LOS ANGELES — Home schooling can kill, reported CBS News in a two-part series Oct. 13-14 that critics decry as a journalistic hatchet job designed to trip up the growing home schooling movement.

“Home schoolers throughout the country are absolutely outraged,” said Kerry Kantor, a Colorado Springs, Colo., public school district employee who works as liaison between the district and thousands of home schoolers in the community. “Essentially, CBS News equated home schooling with child abuse.”

Does CBS News have it out for home schoolers?

“Of course not,” said CBS News publicist Andie Silvers, who deferred all other questions to the network's official statement.

In his first report, titled “A Dark Side to Home Schooling,” CBS News correspondent Vince Gonzales told the story of North Carolina's Nissa and Kent Warren, child abusers who home schooled their children for five years. An anonymous tipster told authorities to check on the household, and police found three dead children who'd been living in squalor. In a bedroom, 14-year-old Brandon had committed suicide with a rifle after killing his brother, Kyle, and sister Marnie.

The second CBS report, titled “Home Schooling Nightmares,” led with the case of Neil and Christy Edgar — Kansas home schoolers who abused and murdered their 9-year-old son.

Introducing the story, CBS anchor Dan Rather said: “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.”

Both stories stressed that home schools are largely unregulated by most states, therefore accommodating parents who choose to abuse and even kill their children.

The first report quoted Marcia Herman-Giddens, of the North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute, saying that home school laws “allow persons who maltreat children to maintain social isolation in order for the abuse and neglect to remain undetected.”

Kantor counters that child abusers are criminals who use any means necessary — not just statutes that allow home schooling — to get away with their crimes.

“They took a few sensational, isolated stories about murdered and abused children and exploited those tragedies by tying them in with home schooling,” Kantor said. “What about all the public school children who end up tragically abused and murdered in various circumstances? Where's the series that ties those murders to the proliferation of public schools?”

Kathy Harkins, a leader in the St. Louis Catholic Homeschool Association who home schools seven of her own children, said the CBS story was “just plain nonsense.” She suspects the series will do little to harm the reputations of home schoolers, and much to reveal how out of step the network is with middle America.

“In general, I find that the perception most people have about home schooling is extremely positive,” Harkins said. “The success stories and the standardized test scores of children who've been home schooled speak for themselves.”

All 50 states allow home schooling, but regulations vary from state to state. In 1999, after a decade of growth in the home school movement, the Parent Survey of the National Household Education Surveys Program found that an estimated 850,000 children are home schooled in the United States — about 1.7% of the country's population of school-aged children.

In 2001, results of a U.S. Department of Education survey shocked the education establishment by revealing that home schoolers as a whole do better on the SAT and ACT — standard college admittance tests — than students who go to schools outside the home. The survey found that home schooled students average 568 on the verbal test (out of a possible 800), whereas the rest of the schooled population averages 506. For math, home schoolers average 525, while others average 514.

Anecdotal home school success stories abound, such as 11-year-old Andrew Hsu's victory at the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair in April. Hsu — home schooled all his life — shocked judges when he brilliantly defended his self-titled project “Identification, Characterization and DNA Sequencing of the Homo Sapiens and Mus Musculus COL20A1Gene (Type XX Collagen) with Bioinformatics and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).”

Isolating Effect?

Despite the successes, CBS isn't alone in criticizing the lack of state regulation of home schools in most states. Rob Reich, a Stanford University assistant professor of political science, told the Register that unregulated home schooling allows parents to isolate children while indoctrinating them with a single set of values. Such isolation, he argued, threatens to “disable children and render them unable to engage in democratic citizenship.”

“It's not just the Catholic family, or the fundamentalist family that may want to completely isolate a child from competing views,” Reich said. “It's just as likely to be the left wing, New Age home schoolers in Boulder and Berkeley who want to indoctrinate their children with a leftist, pluralist doctrine while isolating them from competing ideologies. What I'm saying is that the right of parents to direct a child's education is only partial. The state may want to backstop the role of parents in order to protect the independent interests of the child. As it stands now, home schoolers have virtually unlimited authority over the child.”

Pete Storz, who founded a Christian home school support network in San Jose, Calif., argues that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows parents to do exactly what Reich opposes: instill in their children whatever religious or moral values they choose, without government interference.

“If government were to exercise such arbitrary, intrusive power, what would protect home schooling parents and their children from abuse by government officials?” Storz wrote in a position paper on Homsechoolchristian.com. He explains that government intrusion into the content of home schooling practices could easily lead to government exclusion of left wing schools, right wing schools, Christian schools, atheist schools or Jewish schools.

Kantor, of the Colorado Springs school district, said Reich's concerns about home school isolation from diversity are sensationalistic just like the CBS warnings of child abuse.

“The vast majority of home schooled children are arguably better socialized than children in public or private schools,” said Kantor, who has constant contact with public school children and home schooled children.

Kantor tells of a home schooling cooperative in Colorado Springs that involves hundreds of families who are secular, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant and atheist, representing a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

“It's one big happy family,” she said. “Children of all ages and backgrounds getting together for all sorts of academic and athletic events. Isolation? Far from it. Home schooled children have the freedom to go anywhere and do anything. That's not possible in the traditional classroom with one teacher and 20 or more students.”

Storz argues that shocking stories of extreme abuse, such as those aired by CBS, are used to stereotype home schoolers and single them out for unlawful government regulation.

“Fear, manipulation and stereotypes make for poor government policy and are insufficient grounds for barring or restricting home schooling,” Storz wrote.

Even if there were sufficient grounds for more home school regulation, Storz writes, it's not the government's role to identify groups of civilian Americans — such as home schoolers — as potential criminals that must be regulated in order to preclude potential crime.

“Second, government is forbidden to invade people's privacy without probable cause,” Storz argued. “Government cannot legally monitor its citizens — nor would it be possible. It is government's role to restrain evildoers. For this, existing community resources such as police, doctors and concerned neighbors suffice.”

In defending its series, CBS released an official statement that says: “These reports examined a group of people who are using home schooling as an excuse to hide the physical abuse they inflict on their children, a disturbing reality in this country. CBS News clearly reported that the majority of parents who home school their kids are doing a fine job of teaching and raising their children.”

Even some of the most vociferous critics of home schooling admit that it's an overall success.

“One of the basic rules to my approach to home schooling is: ignore the extreme cases,” said Reich. “If you listened only to advocates or critics of home schooling, you think that there were two possible results: either the kid wins the national spelling bee and gets into Harvard or Stanford, or the kid is abused, starved and killed by the parents. Of course, the overwhelming majority of home schooled kids fall in the vast middle.”

Wayne Laugesen is based in Boulder, Colorado.