On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Nathan Leamer, Vice President of Targeted Victory and the “Reclaiming My Time” podcast co-host, joins Federalist Staff Writer Jordan Davidson to discuss why his family decided to homeschool after discovering their local school district would remain closed for months and what implications prolonged virtual learning may have for the school choice movement.
“Instead of going back to online programming, my wife and I decided to homeschool our kids, pull our kids out,” Leamer said. “There was an opportunity for us to reject the premise, if you will, that we had to do the public school thing or had to find a private school that could get us in, but that we could take ownership over what our kids are going to learn.”
Instead of accepting the narrative that you “must accept the status quo for a year” and stay home, Leamer said his family leaned into different education options that best suited them, a decision that he hopes will become more widely available to students and their families who were shorted by public school districts during the pandemic.
“Whether it’s a teacher union or a certain school board, or certain entities affiliated in the school industrial complex, we’re seeing this realization that the interests of those entities are not always the students or the parents. It’s actually themselves,” Leamer said. “…Instead of encouraging parents to make the best decisions for themselves, people are told ‘oh it’s going to be difficult if you do these other things,’ … these narratives that come out of these discussions are unfortunate and hinder the way we as a community address and adjudicate these concerns.”
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