Child maltreatment, home schooling, and an organization in need of support

The Turpin family has been in the public eye once again after NBC broadcast Diane Sawyer’s interview with two of the victims rescued from the “House of Horrors” in Perris, California on January 24, 2018. In riveting footage, Jordan Turpin describes how as a 17-year-old she escaped through a window and called the police on a de-activated cell phone which her parents did not know she had. Never having left the house by herself or spoken to a stranger, she managed to convince a sheriff’s deputy with cellphone photos of her sisters in chains. “If something happened to me, at least I died trying,” Jordan told Sawyer, stating her parents would have killed her if they had caught her. Body camera footage shows deputies walking through the trash-filled house and finding Jordan’s 12 siblings, all but the youngest stunted by malnutrition, one in chains and two others with bruised wrists from chains that had been removed and hidden while the deputies were knocking on the door. Louise and David Turpin have pleaded guilty to multiple counts of cruelty to a dependent adult abuse, false imprisonment, child abuse, and torture, and have been sentenced to 25 years in prison.

David and Louise Turpin were able to hide their extreme abuse and neglect behind the facade of a “private school” operating out of their home. Calling their home a private school is one of the options for homeschooling parents in California. These “schools” are not monitored or inspected aside from an annual fire inspection for those with six or more students, but city officials in the aftermath of the rescue could find no record that such an inspection was ever conducted on the trash-filled and hazardous Turpin home.

California is not atypical in its minimal regulation of homeschooling. As William and Mary’s James Dwyer stated at a 2021 Homeschooling Summit sponsored by Harvard Law School and described here), twelve states require nothing of homeschooling parents, not even notification to the school district; another 15 or so require notification only. The other half of states have some requirements, such as that the parent have a high school degree, that certain subjects be taught, or that students be assessed requirements, but these are generally not reviewed or enforced in a meaningful way. Moreover, no state requires that a state employee or contractor set eyes on the child once homeschooling is approved.

Clearly, the Turpins could not have gotten away with such severe abuse if the children had been in school. Teachers would have seen the extreme malnutrition of the children and the marks from chains and beatings, and the children would have been able to disclose what was happening to them. Education personnel make more child abuse reports than any other group; they made 21 percent of calls to child abuse hotlines in 2019. So it is not surprising that a disproportionate number of the horrific abuse deaths that make the news (such as the Hart children, Natalie Finn in Iowa, Matthew Tirado in Massachusetts and Adrian Jones in Kansas), involved parents who hid behind the guise of homeschooling, even though schooling rarely took place in these homes.

We have no systematic data about the association of homeschooling with child maltreatment due to data limitations. But there are some troubling reports. Child abuse pediatrician Barbara Knox studied 28 children who were victims of abuse so severe that it merits the definition of torture. In most of these cases, the children were kept out of school; about 29 percent were never enrolled in school and another 49 percent were removed from school, allegedly for homeschooling, often after a CPS report was made by education personnel. Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate found that of children withdrawn to be homeschooled between 2013 and 2016, 36 percent had at least one prior accepted report for suspected abuse or neglect to the Department of Children’s Services, and the majority of these families had multiple prior reports for suspected maltreatment. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education maintains a database called Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, which includes 454 cases of severe and fatal child abuse in homeschool settings in the United States since the year 1986. Since these are only the cases that made it into the media and were found by CRHE, there may be many more.

Data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicates that the percentage of Americn children who were homeschooled rose dramatically from 1.7 percent in 1999 to 3.4 percent in 2011-2012, then decreased slightly through 2019. There is some anecdotal and statistical evidence that homeschooling rose considerably during the pandemic but no definitive data as of yet; we also do not know how many children will return to school buildings when the pandemic recedes.

While abusive and neglectful parents are likely a very small minority of those who homeschool, the lobbies that represent them oppose any regulation of homeschooling, arguing that the vast majority of homeschooling parents should not be punished for the actions of a small minority. Homeschool parents who oppose regulation are represented by strong lobbies in both state capitals and at the national level. Homeschooling’s national lobby, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) resembles the National Rifle Association in the single-minded passion of its members and its surplus of legal resources. Payment of annual dues of $130 to $144 per year buys free legal defense and representation in court for members. Adults who grew up homeschooled reported at the Harvard summit that their parents kept the organization’s telephone number on their refrigerators to be called as soon as CPS showed up at the door. HSLDA sends out email blasts to its members that can result in a barrage of phone calls that can swamp legislators’ offices and even in-person threats and harassment of state legislators, as an investigation by Pro Publica found. 

There are strong homeschool lobbies at the state level as well. In the aftermath of the Turpin case, California Assemblyman Jose Medina introduced a bill that would require a fire inspection for all private schools, including those with five or fewer students. Due to a “massive outcry” from the homeschooling community, the the inspection requirement was eliminated, leaving a bill that required nothing but identification of homeschooling families by name and address. When the eviscerated bill was scheduled for a hearing, hundreds or perhaps thousands of homeschooling families poured into the capitol building, testifying for three hours. No committee member even moved to approve the bill, and it died that day.

Playing David to HSLDA’s Goliath is a mighty little group called the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. CRHE’s mission is to “empower homeschooled children by educating the public and advocating for child-centered, evidence-based policy and practices for families and professionals.” Among its many recommendations, CRHE has several that are designed to protect homeschooled children against abuse and neglect. These include prohibiting homeschooling by parents who have committed offenses that would disqualify them from teaching school, requiring that students be assessed annually by trained mandatory reporters, and flagging certain at-risk children (such as those in families with a history of child protective services involvement) for additional protections and support.

CRHE was launched in 2013 by a group of homeschool alumni who had met through a network of blogs and Facebook groups. In the past seven years, The Coalition does more with less than any other organization I know. As described on its website, CRHE has driven media coverage of the need for homeschooling oversight; conducted extensive research; developed a set of policy recommendations, advocated for homeschooling oversight in over a dozen states and territories and helped craft successful legislation in Georgia; created a comprehensive suite of resources for homeschooling parents and students; and written a bill of rights for homeschooled children. This has all been done with unpaid staff, including its executive director, and contract workers. Now, CRHE is trying to raise funds to pay a part-time executive director next year, with the hope to grow further in the future.

In my research, I have been surprised at the paucity of organizations that advocate for better protection of children from abuse and neglect, a topic that I hope to address in a future post. While CRHE’s focus is limited to home-schooled children, this is a group that is particularly vulnerable, and evidence suggests that these children are disproportionately represented among the most egregious cases of abuse. For this reason, and in light of CHRE’s extraordinary passion and productivity, I cannot think of an organization more deserving of support by those who care about child maltreatment.