Over one million children are homeschooled each year in the United States. While many of these children thrive, others suffer from a lack of adequate education, socialization, and access to mandatory reporters to escape familial abuse. For those children, there are no avenues through which they can assert their right under state law to a public education. Courts, however, are generally reluctant to engage with this topic for fear of interfering with parents’ rights. State legislatures, influenced by homeschooling rights organizations, have also failed to act.
This Essay offers a novel solution to this problem—stepping in to protect children where courts and legislatures have not. The Essay proposes that courts apply a modified version of the procedure set out in Bellotti v. Baird to cases where children assert their right to public education against their parents’ wishes. In Bellotti, the Supreme Court allowed minors seeking abortion to bypass parental consent. Under this framework, a child would be permitted to pursue a public education without parental consent if she can prove either that (1) her maturity level is that of an eighteen-year-old or older or that (2) receiving a public education is in her best interest.
While this proposal raises some practical implementation problems, it is a crucial step toward allowing children to assert their fundamental right to an education. For the children whose lives would be impacted by this proposal, the adoption of some kind of pathway to public education is of the utmost importance.
Authors
Jamie Miller: J.D., University of Virginia School of Law.
Samantha Blond: J.D., University of Virginia School of Law.
We would like to thank Professor Andy Block and Professor Gerard Robinson for their thoughtful feedback and suggestions. We are also grateful to Julie Mardini for her invaluable advice, as well as Lauren Bamonte, Maya Kammourieh, Niki Hendi, Sydney Eisenberg, and Sydney Hallisey for their helpful edits. Lastly, we would like to thank the editors of the Northwestern Law Review Online—Brianne Wylie, Matthew Chu, Michael Judah, Rachel Rucker, Micaela Yarosh, Joseph Wolf, Marisa McGettigan, Will Cutler, Nat Hartl, and Stuart Massa—for their hard work on this Essay.
Copyright 2024 by Jamie Miller and Samantha Blond
Cite as: Jamie Miller and Samantha Blond, The Missing Interest: Enforcing a Child’s Right to Public Education, 119 Nw. U. L. Rev Online. 184 (2024), https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1346&context=nulr_online.