(CBS) It is estimated that 850,000 children in this country are home-schooled -- the overwhelming majority by parents who have only the best interests of their children at heart.

But homeschooling is largely unregulated. A CBS News investigation reports how some children have suffered abuse -- and much worse -- while no one was watching.

Neil and Christy Edgar will be sentenced next month in Kansas for abusing and murdering their 9-year-old son. He suffocated after his head was wrapped in duct tape as a punishment for taking food without permission.

It's a shocking case, but as CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, not an isolated one. A CBS News investigation found dozens of cases of parents convicted or accused of murder or child abuse who were teaching their children at home, out of the public eye.

"A lot of reports for suspected abuse or neglect are made by the schools when they observe children coming in that may be bruised or not well fed," says Marcia Herman-Giddens, of the North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute.

In Iowa, a father is serving life, and a mother goes on trial later this month, for killing their 10-year-old adopted son and burying him at their house. Because they were home schooling, no one noticed he was missing for more than a year.

There are two notorious Texas cases.

Andrea Yates gained national attention when she drowned her five children in a bathtub. Deanna Laney told investigators she beat her three sons with rocks, killing two of them. Both mothers taught their children at home.

"The genuine home schoolers are doing a great job with their children, but there is a subgroup of people that are keeping them in isolation, keeping them from public view because the children often do have visible injuries," says Herman-Giddens.

Even a very public home school success story can hide a private dark side. Marjorie Lavery says her father beat her before the National Spelling Bee then threatened to kill her after she came in second. He pleaded guilty to child endangerment after she testified about years of cruelty.

Hal Young and other home school advocates vigorously defend the right to teach their children at home without government intrusion.

"The cases that you've mentioned are very, very rare - extremely rare," says Young.

"There's not a pattern there, there's not a trend," says Young. "It's not something you can point your finger at and say there's this vast undercurrent, because there's not."

But it's hard to know how widespread abuse might be because the government doesn't keep track. It doesn't even know how many children are taught at home in this country.

In eight states, parents don't have to tell anyone they're home schooling. Unlike teachers, in 38 states and the District of Columbia, parents need virtually no qualifications to home school. Not one state requires criminal background checks to see if parents have abuse convictions.

The Edgars now face life in prison. The dilemma raised by their case and others: how to protect parents' rights to raise their children and still protect children from parents who abuse them.

COMMENTS
According to the Home School Legal Defense Fund, 6 states (11 percent) have no home school requirements; 10 states (18 percent) have negligible home school requirements such as student identification as home schooled; 18 states (33 percent) have
minimal requirements for home schooling such as course identification and student progress reporting; 21 states (38 percent) have good home schooling standards including home visits, minimum teacher education/background check, continuing student progress standards, and so on. (Figures above are for US states and territories).

I had no idea that home schooling was such a mess in the USA. I'm sure that many, if not most, parents take their home school efforts seriously with acceptable results. But immediate action should be taken to standardize and expand each state's home school regulations. Each program should have the intervention of children and family services to be on the lookout for abuse and/or neglect, incliding parent/instructor background checks.

This is an immense subject because it is encompassing a lot of people who are fed up with the schools for one reason or another. Some are doing it because of religious convictions, some for educational concerns that the schools don't manage to address, others for nefarious purposes according to this report, which I don't doubt at all.

We have one home schooled kid in the extended family. It became urgent to find him a better educational situation when the public schools did not address his needs because he was highly gifted and socially inadapted to deal with his great stature because quite frankly, boys like to fight and a big guy lacking coordination was a good target.
So between a lack of any challenge and the A requiring a kid to go back to what must have been like two plus two equals four to get that top grade, he left the system and was tutored by several relatives. He entered a community college then one of the most prestigious universities around so it worked. It might have backfired.
Socially the kid suffered isolation and is still making it back uphill.

Did he lack supervision from the proper authorities to address his problems? Yes, but they did not provide that supervision in the first place. Schools are overwhelmed and bullying problems etc are just too rife for them to address them all.

I have known many homeschooling families in the Philadelphia area. I'd say half of them are for religious reasons and they have their own curriculum and it's adapted to their beliefs. No dinosaurs in the math book mind you!
Many of them socialize together or belong to organizations that share materials. They also take their kids to classes etc.
One of the most salient things to me though is the mother is pretty much the main person doing the work and in some families the role has been assigned to her to be the hearth and home person as well as educating those kids. It requires a lot of devotion and I think few people are really made for that much contact with their children without some sharing of roles. This is my belief.
Even with the best intentions, some of the mothers doing this job are overwhelmed and the kids are good kids, but, they become used to having Mom at their beck and call and responding to their whims. I remember the kind of chaotic situation in some of their homes and I thought, I don't think I could do this, my kids are too social!

Some of the families that are 'home-schooling' are also those who may have decided it wasn't worth forcing their kids to school or they wish to keep them 'protected' but in reality, they are perpetrating unspeakable acts of abuse on them in the guise of religious freedom. Some of the cults kept the kids at home and 'home schooled' them.

I don't know whether state regulation is going to do the trick however.

I firmly believe that some of the most important thing a child learns is learned at recess. School yard politics are tremendously important in preparing kids to live in the real world.
I do not claim that all is perfect there, and have a son who was the victim of some pretty nasty bullying. However we got help for that, and the social skills he has learned (both within and outside of that situation) will serve him well.
I have only known a few kids who were homeschooled, and every one of them ended up with social inadequacies, and had a really hard time adjusting once they eventually reentered the mainstream. And they all did at some point or another.
The fact that some parents are using it as a means of hiding the abuse of their kids is truly frightening.
A whole year went by without anyone noticing that that boy wasn't around anymore. How many have never been noticed?

Nearly a year ago BBC Television broadcast a programme on home schooling in the U.S. In the majority of cases - according to that programme - the reason(s) were religious.

Some of the parents interviewed struck me as extremely sanctimonious and arrogant. Some said they didn't want their kids to mix with (and be tainted by) the 'ungodly', with people who accepted the theory of evolution and so on. Obviously, I have no idea whether such views are typical.

I do not doubt that this can happen - it seems tailor made for a certain kind of abuser. I hope that this is not used to tarnish home schooling wholesale, though.
I personally am not a great fan of home schooling, for reasons mentioned above, of social isolation. I also don't really believe that it is in the best interests of our children to only expose them to our own viewpoints. However, I know a lot of people who do home school, and most of them are making at least as good a job of it as the public schools (and our public schools here are, by and large, pretty good.)
One hopes that now that some light has been thrown on to possible abuses, some kind of periodic check-in by authorities will be built into the system.

I agree with agony - abusers can certainly take advantage of lax home school regulations and use them for their own advantage. I would really hope that all homeschoolers wouldn't be lumped in with them, or with the "kooks."
I've homeschooled for the last 15 1/2 years. 3 of my 4 children have graduated from college, and my youngest is 15 and in 10th grade. My son, the oldest, is a District Manager for a major US Account Services Company. My oldest daughter lives at home and teaches at a child care facility, and my middle daughter, who graduated from college at 18, is living and teaching English in China.
My kids were always involved in Church, 4-H, Boy and Girl Scouts, local sports teams, etc., and I would match their social skills against any public schooled children.
Here in Pennsylvania, we have pretty stringent regulations and I'm guessing it would be pretty hard for a child to just disappear. I'm sure it is possible, though - although it is equally as possible for a family to move into a neighborhood and just not ever register their children in school at all.

I don't know about abuse, but it seems like each of the families they get on the wife swaping or Nanny 911 shows whose kids are home schooled, the kids almost always seem to be behind their peers in academics.

Cinnam0n, I'm glad you posted your experiences. What you describe is more my experience with homeschooled kids than the negative cases.
I've known many homeschooled kids, and they have all been well-adjusted, social, involved, pleasant people.
I see nothing inherently wrong with homeschooling, and in fact am considereing it with my own kids since the state of public schooling in California is abysmal right now. When I went to high school here, it was one of the best places in the country. Now it ranks somewhere near the bottom of the heap.
Homeschooling here is monitored (not sure to what extent) and they have groups that work together, and are also allowed to participate in the public schools' sports programs, music programs (what few there are left ) and other extracurricular activities. There are plenty of opportunites for socialization. And with the behavior of children in school nowadays, well, frankly, I'd rather mine weren't exposed to that any more than necessary.

Of course, there are abusive situations, as there are in ANY segment of society. There are many many more that are healthy and loving situations. I think it's a bit short-sighted and reactionary to blame the abuse on homeschooling.

Agreed. I've known far too many families personally who home schooled in the past. Many of the HS kids my son grew up with have long ago graduated from college. One went on to Annapolis and another was a page on Capitol Hill for a time.

To base what one believes about a subject due to what is offered on some synthetic television show seems incredible to me.

I'm sure that there are countless cases of effective and succesful home schooling; the article should have been more specific and balanced about them. I didn't interpret the article as a condemnation of the concept of home schooling, but rather a wake up call about a widespread activity that is fragmented, poorly run and ignored legislatively with some ghastly results.

It takes only one Andrea Yates to erase all of the positive home schooling accomplishments. I'm not saying that Mrs. Yates' home schooling of her children was the cause of her murderous rampage. But I will say that, had home schooling been monitored in the Yates' home state, perhaps the monitor would have acted on Mrs. Yates' many behavior oddities that her family, friends and doctors ignored or missed.

From most of what I've heard, seen and read about home schooling, one of the few things apparently not widely doubted is that purely academically it is successful. However, the point is sometimes made that failure may not be reported.

A further difficulty arises from the fact that the exact number of kids being schooled at home is unknown, which makes it almost impossible to compile accurate statistics except in those areas where registration of home schooled children is compulsory and works.

There's an interesting "Wikipedia" article on home schooling. The section on results discusses the issue of academic success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

Perhaps Bloomsby will be able to confirm that home schooling is certainly very rare in the UK. The alternative to State education is a network of excellent private schools where parents can rely on traditional educational standards. Sadly this is sometimes prohibitively expensive and the present labour government suspended the excellent assisted places scheme.

However well educated home schooled kids are academically, I do feel they may lose out a little on the rough and tumble of school life and its extracurricular activities, sport, etc.

In the UK home schooling is rare and is widely considered eccentric. To a large extent home schooling is provided by gifted parents for extremely gifted pupils. The parents feel that ordinary schools have little to offer and can't afford the fees at a good independent school. As for fee-paying schools in the UK, they vary enormsously in quality and in what they actually offer.

Most of the fee-paying schools are good to excellent, and I have no doubt that most of the very best schools from an academic point of view are outside the state system.

However, some fee-paying schools are appalling. It used to be said of one fee-paying day-school that the attitude was, 'Just pay our exhorbitant fees; we're not too bothered whether your kids actually attend regularly'. They were quite happy if kids turned up by 10am (!) and allowed kids of 14+ to miss school ... The school was in the bottom 10% of all national league tables, and if they'd reported results honestly they'd have been at the very bottom keeping company with the very worst 'bog standard' state schools. Even nowadays, there are snobs who will buy any rubbish in education to keep their children away from what one parent at the school usually called 'the criminal classes' (!), meaning ordinary folk.

In my view if kids miss about half their schooling every week the parents should be reported to Social Services without further ado. I find any form of bribery (whether disguised or not) to cover up for truant completely unacceptable.

As for 'traditional educational standards', the efforts of fee-paying schools are to some extent vitiated by the fact that they prepare take the same qualifications as the rest. Some of the heads of independent schools have for some time been campaigning for the introduction of a much more challenging set of parallel qualifications.

Have to agree with Bloomsby here about the differing standards in private schooling.

Strangely, my eldest daughter went through the state system and is the most gifted academically of my three children and is a successful architect.

The younger two went to private schools as we moved areas and the local schools were not appropriate. Whilst happy with the cathedral choir school, have to say that neither are as successful in their careers. They are, however, happy and well rounded individuals and now parents themselves.

The snobbery attached to private education is, I think, one of the peculiarities of the English. I was fortunate to be able to make choices with my childrens' education and, if qualified, would certainly have considered home tutoring if we could not have afforded the option we took.

All of my grandchildren are going through the state system - some in Devon and some in Cambridgeshire - the differences are quite interesting. Devon, tends to be more traditional and the area in which they live is rather Bohemian. Cambridgeshire schools do seem to be excellent and we couldnt be more happy with their progress.

This is nothing, I might add, to do with having Cambridge University in our midst.

Jersey has a three-tiered education system , private schools, free staate schools and fee paying state schools. The latter are in very high demand and it certainly used to be necessary to plut a child's name down at birth, if your child's birthday is towards the end of term it is likely they would n't get a place.

The fee paying states schools are selective and only accept children of average and above average ability, if heavily subscribed the 'average' pupils won't get places.

I don't know if the record for the most grade A 'A level' passes has now been beaten, but certainly it was held by a boy from a Jersey fee paying state school, I am not sure if it was 7 or 8 grade A's at A level.

I am unaware of any children being home-schooled here, I am fairly sure we have none. Gifted children will get special support from the education system.

Until the 1970s the U.K. had some types of schools that were in effect joint state and independent schools, in particular the direct grant schools. All of them had to offer at least 25% of their places free to local children, and had the option of offering a higher percentage if they so chose. (The government paid for the free places on the basis of a well established formula). For those who didn't have free places these schools charged reasonable fees. The schools were meritocratic and achieved very high standards.

It sounds as if the fee-paying state schools in Jersey may have some affinties with these schools.

In the UK fee-paying in state schools was abolished with effect from April 1945 under the terms of the 1944 Education Act. The result was that in the state sector it was in effect local authorities that decided, on the basis of tests and reports, what kind of school children attended on leaving primary school. In the long run this state of affairs was very hard to justify and impossible to sustain. I'm interested to learn that in Jersey this problem has been avoided.

I share Waggette's view that it's important for kids to experience the 'rough and tumble' of school life. However, I've noticed that a relatively small number of teenagers seem still to be very sheltered (and often also very shy) on reaching university. Usually they've been to calm, well ordered schools with few discipline problems. Yes, there are a few schools like this.

I went to a direct grant school in Southampton, I would estimate the percentage to have been about 66% of free places in my school, we had two forms of eleven-plus pupils and one form of fee payers in each year.

The state fee-paying schools here have two entrance exams, one at seven and the other at eleven. Children from other schools can take the exams at that time and compete for places. We have had the situation whereby a child had been in the school from the age of five then fail to progress to senior school at eleven, that is tough.

Overall, the standard of education is excellent here and the island consistantly has a higher GCSE and A-level pass rate than the national average.

I just wrote a very long letter spelling out some oddities in the Alberta system - our publicly funded Catholic schools; Hutterite colony schools; the charter system, which leads to things like a Mandarin immersion school being publicly funded - and I lost the whole thing inexplicably. Sigh.
The point I wanted to make was that Home Schooling here tends to be used by those too eccentric even to fit under this broad canopy, or by those in isolated places. Supporting gifted children is not usually the reason I hear from parents who home school, in this part of the country, anyway.

I'm sorry to hear that your letter/post disappeared.

As you suggest, I'd expect the situation to vary from country to country and in many countries also from region to region. Some aspects of the situation in Alberta certainly sound odd.

Incidentally, in the UK it's common for the state to subsidize faith schools, though there is controversy about this. Often the experiences of Nothern Ireland are cited as reasons for discouraging faith schools.

My comments about gifted children arose in connection with Waggette's post and apply to the UK, where the number of home schooled pupils is small. As Waggette pointed out, in the UK there's a wide range of independent (private) schools, which probably cater for many parents who might otherwise wish to keep their kids at home. However, independent schools charge very high fees.

The statistics for home schooling are likely to be compiled differently in different countries, and should be regarded with several pinches of salt. In federal countries there are often differences between the various states and provinces. For example, there is likely to be inconsistency in respect of home schooled kids above the minimum school-leaving age. In some places they will be included and in others ignored as irrelevant.

As far as the UK is concerned I don't think home schooling is seen as a problem.

I think the problem with home schooling in some instances is that, it is the only solution for some families whose children are just way out of the mainstream and can't find a way to fit into that mainstream. This is probably only a small percentage of the cases. In my own nephew's it was the only solution available.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but school requires a great deal of conforming to a lot of rules and regulations and someone who's got a different way of thinking or is way beyond that of his or her peers, is either given more work, or, considered a smart aleck spoiled brat. The kids who are tested into a program in America early on are fairly fortunate but, as their schools require more work, not all 'gifted' kids are going to fit that mold.

Someone who is capable of solving problems differently yet getting the correct answer may be doing it the way a scientist would, but because he or she hasn't done it the teacher's way, he or she will be penalized. My children went to French and American school and in both, had moments where they had to act stupid in order to please the teacher. I tried to teach them to play the game, as they might need this skill in work. In France, if you get the problem right, it's not an automatic good mark if you haven't done it exactly like the teacher's told you, with this color pen, underlined in yellow, what have you. In France, the child in English might have written a beautiful composition and put effort into it, though she could have done something boring and exactly right, and, no matter what, they'd mark her down for a preposition being in the wrong place, though you or I would say it could go in either place as English speakers.

In America, it was the same when I was little and learned math shortcuts from my teacher father that were over the head of the lady teaching the new math, so, they just assumed I was being a pain, put me into a math book that was for kids a year younger, and made me work in front of the class. I'm still getting over that now.

So, in gifted education they have a fancy name for being out of synch with your chronological age. I fear that this may be the only solution for some people whose children are far out of the mainstream in terms of their age level.
Imagine, you're so far ahead of your age group that, you either have to pretend not to understand or, you become the trained pony doing tricks and trust me on this one, it's probably easier to be behind than to be ahead in class.

If however, parents have decided that this is the case for their child and taken him or her out of the school system and are dragging him around here and there to quantum physics lessons and dance and what have you, I question the sort of upbringing this will give the child. It is almost always heavily mother based from what I can see,and though, some mothers are competent at this task, some become totally absorbed with their children, have no life whatsoever, and, it requires a major commitment from the wage earner. I have seen several families like this. I know that for some of them, the child was so far ahead of the mainstream that it was hard to send them to school, and putting a kid ahead in school doesn't solve the problem.
My son's been put ahead, and it's not the end all solution.

Here's another insider view of the kids on the playground though...oh my. They are so used to being accomodated by their mothers who reason with them that they can't handle children at first. They eventually do, but,they aren't used to dealing with kids who can't reason verbally like they can. This is just some, not all.

The religious families I've met, well, it kind of troubles me, as they don't seem armed for real life, but they are polite, well behaved and all that. I just worry that the lack of street smarts will play tricks on them.

I've never met any home schooling family that seemed to be abusing its power over their kids in any way though.

Only the charter system in the States is troubling as it may be letting some kids fall behind the wayside.

I think school is important not for knowledge, but, for getting along with others.

Heather makes a good point, I think - there is a certain amount of "this is how things are done here, get used to it" in schools. This can be frustrating to a creative spirit. However, it's not only in schools where you will encounter that attitude, and in order to get along in the world, you have to find a way of living with it.

I think it is a big mistake to think that schools are only for (or even primarily for) academics. A major funtion of school is to teach children how to survive in society - how to work with it, live by its rules, and yet still retain some creativity and individualism. This cannot be taught by mom at home. Even the outside activities which a good home-schooler will use may not really teach this. Well run sports and social programs may not really have the conflict necessary to help a kid develop his 'dealing with jerks' muscles.

I'd have to say that I learned almost everything academic despite school as we had literally no grammar at all and anyone in my years will back me up on that, none of us ever visited the counselor for college admissions ever, and various 'lacks' that any of us will name.
However, if a kid was able to find something enjoyable, they didn't suffer what the kids do now, dismally boring things that I'm not even sure will benefit them in the work world.

What I worry about is what if a kid is capable of solving equations, or writing a novel, yet, is penalized for not doing it the way it's taught, or not bringing in his or her notebook each day, or, well, that's what I fear. My way or the highway is a pretty dismal failure of the schools to do this.

By the way, it's best not even contemplate someone who is truly gifted in the French schools, as teachers will do their utmost to knock that kid down. NO one gets the top score ever unless they conform precisely to the model the teacher gives. You get an A by spouting what the teacher says on your exams, not by taking risks.
American schools, perhaps less so.


I think a parent of a child who doesn't fit into the system and there is a great gap, has to weigh the pros and cons. It will depend on the kid's personality too.
But what if getting an A meant accepting falsehoods? Sometimes it will, which is what bothers me.

Ah, I've noticed that kids who were taken out of the system here because they were way ahead and adapting would have required them to fake lack of knowledge, have been able to adapt to the junior or senior college system quite well and excell.

I won't be winning any parent of the year awards so I may as well say it ... I can't be the only ones who looks forward to the day that you can send the kids to school?

I agree with those that say that the academics is only a part of what a school is for. There is a school system here calledSchool of the Air for kids where distances are too far for them to get to school. They do everything they can to get the kids together and socializing - their motto is "parted but united".

I'm tickled by some of your comments, Bruyere. In the late 1960s a quite perceptive book appeared entitled "Learning to be a Pupil". (Alas, I forget the name of the author). I'm also aware of the of French schools, where one usually has to know exactly what the teacher wants and serve it up at the double.

There's a little anecdote, written in 1897 by Sir John Adams who in 1902 became head of the newly founded University of London Institute of education (ULIE). It's about kids having to guess the teacher's mind.

I've just spent several minutes searching for the original, without success, so again I'll have to rely on memory.

"Teacher (thinking of the purification of the R. Clyde): In his old age David II [of Scotland] visited Roseneath and fished in the Clyde. Why could he not do so now?

Child (full of common sense): 'Cos he's dead, sir!"

Well, that sparked quite a detour and yet another sad reminder that I'd be turned away at the pearly Mensa Gates, alas alack. I honestly think I have the Andromeda Strain syndrome of totally freezing or blanking out whenever faced with certain math or logic problems as the woman faced with a stoplight was.

I was looking for my 'young relative' though as the Mensan homeschoolers group has a group message board. It's quite interesting, but after about an hour of reading through it, plus the time it took to realize, sigh, I'm not Mensan...I was struck by how intense some parents were about their children's education. I know this is probably a virtue, but, one wonders, what happens when Mom or Dad aren't there to prod the kid along?
Many of the kids are overbooked as far as I can see! 5.2 activities per week are the average in bigger cities.

I am sympathetic to their plight at finding something that stimulates their kids and I know now that I should never have kind of snickered at some of the things I saw when mine were much smaller. (can you imagine, they were actually playing with....Fisher price toys! Oh heavens! I know this one woman who immediately yanked her child out of a school because they played with plastic uneducational toys.)
because now, I'm thinking that some kids are so far out of the mainstream that they need out of that system.

The argument for homeschooling gifted kids is often this, that many are more at ease with different ages of people, rather than the age of their classmates which creates a constant tension because no one wishes to stick out, and then again, no one really wishes to play like they don't understand indefinitely.
So, they're actually learning to get along with people of different ages (ie, taking community college courses or visiting museums or something) rather than just working their peers and trying to force themselves to appear slower than they really are.
It is something to think about.

So, the question might be posed this way, why DO we have to get along with people our same age? Is that a condition for living?