshay,
After reading your article in the Hechinger Report, I wanted to reach out to you with a different perspective on the home-school data collection by the U. S. government.
In your article, you seem to be making the case for the Feds maintaining data and statistics on home-schooling families, and reporting on those trends. You write, “Angela Watson, a prominent Johns Hopkins University researcher who runs the Homeschool Research Lab, called it a “massive loss.” Robert Maranto, a professor in the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, said that in the past, the federal statistics have helped “dispel some of the myths” that homeschooling is “overwhelmingly white,” when, in fact, a more diverse population is learning this way.
I am an education researcher, and a parental rights advocate focused on academic excellence in education. I have been doing this work for about 20 years, unpaid, and on behalf of many home-school families in New Hampshire. We have a large, and strong network of families, who have some prominent residents working on their behalf to assist them in their work. We are already aware of the tremendous growth in this education community, and how diverse it is because we are close to the people involved.
Home school parents are certainly not monolithic in their beliefs, but this movement has been growing for numerous reasons. I’m not sure why some believe the federal government needs to be involved with collecting these data, and sharing news that it’s a diverse community. Is this an essential task for the federal government using our tax dollars? It’s interesting that those who object to ending this practice are recipients of those tax dollars. Look what has happened without any interference from the federal government so far.
With a current national debt of $36 trillion dollars on the backs of home-school children, when will someone target this unsustainable spending? These decisions are not easy to make but at some point, someone has to do the hard work of limiting federal spending. This data collection involves employing bureaucrats, and a system to gather and interpret the data. If this is that important, states are certainly free to continue this practice.
The following video features Emmet McGroarty from the American Principles Project testifying to the Commission for Evidence Based Policy in October 21, 2016 regarding student data privacy. In this short video, he explains why the collection of data on students by the federal government can be a problem. I encourage you to watch it in order to understand why the federal government does not need to be involved. It’s costly, it can be done by states, and any personal information sent to the federal government can have an impact on our individual liberties.
Sincerely,
Ann Marie Banfield
