People in Robyn Head’s Hendersonville neighborhood are concerned about the 13-year-old’s social life. They also want to know whether or not she and her two younger sisters go to school in their pajamas.
The Heads look like the typical American family. Along with their parents Genny and Steve, the three Head girls, Robyn, Mary and Christy, live a peaceful life in a quiet suburb. Their cozy ranch-style home is tidy, but it looks like a place where kids are allowed to be kids. A stray pen has been flung here; a schoolbook lies open there. There is a slew of pets—many more pets than there are humans. Without warning, a frantic search begins for a favorite pair of shoes; there are last-minute negotiations to determine who will drive whom to dance practice.
Still, the Heads live a life that seems alien to most of their neighbors. “The question I always get asked is if whether or not we’re breaking the law,” explains Genny Head.
Unlike most of the other children in their neighborhood, the Head girls do not go to public or private school. For most of their lives, they have been schooled at home. Genny Head is eager to point out that this fact does not mean she and her husband are freaks. Neither, she says, does it mean they are religious fanatics. Instead, she says, it means that they are very serious about being responsible parents.
When it comes to religion, Genny Head says, “We are really not die-hard anything.” Indeed, she does not look like a woman who is out to undermine the public education system. She speaks quietly, displaying the sort of calm necessary to survive in the constant company of three prepubescent girls and with a husband who frequently works at home.
“Steve and I were always mainstream people,” says Genny Head. “We grew up in Tennessee. I went to public schools and my husband went to private.” What’s more, she insists that there is “really, no right way” to educate all children. Home schooling, she says, was the right option for her daughters because it provides “the greatest freedom” and permitted her to be “the most creative I could be.” Because they are schooled at home, she is confident that her daughters “get our philosophy in life and are grounded in family.”
Nobody—not even state officials—can state precisely how many Middle Tennessee children are home schoolers. The Heads, like other families who home-school their children, were required to register either with their county school superintendent’s office or with a private school. Still, there is no place where a tally is kept of all the students enrolled, even theoretically, in private schools. And it is not surprising that home schooling, as a phenomenon, is, as one home schooling lobbyist describes it, “happily decentralized.”
This much is certain: For the 1995-1996 school year, 234 children from 161 families have been registered with the Davidson County School Superintendent’s Office as home schoolers. Of this number, 127 children are in grades K-6. Only 11 are of high-school age.
Claiborne Thornton, president of the Tennessee Home Education Association, says 1,700 students are signed up statewide. He estimates another 11,000 statewide are affiliated with private schools. All in all, he estimates, 1,170 kids are being home-schooled this year in Davidson County.
In 1990, the National Home Education Research Institute concluded that some 474,000 children were being home-schooled in the U.S. The Home School Legal Defense Association in Paeonian Springs, Va., estimates that this number has now grown to a figure somewhere between 900,000 and 1.2 million children, representing 330,000 families that have opted for home schooling.
Home schooling has a strong American tradition. On the frontier—for Indian and settler alike—home schooling was the only schooling available. After the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization of American society, however, home schooling became virtually extinct. It enjoyed a rebirth in the early 1980s. Now, a decade or so later, home schooling is legal in every state, although the restrictiveness of the laws varies widely from state to state.
Tennessee’s Home School Bill was introduced in the state Legislature in 1984, and Lamar Alexander signed it into law in May of 1985. The Tennessee Home Education Association was formed that same year, and Thornton, who helped charter the group, has been its president for most of the years since. Today the group has 850 members.
Thornton says that, while there was little overt opposition to the bill, he later discovered that there had been “a great deal of skepticism for the bill. The attitude was: These people are crazy. They’ll get tired of all this work and quit, and it will all go away.”
The skeptics, apparently, were wrong. In 1985-1986, the first year home schooling was legal in Tennessee, only 57 home-schoolers were registered with the Davidson County Superintendent’s Office. The total has grown every year since.
Tennessee’s home-schooling law, Thornton says, is a progressive one. “I would guess that Tennessee was in the first 10 percent of states that listed home schooling as a clear legal alternative.”
Back in 1989, when Genny and Steve Head began talking about home schooling, they didn’t know a thing about establishing a curriculum, organizing home-schooling networks, or coping with suspicious, misinformed neighbors.
“That first year, we sort of felt like we had stepped off to the planet Mars,” Genny Head says, chuckling quietly. “Some kids would come up and tell the girls that they were going to be arrested and taken to jail.”
For a number of years, the Head children participated in Hendersonville’s Tuesday School group, one of 500 home-schooling groups now active across Tennessee. With support from parents, home-schooling groups sponsor weekly group classes, as well as field trips, field days and even proms. Parents, however, are determined to make sure that even these groups remain small. Recently, in order to reduce the size of the Tuesday School group, the Head family helped organize an even smaller home-schooling group.
Genny Head says that “being a housewife and home teacher was the last thing I ever intended to do.” Nevertheless, when Robyn finished first grade and still couldn’t read, Head says, she and her husband began considering other options.
According to Genny Head, school officials insisted that “Robyn was just slow—that, unless it was a discipline problem—which it wasn’t—they wouldn’t do anything extra for her. Basically, we were told she would just be pretty and stupid her whole life.” When Robyn was in the second grade, a teacher suggested that Head start teaching her daughter reading at home. “Then they said she needed math at home,” Genny Head recalls. “That’s when I pulled her out.”
Robyn was home-schooled for two years, but she returned to public school for fifth and sixth grades. It was only after the Heads moved to a more affluent school district, Genny Head says, that their daughters began to experience social problems. Their youngest daughter, Christy, then 6, enrolled in the new public school after Christmas. Before long, Genny Head remembers, her daughter was having sleepless nights, and, she says, there were other symptoms of social abuse. Christy was back home by Easter.
“Kids would ignore me,” recalls Christy, now 10. “I’d have to do things in a group, and I wouldn’t be able to find a partner.” According to Mary, now 12, children in public school would have one best friend one day and pick someone else the next. “They would talk about whose grandmother was richer than whose,” Mary says.
In many ways, the Head family’s home-schooling experience is atypical. Many home-schooling parents maintain that they keep their children home from an overwhelming sense of parental responsibility—and because of a firm conviction that no one can better educate a child than that child’s parents. Some say they would teach their children at home even if schools were not so marred by drugs and violence.
Deborah Head and her husband (no relation to Genny and Steve Head) have home-schooled all three of their children, now 10, 7 and 5, from the very start. “There’s a common misconception that we’re all running away from the school system,’’ Deborah Head says. “But I learned about [home schooling] before I had children. When it came time to put the oldest in school, I felt so close to her, I thought, ‘Why should I let anyone else do it?’ I don’t have anything against public schools, but the interpersonal relationships between kids concerned me.”
Even in private schools, Deborah Head says, she saw students being separated from their parents and having to cope with teasing and fighting. “Within [home-schooling] groups, our children have someone they can count on; they have a core circle of friends,” she says. “We have a value system. This gives us a very homogeneous group feeling for the children to grow with.” Claiborne Thornton and his wife are now completing their 14th year of home schooling. Public school, Thornton says, “can be like taking a plant, and picking it up and transplanting, picking it up and transplanting.” Instead, he says, he and his wife preferred to have their children remain “in a greenhouse, protected during the formative period. That way, when they go out into the world to analyze things, they have a basis from which to analyze.”
In a nation where the words “family values” can make or break a politician’s career, it is hard to understand why there should be any hoopla over the notion of raising and educating children in a sheltered environment. On the other hand, many Americans still believe that home schooling sequesters children from the “real world.” Many home-schooling opponents charge that people like the Head families and the Thornton family are raising socially dysfunctional kids. “We speculate that children who are home-schooled and then arrive at middle or high school are considerably left out of the socialization process, and it’s a shock to their system,” says Tennessee Education Association President Kathy Woodall.
“Socialization, that’s the big worry,” admits Steve Head. Still, he argues that “virtually all home schoolers join support groups, play on sports teams and are active in churches. Home-schooled kids also have a better ability to deal with adults; they’re more sure of themselves because peer pressure has been removed.”
Socialization skills are hard to measure, and the effects of peer pressure are uncertain. Some local psychologists say they are not convinced that traditional schools provide children with the healthiest social interaction. Jim Nobles, a licensed psychological examiner in Nashville, says that it may not be necessary to expose youngsters to the social pressures of a public or private school. The socialization of home schoolers, Nobles says, “is absolutely enough. I think in the school system today, peer pressure is not necessarily positive.” According to Nobles, most of his public-school patients are “kids who have succumbed to peer pressure—taking dope, having excessive sexual activity.”
John Rosemond, whose syndicated column on parenting appears in more than 100 newspapers nationwide, argues for the psychological—and social—benefits of home schooling. Home-schooling parents, he says, “are to be applauded.” Rosemond concedes that “the public perception is that these people are just a little bit weird,” but he insists that he has “met lots and lots of home schoolers, and I have yet to detect any weirdness. They are average people, salt-of-the-earth people with lots of common sense. Their children tend to be mature, respectful and very well behaved.”
Jerold Bauch, director of the Betty Phillips Center for Parenthood Education at Vanderbilt University, expresses some reservations about home schooling. “A lot of home schoolers get into it because of church membership, so socialization becomes centered around the church, and it’s sometimes very homogeneous,” Bauch says. “In the broadest sense, there is some concern that home schooling might not prepare people to live in a diverse world.” Such concerns, Bauch concedes, come down to “conjecture.”
Almost invariably, the home-schooling debate comes down to a concern about the three R’s. The basic question is whether or not home-schooled students can make passing grades.
Apparently, they can. According to a press release, distributed earlier this month by the National Center for Home Education, 16,000 home-taught children, K-12, participated in a study in which they took the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, provided by the Riverside Publishing Company. In the study, home-taught students averaged in the 77th percentile; 54.7 percent of those tested ranked in the top quarter of the population.
In Tennessee, the state Department of Education tests all home schoolers in grades 2, 5 and 7. If a student fails the test two years in a row, he or she is not allowed to re-enroll as a home schooler. Jeanelle James, secretary of social work and attendance for Metro Schools, says last year only three Davidson County children failed the tests. Those children, James says, were all members of the same family.
Many home-schooling parents insist that their children can only profit from one-on-one teaching. Thornton says that the benefits of individual attention override any disadvantages parents encounter in tackling tough subject matter.
Meanwhile, the Tennessee Education Association’s Kathy Woodall isn’t so sure. “I worry about the continuing reduction of standards that the Legislature has imposed on home-schooled students,” she says. “There are certain subjects like physics, higher math that I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing with my children.”
Genny Head says she has the hardest time teaching composition and English, but she insists that hard subjects simply get more attention in the Head family’s home school. That flexibility, she says, is yet one more reason large classrooms and set schedules are less effective than custom-tailored home schools.
What’s more, she says, many people don’t realize just how hard her kids work. “Many people think we just sit around and don’t really do much,” Head says. “But it is a lot of work.” Her daughters don’t have snow days, they often study six days a week, and they often have a shorter summer vacation than their public school counterparts do. “Why waste all that time at the end of summer, when kids are bored with hanging out and doing nothing?” Head asks.
Even her daughters’ Tuesday Group meetings are not just weekly ice cream socials. Each meeting, she says, is a structured “class time,”designed to be hands-on and interactive.
The “classes,” which meet at Long Hollow Baptist Church in Hendersonville, usually last half a day. Each group of mothers is given a one-hour to 90-minute “class” to teach throughout the semester. The subjects are designed as “enrichments” to the at-home curriculum. “We’ve had units on flight, one that takes kids from balloons to homing pigeons to spaceships,” explains Deborah Head. “The fourth- and fifth-graders always have a unit on Tennessee history. The younger kids have a unit on animals—hibernation, migration. There are units on the human body. We once did a unit on communication, another time on manners.”
In such classes, according to Genny Head, children learn to relate to children of different ages; older students share and help out younger kids. In most public schools, she suggests, such interaction could not take place. It would be deemed too uncool.
Nowhere have the public’s fears about socialization—as well as the solidarity among home schoolers—been more visible than in America’s courts and legislatures. Only two years ago in Congress, a bill threatened to wipe out home schooling across the board. “H.R. 6 was a bill that required all teachers to be certified by the state,” says Matt Chancey of the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association, which has 50,000 members and employs five attorneys. “But one clause would have required home schoolers to be certified too. We put out an alert, urging people to call for an amendment. The media, largely the Christian media, picked it up. A snowballing effect started.”
Over the course of three days, Chancey says, AT&T reported that a million calls poured into Washington, effectively shutting the city down. “Nothing like that has ever happened before,” Chancey says. On the floor of the House, he says, “congressmen were lining up” to support an amendment to the bill.
Chancey says that home schoolers have high hopes for The Parental Rights and Responsibility Act, drafted by the Home School Legal Defense Association’s president, and recently introduced in Congress by Rep. Steve Largent, R-Okla., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. The bill, which is still in committee, would establish parental rights as fundamental rights, Chancey says, and would help protect home schoolers from intrusive visits by government agencies, alerted by “an anonymous phone call by a neighbor wondering why kids are playing outside in the middle of the day.”
Such pestering is not unheard of. On one day in 1993, two Michigan courts ruled on two separate cases in which parents were charged with violating compulsory school attendance violations. One family successfully defended its case on religious grounds. The other family based its case on parental rights—and lost.
According to Chancey, a slew of groups have opposed The Parental Rights and Responsibility legislation. Opponents, he says, without being specific, include gay-rights groups and even one agricultural group. The most powerful—and most vocal—opponent of the bill, he says, is the National Education Association.
Columnist John Rosemond says that, “to the NEA, home schoolers are highly threatening. The NEA is the largest teacher’s union, and they steadfastly protect their turf.”
In its 1995-96 handbook, the NEA states that “home-schooling programs cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience.” The handbook also states that “local public school systems should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting from a home-school setting.”
Dale Lestina, a spokesperson in NEA’s government relations office in Washington, D.C., says that the association’s concern is for the quality of the education being offered to home-schooled children. “When they get back to public schools, Mom and Dad often think they’re doing eighth-grade work,” Lestina cautions, “and they’re not.”
Part of what’s at stake, undeniably, is money. Metro Schools would not divulge the amount of money the local school system receives, per child, from state and federal sources. According to Chancey, the average allocation nationwide is $5,000 per child per year. A home-schooling boom could deal a severe financial blow to any public school system’s budget.
Meanwhile, home-schooling parents talk about providing their children with family-based value systems. On occasion, their language smacks of conservatism and radical Christianity, but not all home-schooling parents, whatever their determination to raise their children as they see fit, subscribe to fundamentalist religious views. “The school system is taking over our responsibilities,” says Steve Head. “We don’t want things like prayers in school. We want less government in school, not more.”
Tennessee home-schooling laws have remained virtually unchanged since they were created. Under the original statute, home-schooling parents with children at the high-school level were required to have bachelor’s degrees. In 1994, this requirement was revised, allowing parents without bachelor’s degrees to home-school, so long as they were affiliated with a private school.
Such private schools, many of them satellites of churches, “oversee” the home schoolers, often providing curriculum, usually at a fee of about $200-$300 per year, says Metro Schools’ Jeanelle James. In recent months, home schoolers have been campaigning for still more revisions in the state’s home-schooling legislation.
A bill, to be introduced by Rep. Bill Dunn of Knoxville, would give home schoolers more rights when seeking access to public-school services or equipment. Currently, home-schooling parents must seek the permission of the local school superintendent if their children wish to participate in a public school’s marching band, debate team or soccer league.
When it comes to sports, Thornton says, home schoolers meet their staunchest opposition from the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, the private organization to which most public and private schools belong.
Currently, TSSAA rules do not specifically exclude home schoolers. TSSAA guidelines do state, however, that students who participate in school-sponsored sports must be enrolled in a school and in regular attendance. Because, under state law, a child can only enroll in one school, home schoolers are ineligible.
“[Right now], TSSAA is opposed,” Thornton says. “We are at the point of doing delicate negotiating to understand what their concern is.”
Ronnie Carter, executive director of TSSAA, says his position is simple: “If the state were to consider home schoolers enrolled in school, and if state money went to those schools, they would be able to play for us.” On the other hand, he says, “that is not the current posture, and it probably won’t be.”
Like many other home schoolers, the Head sisters plan to return to mainstream schools when they reach high-school age. This move is a tradition among home-schooling families, but parents honor it for a variety of reasons.
Some parents don’t want their children to have to earn a GED, since home schoolers aren’t eligible to receive high-school diplomas. For others, access to resources such as chemistry labs becomes an issue. Some parents simply believe that the youngest years—grade school—are the most formative, and that it is in those years that the need for home-teaching is the greatest.
The Head girls, meanwhile, are more worried about the prospect of pep rallies and proms. Robyn will start attending a public high school next year as she enters ninth grade. Her sister Mary says she plans to observe Robyn’s experience carefully before she makes her own decision.
“I’m still tossing it around in my mind,” says Mary, who is dubbed “the brain in the family.”
“I’ve also thought it would be fun to work in a flower shop, as sort of an apprenticeship, which I couldn’t do if I did go back [to public school],” Mary says. “I guess I’ll see how it goes with Robyn.”
Robyn, meanwhile, says she isn’t nervous at all. What she will always remember best about home schooling “was the chance to get so close to Daddy.”
“What it all comes down to,” says Genny Head, “is what you want to do. Both [conventional schools and home schooling] have good points and bad points. If the girls feel the need to go back, we let them. This isn’t a prison. But they always know if it doesn’t work out, it’s an option.”
Bob Holladay provided research assistance for this article.
