Home (School) Improvement

By Peter Beinart/Wichita

Walk through the doors of Warehouse No. 2 at 701 East 37th Street in Wichita, Kans., on a weekday morning, and you will swear you have entered a school. Parent sign-up sheets festoon the walls. A small library offers comfy chairs and a plentiful supply of magazines. Basketballs bounce in the distance, and a poster next to the weight room illustrates the "6 S's of Fitness" (strength, stamina, speed, suppleness, skill, spirit). The kids racing down the linoleum hallway take Spanish, art, p.e. and government here. They hit baseballs from the pitching machine, and they splash in the pool. But this is not their school. They go to school at home.

Warehouse No. 2, donated by a sympathetic local business, is what happens when the home-school movement reaches critical mass. Fifteen years ago, there were perhaps 50 families home-schooling their kids in Wichita. Afraid that the practice violated Kansas law, they met in secret and kept their children inside during school hours. Most publishers refused to sell them teachers' guides, assuming they wanted the answer sheets to help their kids cheat. So they bought the textbooks Christian schools were throwing away. Home-schooled kids didn't have many academic or extracurricular outlets, which was all right, since almost all were under the age of 10.

But in the ensuing decade and a half, Wichita's home schoolers have hit adolescence. And with the legality of home schooling firmly established, home schoolers have been joined by an exodus from the city's troubled public schools. The result is a metropolitan area that today boasts 1,500 home-school families, many with teenage children demanding basketball teams, theater productions and science labs. So the home-school movement in Wichita has literally outgrown the home. Wichita's home schoolers boast three bands, a choir, a bowling group, a math club, a 4-H Club, boy- and girl-scout troops, a debate team, a yearly musical, two libraries and a cap-and-gown graduation. In donated rooms across Wichita, home schoolers attend classes in algebra, English, science, swimming, accounting, sewing, public speaking and Tae Kwan Do. Parental support groups with names like BEST (Believing, Encouraging and Studying Together) and HOPE (Helping Other Parents Educate) crisscross the city, organizing field trips and swapping lesson plans. This year the Wichita Home School Warriors hosted two basketball tournaments, attended by 54 teams from around the U.S. and scouts from half a dozen colleges.

As home schooling becomes mainstream, other institutions are finding it hard to adjust. For example, the National Collegiate Athletic Association judges scholarship eligibility by grade-point average and has run into problems evaluating grades awarded by parents. The military deems home-school degrees inferior to those from accredited high schools, which has opened it to charges of discrimination.

But no one has had more trouble adjusting to the success of home schooling than home schoolers. The movement's founders were devout Evangelicals trying to insulate their children from what they believed was a morally depraved culture. Wichita's original home schoolers were often members of the militant antiabortion group Operation Rescue, which had a strong presence in the city. But as home schooling infiltrates the wider culture, the wider culture is starting to infiltrate home schooling. Many of the newest home schoolers are not religious. And home schooling, with its low cost, is attracting growing numbers of children who have been expelled from public school.

The growth of home-school organizations outside the home, while expanding educational options, inevitably diminishes parents' control over what their children learn and see. Already controversies have sprouted over what kinds of uniforms are appropriate for home-school cheerleaders and whether rock music may be played at home-school events. Some Evangelicals have even pulled their children out of home-school clubs and classes.

All of which points to a paradox. Home schooling can provide a broadly accepted, large-scale alternative to the public schools, or it can provide a true sanctuary from the wider culture. But it cannot do both, because the more attractive the movement becomes to children in the public schools, the more it will start to resemble them. Warehouse No. 2 may look like evidence that home schooling is eclipsing public education in the city of Wichita. Then again, it could be the other way around.