Real Heroes

by Lawrence W. Reed

  “A Spine of Pure Steel”

  In the 1960s, with the withholding issue still to be resolved, Kellems took up another tax crusade—to remove the built-in penalty against single people. Income tax rates for an unmarried person were as much as 42 percent higher than those for married couples making the same income.

  Gloria Swanson captured what made Kellems such an effective antitax lobbyist: “Vivien could quote passages from the Constitution by heart, recite the legislative history of obscure sections of the Internal Revenue Code, and do it all in a grandmotherly, finger-wagging manner that disarmed even the most experienced politicians.” Congress gave her a partial victory in 1969, when it cut the disparity to a maximum of 20 percent.

  The Bridgeport Post paid tribute to Kellems in an editorial:

  When it comes to possessing a spine of pure steel, we wonder if there is any man or woman in Connecticut who can match Miss Kellems. One lone woman against the whole U.S. government! If there are persons—and we know there are—who think she is simply a pugnacious person making a personal fight over the withholding tax, they are doing her a great injustice. Her interest is one of deep conviction and firm principle based on study of the history of the Constitution of the United States. She understands the circumstances which gave birth to this country, the firm realization of the founders that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and the steps which they took to prevent this power from being misused.

  Kellems ran four times for public office in Connecticut, once for governor and three times for U.S. Senate. Though she never won, she did something all too many candidates seldom do: she educated people. After a Kellems campaign, nobody could say she stood for what she thought people would fall for.

  Kellems lived until 1975, when she was seventy-eight. She never changed her mind about the income tax. The personal income tax forms that she filed for the last ten years of her life were all blank. Apparently not even the IRS wanted to tangle again with this scrappy patriot.

  Whether you agree or disagree with Vivien Kellems on the issues, you have to give her credit. She had principles—sound ones, in my estimation—and the courage to stand for them no matter the legal, economic, or political consequences.

  Lessons from Vivien Kellems

  Don’t roll over when unjust laws are passed: The rule of law is a prerequisite of a free society. But that does not mean every law is just or constitutional. Vivien Kellems challenged the government whenever she believed that a law violated individual liberty or exceeded the limits of federal or state authority.

  Bring attention to your cause: “Of course I’m a publicity hound,” Kellems once said. “Aren’t all crusaders? How can you accomplish anything unless people know what you’re trying to do?” Her fiery oratorical style, command of the issues, and ability to get to the nub of complex subjects made her a natural publicist for her causes.

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  Homeschoolers

  It’s for the Children!

  The hero in this story is not any one person but rather the moms and dads of some 2.3 million American children. Often at great sacrifice to themselves, they are rescuing children in a profoundly personal way.

  They are the homeschoolers, parents who give up time and income to supervise directly the education of their children. They teach, they arrange learning experiences in cooperation with other parents, and they inspire a love of learning.

  The Most Important Ingredient

  Of all the ingredients in the recipe for education, which one has the greatest potential to improve student performance?

  No doubt the teachers unions would put higher salaries for their members at the top of the list, to which almost every school reformer would reply, “Been there, done that!” Teacher compensation has gone up in recent decades, while indicators of student performance have stagnated or fallen.

  Other standard answers include smaller class size, a longer school year, more money for computers, or simply more money for fill-in-the-blank. The consensus of hundreds of studies over the past several years is that these factors exhibit either no positive correlation with better student performance or only a weak connection.

  On this important question, the verdict is in and it is definitive: The one ingredient that makes the most difference in how well and how much children learn is parental involvement. Homeschooling is the ultimate in parental involvement.

  When parents take a personal interest in their children’s education, several things happen. The child gets a strong message that education is important to success in life; it isn’t something that parents dump in someone else’s lap. Caring, involved parents usually instill a love of learning in their children—a love that translates into a sense of pride and achievement as their students accumulate knowledge and put it to good use. As one might expect, time spent with books goes up and time wasted on screens or in the streets goes down.

  But there’s so much more to the homeschooling experience. My colleague Marianna Brashear, curriculum development manager at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), explains:

  Much time is spent not just in books but also in seeing the world and participating in field trips with hands-on learning. There is so much knowledge that is gained through real-world exposure to a vast array of subjects far more lasting than reading out of a textbook. The word schooling in homeschooling is misleading because education takes place in and out of formal lessons. The biggest waste of time in schools comes not just from indoctrination but also from “teaching to the test,” where kids memorize, regurgitate, and forget.

  Words of Wisdom from Marianna Brashear

  “The word schooling in homeschooling is misleading because education takes place in and out of formal lessons.”

  The Homeschooling Boom

  American parents were once almost universally regarded as the people most responsible for children’s education. Until the late nineteenth century, the home, the church, and a small nearby school were the primary centers of learning for the great majority of Americans.

  American parents have largely abdicated this responsibility, entrusting supposed “experts.” The context for this abdication is a compulsory system established to replace parental values with those preferred by the states and now, to an increasing degree, by the federal government. (Remember J. Gresham Machen, our hero from chapter 19? He wrote, “This notion that the children belong to the State, that their education must be provided for by the State in a way that makes for the State’s welfare . . . , is inimical at every step to liberty.”)

  Twenty years ago, a Temple University report revealed that nearly one in three parents was seriously disengaged from his or her child’s education. The Temple researchers found that about one-sixth of all students believed their parents didn’t care whether they earned good grades, and nearly one-third said their parents had no idea how they were doing in school. I can think of no reason to believe things have improved in the two decades since.

  Teaching children at home isn’t for everyone. No one advocates that every parent try it. There are plenty of good schools—private, public, and charter—that are doing a better job than some parents could do for their own children. And I certainly praise those parents who may not homeschool but who see to it that their children get the most out of education, both in school and at home. Homeschooling almost always goes the extra mile, however, and it is working extraordinarily well for the growing number of parents and children who choose it.

  This outcome is all the more remarkable when one considers that homeschooling parents must juggle teaching with all the other demands and chores of modern life. Also, they get little or nothing back from what they pay in taxes for a public system they don’t patronize. By not using the public system, they are saving taxpayers billions of dollars annually—more than $27 billion, according to the National Home Education Research Institute—even as they pay taxes for it anyway.

  In the early 1980s, fewer than 20,000 children were homeschooled. From
2003 through 2012, the number of American children ages five through seventeen who were being homeschooled by their parents climbed 61.8 percent, to nearly 1.8 million, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That’s probably a conservative estimate, but it equals 3.4 percent of the nation’s students in this age group.

  Parents who homeschool do so for a variety of reasons. Some want a strong moral or religious emphasis in their children’s education. Others are fleeing unsafe public schools or schools where discipline and academics have taken a backseat to fuzzy, feel-good, or politically correct dogma. Many homeschool parents complain about the pervasiveness in public schools of trendy instructional methods that border on pedagogical malpractice. Others value the flexibility to travel with their children for hands-on educational purposes, the ability to customize curricula to each child’s needs and interests, and the potential to strengthen relationships within the family.

  “When my wife and I first decided to homeschool our three children,” says Bradley Thompson, a political science professor who heads the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University, “we did it for one reason: we wanted to give them a classical education—the kind that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson might have received when they were young boys.” He continues:

  Within a couple of years, we added a second reason: we didn’t want our children exposed to the kind of socialization that goes on in both government and some private schools. Over time, however, we added a third reason: homeschooling became a way of life for our family, a way of life that was irreplaceable and beautiful. By the time our third child goes to college, we will have been homeschooling for eighteen years. Those years have been, without question, the most important of my life.

  Proving the Critics Wrong

  Homeschool parents are fiercely protective of their constitutional right to educate their children. In early 1994 the House of Representatives voted to mandate that all teachers—including parents in the home—acquire state certification in the subjects they teach. A massive campaign of letters, phone calls, and faxes from homeschool parents produced one of the most stunning turnabouts in legislative history: by a vote of 424–1, the House reversed itself, and then it approved an amendment that affirmed the rights and independence of homeschool parents.

  The certification issue deserves a comment. We have a national crisis in public education, where virtually every teacher is duly certified. There is no national crisis in home education.

  Critics have long harbored a jaundiced view of parents who educate children at home. They argue that children need the guidance of professionals and the social interaction that comes from being with a class of others. Homeschooled children, these critics say, will be socially and academically stunted by the confines of the home. But the facts suggest otherwise.

  Reports from state after state show homeschoolers scoring significantly better than the norm on college entrance examinations. Prestigious universities, including Harvard and Yale, accept homeschooled children eagerly and often. And once homeschoolers get to college, they tend to perform better than students from public or private schools: U.S. News and World Report cited various studies showing “that on average homeschooled students have higher grade point averages in their freshman years and have higher graduation rates than their peers.”

  But what about socialization? That’s probably the question homeschooling parents hear more than any other. The evidence contradicts claims that homeschooled students will be socially stunted. In fact, as homeschooling expert Diane Flynn Keith put it in an interview with Homeschool.com: “Socialization is actually meant to prepare children for the real world, which means learning to interact and deal with people of all ages, races, and backgrounds. In this case, homeschooling actually does a better job of this because homeschoolers spend more actual time out in society.” A 2013 article in the Peabody Journal of Education supports this claim. After reviewing the research on homeschooling and socialization, the author, Professor Richard G. Medlin, concludes: “Homeschooled children are taking part in the daily routines of their communities. They are certainly not isolated; in fact, they associate with—and feel close to—all sorts of people.”

  Homeschooling parents emphasize this engagement. Writing in The Freeman in May 2001, homeschool parent Chris Cardiff observed that because parents aren’t experts in every possible subject, “families band together in local homeschooling support groups.” Cardiff continued: “From within these voluntary associations springs a spontaneous educational order. An overabundance of services, knowledge, activities, collaboration, and social opportunities flourishes within these homeschooling communities.”

  My former FEE colleague B. K. Marcus, also a homeschool parent, agrees. “Homeschooling produces communities and participates in a division of labor,” he says. “Homeschooling is social and cooperative, contrary to the stereotype of the overprotected child under the stern watch of narrow-minded parents. Traditionally schooled kids show far fewer social skills outside their segregated age groups.”

  A quick Internet search reveals thousands of cooperative ventures for and among homeschoolers. In Yahoo Groups alone, as of July 2016, about 8,400 results pop up when you search for the keyword “homeschool.” Close to 1,500 show up in Google Groups. Facebook is another option for locating a plethora of local, regional, and national homeschool groups, support groups, events, co-ops, and communities.

  As homeschoolers reach high school age, they can participate in early-college and dual-enrollment programs. Marianna Brashear reports that these programs “are quite eager to admit homeschoolers for their ability to take responsibility and to self-motivate, for their maturity, and for their determination to learn and succeed.” Her own daughter, at fourteen, began a program at a nearby technical institute that gave her high school and college credit simultaneously.

  The few longitudinal studies that have been conducted all show that homeschoolers fare well as adults. In measures of employment, community involvement, and even happiness, homeschool graduates do better than the rest of the population.

  Educational Heroes

  In every other walk of life, Americans traditionally regard as heroes the men and women who meet challenges head-on, who find solutions when the conventional responses don’t work, and who persevere to bring a dream to fruition. At a time when troubles plague education and educational heroes are too few in number, recognizing the homeschool champions in our midst may be both long overdue and highly instructive.

  Common to all homeschool parents is the belief that the education of their children is too important to hand over to someone else. Hallelujah for that!

  Lessons from Homeschoolers

  Don’t be so quick to entrust important decisions to “experts”—and certainly not to the government: We have a national crisis in public education, not in home education. The next time you hear someone calling for more federal funding for education, or more spending on technology in classrooms, or some other government reform, remind the person that parental involvement makes the most difference in how well and how much children learn.

  Question the conventional wisdom: Parents might never start homeschooling if they accept at face value the skeptics’ common criticisms, such as that parents aren’t qualified to teach their children in most subjects or that homeschooled children will be socially stunted. Dig deeper and you’ll see that the evidence contradicts these claims. In fact, homeschoolers perform better academically and develop stronger social skills than their peers in public or private schools.

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  Larry Cooper

  Never Too Late for Character

  On a fateful day he’ll never forget, eighteen-year-old Lawrence (“Larry”) Cooper, an unmarried black man and high school dropout, found himself on the wrong side of the law. He attempted an armed robbery of a store in downtown Savannah, Georgia. It was April 1987. The cash involved? A mere eighty dollars, enough to finance his cocaine habit for less than a day. Larry was cau
ght and sent to a maximum-security prison.

  One month after Larry’s arrest, his son was born. The boy wouldn’t see his father outside a cell until November 2015, when his dad was finally released. “I wasn’t there even to sign the birth certificate,” Larry told me in February 2016.

  These lamentable chapters of the Larry Cooper story are distressingly familiar in America.

  Today, incarcerated black American males number about 750,000. That’s more than the entire prison populations of India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel, and England combined. An August 2013 report from the Sentencing Project on Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System revealed that “one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.”

  The leading cause of incarceration of black males is nonviolent drug offenses. This is no accident. President Richard Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser and Watergate coconspirator John Ehrlichman revealed in a 1994 interview:

  We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

  For black men, the next leading causes of incarceration are false accusations, then crimes against persons, followed by crimes against property. Economist Thomas Sowell argues convincingly, as do many others, that the genuinely criminal behaviors—the violations of person and property—have much less to do with racism and poverty than with the debilitating, family-busting policies of the welfare state. (It doesn’t help that poor, inner-city families are often trapped in lousy government schools.) Sowell observes: