Several past studies have shown that homeschool students typically outperform their public and private school counterparts on things like standardized tests and college performance. A 2016 study from the National Council on Measurement in Education showed that, when adjusted for demographic factors, homeschool students were on par academically with their demographically-similar peers.
In a recent paper published in the Arizona Law Review, Bartholet offered a more developed take on the ideas mentioned in the Harvard Magazine article. In the Arizona Law Review, Bartholet argues that while homeschool children may perform as well as their peers on standardized tests or in college, they are also often isolated from their peers and denied experiences and exposures that would make them more productive citizens.
"Also, academic success says nothing about success in terms of preparing students for civic engagement. Many homeschooled children miss out on exposure to others with different experiences and values. Most all miss out on extracurricular activities like student government. A very large proportion of homeschooling parents are ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture," she said.
Felix Miller is a 27 year-old doctoral student in philosophy living in Washington, D.C. He was homeschooled with his family in New York from kindergarten through high school, an experience he said he "really liked."
Miller said homeschooling gave his family the time and flexibility to engage in some travel and cultural activities that he may have missed out on were he in a public or private school.
"(M)y parents did a lot to instill a sense of wonder and willingness to try new things. We lived about an hour and a half from Montreal, so every few weeks we would go up, and we might go to the jazz festival that happens there every year, or we'd go to the opera, we'd go to the Biodome or the Museum of Fine Arts," he said.
The family also frequently attended local Shakespeare performances and did a lot of hiking in the Adirondacks, along with formal schooling in subjects like literature and science.
"I think that being homeschooled allowed me to have a lot of opportunities .. .intellectual and cultural opportunities that many of my public and private school peers didn't have the chance for," he said.
As for being isolated from peers, Miller said he and his siblings participated in several extracurricular activities, like a speech and debate team, Boy Scouts, and science competitions at the local high school that frequently put him in contact with students from public schools and a variety of backgrounds. Miller said in his junior year, he dated a girl from a local public school that he had met through speech and debate.
"I always had a pretty easy time meeting and making friends with both homeschoolers and public schoolers. I think (the Harvard Magazine article paints) a pretty isolationist picture of the way that most homeschooling occurs. I don't see that to be the case," Miller said.
"While it is true that my parents have certain disagreements with the dominant view on certain cultural issues...in public schooling, especially through things like sex education...I think in general in terms of socialization, they were always perfectly happy for me to have friends regardless of background," he said.
Laura Aumen is a 27 year-old medical radiation expert who was homeschooled in Omaha, Nebraska and now lives and works in the Dallas area in Texas.
Aumen said that most families are probably painfully experiencing isolation during this time of coronavirus, and that most homeschool families she knew growing up participated in a lot of group and extracurricular activities in order to avoid isolation.
"We were part of a very large homeschool group, there were all sorts of parent-run activities," she said. "A lot of these parents had a lot of expertise to offer, as far as homeschool co-ops, sports programs, drama programs."
There were "people who did these things professionally, and just wanted to teach it to their kids and their kids' friends. You have a lot of really great activities, extracurriculars, in the homeschool community, just because people don't like to feel isolated," she added.
Bartholet also claimed in Harvard Magazine that homeschooling is a threat to democracy.
"From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society," Bartholet said, which in part entails educating children so that they may support themselves in adulthood.
"But it's also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people's viewpoints," Bartholet added.
Miller said that besides being exposed to students from a variety of backgrounds, he also "couldn't count the number of times I had to read the Declaration (of Independence), or the Constitution," and that homeschooling families typically spend much more time learning about civics than most students do in public school.
Anecdotally, Miller said his friends who were homeschooled are more likely to vote even in non-Presidential elections or to volunteer for activities that promote the common good than their public schooled peers.
"We went to the National Archives and read primary documents. We went to Lexington and we went to Boston and we did all of those things. We didn't learn history from the history books. We learned it from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton," she said.
Aumen said she also didn't think her homeschooling experience taught her to be undemocratic.
"We were raised with respect for our government leaders and love for our country. We said the Pledge of Allegiance every day," she said. "It seems like (Bartholet) wants the government to be able to control what the citizens think from a very early age. And to me, that seems like the opposite of democracy."
Aumen said she thought that on the whole, parents who choose to homeschool their children often discover how difficult it actually is, and the ones who stick with it are those who are highly motivated and invested in their children's education.
"I think homeschooling parents have to be courageous, and very patient, and it takes extra patience and virtue to maintain good family relationships. And so I think that for the most part, the people who can't handle it, they self select out, or they never attempted in the first place."
Correction 4/23: A previous version of this story misidentified Barrett's son Ryan as Wyatt. We regret the error.
Mary Farrow worked as a staff writer for Catholic News Agency until 2020. She has a degree in journalism and English education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.