Some Recent Court Cases involving Homeschooling

From time to time I like to provide a brief summary of some recent court cases relative to homeschooling.  Today I’m stressing only those decided by a court of appeals or higher, not district court decisions. We’ll begin with a couple of special education decisions that together say something important about homeschooling children with special needs. Then we’ll move on to the more unseemly stuff.

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Homeschooling and Autism

This post reviews Karen S. Hurlbutt, “Experiences of Parents Who Homeschool Their Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders” in Developmental Disabilities 26, no. 4 (December 2011): 239-249.

Hurlbutt, a Special Education professor at Minnesota State University, here presents the results of a qualitative study of nine families who have chosen to homeschool their children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).  She begins by noting that several experts in the field point to autism as the most challenging of conditions for public school teachers due to the rapidly changing nature of diagnosis and treatment protocols.  Many teachers and schools feel unprepared to deal well with children with ASD, and as a result a growing number of families with ASD kids are turning to homeschooling.

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Three Types of Homeschoolers

This post reviews Ruth Morton, “Home Education: Constructions of Choice” in International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education 3, no. 1 (October 2010) Available Here.

Morton, a doctoral student at the University of Warwick whose dissertation is a qualitative study of homeschooling motivations and practice in the United Kingdom, here gives us a taste of what the dissertation will contain, describing how there are three basic motivational types of homeschoolers.

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Parsons and Lewis on Special Needs Homeschoolers in Britain

This post reviews Sarah Parsons and Ann Lewis, “The Home-Education of Children with Special Needs or Disabilities in the UK: Views of Parents from an Online Survey” in International Journal of Inclusive Education 14, no. 1 (February 2010): 67-86.

Parsons, research fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Lewis, a professor at the same institution, came to this project after an earlier study of parents of children with disabilities kept running into anomalies.  Parsons and Lewis kept finding parents who didn’t fit their survey categories because they had pulled their kids out of schools.  7% of the sample of their earlier study had done this, which was a surprise to Parsons and Lewis.  They were further surprised at how many of these parents expressed frustration that their choices and views weren’t being taken into consideration in the original study.  As Parsons and Lewis put it, “our interest (and conscience) pricked, we were determined to find out more about these ‘invisible’ families.” (p. 68)  So they created an online survey for homeschooling families with special needs kids and got 27 British parents to fill it out.  Here is what they found: 

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Winstanley on Homeschooling Gifted Children

This post reviews Carrie Winstanley, “Too Cool for School? Gifted Children and Homeschooling” in Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 347-362

Winstanley, Principal Lecturer in Education at Roehampton University in London,  here argues that gifted children form a distinct group of homeschoolers that defy classification schemes usually employed by scholars to describe the homeschooling movement. 

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Osborne, Jr. on Homeschoolers with Special Needs

This post briefly reviews Allan G. Osborne, Jr., “IDEA and Alternative Education Choices: Legal Issues” in School Business Affairs 74, no. 10 (November 2008): 24-26.

Osborne, Jr., an authority on special education law, here explains the rights accorded homeschooled children by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

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Lisa Rivero on Homeschooling Trends and Special Ed

This post briefly reviews Lisa Rivero’s The Homeschooling Option: How to Decide When It’s Right for Your Family(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).

Rivero, author of two previous books on home-based education, Gifted Education Comes Home : A Case for Self-Directed Homeschoolingand Creative Home Schooling: A Resource Guide for Smart Familieshere provides the latest in a long line of introductory books aimed at parents thinking about homeschooling and looking for advice.  Much of the book is similar to other books of this genre, but there are a few features that make it worth a brief notice in this blog on homeschool research. 

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