Thankfully, black holes reside far away from us in the universe as their irresistible gravity will pull anything nearby, even light, into their utter darkness.  While we do not have to worry anytime soon about a black hole engulfing the earth, we do need to be concerned about a legislative black hole called school choice.  Bad legislation such as school choice can act similar to a black hole in that it can pull the unsuspecting bystanders into an undesirable situation by its own legal force or through its connections to other previous legislation.  Beyond these legislative strings, “natural” strings pull some into the black hole unexpectedly when they are connected by shared programs or services.  I will cover the basics of these various strings in regard to the black hole potential for school choice legislation in Tennessee to affect homeschoolers so that you can decide for yourself how to respond.

               Over the course of this essay, I will provide the following information concerning the present status of Tennessee homeschooling and then the potential future for homeschoolers under school choice.  First, I will review the current homeschool legal status and how we got here.  Second, I will examine the natural and legal ties of homeschooling with public and private schools.  Third, I will discuss some effects that school choice legislation could have on public and private schools.  Finally, I will return to the primary emphasis of this article, how homeschoolers can get pulled into the school choice black hole before they know what grabbed their children.

               The current laws permitting and addressing homeschooling in Tennessee did not begin with the state’s founding nor did they pop into existence and remain unchanged.  Under the compulsory school laws which covered Tennessee in 1913 (LINK) students were required to attend a public or private school between certain ages.  Today, this is an accepted fact of life that kids must go to school. This fact of life had little pushback until back in the 1970s and 1980s when parents were beginning to object to some subjects and books taught in public schools. This led to the early homeschool movement.  After a series of court battles followed by legislative advocacy, homeschooling legality was signed by Governor Lamar Alexander in 1985.  Initially, this freedom was limited, but over time legislative changes have brought us to the present status in which parents have three options to homeschool their children in Tennessee. The first option, which still continues from early legislation is for the parents to enroll as an independent home school with the local school board and follow certain rules.  The second option allows parents to affiliate with a church-related umbrella school that allows more independence from the public system.  The final option allows parents to enroll their child with an accredited online school.  Each of these have some requirements attached which can be read at (LINK).  While the current law offers some freedom, they require ongoing vigilance to maintain and need concerted effort to press for more freedoms.

               While Tennessee legal code officially considers these homeschool options separately from other school legal code, parents and their homeschooled children still live with various connections to the private and public-school systems.  At the most general level, all students must comply with state requirements for a high school diploma.  From there, connections with public schools exist for independent homeschoolers who report to the local education association (LEA).  These parents are held accountable by these LEA’s for standardized testing and other reporting.  The LEA’s can at times attempt to refuse permission for parents to withdraw their children from the public schools or at least make it difficult.  For these reasons and others, legal groups like Home School Legal Defense Association and Heritage Defense exist to provide legal support for these parents against resistance from school districts.

               For homeschoolers who choose either private school option, umbrella or online schools, you are dependent on the existence, support, and advocacy of such schools.  While many of these schools do not have brick and mortar private school counterparts, many do operate private schools which must follow legal codes applicable to them.  Homeschoolers who affiliate with these options must abide by the regulations that their umbrella or online school is held to.  These schools report less to the state but are still held accountable for their education of the children.  Participating families benefit from the services and opportunities found under such schools such as academic counseling, record keeping, social connections, and extra-curricular activities like sports.

               Should the school choice legislation described in a prior essay pass this year, the various forms of schooling in Tennessee will be affected in different ways.  The public school system stands the most at risk of major changes if parents are able to take their children out of poorly performing schools and then legislation dictates that the school loses some of their funding for that reason.  While the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act of 2019 (described at LINK ) claims that the money follows the child in order to incentive schools for success, one major pushback against the school choice program concerns this loss of money for public schools. Without an actual written proposal by our Governor for his so-called Education Freedom bill, we don’t know the final plan, but we can hear the hemming and hawing of numerous legislators claiming that we won’t take money from our children in the public school system despite that being a point of emphasis for school choice in general.  No one is sure which direction this will go.

               While the wider public will continue the public-school funding debate, private schools need to be watching the legislation’s development and final details also.  The private schools accepting voucher or scholarship money (which term is actually used by law makers is superfluous) will have to accept the regulations which are attached to the money.  In lay terms, there will be strings for any government money handed over to private schools.  Public school advocates demand a variety of strings, but ultimately it comes down to proof of the school’s success in terms of comparable standardized testing and some type of reporting whether accounting of money spent, or public reporting of curriculum taught.  The legislation could include limitations on what worldviews or topics are allowed in classrooms.  Once these schools accept state money with such strings, they must find ways to implement it through adding expenses or shifting expenses or raising prices.  Changes must occur to some degree or else they will risk losing their approval to participate. 

               Homeschoolers would seem to have it the simplest of all these groups.  Like private schools who could just say no to state money, they could feel pretty safe from governmental intrusion.  Private schools might suffer from such a decision due to competitive forces from those schools who take the money, but it would seem that homeschoolers could continue to function outside the gravitational force of school choice legislation.  If only that were true, I would not need to write so much about this issue.

               In reality, homeschoolers can also be pulled into the school choice black hole in a number of ways without seeing the danger before it is too late.  For the independent homeschoolers, they are already beholden to their local LEA for oversight, so less may change for them.  For homeschoolers operating through private options like the umbrella option or online school option, regulations for the private school could trickle down to the homeschoolers and pull them in. Regulations regarding required standardized testing could extend beyond the private school students receiving vouchers/scholarships to engulf the homeschoolers either by legal code imposed in the legislation or by the school’s necessity.  For online schools, curriculum options could be affected so that they would comply with state requirements or to optimize scores on standardized testing.  For either type of private school, the costs of compliance with the new system could increase costs which would be passed on to parents or cause the school to face difficult business dilemmas.       

               Outside of these more indirect effects upon homeschoolers under private schools, there is also the potential for legal terminology changes or confusions.  The long and broad history of law offers near limitless examples of the importance of terminology in understanding and applying passed legislation.  When a term is used in formal law, it must carry specific meaning.  When that word is used across a variety of legal codes, it must carry the same meaning in all settings and then connects those different laws when legal challenges arise to the definition of that term.  In Tennessee, homeschool laws maintain a separate section under education law which limits their connection to public school and private school laws as much as possible.  For example, homeschooling families do not have to abide by fire codes or emergency planning regulations.  Homeschool parents also don’t have the same education requirements as do schoolteachers.  Neither do they have the same reporting requirements to the state for their child’s education or curriculum.  Should school choice offer its money to homeschoolers under private school options, homeschooling code and public-school code could be intertwined.  This is almost never a good thing. 

               Beyond these indirect effects and potential legal ties, future legislation amendments could even bring homeschoolers who refuse the money into the regulations imposed on those that do.  Control enamored legislators claiming noble intentions could come back and decide that while initially only the homeschoolers taking the money had to follow the new rules, later they want all homeschoolers to follow a certain curriculum or take the standardized tests or have to report more on their children.  Even if the legislators don’t do this, the department of education could “interpret” the regulations as applying across all homeschoolers.  The Tennessee Department of Education recently attempted to reinterpret legislation regarding homeschoolers reporting of vaccination status.  Only a statement by the state legislature corrected them and stopped their completely opposite interpretation.  We must always be vigilant for future legislation to change our present freedoms or for the bureaucracy to impose its own faulty interpretation on otherwise decent legislation. 

               This brings up the question of why our government moves in these directions towards more and more restrictions of freedoms unless we push back.  In this case, it comes down to the basic assumption by many in government and the education world that our children belong to the public of Tennessee and they as our leaders have a responsibility to prepare them for our future society.  This blatantly contradicts the Biblical and Christian worldview that parents are the primary parties responsible for the education and rearing of children.  That worldview of lawmakers and the general public results in law code that seems to focus more on limiting parents’ freedom in the name of preventing parents from harming their own children.  What we need instead is more legislation intent on preventing government from intruding into the jurisdiction of family life and parental freedom.  The faulty worldview has created major blind spots for sometimes well-intentioned legislators in terms of supporting the education of Tennessee children.  They do not recognize the black hole they can create with this new legislation and do not seem to see the repercussions of the school choice upon private schools and homeschools in Tennessee.

               Parents of homeschoolers and those hoping for a future opportunity to freely homeschool future children must see through the darkness of this black hole by viewing the situation through a different worldview.  We must recognize that these precious little ones before us are gifts of God, and we are called to be stewards of their future rather than just serve as babysitters while the state dictates their future.  The legislation of our state can either work to protect our freedoms and thus our children or it can encroach on those freedoms and lead to lifelong harm.  We must evaluate school choice proposals when they are formalized and understand how it will impact on homeschooling in Tennessee.  If we don’t, no one else will do so.  It is up to us to stand firm.  We must know the issues ourselves and not depend on our legislators to simply tell us what is best for us and our children.  We must then make the issues known by others around us so that we can collectively and effectively advocate to reject the school choice black hole.  We can do this through social media postings of essays like this one, emailing our legislators, sharing this understanding with our churches, calling legislators with our opinions, attending legislative meetings, and more. In these situations, besides knowing your position, don’t accept platitudes and unhelpful generalities about helping all of our state’s children. Open other’s eyes to what we are facing and hold legislators accountable to protect our educational freedom instead of watching it go down a black hole with a new bill falsely advertised as Education Freedom.

Bibliography:

Langley, D. (2015, Autumn). A history of homeschooling in Tennessee. https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/histories/a-history-of-homeschooling-in-tennessee/#:~:text=The%20legality%20of%20homeschooling%20was,file%20as%20a%20private%20school

Tennessee investment in Student Achievement (TISA) formula. (2024a). https://www.tn.gov/education/best-for-all/tnedufunding.html T

Tennessee State Government – TN.gov. (2024). Home school . https://www.tn.gov/education/families/school-options/home-schooling-in-tn.html

Prior Essays in this Series:

Be The Opposition (by my wife) (LINK)

Three Reasons to Oppose School Choice

Part 1 – LINK

Part 2 – LINK

Part 3 – LINK

Part 4 – LINK

Comparison with North Carolina

Part 1 – LINK

Part 2 – LINK

Tennessee School Choice

Part 1 – LINK

Part 2 – LINK

Part 3 – LINK