Series: HomeEd
Episode one: “Collateral Damage”
By Mary Steffenhagen
Content warning: this episode will contain discussion of child abuse and death.
TRANSCRIPT KEY:
In this transcript, all words including speakers, ambient sound, and music notes will appear in size 11 black type. Speaker names are bolded.
Speakers (in order of appearance)
Mary Steffenhagen: Reporter and host.
Shawn Fluarty: A Democratic state legislator in West Virginia. He was interviewed over the phone.
William Jasper: An editor of a conservative magazine who interviewed Michael Farris.
Michael Farris (referred to in audio as Mike Farris): The co-founder and former president of a homeschooling advocacy group. His audio is taken from public appearances.
Esther: A formerly homeschooled student (called homeschool alum/ni in this series) who shared her personal experience as a kid growing up in an environment shaped by the advocacy group. She was interviewed over Zoom.
- Michael Smith (referred to in audio as Mike Smith): The co-founder and former president of the advocacy group. His audio is taken from an advertisement he appeared in in 2020.
Mike Donnelly: A lawyer and lobbyist in the advocacy group. His audio is taken from a podcast he appeared on in 2020.
Jim Mason: The president and former vice president of litigation and development for the advocacy group. He was interviewed over Zoom.
END TRANSCRIPT KEY
Mary Steffenhagen:
Before we begin, a content warning: this episode will contain discussion of child abuse and death.
Raylee Browning was 8 years old when she died. She had strawberry blonde hair, her favorite color was purple, and she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up. She lived in a small town in West Virginia, called Oak Hill.
Raylee died of an infection from untreated pneumonia. But doctors also found a lot of bruises, burns and cuts on her body. Investigators have concluded that her father and step mom had been starving and beating her. And this had been going on for a while.
Raylee’s teachers at school say they realized she was being abused and tried to help. They’d called Child Protective Services, or CPS, multiple times—but Raylee’s dad and stepmom took her out of school while the investigation was going on.
They’d said they were going to homeschool Raylee. That was in 2017. Raylee died a year later. Her father and stepmom have since been charged for her death and the prosecution is ongoing.
Shawn Fluharty:
After the horrendous news reports of what happened to Raylee and what she went through and those in the community who are impacted and affected by it. Because you know, we’re a small state and these are small towns.
Mary Steffenhagen:
That’s Shawn Fluharty, a Democratic state legislator in West Virginia.
Shawn Fluharty:
Something like that happens, it really shakes the conscience of the community.
Mary Steffenhagen:
See, in West Virginia and many other states, it’s pretty easy to withdraw your kids from school. Parents just have to send a letter to their school board. There’s really no follow up after that. So in 2020, Shawn sponsored a bill: Raylee’s Law.
Shawn Fluharty:
Quite frankly, I thought, well, this is an easy fix.
Mary Steffenhagen:
The bill basically says there needs to be some oversight if parents with an ongoing CPS investigation say they want to homeschool, which was the case with Raylee’s father. It would also prevent parents with a previous domestic violence or child abuse conviction from pulling their kids out of school—away from teachers and other adults who are legally mandated to report abuse.
Shawn Fluharty:
Yeah, let’s implement these types of safety nets to make sure that there’s not another Raylee in West Virginia that could be easily preventable. Right? So I thought it was a non-issue.
Mary Steffenhagen:
But Shawn started getting alot of emails and calls about the bill. Parents were telling him it was misguided. It was unconstitutional. It was a witch hunt against homeschoolers.
Shawn Fluharty:
And then it turns into just, uh, emails and phone calls and people showing up and groups tied to it, and how awful this Raylee’s Law is—like, did you read it? [Shawn chuckles] Did you take the time to read—read what it says?
Mary Steffenhagen:
And he started to notice a common thread in these emails: The Home School Legal Defense Association. The HSLDA.
You’re going to hear that name a lot in this series. They’re a membership organization for homeschooling families in the US. Essentially you pay dues and in return, HSLDA has resources like lesson plans and legal advice.
But when Raylee’s Law was introduced, HSLDA made comments to the local press about the dangers of the bill. They urged members to call Shawn and tell him to table it. Some parents even visited his office at the capitol. So, Shawn wondered: why was this group so against a bill meant to protect kids who might be homeschooled?
Shawn Fluharty:
It caught me off guard because we’re talking about children and the best interest of the child in West Virginia, and it’s turned into political footballs where national groups are getting more powerful, they’re getting more vocal, they’re getting more involved in legislation.
Mary Steffenhagen:
My name is Mary Steffenhagen. I was homeschooled from kindergarten to twelfth grade. When I grew up, I started to have a lot of questions about some of the things I was taught… and where those ideas came from.
So in this episode, we’re going to learn more about the HSLDA and find out what happens to kids who grow up in the culture they helped shape.
William Jasper:
What does Home School Legal Defense do?
Michael Farris:
We defend the right of homeschooling families to have free choices to homeschool their kids.
Mary Steffenhagen:
This is Michael Farris, a lawyer who founded the HSLDA. If you’re just giving the group a first glance, this is probably the basic mission statement you’ll take away: “defending families’ rights to homeschool.” And there aren’t many other national organizations that focus on this.
When media outlets need an expert quote for an article on homeschooling, many turn to HSLDA. If you Google “how to homeschool” in Ohio or Wisconsin, or wherever you are—the first results you get are usually from HSLDA. Join a Facebook group about homeschooling and you’ll probably see moms recommending the HSLDA to each other.
And in the past year and a half, homeschooling has exploded in popularity. Three percent of school age kids were being homeschooled before the pandemic. But now it’s over 11 percent. There could be anywhere from 3 million to 5 million kids being homeschooled in the US today, according to various estimates.
But all this recent attention on homeschooling has prompted a lot of homeschool alumni to reflect on their own experiences growing up—and the role that HSLDA played in them.
Esther:
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about HSLDA in years.
Mary Steffenhagen:
This is Esther. For privacy reasons, we’re not using her last name. Like me, she was homeschooled from kindergarten to graduation. She’s in her 30s now and working on a masters’ degree.
Esther:
I was on like a Tumblr or a blog, Homeschoolers Anonymous or something like that. And I remember seeing HSLDA and being like, oh, I remember those folks! They were always talking about how we needed to win legal battles or be careful that the government wasn’t going to overreach into the lives of homeschoolers.
Mary Steffenhagen:
Esther’s parents listened to Christian talk radio programs, and Esther remembered them getting catalogs and newsletters about homeschooling. HSLDA was a frequent voice in those materials and on those shows. But she also remembered that they weren’t just giving textbook recommendations or advising parents on educational policies.
Esther:
It was like if you send your kid to public school or secular private schools, be aware that you’re going to have to fight this constant battle, versus if you keep them at home and give them a godly education and a conservative education, they’ll be equipped to go out and fight the culture war.
Mary Steffenhagen:
So, a lot of this recent growth in homeschooling is due in part to just the realities of the pandemic. Schools closed for much of 2020. Virtual learning wasn’t cutting it for many students. Many families found their kids were thriving when they learned at home. And many don’t feel safe about sending their kids into schools where they could be exposed to COVID.
But…. the pandemic also re-invigorated this very public debate about what goes on in classrooms themselves. Local school board meetings have been making national news as the sites of anti-mask rallies. Parents are getting books about LGBTQ people pulled from school libraries. States have started passing laws meant to prevent teachers from talking about the role of racism in American history.
And it’s not just a debate between parents and their local schools… larger interest groups are getting involved too.
- Michael Smith:
As many of you may be aware, the biblical values woven into our country’s founding documents are under enormous attack. Many in public schools, universities and even some churches are instilling young students with worldviews contrary to biblical truth in the areas of science and history, and even mathematics and English.
Mary Steffenhagen: [over Smith]
That’s Mike Smith, in a promotional video. He was the president of HSLDA until April 2022.
- Michael Smith:
Now as parents, we have a limited time to make an impact on our children’s lives and to teach them biblical truth. That’s why HSLDA offers biblically sound high school level courses through the HSLDA Online Academy. The Academy’s instructors are all Christians who integrate a biblical worldview into their teaching, students experience engaging study, while simultaneously strengthening their biblical worldviews in every class…
Mary Steffenhagen: [over Smith]
See, for HSLDA, the purpose of an education is about much more than, well—getting an education. There’s this idea that parents—and ONLY parents—should decide what that looks like. And if they can’t—then it’s time to pull their kids out of school altogether.
- Michael Smith:
HSLDA Online Academy is still accepting registrations for the upcoming school year, and hslda members receive a minimum of $50 off each course… We encourage you to join thousands of homeschooling families across the country as we study truth together. May God bless you.
Mary Steffenhagen:
Now this ad is from 2020. And the HSLDA Online Academy wasn’t a thing when Esther was growing up. But this idea, that parents should have more control, it motivated her parents too. And that control really shaped the kind of education—and childhood—Esther had.
Esther:
I think in the process of getting a curriculum, they started reading a lot about like, what in Christian circles is called ‘the secular education,’ and started reading about how bad the public school system was. And that became something that was scary for them.
Mary Steffenhagen:
I talked to Esther’s mom. And she doesn’t feel like she shielded Esther from anything—but she did tell me that part of why she homeschooled was so she could have more control over the ideas and values her daughter was exposed to.
So from the outside, her family looked pretty average. They lived in a suburb, went to church, took Esther to dance lessons for a few years. The kids in her dance class didn’t really know many homeschoolers, but there was one thing they thought they knew.
Esther:
Everybody would be like, “we’re so jealous of you! You get to do school in your pajamas all day!” And I would be like, “no, I don’t. I wish.” We had a relatively small square breakfast table. And I would start in right there and I would be at that space, in my chair for hours at a time.
Mary Steffenhagen:
The breakfast table was much more than just a school table. For Esther’s parents, it was the site of a crucial battle in a larger war. It wasn’t just about Esther’s education–but about culture and politics and religion.
But Esther didn’t see all that. She was just trying to get through math.
Esther:
Mom would simply read to me out of the teacher’s manual and I think would expect me to just understand or would really want me to. We would just sit there, repeating it over and over. And often she would get herself very worked up and wind up, yelling at me for a long time or hitting me. And she would say that like, “If you were out in school, the teacher would never allow this. And right now I’m not your mother. I’m your teacher.” And for some problems, I vividly remember never being able to get it right.
Mary Steffenhagen:
Now, I spoke with Esther’s mom, and she confirmed that this happened. She did take her frustration out on Esther, by yelling and sometimes hitting. She told me she remembers these early days of teaching math. The subject had been difficult for her to learn as a kid, so teaching it was even harder. She had all these expectations about what school should look like and she felt like she was failing them. And for what it’s worth, she deeply regrets that her frustration and anger shaped so much of Esther’s early education.
But Esther didn’t know any of this. She was just a kid. And this whole environment–it made her feel really isolated.
Esther:
And I remember looking at algebra one and algebra two, completely not understanding anything. And finding the teacher’s manual with all of the answers and knowing that if I got things wrong, there was going to be a lot of physical and emotional retaliation. And instead of actually attempting to teach myself math, which I didn’t understand I would secretly read the Harry Potter book. And then go back through and copy down answers from the teacher’s book
That didn’t really change until I got to high school and both of my parents were out of the house. And I was left alone for the majority of that time,
Mary Steffenhagen (Zoom):
What was it like for you to have the house to yourself in those times?
Esther:
In some ways, a huge relief. I had been trapped there with my mom for so many years, and it was just freedom to be alone and to have some kind of control over the flow of my own day.
Mary Steffenhagen:
The choices Esther’s family made weren’t made in a vacuum. About a decade before Esther started homeschooling, Mike Farris and Mike Smith founded the HSLDA. In 1983. Back then, homeschooling was functionally illegal in a lot of states.
But HSLDA took states and school districts to court. They lobbied congresspeople. They turned out votes for pro-homeschooling candidates, who typically lean conservative. They’ve done a lot to basically shape what homeschooling in the US looks like
Michael Farris:
There are people who do not want you to homeschool. And they are very powerful.
Mary Steffenhagen:
Here’s Mike Farris again, speaking at a homeschooling event in Arizona in 2018.
Michael Farris:
They don’t like what we teach about families, they don’t like what we teach about abortion, they don’t like what we teach about a lot of things. But ultimately, it’s this. They don’t like what we teach about Jesus. That’s really what it’s all about.
Mary Steffenhagen:
With this kind of messaging, HSLDA has taken homeschooling from a personal choice for individual families to somewhat of a cultural identity. And that’s had larger ramifications.
Mike Donnelly:
Between the parents and the government, parents are the ones who should be making the decision about how their children are educated, period. Okay, period, full stop. Okay. And that’s what we’re all about.
Mary Steffenhagen:
That’s Mike Donnelly, a lawyer and lobbyist for HSLDA. He was speaking on a podcast in 2020. And yes, that’s the third Mike I’ve mentioned. I promise he’s the last one.
Mike Donnelly:
We don’t think there’s any place in the United States where there needs to be any additional regulation on homeschooling.
Mary Steffenhagen:
So in most states, parents don’t have to keep any kind of record that their kids are getting an education. Eleven states don’t even require them to notify anyone if they’re homeschooling. I’ve spoken with a lot of researchers who tell me it’s really difficult to know anything about homeschooling kids on a large scale–we have some studies that show good academic results, some that show bad results, some that show neutral results. But nothing comprehensive.
And we know even less about the rates of abuse in homeschooling families. It’s just not a category that’s collected in government reporting. Only two states have laws that explicitly prevent convicted abusers from pulling their kids out of school to homeschool.
When people have tried to change some of these things: HSLDA has opposed them.
Jim Mason:
Ideologically, we believe that empowering parents is better for children. And so we work to empower parents to do what they think is best for their kids.
Mary Steffenhagen (Zoom):
This is Jim Mason, who’s now the president of HSLDA. Before that, he headed up their legal team. We spoke on the record over Zoom.
Jim Mason:
Most homeschool regulations that have existed in the past and are proposed now impose kind of bureaucratic hurdles that don’t help families or children.
Mary Steffenhagen (Zoom):
I guess I’m wondering, you know, what sort of regulations then would constitute reasonable oversight to HSLDA?
Jim Mason: Yeah. So we’re kind of in the freedom business, and I’m probably not the right person to ask what kind of regulations.
Mary Steffenhagen:
Remember: HSLDA publicly opposed Raylee’s Law, the effort in West Virginia to ban convicted child abusers from homeschooling. So I asked him what HSLDA thought about that case.
Jim Mason:
Oh, well, I mean, we’re horrified by by child abuse, and we think it should be investigated and prosecuted.
Mary Steffenhagen:
But where HSLDA and supporters of the bill differ, is on the best ways to prevent child abuse.
Jim Mason:
Well, I don’t concede the premise that regulation or lack of regulation played a role. People do bad things. People who send their kids to public school do bad things, public school teachers do bad things, you can’t regulate bad acting.
Mary Steffenhagen (Zoom): So you don’t agree with the premise that some critics have brought up that, you know, more regulations could potentially prevent some of these cases?
Jim Mason:
I don’t.
Mary Steffenhagen:
So, not all homeschoolers are politically conservative, religiously motivated. Or even part of HSLDA. I said earlier that there are as many as 5 million homeschooled students in the US now.
Well, HSLDA only has about 107,000 families as members. Even if you assume that each family has say, three kids, the average in the US, that’s only like 6 percent of US homeschoolers.
Even so they’ve really been able to direct the narrative for a long time. Because for HSLDA the stakes of homeschooling go far beyond individual child safety, educational standards, or really anything else.
Michael Farris:
Denying parents the right to choose such education is an act, not of a legitimate government, but of a rogue state. And it should bear the same level of shame in international law as the practice of indiscriminate killing, torture, slavery and genocide.
Mary Steffenhagen:
But when you’re just a kid, growing up, trying to learn algebra…. What does it look like for your parents to have absolute control over your entire educational experience?
Esther:
There was also kind of an ever-present fear that I wasn’t good enough somehow, that I didn’t actually know everything my peers knew and that I was gonna be behind and caught in a giant lie.
Mary Steffenhagen:
By the time she was a teenager, Esther started to realize there were things she was missing out on. Like, she’d loved learning about physics. But because she never really got a grasp on math, she couldn’t wrap her head around it.
And then there was sex ed—Absolutely off limits. Like, until college, she said. And, when it came to American history—
Esther:
And I remember us visiting plantations when I was a child and being taught that—by my parents and honestly, by the plantation guides—that slavery and enslaving other human beings, wasn’t all that bad that like, white folks were actually very good to their Black slaves and all the political, like machinations around the narrative now are—are wrong.
Mary Steffenhagen:
Esther’s mom told me she doesn’t remember this. She said they visited a lot of historical sites as field trips, including some places where people had been enslaved. But this narrative Esther remembers, her mom told me she never said it, and it doesn’t reflect her views.
But still—Esther says somehow this idea was deeply impressed upon her. Even though no one might have explicitly said it, it came through in her textbooks and surrounding environment… it was just the water they swam in.
Esther:
I didn’t know what the Civil Rights Movement was—being from Atlanta, I didn’t know what the Civil Rights Movement was, until I was like late in high school, didn’t really know who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was. So there were many, amny narratives around whiteness and Blackness and race that I received.
Mary Steffenhagen:
Looking back, Esther feels that almost everything she learned sort of reinforced an echo chamber. Like, for example: her science education was mainly based on creationism. Her mom told me that she really didn’t see a point to teaching much science beyond fourth grade. But she also told me that she didn’t want Esther exposed to what she called “liberal or leftist ideas”–like evolution being taught as a fact.
Esther:
And eventually that wound up really hurting my learning because like science got dropped almost entirely. Social studies or history got dropped. I didn’t really learn broad history until I got to college though.
Mary Steffenhagen:
Esther didn’t get to make those decisions for herself. While her mom may have had nuanced reasons–it meant that Esther was kind of prevented from exploring entire areas of knowledge for a long time.
Esther:
And then it all started to unravel.
I took an introductory biology course and this was kind of the first time some concepts started to really click for me. And I found the idea of like, mutation and evolution so interesting because I had been told growing up, all of the non creationists scientists out there are in this vast liberal, secular conspiracy, and they’re lying.
And I was like, it just fundamentally doesn’t make sense to me that all of these people who are really intelligent, who’ve worked so hard, who understand these complicated processes—would be lying about it. Like if this were really all true, wouldn’t they get that?
So I talked to my professor after class one day and I was like, “can you just be honest with me? Is there any way that young earth creationism or creationism in general is possible?” And he was so kind, I deeply appreciate it to this day. He took me very seriously and said, “I’m really sorry, but unfortunately, no, there’s not. There’s so much evidence to the contrary.” And he walked me through it, it was really lovely. And I walked out of that building being like, ‘everything I’ve been taught is a lie.’
Mary Steffenhagen:
This is Home Ed, a podcast about homeschooling in America and the culture wars that are shaping it.
I’m Mary Steffenhagen. This series is reported and produced by me, with Alana Casanova-Burgess as editor. Thanks also to Chad Bernhard and Curtis Fox for sound and editorial advice. Theme music was composed by Blue Dot Sessions.
I’m particularly grateful to every homeschool alum who shared their stories with me this past year.
Thanks for listening.