I heartily accept the motto, "that government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience

Once the decision to homeschool is made,
the first step for homeschoolers with children of school age is to become acquainted with stipulations of state homeschooling laws and local regulations. Kids under (or over) legal school age ar not subject to such laws and regulations, so don’t leap into anything prematurely. Definitions of "school age" vary somewhat from state to state, generally beginning anywhere from age five to eight and extending through age sixteen to eighteen. Young Virginians, for example, must be enrolled in school by the age of five; Vermonters, by the age of seven; Pennsylvanians, by the age of eight.

My homeschool journal began
inauspiciously enough, on Friday the thirteenth in November 1987. Josh, our oldest son, was a school-age six that year; Ethan, our second son, almost five; and Caleb, our youngest, just three. We were living in La Honda, California, a tiny town in the redwoods south of San Francisco, onetime home of Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead, then stomping ground of potters, schoolteachers, sheep farmers, artists, computer programmers, and physicists from the Stanford Linear Accelerator. We had a blue house, a brown van, two organe cats, and a goldfish. And we were criminals. We were homeschooling illegally.

Different laws in each state
Today the legal aspects of homeschooling – though not always comfortable for the families involved – are at least increasingly well defined. Homeschooling is legal in all fifty states, from Alabama to Wyoming, though requirementsvary widely among them ranging from the comfortable permissive to the nitpickingly restrictive. Missouri homeschoolers, for example are blessed with one of the least invasive laws in the nation, requiring that parents maintain a "daily log" of each child’s educational activities and a portfoloio of samples of each child’s academic work. The first is to be used only in the event of run-ins with the law; as evidence of ongoing education; the second doesn’t need to be shown to anybody unless parents or children feel like it. Missouri homeschoolers do not even have to announce their educational intentions to the school authorities, though those worried about unexplained visits from the truant officer may wish to declare themselves just to eliminate potential annoyance.

A labyrinthine list of bureaucratic regulations
On the opposite end of the scale, Pennsylvania homeschoolers must wrestle with a labyrinthine list of bureaucratic regulations, first filing an annual affidavit listing names and ages of the participating children and names and telephone numbers of the homeschool "supervisors" (usually Mom and Dad), along with educational curriculum (by subject area) and an up-to-date immunization record (or official exemption) for each kid. Subjects to be taught areprecisely specified, including English, mathematics, science, geography, history (state, U.S., and world), health, physical education, art, music and – at both elementary and secondary school levels – "safety education, including regular and continuous instructionto the dangers and preventions o fires." (Optional: biology, chemistry, economics, trigonometry, and foreign languages.) The long-suffering supervisors must maintain a detailed portfolio of all materials used and student work completed; this portfolio must be evaluated and "graded" annually by an approved teacher or administrator. Standardized tests must be taken in grades 3, 5, and 8. If none of the above meets with the evaluator’s approval, you may not be able to continue homeschooling. And if any of your children turn out to need special education services or to be gifted and/or talented, your program will need to be approved by a certified special education teacher or a licensed clinical or certfied school psychologist.

Qualifications for Parents
It’s not only the homeschooled kids who are under scrutiny here; often state law turns its chilly eye upon the qualifications of homeschooling parents as well. From the point of view of educational officialdom, the idal home instructor is a state-certified teacher; if you happen to be one, your credentials will cut a lot of red tape. Some states require that the teaching parent have a high school diploma or its equivalent; others require some college background or a completed bachelor’s degree.

Parents can teach their kids in North Dakota if they posess either a teacher’s certificate, a four-year college degree, or evidence of a passing grade on the National Teacher’s Exam (NTE). The can also homeschool with nothing more than a high school diploma, but in such cases they must be monitored by a state certified teacher. Minnesota, whose Compulsory School Attendance Law states – in somewhat two-faced fashion – "The paent f a child is primaily responsible for assuring that the child acquires knowledge and skills that are essential for effective citizenship." Offers a similar array of qualification possibilities; you can be a certified teacher or a teacher in an accredited private or parochial school; you can be supervised by a certified teacher; you can pass a teacher competency exam on your own; you can have a bachelor’s degree; or – one sees legislative despair here- you can simply be the parent of the homeschooled children involved. Parents in Tennessee can homeschol children through grade 8 with a high school diploma; to homeschool their high school students, they need a bachelor’s degree. Massachusetts ostensibly has no formal parental qualification requirements, but this may vary from school district to school district, since homeschooling approval is the prerogative of local superintendents and/or school boards.

Our journey
In our California county in 1987, there were only three accepted roads to homeschooling. Legally, we could have participated in an "independent study" program under the direction of the local public school, using public school textbooks and following the public school curriculum, with weekly monitoring by a public school teacher. Or one of both of us – the homescholing parents – could have acquired a California teaching certificate. Or we could have established a formal private school at home (student body: three). W had failed, for one rason or another, to do any of these. The first choice we wrote off almost immediately: "independent study" clearly wasn’t all that independent, and our plans for home educaton did not involve reproducing a public school classroom in our living room.

The second proved to be a remote option: Randy, my husband, and I, both with college-level teaching experience and Ph.D.s in cell biology, still needed over two years of education courses – including classes in sexx and drug counseling and a stint of student teaching – to qualify fo California certification. Choice number three – declaring our home a private school – looked most appealing. The mandatory application form, howevere – when it finally arrived – quickly showed us to be deficient in fire escapes, refrigerator square footage, and protective fences. Now, not only were we educationally weird, but - barely months into homeschooling – we were delinquents. We were dropouts. We were officially underground.