A Peek Behind The Curtain

The project is to tear down the traditions and institutions of democratic self-governance in order to replace it with a corporate plutocracy.

So the Radical Libertarians, described by Nancy MacLean in "Democracy In Chains", intend to kill off everything we pay for with tax dollars, and privatize everything possible, leaving the federal government with only three basic functions:

1. Defend commercial interests abroad
2. Keep the domestic rabble in line
3. Settle contract disputes

We’re Reporters, Not Teachers.

We Were Able to Start Private Schools Anyway.

Our reporting has shown how easily people — some with questionable backgrounds — have founded their own private schools in barns, strip malls and other places. That led us to an experiment: If the hurdles to open a school are so low, could we do it?

We have no business running a private school.

We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either.

Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.

And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.

We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.

And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.

For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.

This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.

Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.

All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?

Smith Richards, Cohen and Strain, in the Arkansas Times newsroom at Strain’s cubicle, apply online to found a private school.

The only requirement to open a private school in Arkansas is displaying a flag and flagpole, so the team visited the local flag shop in Little Rock.

After much deliberation, we chose small state and national flags.
Photography by Brian Chilson/Arkansas Times
Inside a flag shop in Little Rock, we surveyed our options. There were handheld American flags on skinny sticks, midsize ones to display on a wall and majestic formal flags adorned with silky gold fringe.

State law in Arkansas doesn’t require much to open a private school, nothing about teacher skills or what kids learn. But it does require that all schools display an American flag, and we wanted to follow the rules. So, at the Arkansas Flag and Banner store, we decided on a smallish one that could fit in a circular base atop a newsroom cubicle. We also bought an Arkansas flag — even though only public schools are required to have those. Total cost: $49.45.

Picking the flags for our new school was the hardest part of an astoundingly easy process.

Early in our reporting in Arkansas, we tried to figure out what steps we’d need to take to make a private school. We couldn’t find all the answers online, so we called the state.

“We don’t have rules for opening a private school,” Kaelin Clay, an Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, told us earlier this year.

In fact, we didn’t even have to file anything with the Education Department. All it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website, where we registered the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy LLC as a business, listed ourselves as agents and officers, and paid a fee.

“We picked a name. We paid 45 bucks,” a ProPublica reporter noted after we submitted the application. With that, we had created a private school.

The secretary of state’s office approved our new business the same day. We even got a certificate.

The Arkansas Department of Education does not regulate private schools once they’re open, and no one from the state inspected the Arkansas Times newsroom, the location we chose for our school. As far as we know, nobody checked our backgrounds, either.

A document that reads: “State of Arkansas. Secretary of State. Cole Jester. Arkansas Secretary of State. To All to Whom These Presents Shall Come, Greetings: I, Cole Jester, Arkansas Secretary of State of Arkansas, do hereby certify that the following and hereto attached instrument of writing is a true and perfect copy of Certificate of Organization of ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy LLC filed in this office June 16, 2026. In Testimony Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and affixed my official Seal. Done at my office in the City of Little Rock, this 16th day of June 2026.”

The official certificate acknowledging our school Secretary of State/State of Arkansas

Arkansas adopted a private school funding plan in 2023, and back then there were fewer than 100 private schools on record. With the state in the fourth year of its Education Freedom Accounts program, which provides vouchers that can be spent on private schools, there are now more than 220.

In addition, 143 microschools, which are a different category in Arkansas, were approved this year to accept tax dollars. That’s up from about 100 last school year.

Establishing the Curiosity Academy was so simple — and, frankly, a bit anticlimactic — that reporters then applied to become eligible to receive public funds. (Again, we applied with our names, work email addresses and a note that this was a journalistic exercise. We had no intention of actually ever taking any public money.)

Accessing public funds as a microschool in Arkansas is easier than it is for other types of private schools, even though there is no limit to the number of students one can enroll. Unlike private schools, we didn’t need to seek accreditation or show proof of financial solvency to accept state funding.

It took about 10 minutes to fill out the required information in early September. Other than our contact information, we had to upload just two documents — one detailing our proposed tuition and fees, and the other with our refund policy.

We said that — “should we open a school” — our tuition and fees per student would not exceed $7,208 per school year, the exact amount of Education Freedom Account money that each student in Arkansas is eligible for this year. We said tuition “would be collected only if education is delivered, and it would be the policy of the school to refund all tuition payments for educational services that are not provided.”

When more than two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard back, we reached out to the state Education Department. An employee called back that afternoon and explained that the department had decided not to accept any more because the school year was underway.

But he didn’t reject us outright. He looked up our application and invited us to keep pursuing the public money. He said we still could apply to receive public money this school year, but as a vendor providing educational services such as tutoring. He also said we could apply as a microschool next year and even suggested a tweak to the language in our tuition policy should we decide to do that.

After we hung up, he emailed us the vendor application (which we will not pursue) and let us know the microschool application for next school year will open in the spring.

We asked the state Education Department whether it would be OK with us operating a publicly funded microschool. Clay, the spokesperson, said the agency’s role is to decide if schools meet state requirements. Microschool families, she said, “have the freedom to choose the educators and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs.”

We decided to handwrite our application for a middle school after seeing other school applications submitted in casual ways.

Smith Richards and Culvyhouse go to the Capitol to hand-deliver their application.

Hunched over a desk in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom in Charleston, West Virginia, pen in hand, we scrawled out official notice of our new school in a spiral-bound notebook. We wrote that we would serve middle school students and listed our first day as TBD.

Leaving the crunchy, ragged edges on the paper, we stuffed our notice of intent into an envelope. We’d seen other new operators file similarly casual ones as they sought to register private schools in West Virginia.

Then we drove over to the state Education Department to deliver the request. Our group — two reporters, a photographer and a video journalist — went through security and, camera rolling, wound our way through the maze of the midcentury building. We got lost once, and our entourage received several perplexed glances from workers, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. The person we needed to deliver the letter to was out, but a friendly employee agreed to place it on his desk.

Dozens of new private and microschools have set up shop in the state in recent years, fueled by the roughly $5,400 the Hope Scholarship offers each student to pay tuition. New private schools all go through Dustin Lambert, a manager in the Office of Student Enrichment and Support at the West Virginia Department of Education.

We heard back from Lambert the next day. Our notice was received. (Hooray!) He said now we needed a letter from the fire marshal that our school building was safe for children. (Oh no.)

This was a problem. Our school would be housed in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom, which had not been inspected as a school site. We didn’t want to usurp public resources to undergo a new inspection. It felt like the end of our Mountain State school experiment.

But it wasn’t.

After we followed up to ask whether all schools, including virtual schools, need safety clearance to register with the state, Lambert told us that though all brick-and-mortar private schools do, we “may want to consider the microschool route.”

In that case, we later learned, the department wouldn’t be involved because state law doesn’t include any mechanism for oversight.

West Virginia defines microschools as schools that charge tuition and are started by one or more teachers. In practice, there’s no real difference between a microschool and private school — neither has a limit on enrollment. (Yes, a micro can be macro.) He forwarded us the rules for starting a microschool, which involve providing proof of a high school diploma, at least. We notified the local school district of our new microschool venture and sent a college transcript.

The Kanawha County school district, in turn, notified the state of the existence of a new microschool.

And with that — bypassing the building health and safety requirements — we established the ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. Officials at the Department of Education said they were aware that journalists were establishing a school. But they had to just watch us do so — they have no authority over the state’s microschools.

In an official statement, the department’s spokesperson said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.”

By law, should we open our microschool — and we won’t — we could enroll an unlimited number of students.

The proposed school has outdoor space for students.

On Friday evenings, hundreds of people gather at Ponysaurus Brewing Co., a trendy spot in Durham, North Carolina, to savor its craft beers and cocktails, hardly the place you’d expect a school to open. But why not?

On a recent Tuesday morning, the brewery was quiet and closed to customers. Behind the bar, yeast busily converted sugars into alcohol inside giant stainless steel fermentation tanks. Two journalists settled onto barstools beneath signs for pilsners and cherry sours. Icy cold glasses of Tell the Truth, a light and lemony ale, sat before them on a high-top table beside a stenographer’s notebook and a laptop.

The brewery created the craft ale in partnership with The Assembly, which also is ProPublica’s journalistic partner in this private school endeavor, so it all felt very symbiotic. Ponysaurus’s owners had agreed to let us use their building and its fire and sanitation inspections, which are required to open a private school in the Tar Heel State.

Reporters from The Assembly and ProPublica scanned a state of North Carolina website that details how to file a notice of intent to open a private school.

First, it explained the state’s statutory requirements for opening a private school, things like reporting the school’s name and address. We also would have to administer a standardized test in certain grades, if we were going to open an actual school, and maintain annual records about student attendance and immunizations.

Then, we watched a four-minute, 39-second video explaining how to file the required notice of intent.

From there it seemed simple. We created a login, then filled in the address of our school (Ponysaurus’s building), noted its owner and chief administrator (our reporters), and named it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy. We’d hoped to include the word Curiosity in the name, but the field in the form didn’t allow enough characters. In North Carolina, our curiosity would have to be implied.

We filled in a few more fields, including the grades we would serve (high schoolers), whether we would open a religious school (no) and the dates of our academic year.

Then we needed to upload fire and sanitation inspection reports. This step is what brought us here, to Ponysaurus, filling out the online notice to the tune of a hissing compressor that kept clean air moving through the brewing system.

“You will need to secure inspections for the building where the school will be housed. You will need a fire inspection from the local fire marshal and a health and sanitation inspection from the local health department,” the video said.

Just that morning, a City of Durham Fire Department inspector had visited the brewery and provided Ponysaurus with a fresh business occupancy inspection. We uploaded the new report, along with the brewery’s current food establishment inspection (on which it received a 99, an excellent score, we felt, for a school).

The screen flashed a confirmation. “Thank you. We have received your request to open a private school.” If approved, the page said, we should receive a school identification number in three to five business days.

We hoped to join the at least 169 other new private schools that have opened in North Carolina since the 2021-22 school year, which marked the start of a series of expansions to the state’s publicly funded vouchers for private school tuition.

If we wanted our school to tap the voucher money, we’d have to go through some additional steps such as getting criminal background checks. We weren’t doing that.

The following day, we hit a snag. It came in a brief and garbled email. It said only: “Good morning and thank you for submitting a Notice of Intent to operate a private school. To complete the process we need to fire and sanitation inspections to” and then ended abruptly like that, no explanation or period. We emailed back, asking for clarity and noting we had already uploaded the inspection reports.

An official from the state Division of Non-Public Education then called. The school’s name needs to be on the inspection reports, she said, something we had not seen in any of our research. We also had not found any state statutes or rules that would preclude us — or anyone else — from opening a private school wherever we saw fit, be that a church or a brewery, as long as it passed “reasonable fire, health and safety inspections.”

In a follow-up call, she clarified that her division checks only to be sure the building has passed inspections specifically for a school. A spokesperson for the agency later added that state statute does not allow them to deny a private school application, but they won’t process an incomplete application — notably one without the proper inspections.

We hadn’t expected we would need a school-specific inspection at this point. The video explainer referred to inspections only generally, and the state’s written guidance indicated only that this would need to happen before occupancy.

Given we had no intention of actually opening a school, we had decided ahead of time that we wouldn’t consume any additional public resources — such as fire or health inspectors’ time — in our journalistic pursuit.

Perhaps Ponysaurus could pass the school-specific inspections. But the ethical red line would be our stop sign. Our curiosity would have to end in North Carolina.

Kids In School

Schools

Trump lies through this entire sorry episode.

I just wanted to put that up front, in case anybody needed reminding. And I won't try to catalog all those lies myself. The lady in the video does that quite well.

Countries with the strongest teachers' unions have the best schools.

Countries with the strongest federal support and guidance have the best schools.

Countries with the strongest efforts at social and economic equity have the best schools.

Wanna Get Something Back?

Let's go back to when a school was like a palace, and teachers were respected professionals.

Denver East High School - 1927

What every school should be

Dumb & Dumber

The hollowing-out of public education in USAmerica Inc has to be getting close to where the whole thing implodes.

Standard Operating Proceedure for 'conservatives' has been to cut school budgets and attack the Dept of Education, and then crow about what a mess the schools are -"See? Government schools are bad. We need to privatize the system - put it in the hands of a few noble entrepreneurs and let them raise us back to the heights of blah blah blah..."

1. Fuck something up
2. Wait a bit
3. Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up. Vote for me and I'll fix it for ya."

Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

A district-by-district look at home schooling’s explosive growth, which a Post analysis finds has far outpaced the rate at private and public schools

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.

The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.

Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.

The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country’s school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison.

The resulting analysis — which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.

Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in home-school enrollment since the 2017-18 school year. There were 88,626 students enrolled districtwide in the 2021-22 school year.

Examination of the data reveals:

• In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
• Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
• In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.
• Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.

Because they do not cover every state, the figures cannot provide a total count of the country’s home-schooled children. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling’s dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate.

Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.

By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.

It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.

“This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.

“The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,” Malkus said. “They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”

In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four — Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota — home schooling has continued to expand.

Celebrated by home education advocates, the rise has also led critics of weak regulation to sound alarms. Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.

Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.

“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”

‘Such a long way’

If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla.

The Gulf Coast county of 1.5 million — including Tampa and its orbit of palmetto-studded suburbs — is famous as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Its vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling.

There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County’s school district, the biggest total in The Post’s home-schooling database. The county’s home-schoolers outnumber the entire public enrollment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74 percent since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrollment grew 3.4 percent, to 224,538 students.

Just as remarkable is the infrastructure that has grown up to support home-schoolers.

Their instruction still happened at home much of the time when Corey McKeown began teaching her kids 14 years ago in Carrollwood, a Tampa suburb. Once or twice a week, parent-run co-ops offered a chance to mingle with what was still a small community of home educators.

Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.

The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.

“Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”

Corey McKeown owns and operates Trinity. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.

Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.

“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and she is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice.

“I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”

Some of home schooling’s immediate costs to society will soon be more directly measurable in Florida. Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), following the lead of policymakers in other conservative states, expanded the state’s educational voucher program. Children who learn at home are now eligible if their parents submit instructional plans and they take an annual standardized test.

As a result, families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to home-school: up to $8,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding.

From Harlem to Kentucky

Home-schooled kids number more than 154,000 in Florida, the largest count among states with available data. But in no state have their ranks grown faster than in New York.

Its home-school population has more than doubled since 2017, rising to nearly 52,000. It was the largest statewide rate of increase in The Post’s database, and some of the fastest growth came in a place not necessarily synonymous with home education: New York City.

In 24 of the city’s 33 school districts, home-schooled children increased by at least 200 percent over six years. The largest growth was seen in Brooklyn and in the Bronx, where some districts exceeded 300 percent growth.

Afua Brown, who lives in Harlem, pulled her daughter out of a public elementary school in 2015 after she was bullied in kindergarten. Private school was too expensive, so Brown tried her hand at home education for her daughter and younger son.

She eventually became a leader in the New York City Home Educators Alliance, where she watched the local home-school community expand dramatically. But while their ranks can feel large at the organization’s science fairs, picnics and ice skating days, Brown recognizes home-schoolers are still a tiny fraction of the city’s school-age kids. Her children were among 377 in the fall of 2022 in a school district, including Manhattan’s Upper West Side and part of Harlem, where public enrollment is close to 20,000.

“It feels like there’s a bunch of us,” she said. “But in reality, there’s not that many of us.”

In only one of the city’s districts, Staten Island, are there more than 1,000 home-schooled kids.

The situation is very different in rural Pulaski County, Ky., where home schooling has grown 75 percent since 2017. There are now 908 home-schooled children in Pulaski — a number hard to ignore in a public school district with fewer than 7,800 students.

When Angelia Lamb stopped by the post office last summer to mail home-schooling notification forms for her 11-year-old son, the postal clerk glanced at the envelope — and then astonished Lamb by guessing its contents.

“You’re home schooling, aren’t you?” he asked, explaining that so many other parents had been sending the same official correspondence to the district that he recognized it on sight.

There is a kind of safety, or at least reassurance, in numbers for parents like 36-year-old Jessica Noplis, who lives in Crab Orchard, Ky. Noplis had misgivings when she pulled her 5-year-old son from a Pulaski elementary school: The boy loved school, and would habitually be ready in his backpack to board the bus at 6 a.m. — 50 minutes before it arrived.

But Noplis clashed with two of her son’s teachers over speech therapy (Noplis thought he didn’t need it) and grew upset when one of them didn’t seem to believe that the boy was reading better at home than in school. She soon discovered no fewer than six local and state Facebook groups devoted to home schooling.

“I was shocked to see how many people actually home-schooled,” she said.

Pulaski is one of 19 school districts in Kentucky where there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 enrolled in the public school system during the 2021-2022 school year. There were 48 such districts in Arkansas and 46 in California, according to The Post analysis. Most are rural.

Rural districts tend to struggle with especially tight budgets, and as more of their families turn to home schooling, some professional educators feel uneasy. Krystal Goode, a high school social studies teacher and head of the Pulaski County Education Association, said the district is already so strapped for cash that at least 30 students are now crowded into each of her classes.

In Kentucky, as elsewhere, public school funding is directly tied to enrollment. Goode said she worries about Pulaski’s home-schooled kids, a few of whom joined her class last year substantially behind their peers in academic skills.

But she also worries about what home schooling’s growth will mean for the children in the public education system.

“If [home-schooled] students are not enrolled in our district, we are not getting funding for them,” she said. “And we are already underfunded.”

Leaving ‘excellent’ schools

After Cassie Hagerstrom moved to De Pere, Wis., last summer, she noticed her new neighbors had a favorite topic of conversation: the superb quality of their public schools.

“It’s the first thing they bring up here,” she said.

Other parents would often talk about how much better they believed the schools were than those in the nearby city of Green Bay.

In fact, students in the Unified School District of De Pere perform better on standardized tests than their counterparts not only in Green Bay but in 95 percent of districts across the country, according to the Stanford Education Data Archive. Three of De Pere’s six public schools were rated in Wisconsin’s highest possible category in their most recent assessment, while each of the remaining three “exceeds expectations,” state officials found.

But Hagerstrom never considered giving her new town’s renowned schools a chance to meet, let alone exceed, her expectations for her 6- and 8-year-old daughters. She began home schooling when they lived in Fort Myers, Fla., she said, after a girl in her older child’s aftercare program shared a video of her father showering on her phone. The experience reinforced bad impressions Hagerstrom formed when she worked for a year as a middle school counselor.

“I’m not really on board with the schooling process as a whole,” Hagerstrom said. “Too many negative influences.”

Hagerstrom isn’t the only home educator to spurn a high-performing school system. In the fall of 2022, more than 60,000 students were home-schooled in districts that rank in the top fifth of academic achievement nationwide, The Post found.

There are 505 such school districts in The Post’s home schooling database. Data on academic performance were drawn from the Stanford archive, which collects standardized test score results from thousands of school districts across the country. (The archive does not include information for about half the districts in The Post’s database.)

Another high-caliber school district with explosive home-schooling growth is Capistrano Unified, which serves a prosperous slice of coastal Orange County, Calif. In the fall of 2022, the district had 711 home-schooled kids — a dip from its high of 1,000 in the fall of 2020 but still a 139 percent increase from the 2017-18 school year.

Until last year, when she moved to neighboring Riverside County, Stephanie Peterson lived in Capistrano Unified, which outperforms 87 percent of other school districts nationwide on standardized test scores. Peterson describes herself as “very pro-public education.”

But Peterson found that her children didn’t thrive in Capistrano Unified schools. Her eldest daughter, now 20, eventually transferred to a charter school. Officials at the local elementary school didn’t properly accommodate her 9-year-old daughter’s severe peanut allergy, Peterson said, and she worried that school services for the girl’s autism were insufficient.

Since 2021, Peterson has home-schooled both the 9-year-old and her 7-year-old son.

“I think it’s an excellent school district,” she said of Capistrano Unified, “if you are a kid who doesn’t have any special needs.”

‘The heart of the community’

Parents and students break for lunch at Trinity Education Academy of Christian Homeschoolers in Tampa. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
What lies ahead for American home schooling?

It has dropped from its pandemic peak in most of the school districts for which data are available through the 2022-2023 academic year. Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.

Other factors could fuel more growth in the years ahead.

Concerns about school shootings, bullying, and the general quality of the school environment — intractable problems, some of which school officials have limited power to solve — were among the top reasons for home schooling cited by parents in a Washington Post-Schar School poll earlier this year. Many also said they feared the intrusion of politics into public education, a worry unlikely to recede amid arguments over how sexual identity, Black history and other subjects are handled in the classroom.

Another factor that could boost home schooling’s appeal: Vouchers that offer parents thousands of dollars per year for children outside the public school system. Such vouchers have recently been made available to home educators in states including Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia and New Hampshire, as well as Florida, and are on the agenda for conservative education activists across the country.

Thanks in part to such policies, home schooling will increasingly compete for tax dollars with the public education system.

It could also undermine the role that public schools have traditionally played in American life.

“If you go to any public school, it’s the heart of the community in which it is situated,” said Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association. “People gather there for football games. They gather there for concerts. They go to celebrate the academic success of their students.”

Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people.

And some of what schools offer is hard to replace. When floods ravaged the Appalachian region where Campbell worked as a music teacher, he said, many turned to the public schools for shelter.

But many are also turning away. In Campbell’s Knox County school district, public school enrollment declined 16 percent during the last six years.

Over the same period, the county’s number of home-schooled students grew 80 percent.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

On Banning Books

The Kennedy family reads controversial books while waiting
for a board meeting of the Hamilton East Public Library
Noblesville IN 08-24-2023

(these people are about to be labeled "outlaw" because

they refuse to let a buncha pinch-faced, blue-nosed, puritan biddies

tell them what the can and can't read in a public school)

And BTW, this move against books is another aspect of the "conservative" effort to kill public education. If I can make you believe the schools are so thoroughly fucked up that your kids are being damaged, then it's going to be easier for me to convince you to privatize the system, and let me sell the whole thing to my brother-in-law, who, by some odd coincidence, has recently developed a burning desire to teach children what I think they should know.

Oy

Everything You Need to Know About the Right-Wing War on Books

Here’s your guide to the heroes and villains—plus a list of the 50 most banned books.

Citizens have led fiery campaigns against books they deem objectionable since before America’s founding. As early as the 1650s, Massachusetts Bay colonists banned and burned William Pynchon’s pamphlet “The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption” because it allegedly failed to adhere to Calvinist beliefs. Book bans were common in the South in the run-up to the Civil War, and nationwide during the McCarthy era.

But in the last few years, something changed. More people began writing complaints and demonstrating at meetings. They grew far more vocal. And they started to rally around the same texts, slamming them as “pornographic” or for supposedly preaching “critical race theory.” Since 2021, book banning—specifically, blocking access to books in schools and libraries—has become an organized movement, one backed by a powerful network of politicians, advocacy groups, and conservative donors.

More books are being challenged—for possible restriction or removal from libraries and curricula—than have been in decades. In the first half of the 2022–23 school year, PEN America, the free speech organization, tracked nearly 1,500 book bans nationwide, affecting 874 unique titles. Books centering on people of color and LGBTQ+ characters have been disproportionately targeted. In some GOP-controlled states, legislation has led to the widespread removal from schools of books with references to sex and sexuality, as well as race and racism.

The first week of October is the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, and to mark the occasion, The New Republic will launch a Bookmobile Tour to distribute texts conservatives have decided children simply should not read.

CENSORSHIP CHIEFS

Ron DeSantis

Under Governor DeSantis, Florida became the first of many red states to enact laws making it easier for parents to challenge books in school libraries that they believe are pornographic, deal improperly with race, or can otherwise be considered inappropriate. DeSantis was applauded by a Moms for Liberty (see below) founder for “blazing a trail” on school book bans.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Governor Huckabee Sanders signed a law imposing criminal penalties on Arkansas librarians who knowingly provide “harmful” materials to minors—though a federal judge has temporarily blocked sections of the law, calling them too vague. In January, Sanders also signed an executive order to prohibit “indoctrination” and “critical race theory” in schools.

Greg Abbott

The Texas governor signed a law banning sexually explicit books from schools. The law requires vendors to rate books as “sexually relevant” or “sexually explicit” to determine if they require parental approval or full removal. During the 2021–22 school year, Texas districts banned more books than those in any other state.

Moms for Liberty

Founded in 2021, Moms for Liberty has rapidly expanded into a national organization with almost 300 chapters. Its strategy is to take over school boards and label dissenting teachers, librarians, and parents “groomers.” The organization has also endorsed legislation in line with its goals like “Don’t Say Gay,” the notorious Florida law hamstringing discussions of sexuality in many classrooms. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Moms for Liberty an extremist group.

READING REBELS

Suzette Baker

In March 2022, Baker was fired as head librarian of the Kingsland Branch Library in Llano County, Texas, for “insubordination” and “failure to follow instructions,” which she said included her refusal to take down a display of banned books. Among the titles that have attracted the ire of local officials: Between the World and Me, the Ta-Nehisi Coates book that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Debbie Chavez

Chavez quit her school librarian job in Round Rock, Texas, after a parent met with her to discuss Lawn Boy—a novel that includes a romance between two boys—and secretly recorded the conversation, sharing excerpts on Facebook. Critics claimed she was “grooming” kids and called for her firing. “It was so horrific to see that my words were being used as a rallying cry for the book censors,” she told The New York Times.

Summer Boismier

Boismier, an English teacher at Norman High School in Oklahoma, shared with her students a Q.R. code to Books UnBanned, a program of New York’s Brooklyn Public Library that offers access to books that have been banned or challenged. She received a torrent of abuse and later resigned, claiming there was no way for her to do her job amid passage of a new law limiting instruction related to race and gender.

Anonymous Utah parent

In a protest of legislation making it easier to remove “pornographic or indecent” content, a Utah parent filed a complaint with an eight-page list of objectionable passages from the Bible—successfully forcing a district to remove the text from elementary and middle schools. The decision was quickly reversed.

50 MOST BANNED BOOKS

(Books are listed in descending order by frequency of bans in schools nationwide.)

Gender Queer: A Memoir
by Maia Kobabe

All Boys Aren’t Blue
by George M. Johnson

Out of Darkness
by Ashley Hope Pérez

A Lake Travis, Texas, parent got a book purged from her school’s library after googling “cornhole,” a word that appears in Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez, explaining at a school board meeting what she’d learned: “Cornhole is a sexual slang vulgarism” and “means to have anal sex.”

The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison

Lawn Boy
by Jonathan Evison

The Hate U Give
by Angie Thomas

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
by Jesse Andrews

Thirteen Reasons Why
by Jay Asher

Crank
by Ellen Hopkins

The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini

l8r, g8r
by Lauren Myracle

This Book Is Gay
by Juno Dawson

Melissa
by Alex Gino

Looking for Alaska
by John Green

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out
by Susan Kuklin

Beloved
by Toni Morrison

A Fairfax County, Virginia, parent tried and failed to get Toni Morrison’s Beloved banned for allegedly being rife with explicit material. Still, the aggrieved citizen went on to star in a Glenn Youngkin campaign ad as he successfully ran for governor in 2021.

This One Summer
by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

Drama: A Graphic Novel
by Raina Telgemeier

Flamer
by Mike Curato

Jack of Hearts (and other parts)
by L.C. Rosen

The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel

The Breakaways
by Cathy G. Johnson

Nineteen Minutes
by Jodi Picoult

All American Boys
by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky

Tricks
by Ellen Hopkins

More Happy Than Not
by Adam Silvera

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer

It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health
by Robie Harris

Monday’s Not Coming
by Tiffany D. Jackson

A Court of Mist and Fury
by Sarah J. Maas

Sold
by Patricia McCormick

The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives
by Dashka Slater

Dear Martin
by Nic Stone

Speak
by Laurie Halse Anderson

Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen
by Jazz Jennings

Almost Perfect
by Brian Katcher

Real Live Boyfriends: yes. boyfriends, plural. if my life weren’t complicated, I wouldn’t be Ruby Oliver
by E. Lockhart

The Truth About Alice
by Jennifer Mathieu

Lucky
by Alice Sebold

Killing Mr. Griffin
by Lois Duncan

We Are the Ants
by Shaun David Hutchinson

I Am Jazz
by Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel

How to Be an Antiracist
by Ibram X. Kendi

Two Boys Kissing
by David Levithan

The Infinite Moment of Us
by Lauren Myracle

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You
by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds

Seven white school board members voted unanimously in Pickens County, South Carolina, to remove Stamped from libraries and classrooms. It traces the history of racism in the United States, but parents complained that it “promote[s] socialism” and “demonstrates radical Marxism infecting our schools and our culture.”

And Tango Makes Three
by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

Source: PEN America data from 2021–22 school year

MORE RIDICULOUS STORIES

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation

An illustrated adaptation of The Diary of a Young Girl was banned from a high school library in Florida because, critics bizarrely claimed, it minimized the Holocaust and—perhaps more important—captured a young girl’s thoughts about other female bodies. A county chapter chair of the far-right group Moms for Liberty led the charge for removal over its “sexually explicit” material.

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes

The director of a Florida police union targeted this book about a Black boy killed by police. “Our members feel that this book is propaganda that pushes an inaccurate and absurd stereotype of police officers in America,” he wrote. Further use of the book was paused in a classroom in Broward County.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

A Leander, Texas, parent went after Machado’s surreal memoir about domestic abuse, brandishing a sex toy at a school board meeting while decrying portions of the book detailing a lesbian relationship. “This is what we’re asking our children to read,” the parent said, taking out a pink dildo. The book was ultimately removed from school libraries in the district.

Maus by Art Spiegelman

In January 2022, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban this Pulitzer-winning graphic novel from its eighth grade curriculum. The book depicts Holocaust victims as mice and Nazis as cats. One board member took offense at illustrations of naked mice in the book. “All the way through this literature we expose these kids to nakedness, we expose them to vulgarity.… If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it,” he said.

Today's Deep Thought

If teachers have been indoctrinating kids in public schools, then more adults would know the correct usage of commas and apostrophes. 

It Gets Worse

I'll say it again:

Somewhere in Texas, someone has recently discovered he has a passion for DNA testing and all he really wants to do is help those poor unfortunate people in their time of need - and for only about 60 bucks a pop.

$322,295,160.00

in somebody's pocket

if they send out a test for every school kid.

A nice fat payday,

potentially for years to come.

(pay wall)

Opinion
DNA kits for kids show Texas’s twisted priorities

Members of the U.S. armed forces are fingerprinted, their DNA is collected, and the information is kept on file and in storage. It is a precaution for those terrible situations in which a body needs to be identified and an acknowledgement of the danger inherent in serving in the military. That Texas officials think schoolchildren should take the same precautions as troops who go into battle speaks volumes about the twisted priorities that have protected gun rights at the expense of children.

“A gift of safety, from our family to yours” reads the message printed on fingerprint and DNA kits that are being handed out to parents of Texas public school students to help them identify their children “in case of an emergency.” Parents who opt in — the program is free and voluntary — will be able to keep their child’s DNA and fingerprint information at home, and can later provide it to law enforcement agencies in emergency situations if needed. The 2021 law establishing a “child identification program” doesn’t explicitly say it’s for identifying victims of school shootings, and text on the kits only references missing children. But five months after a gunman killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., it is hard not to make the connection.

“I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?” said the mother of a Texas second-grader. “Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son, Uziyah Garcia, was killed in the Uvalde shooting, posted on Twitter. Among the gut-wrenching things we learned about Uvalde was that authorities had to ask for DNA samples from parents because it was hard to identify the bodies due to the devastating damage caused by the high-powered rifle the gunman used. A pediatrician who treated Uvalde victims told Congress what he witnessed: “Two children whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart that the only clue as to their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who is running for reelection this year, has refused to even entertain the idea of trying to do something about the availability of weapons of war that did such unspeakable damage. Such as banning them or, at the very least, changing the law so that someone such as the Uvalde shooter wouldn’t be able to legally buy an assault rifle just after they turned 18. Instead, the state hands out kits that make it easier for parents to identify their slaughtered children and has the gall to do it in the name of safety.

Tell me there's no real probability that this little stunt is aimed at making parents less likely to support public schools, and more likely for another brother-in-law to pop up and sell his ideas for privatizing education "for the sake of your children's safety".

- or just - 

Sorry, folks, but we can't afford to keep the schools open because we spent all the money on School Resource Officers, steel doors, combat arms training for teachers - and DNA tests so we can identify what's left of your kids once all of our other stupid ideas fail.