Opponents of House Bill 2827 —dubbed the “Homeschool Act”—managed to keep it from the floor of the Illinois House for a vote before the April 11 deadline. But the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Terra Costa Howard (D-Glen Ellyn), remains committed to getting it passed.
“Our intention is to keep working the bill, keep making amendments as necessary, and continuing to meet with organizations who have strong opinions about it, that's what's important to do,” said Costa Howard.
HB2827 did not make the third reading to pass out of the chamber but remains live until the legislative session ends in May or June of 2026.
The bill requires parents or administrators to file a homeschool declaration form with the State Board of Education, notifying their local school district of their intent to homeschool a child.
Specifications of what the form will entail remain unclear but could require parents to report curriculums used in home schooling and other personal information like the child’s name, birthdate, and gender. It also requires homeschool administrators to have at least a high school diploma or equivalent to teach.
Costa Howard first introduced the bill after an in-depth ProPublica investigation revealed Illinois’ lack of regulation among homeschooled children. In some instances, state oversight led to cases of unreported child abuse, as the investigation reveals.
“First and foremost, [this bill] is to protect kids,” said Costa Howard. “We know that there are children who, when they have been pulled out of school, nobody sees that these kids have fallen through the cracks and they are not in front of mandated reporters. We want to make sure that that doesn't happen,” she said.
Illinois does not currently keep data on how many children are homeschooled in the state nor does it mandate a specific curriculum or testing protocol.
The “Homeschool Act” has generated historic opposition in the House session, with thousands of homeschool parents and religious-affiliated groups signing witness slips to oppose the bill from moving forward.
The legislative session in the Springfield capital is expected to end in May or June 2026. (Credit: Maggie Dougherty)
“This bill's provisions threaten families’ due process rights in multiple ways, which are very concerning,” said Mailee Smith, a staff attorney and senior director of labor policy at Illinois Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization tracking government accountability.
“It allows truancy officers to interrogate children without cause and without parental presence. It also allows these parents to be investigated and their children to be interviewed based on anonymous reports, and that's from the language of the bill itself,” said Smith.
According to the legislation, if homeschool parents or administrators fail to submit the required forms on time, a truancy officer may visit the home and meet with the child to determine whether an investigation may be warranted.
“This is a bill that could cause trauma to children on the whim of a government bureaucrat or an anonymous complaint or just a cantankerous neighbor who reports a family to the government,” said Smith.
Previous iterations of the bill included criminal penalties for noncompliance, including fines and jail time. The current version states that parents will be referred to the State Attorney's Office to determine the charges.
A critical component of the bill that remains unclear is how the state plans to contact families for noncompliance when it does not keep records of currently homeschooled children.
Rachel Mikottis runs an outdoor homeschool co-op called Free Haven Forest School in Mokena. She said the passing of a bill like this would greatly impact the school, which offers hands-on, educational experiences in nature.
“Current homeschool laws give us the freedom to [teach this way] because we don't want to operate in a building, that is not our goal,” said Mikottis. “The purpose of outdoor education is to get kids engaged in nature and to use nature as our classroom,” she said. The new homeschool requirements could subject schools like Free Haven Forest to adopt more standardized policies for learning.
Mikottis said one of her biggest concerns is how homeschoolers will be notified of the new registration requirements.
“What if I live in rural Illinois, and I'm a farmer—I homeschool my kids because the closest school is an hour away and no one notified me of this law? Now, a truancy officer can come by and [investigate] me. The criminalization of parents is definitely the worst part,” said Mikottis.
In response to how the state plans to notify parents, Costa Howard said administrators will “do their best” but did not specify a formal plan.
Despite other states' efforts to make homeschooling easier for families and a growing number of educational options available for children across the country, Illinois has increasingly pushed for more regulations, including requiring private schools to register annually with the state, which is currently optional.
Opponents of the bill argue the legislation attacks constitutional rights to educational freedom, with some families pursuing homeschooling to avoid the state’s public school challenges.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, National Education Surveys Program. “Parent and Family Involvement in Education: 2023” (accessed May 10, 2025).
“Illinois has a plethora of issues going on within its own school systems throughout the state, not least among them are proficiency levels,” said David Smith, a homeschool parent and executive director of the Illinois Family Institute.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), only 33% of Illinois students performed at or above proficiency in 2024.
Illinois is one of 41 states with 1 in 3 or fewer of its fourth-graders meeting reading standards.
“Can we blame parents for wanting better for their kids and leaving the system?” said Mikottis.
2024 data from the National Home Education Research Institute reported that home-educated students typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above that of public school students on standardized tests.
“Instead of focusing on fixing the issues in the school system, they're focusing on criminalizing parents for wanting to raise their kids better than what [public] schools have to offer,” she said.
Claire Murphy is a master’s student in the investigative specialization at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is also a freelance journalist based in Chicago, IL.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.