Читать книгу The Homeschool Choice - Kate Henley Averett - Страница 17

Even as homeschooling was being established as an alternative to public schooling during the 1970s and 1980s, the practice was still illegal in most states. Despite their very different political and religious orientations, the religious Right and the progressive education reformers of the Left worked together to mobilize politically to get pro-homeschooling legislation passed in each state. Scholars note that several US Supreme Court cases pertaining to parental rights paved the way for the success of homeschoolers’ legislative efforts, including Meyers v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Seven Sisters (1925), which established parents’ fundamental authority over their children’s upbringing, including their education, and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which argued that, in certain cases, parents’ religious freedom could trump compulsory education laws.15

Homeschoolers took a two-pronged approach of litigation and lobbying—targeting both the courts and state legislatures—in almost all states, in order both to make homeschooling legal and, once it was legal, to attempt to strip away some of the more obtrusive regulation of the practice. This effort was quite successful; by 1993, homeschooling was legal—with varying degrees of regulation—in all fifty US states.16 In Texas, where I carried out the research for this book, the legality of homeschooling was decided in 1987 via the Leeper v. Arlington Independent School District class action case, which ruled that homeschools count as private schools under Texas law. The decision was appealed by the state twice but was upheld both times, in 1991 by a district appeals court and in 1994 by the Texas Supreme Court.17 (Interestingly, Texas is one of the only states where litigation, rather than lobbying the state legislature, was the primary means of achieving legality of homeschooling.)18 Once this legislative agenda was accomplished in every state, there was less need for cooperation between the left and right wings of the movement, and from this point, the movement became quite bifurcated.19