Massachusetts News
By Izzy Lyman

December 1--Six months ago we moved from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Edmond, Oklahoma, and learned that homeschoolers are separate but not equal in the Sooner State. Dan, my 16-year-old son, is a barbarian. He loves collision sports. 

He played on our local public high school’s football, ice hockey and lacrosse teams in Massachusetts last school year. I was tickled that no other student did so while being schooled at home. Although their property taxes subsidize government education, the homeschoolers in Oklahoma are denied access to public school athletic teams. 

Dan elected to attend public school so he could continue to pursue his goal of being a jock. He’s glad he made this decision since the football team he plays on is 10-0 and vying for the state championship. Wid III, our 14-year-old, faced a different dilemma. He wanted to be homeschooled and be on a football team. My husband asked the coach at a local Christian school if he could join their team. The coach graciously made the necessary inquiries but was told "no." Another surprise. My family and I directed a private high school in Massachusetts for eleven years, and we often allowed home scholars to attend our little school on a class-by-class basis, as did other private schools in the region. We thought Christian schools, in the buckle of the Bible Belt, would be equally as accommodating and inclusive of homeschoolers. 

These experiences have been somewhat of a disappointment, especially for Wid III who had to give up football and sign up for basketball at the YMCA. But this tale of two homeschooling states hardly ends on a sour note. There is much to praise about the homeschooling community of central Oklahoma. We participate in the Edmond Home Educators’ Support Group, which is run by homeschooling mothers with a Christian bent. This support group offers a dizzying number of activities from field trips to a band to a Life Learning science lab at the University of Central Oklahoma. Monthly meetings usually feature a motivational speaker. Wid III also participates, twice a week, in a homeschooling co-op where he takes algebra, Spanish, and speech classes. The co-op enrolls nearly 200 homeschoolers and has a sizeable number of students on the waiting list. 

In our former home of Amherst, a famously left-wing college town, we met only a handful of traditional, religious homeschoolers. There were, however, many homeschoolers who were New Age devotees. Their reasons for homeschooling were mainly philosophical, e.g. a distrust of social institutions. Many New Age parents create homeschools to promote their isms: vegetarianism, environmentalism, pacificism, feminism. I defend the right of parents to teach their children as they choose, even with ideas I don’t especially agree with. But I didn’t have much in common with folks who don’t expend much effort doing academic work – or any other disciplined activity – with their children. The laws in the Sooner State are very liberal toward homeschooling. Attorneys affiliated with the Home School Legal Defense Association of Virginia are of the opinion that Oklahoma’s home education laws are among the best in the United States, for there is no requirement for parents to initiate contact with school officials to begin to teach their children at home. In fact, it’s so laid back here that Oklahoma State Superintendent Sandy Garrett says she has no idea how many homeschoolers there are, as the state does not track, register, or count the population. 

Massachusetts, on the other hand, is a heavily regulated state. Local superintendents must approve a homeschooling family’s curriculum and can require periodic reports about the student’s progress. Families may also be asked to submit standardized, test-score results. Until recently, school authorities in Lynn, Massachusetts, could insist on home visits. 

I appreciate how the Edmond Evening Sun, our local newspaper, frequently runs positive articles about homeschooling – the latest article featured a teen-aged homeschooler who bakes bread for fun and profit. Newspapers in our corner of western Massachusetts tended to publish negative pieces, which focused on the skirmishes homeschoolers faced with public officials rather than those which highlighted their accomplishments. 

It’s certainly an education in itself to compare homeschooling across state lines. But no matter where you go in the United States – Fairbanks, Wichita, Key West – chances are that the local homeschooling community is thriving, since more families are deciding that there’s no place like home to go to school. 

Izzy Lyman is writing a book on homeschooling for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank located in Washington, D.C.
 

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