Homeschooling offers my son amazing learning and social opportunities, as I’ve written. But some people go out of their way to smear homeschoolers.

I’ve read a number of biased political advocacy pieces masquerading as news articles (example: Colorado Sun) to the effect that, based on a small number of fraudulent claims of homeschooling involving abuse, government should more harshly monitor and control actual homeschoolers who follow the relevant laws. Such claims are off-base for a number of reasons.

Homeschooling tends to be protective of children’s safety because parents are better-positioned to watch out for potential bullying by other children and abuse by other adults. Indeed, Pew found that 83% of homeschooling parents said that “school environment such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure” was among their reasons to homeschool.

Government agencies already have the authority to investigate neglect and abuse wherever it occurs. Requiring government to spend more resources monitoring the overwhelming majority of responsible homeschoolers would divert resources away from actual problems.

And asking government agents to single out homeschool families would create bad incentives. Government agents are neither perfectly knowing nor perfectly good. They can make mistakes, become negligent, act with bias, and in rare cases even act with malice. As an example of this last point, a 2023 headline from the Gazette reminds us, “Jury convicts former social worker [Robin Niceta] accused of making up child abuse claim.” So homeschool families can legitimately suspect that government targeting them specifically for increased scrutiny would cause more problems than it solves.

The main problem I want to focus on here is that people who call for tighter controls of homeschoolers (and sometimes also of private schools) do not hold public schools to the same standards. If monitoring and oversight guaranteed safety, then public schools would be the safest places in the world. But they are not.

To emphasize, as I go through examples of problems at public schools, my point is not that we should generalize from these cases to conclude that public schools are fundamentally bad places. That would be stupid. Just as it is stupid to generalize from a few cases of problems with (unlawful) homeschooling to conclude that government should be suspicious of all homeschoolers, the overwhelming majority of whom are great people.

Because my child is elementary-school aged, we know loads of people with children in public schools, and generally those parents love their schools.

With those caveats, let’s proceed.

Bullying in public schools

One form of abuse in public schools is bullying by some children against others. I do not want to pretend that bullying never is a problem among homeschoolers; I’ve seen some minor instances. (Usually homeschooling enables parents to quickly help resolve such problems.) In some schools bullying has become a serious problem.

A headline from Colorado Politics states, “Reports of bullying, school safety rise in Colorado schools,” with hundreds of reports of bullying in a single month.

CPR reports that four minority families sued the Douglas County school district, alleging that “administrators failed to take adequate measures to protect students from severe and pervasive racism and bullying.”

CPR elsewhere reports that a family sued the Pueblo district over “years of racial bullying and harassment.”

In Cherry Creek, CBS reports, a group of Muslim parents alleged “biased-motivated bullying.”

A mother in Boulder, the Camera reports, sued the district because her “daughter was bullied relentlessly.”

In some cases, bullying in public schools rises to the level of serious criminal assault. 9News reports details of a recent example: “A girl was seriously injured when another girl stabbed her during an argument at an Aurora middle school Wednesday afternoon.”

Still, although bullying in schools is for some students a serious problem, getting harshly bullied is not the representative experience.

Assaults in public schools

Deeply concerning are cases of assaults by adults against children in public schools.

Sage Kelley reports for the Gazette, “A group of parents pressed Jeffco Public Schools . . . over . . . multiple sexual assault allegations within the past year and a case involving a child pornography investigation.” Following are some of the details:

“First Judicial District Judge Chantel Contiguglia sentenced 28-year-old former Jefferson County paraprofessional Imagine Kay Ewer to four years in prison Jan. 31 for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old student.”

“Luis Fernando Robles-Luevanos, 29, was arrested on Feb. 15, 2024 by the Lakewood Police Department after allegedly assaulting two boys under 15 at Creighton Middle School, according to his arrest affidavit.”

“Justin Martinez, an afterschool care programs worker for multiple schools in the district, was arrested in May 2024 over allegations of sexual assault on a child.”

“Chloe Castro, 28, was arrested by the Arvada Police Department on Nov. 6, 2024, on suspicion of sexual assault on a child in a position of trust with a pattern of abuse after she allegedly began sending inappropriate messages to a 14-year-old she met while he was in sixth grade.”

“The Chief of Schools for the district, David Weiss, was terminated Dec. 19, 2024. . . . Days later, the sheriff’s office noted that it was conducting an investigation into Weiss that involved possession of child sexual assault material. Weiss shot and killed himself. . . .”

These revelations are horrifying. And that’s just one district. Let’s quickly review some other examples (bearing in mind that criminal accusations are not the same as convictions).

Denver Post: “A STEM School Highlands Ranch teacher allegedly kissed a student and gave them marijuana and cigarettes. . . . Tera Johnson-Swartz, 44, was arrested on suspicion of second-degree kidnapping, a felony, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. . . .”

CBS: “Fort Collins Police Services have arrested a high school teacher [David Miles] in Northern Colorado who now faces several felony charges related to an alleged sexual assault of a child.

WJAR: “37-year-old Tyler Zanella was sentenced in April to 12.5 years in prison [following] accusations that Zanella hit a nonverbal student with autism while working as a school bus aide for the Poudre School District (PSD). An investigation into the accusations revealed evidence that Zanella had also abused 10 other PSD elementary schoolers, according to the Larimer County District Attorney’s Office.”

Denver7: “Former Littleton bus paraprofessional Kiarra Jones is the fourth . . . case of alleged assault of autistic students on Colorado school buses since 2016. The incidents took place in the St. Vrain Valley, Aurora, Poudre and Littleton school districts.”

Gazette: “Terrance Stanley, who works as armed safety and security in the [Widefield School District 3] district, was arrested . . . on suspicion of felony child abuse.”

Drawing the right conclusions

I think you get the idea. Most of the time, most students in Colorado’s schools are safe. But in some cases adults involved with schools abuse the children in their care. Repeated problems in Jefferson County are especially worrying.

A biased writer might try to lay out these facts as though they were indicative of public schools and point to pervasive problems, the way some journalists smear homeschool families.

It is worth thinking about structural problems with public schools that may make them more violent than they otherwise might be. Adults in large bureaucratic schools have a lot of power over and access to children, conditions that enable some adults in schools to abuse their authority. Because public schools rely on tax dollars, they are not very responsive to parental concerns. And the politically powerful teachers’ unions routinely attack private education while downplaying problems in public schools.

Still, most students stay safe in public schools, and almost all adults associated with schools are good people trying their best to improve the lives of students.

It won’t do to demonize homeschoolers while pretending that public schools are little utopias. Thankfully, as homeschoolers, my family has ample time to cover such topics as logical inference and bias. I only wish certain news journalists would spend more time with those subjects.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.