As part of discovering more about homeschooling, you may have heard the terms school choice, ESA (Education Savings Account), voucher, refundable tax credit.
All these terms basically mean the same thing: government funding of private education, including homeschooling.
Homeschooling is negatively impacted by government-funded school choice in several ways:
- Freedom is threatened – historically and pervasively what the government funds, it regulates. For example, in Arizona, ESA users can no longer buy anything with government money unless a curriculum explicitly requires it. In a similar situation, multiple states have been forced to sue to avoid compliance with LGBTQ expansions of Title IX regulations tied to Federal funding.
- Costs are inflated – prices consistently rise when government subsidizes (think colleges and real estate), making consumers even more dependent on the subsidy.
- Dependency is created – when inevitable regulations come, families may compromise rather than lose the money they have become dependent on receiving. A co-op in Michigan that accepted government funds was told by the government that prayer was no longer allowed during classes. Rather than give up the government money, the co-op complied and only allows prayer during non-class time.
Here are links with more information on this topic, followed by MPE’s Facebook Live with HSLDA attorney Scott Woodruff about ESA legislation proposed in KS in 2023:
- https://homeschoolidaho.org/school-choice/
- https://homeschoolingbackgrounder.com/key-articles-on-school-choice-from-homeschooling-backgrounder/
- https://hslda.org/post/how-esa-funding-could-undermine-homeschool-freedom
- https://info.classicalconversations.com/educationalfreedom
- https://nickitruesdell.com/understanding-school-choice/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsls-NpwF1s (School House Rock’d – The True Cost of School Choice)
ESAs nationwide
For the past few years, we’ve been seeing a steadily building wave of interest in laws that allow money that has been collected by the government to be sent back to families for supporting methods of education other than public schools.
In the states where individual freedoms and liberties are held in a very high esteem, for example, Utah, Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, a number of others, West Virginia, Arkansas, these bills have gained tremendous traction.
So it’s a very odd situation because generally when there’s a legislature that values individual freedoms, they’re going to want to protect homeschooling because homeschooling is, I could say the quintessential example of an individual freedom and individual liberty.
But we find ourselves in a very strange situation of very openly opposing many of our friends, because it’s our friends, the people on the conservative end, the people who value individual freedoms, who want to make this government money available for alternatives to public school.
Now, on the one hand, I’m sympathetic.
With rampant wokeism and pushing gender identity issues to a point where kids feel like they’re not really going to be accepted as normal unless they get on the gender change bandwagon, you kind of have to feel sympathy for parents who really want an alternative.

And when we see a bill that only sends money to private schools where the private school is not the same as a homeschool, we don’t oppose those bills. For example, in Iowa an ESA bill was proposed that made it very clear that this money could only go to private schools (not homeschools). We looked at it, we analyzed it, we said, “Okay, this money cannot go to homeschoolers, so we are okay with it.” And that bill became law.
But in contrast in the state of Virginia this year, a bill was filed that would’ve allowed homeschoolers to get government money.
One of the chief sponsors of that bill was a very good friend of homeschooling, I mean a very, very good friend. And yet he had the belief that it would somehow help us to get government money.
I don’t think it’s going to help homeschoolers to get government money. And let me explain why.
Reason 1: Government money creates government dependence.
When people have to fund their own homeschooling, they’re not relying on anybody else for that money. That means they can do whatever they want with their money.
But if homeschoolers get in a situation where they are relying on someone else to give them that money, then they are gonna become dependent upon that entity.
And when that entity starts telling them, “Oh, you can’t homeschool that way, you can’t homeschool with those books, you have to homeschool according to our specifications,” it’s going to be very hard for them to turn down that government money. So number one, government money being sent to homeschoolers will create dependence.
Reason 2: Government money = ‘quid pro quo’.

If government money goes to homeschool families, it will create a quid pro quo mentality where the government says, “Oh, we did you a favor. We sent you thousands of dollars. Now it’s time for payback. You have to give us our quid pro quo now because we’re doing you such a big favor. The quid pro quo is we’re gonna double homeschool regulations on you.”
And we think that is a very unhealthy situation. That’s a situation where the government is going to demand a pound of flesh for all the good stuff they’ve given you.
Now, let me add that the lawmakers who are proponents of these bills, the ones pushing them right now, they would never do that. The lawmakers in Kansas who like ESA legislation would never in their lives turn around and say, “Okay, we want to double the regulations on homeschoolers,” but we have to be realistic.
One day the guard will change, the tide will change. One day there will be a legislature in Kansas that is not friendly to individual rights. We would be naive to think that the folks who are in control in Kansas right now, that that will be the dominant philosophy 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now.
But we’re interested in protecting homeschool freedom, not just now, not just today, not this year or next year, but for generations, for generations to come. That’s our vision and it’s our view that ESA bills create a long tail, long-term hazard to freedom.
Now people will say, well, what harm has happened so far from ESA bills? That’s a very valid question. Problem is ESAs have not been around very long.
So the short answer is, there hasn’t been enough time for the train wreck to occur. This is going to be a slow-moving train wreck. And the train wreck will happen when the party with the other philosophy takes control.
And when they take control, what we believe is very possible, maybe even likely, is that they’ll say, “Oh, we’re sending thousands of dollars to homeschoolers. We better tighten up on that. We need to be fiscally accountable. We aren’t doing enough to create accountability. We’re sending money out there and not insisting on results.”
And that mindset of insisting on accountability is going to produce, we think in some states, is very, very bad homeschool law situations.
Example of ESAs in West Virginia

Let me give you something that’s the closest I know to an example in America. Iin 2021, West Virginia enacted an ESA.
As we looked at the situation, as we looked at who was in favor of the bill, who was against it, the politics of the situation, we did not think that we had the power to outright kill the bill. We didn’t think that was possible.
Next best solution was to create some kind of safeguard within the bill that would hopefully isolate us from collateral damage down the road.
So HSLDA worked with the local state group, and we were successful in getting amendments added into the bill to create different legal silos for homeschooling and recipients of the ESA money in West Virginia, they’re called Hope Scholars.
And we crafted an amendment which created a whole new exemption from compulsory attendance law called exemption M. Homeschoolers per se were under exemption B in the statute. And so by siloing them, we created different legal categories.
So if sometime in the future someone wanted to crack down on just the people getting the HOPE scholarship, they could go after exemption M and hopefully they would leave our exemption alone.
Did we think that was foolproof? We knew it wasn’t foolproof, but it was something that would help us.

Now let’s fast forward to 2023 in West Virginia. A bill was filed, we think primarily at the request of the treasurer who wanted to do some pretty minor procedural tweaks to how the money flows in those ESA scholarships.
It would’ve been a simple bill. But as the bill got into the process, some sources we don’t fully understand, someone inserted language in there that added brand new requirements for homeschoolers that had never existed before.
Well, when we found out about that, we said this is absolutely unacceptable. We communicated with all of our contacts. We got in touch with lawmakers who we know value individual freedom. We communicated with leadership type people and pretty soon, because everything worked out just right, got the bill amended to take out all the bad stuff.
When it got to the House floor, a Democrat offered an amendment. And I’m gonna kind of paraphrase what he said. It’s not his exact words, but a paraphrase. He said something like, since the state is now incentivizing parents to homeschool, we need to provide additional layers of protection for those children. Because as we all know, homeschool parents tend to abuse and neglect their kids. So since we are incentivizing homeschooling, we owe it to those kids to add new layers of protection. Not a quote, just to paraphrase.
Now, as you and I know, that’s absolute nonsense.
There are many very respected institutions that have chimed in on what the risk factors are for child abuse. And there are very well documented risk factors for child abuse. No reputable institution or hospital lists homeschooling as a risk factor for child abuse. It’s an absolute myth. There is no scientific study anywhere that says that homeschooling is a risk factor for child abuse. Doesn’t exist.
But the myth is out there. And people who already don’t like homeschooling love to perpetuate that myth. So this Democratic representative got up there and proposed his amendment.
And then of course there was debate and a couple people argued in favor of a couple people argued against it. When the vote came, his amendment was voted down. So that’s great news, but this illustrates a tremendous vulnerability in any state where an ESA becomes law.

ESAs: ‘A very substantial danger’
The fact that an ESA exists gives every lawmaker who doesn’t value individual freedom a platform for saying the same thing: since we are incentivizing homeschooling, now we have to make sure it runs well. Now we have to make sure those parents are accountable. Now we have to make sure it produces results. Now we have to make sure parents aren’t abusing their children or neglecting them.
It gives them that kind of a platform, and that is a very substantial danger. So those are the main reasons we oppose government money for homeschooling.
Homeschooling has worked fantastic ever since its inception, largely because it’s not connected to government purse strings. Homeschooling is not expensive, not expensive in terms of like out-of-pocket money.
Homeschooling can be done for free. There are free homeschool programs out there. When HSLDA did a survey, I’ll say 10 years ago on cost of homeschooling, about the average amount the family spent was in the neighborhood of $500.
That’s more than, you know, pocket money. But it’s not a whole lot, compared to what ESA bills are offering i- $4,000, $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 per child, which honestly we don’t need.
Have any of you out there spent $5,000 per student on homeschooling? You know what? I’m sure some have, but that’s gonna be an outlier. If you have the money, maybe you’ll spend it, maybe you won’t. But it’s certainly not required to put on a high-quality program.
So homeschooling operates wonderfully without government money, without government strings, without inviting the kind of government attention. That will come from the fiscal hawks who say, “Oh, now we’re spending this money. Now we have to demand accountability.”
And all of those measures that they will call accountability, those all are going to tend to shrink freedom. It’s going to tend to get smaller and smaller, to I don’t know what point. And once families are habituated to the money, they’re going to find it very hard to turn down the money.
Now in the West Virginia example I gave you the amendment that the Democratic representative offered wasn’t limited to just homeschool families getting the money. His amendment would’ve applied even to homeschoolers not accepting the money. And that’s a little scary.
We’ve been fighting to protect freedom for a long time. These ESA bills just kind of give us a bigger fight to fight. But HSLDA will continue fighting that fight in states with and without ESA bills.
Q&A on ESA-related matters
Are there states that have crafted ESA legislation in which homeschoolers are not eligible?
Yes, Iowa is one that’s the best. I also mentioned another state where homeschoolers were left out and that was Nevada. So it can be done. Honestly, it’s gonna be way, way trickier in states where a homeschool is a private school because they fall under the same legal category.

What is an education savings account as it relates to public school funding legislation?
The idea of an education savings account, which by the way is just a euphemism – nobody’s really saving anything. It’s just government money that comes out of the state treasury to a family. It’s the equivalent of a voucher or a subsidy, but it comes from public money. So the government collects tax money and then it sends that money back to people.
So it comes to you as government money, while in contrast, the tax credit or a tax deduction is simply you keeping more of your own money. HSLDA does not oppose those bills. We feel like they create much less of a hazard of bringing down higher regulations down the road. But an ESA bill, it’s not a tax credit. Not a tax deduction. It’s actual money that the government has collected going to private people.

What are the risks to homeschooling if a student becomes an ESA student in the short term?
Not really much because all of these ESA bills are being crafted so that people who take the money don’t feel like they’re being pushed under the heel of government regulation. But you have to think, okay, that’s just the camel’s nose under the tent. So the short-term danger is probably pretty minimal. The long-term danger is that people become habituated to that money. It’s going to be really hard to stop receiving that money when more and more of the camel comes into the tent in the form of government intrusion and regulation.
Some people have said, “Well, Scott, how do you know the future? How do you know this bad stuff is gonna happen? It hasn’t happened yet. Why do you think it’s going to happen in the future?”
Every single bill makes a statement about the future. Every bill that is filed presupposes that something will or won’t happen in the future. Every time a lawmaker votes yes or no on a bill, he is making certain assumptions about the future. He has to, she has to.
We hope that those assumptions are reasonable and that a lawmaker makes a decision in good conscience. I believe our assessment of the situation is reasonable and realistic.
HSLDA has been looking at the national homeschool legal scene since 1983. I personally have been looking at the homeschool legal scene for 24 years. I’ve been doing this a long time, long time I’ve been fighting bills that would restrict homeschool freedom. Long time I’ve been drafting bills to expand freedom.
I’m not naive about this. I can see the handwriting when it’s on the wall. I know the kind of scenarios that are going to tend to pour fertilizer on the idea of, “Yeah, we should regulate homeschoolers more.”
And again, it’s not going to happen with the people who write these laws now because they like freedom. But one day the guard will change. That’s when we’re gonna see the slow-motion train wreck happen.