There are not many ways in which it might be said that Michigan’s legal/political environment is particularly good, but one of those is the light touch it takes at present toward homeschooling. At present, homeschooling is nearly entirely unregulated, requiring no notice or records sent to the state, and therefore how many children are being homeschooled in Michigan is not even known. (Although, if state agencies spoke to one another, one would imagine it should be a simple matter to take the total number of children, from tax returns or something, and subtract off the known number in public or private schools, and voila.)
But of course the present state government looks at anything that is uncontrolled by it and sees that as an evil in itself, and recently the state “superintendent of public instruction”, citing a supposed issue of “student safety” (a problem surely much greater in the public schools), has requested a law be passed requiring the registration of all homeschooled students. MichCapCon has a nice report here, which mentions how empty the proposal is in providing evidence of the supposed danger, or how registration is supposed to reduce that danger, or what the investigation and enforcement mechanisms would be. From my perspective, the real point here is to get the state’s nose in the tent, at which point it would begin finding more and more things that “needed” to be done inside that tent.
So I sent a letter to my two representatives in the state legislature, reproduced below. Opinions will vary on how this matter should be approached, but both my representatives are Democrats, and I choose to make an appeal about which there is at least a chance they will care. In the unlikely event I receive a noteworthy reply I will share that in a later post.
Subject: Opposition to registration of Michigan’s homeschooling families
Hello,
I wanted to drop a quick note *against* the proposed registration of Michigan’s homeschooling families. This has gotten a lot of press recently so I will assume you are aware of it and will not link a news article. (I do suspect this is one of those cases where the regulators are so out of touch with the community they want to regulate that they didn’t realize the proposal would produce the sort of pushback that has now manifested.) We do not personally homeschool our child, but many of our friends do, so we are well acquainted with that community.
The proposal could be criticized from many angles, but for brevity I will just mention one. Governor Whitmer has made it a point of emphasis to try to increase the population of the state. Laying down additional regulations upon one segment of the population that tends to have a large number of children will have exactly the opposite effect. It is obvious to everyone that registration is merely a prelude to additional monitoring and control, and independence and the ability to guide the education of their children as they desire is what these families value. There are not many ways in which it might be said that Michigan’s legal/political environment is an exceptionally positive one for families. The light touch we have taken toward homeschooling is one of those rare exceptional positives in favor of the state. We should not end it.
One final note – it should be remembered that population changes from bad policies is usually a gradual phenomenon. In other words, consider some 45-year-old homeschooling parents, they have jobs, friends, family, roots in this state. Most of them, I suspect, are not going to up and leave immediately if Michigan begins registering families like their own. The changes really begin to appear, though, with the next generation – when your children go out to make their own way in the world, would you advise them to remain in Michigan or go elsewhere? Does the state seem to be on the path of getting better, or getting worse? And this I can speak to a little more personally. We moved to Michigan in 2011, from Missouri, at the end of graduate school. At the time (for job reasons), our choices were between Indiana, Michigan, and Texas. And at the time, the differing legal/political environments of those three states was not seen by me as a major factor in deciding between them. If I was instead ending graduate school in 2024, it would be, I might avoid Michigan now given the changes that have occurred since 2011.
Michigan already struggles to attract population given factors like our climate, which means that in a legal/political way we need to be doing it better than states which are, in some ways, naturally more favorably positioned. Let’s not ruin our present exceptionally good environment for homeschooling.
Thank you,
David Shane
I look forward to possible replies*. I enjoy skimming at the Guardian in the UK and, good heavens, most of those people, journalists and readers alike, would gasp in horror at the fact that the number of HSC "is not even known"! much less nearly unregulated. The horror would be rather less amongst the folks who piously read the NYT and WaPo because so many are already familiar with the unenlightened, 'deplorable' parts of the US.
*I used to send emails to my junior US Senator, whose name I can never remember, Mr Merkley (the not-clever one of the two) because the response would always be 'thank you for your comments' (I believe that there has not been any praiseworthy policy decision on his part in 15 years) until someone gave the poor clerk permission to stop replying at all.