HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - Mary Ann Eagleson's garage is crammed with reminders of how cumbersome it has been to educate her four children at home, including 10 cardboard boxes full of assignments completed over 14 years.
Her two oldest are adults now, but there is still plenty of paper to chase for the two younger children under Pennsylvania's 1988 homeschooling law.
Because of the law, which requires a rigorous accounting of instructional time at home, Eagleson estimates the family has spent 1,300 cumulative hours, or nearly an academic year, just on paperwork.
"As the kids have gotten older, I've transferred more of those responsibilities to them, but it becomes somewhat of a bone of contention," said Eagleson, who lives in Hershey, about 10 miles east of Harrisburg. "They read from their science books and they just want to write down 'science' in the assignment log, but I keep telling them we have to be more specific."
Eagleson hopes that a bill recently introduced in the state General Assembly will eliminate the need to fret over so many details. The proposal would erase many of the law's mandates, including standardized testing, the keeping of assignment logs and year-end evaluations of student work portfolios.
Homeschooling advocates say Pennsylvania's law is one of the strictest in the nation. They say that as more research and anecdotal evidence suggests that homeschoolers can perform as well as their public-school peers, more states have been willing to relax the rules.
"Initially, nobody was certain that homeschooling really works — thus the need for heavier regulation, or in some cases, complete prohibition," said Christopher Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association in Purcellville, Va. "I think the two factors driving this are that homeschoolers are pushing for it and studies are showing there is no need for all this regulation."
According to the most current estimate by the U.S. Education Department, about 850,000 of the nation's 50 million children are homeschooled. Their parents' reasons for keeping them at home vary widely, from concerns that public schools will undermine their religious beliefs to fears of bullying and violence.
Thirty-seven states have adopted laws or regulations governing homeschoolers since 1956, when Nevada became the first state to do so. More recently, some states have revised their laws to reduce the frequency of standardized tests for homeschoolers or to eliminate test requirements entirely.
Arkansas, for example, had required annual standardized testing of homeschoolers under its 1985 law. Students who fell below a certain achievement threshold had to be retested, and if they failed to improve their scores they could be required to attend public or private school.
In 1997, state lawmakers changed the requirement so that homeschoolers only would be required to be tested in grades five, seven and 10, the same years as public school students.
"Under the old law, it was quite an intensive process of setting up statewide testing for homeschoolers," said Dottie Hughes, homeschool program administrator for the Arkansas Department of Education. "I think the parents objected to the yearly monitoring of their children, and traditionally we've seen that homeschooled students have scored higher than other students."
After the changes were enacted, homeschooling parents felt they were finally receiving equal treatment under the law, said Jerry Cox, executive director of The Education Alliance, which represents about 6,000 Arkansas homeschoolers.
"I think the biggest change was that it helped homeschoolers in the state of Arkansas not feel discriminated against by the state," Cox said. "On one hand, you have private schools, which are not regulated at all. They don't test. They don't register with the state. ... Then you had the poor little homeschool family that had to be able to jump through all kinds of hoops."
School administrators remain concerned that some states still provide no regulation. They believe some guidelines are necessary so they can track students' progress and be sure that their learning environments are safe.
"You have to recognize that not everyone who is homeschooling is capable of doing it or is doing it for the right reasons. We are required as a society to properly protect those among us who are least able to protect themselves," said Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "When you start providing no oversight, you are putting the children involved in some jeopardy."