There Is Little Evidence Disproportionately Associating Home Schoolers with Child Abuse: A Rejoinder to Stewart and McCracken

Abstract

ABSTRACT Stewart and McCracken at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) present a rebuttal to our article where their main critique is regarding our study’s ideological roots. In this rejoinder to Stewart and McCracken, we highlight three things: a) the takeaways from our study are robust to the criticism of CRHE, b) our survey instrument and conclusions are well aligned with the existing surveys and findings on child abuse, and c) CRHE itself admits that their mission is not based on using empirical evidence for cross-sector child abuse comparison. They say, “they are not particularly interested in contesting our empirical findings.” While Stewart and McCracken claim that lax homeschooling laws enable or cause abuse, they provide no empirical evidence to support this claim. We argue that CRHE insists on pursuing goals based on their ideology, hence they miss the mark regarding the purpose of our empirical study and critiquing it. Our study is the first of its kind to use a valid and reliable instrument with a representative sample and we encourage others to further this line of empirical work. We caution policymakers to use representative evidence in framing child protection laws after accounting for the role played by demographics and not just school sector.