Illinois has many bad public schools that teach almost none of their students to read, write, or do math competently. Rather than fixing those schools, it is moving to crack down on homeschooling:
A state bill protested by hundreds of homeschooling families at the Illinois state Capitol advanced out of committee on Wednesday and will head to the state House floor for a vote, likely sometime next week…House Bill 2827, known as the Homeschool Act, passed out of the Education Policy Committee by a vote of 8-4. If it passes a House floor vote, the bill will then go to the full House for a vote, followed by the Senate and then onto the desk of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker….
The bill would establish requirements for parents to meet to homeschool their children and if they do not comply, they could face up to a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail. Hundreds of homeschooling families gathered inside the state Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, earlier Wednesday, condemning the bill as an overreach by lawmakers.
Will Estrada, senior counsel for the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, told Fox News that the bill’s language was left “open-ended for unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to be able to write different sections of regulations.”
“If this bill is passed into law, it’s going to be expanded in future years to put even more restrictions on homeschool and private school families,” Estrada said after testifying at Wednesday’s hearing. “The record of homeschoolers shows that we do well academically, socially, emotionally and so why are we messing with them? That’s the question. This bill is a solution in search of a problem.”
More and more parents are seeking to escape rotten schools in Illinois. Since 2012, student “proficiency in math has dropped by 78 percent since then, while proficiency in reading has declined by 63 percent” in the Chicago public schools, even as the Chicago schools are “spending $29,028 per student in the current school year—a 97% increase since 2012.”
Meanwhile, homeschooling rose from 2% of Illinois students in 2020 to about 5% today. Homeschoolers do better on standardized tests than kids in the public schools.
Many public schools have emptied in Chicago, where the teachers union has fought the closure of failing and empty schools, and under its influence, the Chicago schools want “to spend $1 billion alone on maintenance/upgrades for the 20 most-empty schools.”
Illinois has recently restricted school choice, “by stripping 15,000 students of the ability to attend private schools,” notes the Illinois Policy Institute, which notes that the homeschooling bill also imposes some regulations on private schools.
As Guy Benson notes, “Illinois is broke and deeply dysfunctional, with teachers unions bleeding the place dry, and the Dems who dominate the state are moving to crack down on…homeschooling. Union bosses” are “getting their (taxpayer-funded) political money’s worth with this scheme,” having made political donations to most state legislators.
