“Falling through the cracks:” A look at homeschool hyperdocumentation and care

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Migration, Mobility, and Navigating State Systems

Abstract

Homeschooling remains largely unregulated in the United States, a condition secured through sustained movement mobilization since the mid-twentieth century. Recently, however, homeschool students themselves have emerged as a reform movement. Their activism publicizes harms within homeschool settings, from educational neglect to severe abuse, and advocates for expanded legal oversight. They argue that the lack of “reliable data collection on homeschooled children who have fallen through the cracks” exacerbates these harms, rendering this population of children invisible to public records and discourse (CRHE 2025).

Drawing on Aurora Chang’s framework of hyperdocumentation—the precautionary accumulation of bureaucratically and interpersonally significant papers by undocumented individuals—I locate distinct processes of record-making among homeschool students (Mangual-Figueroa 2024). I ask: in what ways do homeschool children, despite holding U.S. citizenship, occupy or confront a quasi-undocumented status? How is the visible/invisible child constructed within this policy discourse? More broadly, I argue that attention to homeschool hyperdocumentation complicates reformist notions of surveillance as care (both within and beyond the household) and engenders liberatory alternatives.

I analyze public testimonials by homeschool alumni alongside autoethnographic contributions to identify three strains of homeschool hyperdocumentation: documentation as access, through which students assemble materials to secure educational and economic mobility; documentation as carework, through which they help one another recover or reconstruct withheld, lost, or destroyed records; and documentation as memory, through which they compile counter-archives of homeschool life. In doing so, this project examines practical and affective impacts of homeschooling’s regulatory landscape on homeschool children, their attainment of certain papers and futures, and their relationship to institutional oversight.

REFERENCES
CRHE. (2025). What we do. Coalition for responsible home education. https://crhe.org/about/what-we-do/.
Mangual Figueroa, A. (2024). “A spiraling curriculum of citizenship.” Pp. 49-70 in Knowing silence: How children talk about immigration status in school. University of Minnesota Press. Project MUSE.

Author

• Meg Honnold, Rutgers University-Camden