Regulators ubiquitously dichotomize schooling into two discrete sectors: public and private. Although homeschooling is regulated in some contexts as a third sector, the general approach is to treat ...it as a species of private education by subjecting it to public regulation while simultaneously denying it public funds. But the public/private binary is increasingly difficult to sustain as charter schools multiply and, especially, as virtual schooling increasingly penetrates primary and secondary education. Public school systems are deploying virtual education in ways that erode once impermeable walls between public and private. Many obstacles to homeschooling will fall with those walls-particularly obstacles related to government financing of homeschooling activities.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
The bricks-and-mortar schools contemplated by American education law and regulation are discrete, bureaucratic institutions, where children interact in person with one another, and with adults who ...supervise them, inside fixed physical borders at fixed times. Their governance is likewise defined geographically. Virtual schooling, by contrast, is untethered from geography, is ubiquitously asynchronous, and involves the interaction of machine representations of people rather than of people themselves. Virtuality privileges the consumer over the bureaucrat, encourages the disaggregation and recombination of educational components on a bespoke basis, and brings different economies of scale and competitive features to the educational marketplace. The education law we have—the law of the traditional, embodied school—fits virtual technology poorly in critical respects. Virtuality demands fundamentally new legal approaches to areas as diverse as curriculum, attendance, student health and safety, privacy, parental responsibility, disability, student rights, discipline, governance, and equity. Responding to these demands provides occasion to see the law afresh, to reassess and redirect, to align principle and practice more closely, and ultimately to transform educational regulation in the service of equity and learning. This is an opportunity of a kind that has not presented itself since the beginning of the Progressive Era.
