Washington Post Revs Up Anti-Homeschool Crusade

The corporate media appears to be launching a full-scale war on one of American families’ greatest weapons against the left-wing education cartel: homeschooling.

For decades, the left has viewed the American education system as a primary tool with which to indoctrinate generations of children with their own political propaganda and feed them a false version of American history. Although not feasible for every family, homeschooling has long been a way for millions of families to avoid potentially subjecting their children to this fate.

But in recent months, The Washington Post, among other left-leaning entities, has ramped up its crusade to disparage homeschool families and discredit the homeschooling movement, which to the left’s chagrin is becoming a more popular education option.

In a December piece targeting the allegedly “flawed” research regarding homeschooling, the Post claimed that Brian Ray, one of the nation’s top homeschooling advocates, “overstates the success” of the homeschooling approach.

“Critics say his work is driven more by dogma than scholarly detachment,” the piece claimed, before quoting an academic who dismissed Ray as pushing an “ideological agenda,” “concoct[ing] bad social science,” and “convinc[ing] naive researchers and naive audiences to accept some position.”

Despite the Post’s attempted smearing of Ray as a faux academic, however, it fails to convincingly debunk any particular component of Ray’s research.

Instead, the story’s author, Laura Meckler, spends most of the piece quibbling over research methods while presenting no evidence—academic or otherwise—that dispels Ray’s conclusion that homeschooled students perform well academically.

Meanwhile, even as publications like the Post attempt to undermine the evidence in favor of homeschooling, they routinely ignore the major research flaws in areas of study such as the supposed “medical necessity” of transgender surgeries, climate change, policing, and abortion—disregarding the facts in favor of upholding scientifically and methodologically dubious left-wing narratives.

As many conservatives will be quick to note, The Washington Post also has never run a story framing left-wing studies on transgenderism – which have routinely been debunked as junk science – as “ideological” or “bad social science.” Instead, the Post frequently relies on them to advance its own progressive vision regardless of the facts.

The Post’s December article is far from its only anti-homeschool hit piece in recent months. Just days prior to publishing Meckler’s piece, the paper ran what is perhaps an even more deceptive article—a smear piece centered on one instance of parental abuse in homeschooling, which the Post used in an attempt to discredit the homeschool movement in its entirety.

As Casey Chalk of The Federalist observed, “This story is less representative of a nationwide crisis of homeschooling abuse than it is a shameful attempt to undermine one of the most successful and transformative movements in American education.”

Though the story does highlight a heartbreaking case of abusive parents who hid behind homeschooling laws to abuse their children—which led to the death of their 11-year-old son—evidence suggests that public school educators are more likely to be abusive than homeschool parents. Even Peter Jamison, the author of the piece, begrudgingly admits, “Little research exists on the links between home schooling and child abuse.”

As Chalk notes in The Federalist, “We should all be in favor of finding and punishing abusive adults like those described in the Post’s patently biased expose. The question is where most of them are hiding. Based on the data collected even by the federal government itself, it’s not in homeschooling households.”

In yet another piece published last May, the Post profiled a couple who had been homeschooled and sent their own children to public school, using their testimony to push baseless accusations of widespread abuse embedded in the homeschool system. Provocatively titled, “The revolt of the Christian homeschoolers,” the piece attempts to establish a bridge between conservative ideas cherished by homeschoolers and child abuse—subtly suggesting that the values held by “deeply conservative Christians” lead to beatings with a broom handle.

Needless to say, if the Post genuinely cared about child abuse, it would devote more of its resources to covering the human trafficking crisis and the disaster along the southern border – as well as the very real epidemic of sexual abuse in public schools. But to the editors of the Post, child abuse is nothing more than another weapon to selectively wield against the left’s political opponents.

Other left-wing publications have also contributed to the anti-homeschool pile-on.

Last June, Salon ran a piece arguing that homeschoolers are “uniquely vulnerable to isolation, abuse and humiliation at the hands of their caregivers”—but failed to present any actual evidence of these claims. In May, MSNBC ran the headline, “How the conservative Christian right is hijacking homeschooling.” And last March, The New Republic claimed that the right’s embrace of classical education is “alarming,” stating, “religious charter schools are plainly a threat to pluralistic society.”

The real reason for the media’s systematic attack on homeschooling is far from a secret. With the recent rise in homeschooling and the surging parental rights movement, the left—and their allies in the corporate media—are terrified that their grip on American education is weakening, and that the next generation of young Americans might dare to think for themselves and see the growing list of failures resulting from liberal policies.

To the editors of The Washington Post and other leftists, nothing could be more frightening.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.