As more families flee from increasingly extreme “public education,” New Jersey lawmakers have a radical new bill to force homeschool parents to teach their children using the same dumbed-down standards and outrageous ideologies as government schools.
That means even homeschool students would be forcibly subjected to dangerous propaganda on everything from “climate change,” race-mongering, and fake history to homosexuality and transgenderism. To graduate, families would have to prove they complied.
Critics, though, are speaking out and vowing to fight back. In fact, the politically powerful homeschooling community is already developing a plan to stop the bill and punish those seeking to infringe on parental rights, educational freedom, and other key liberties.
As The Newman Report documented just last month, the latest bill comes amid a flurry of legislation in New Jersey and other Democrat-controlled states seeking to regulate or even destroy home education. This is the most radical so far, but it will not be the last.
Known as Assembly Bill 5825 or AB 5825, the measure would force home educators to register with the government and hand over large amounts of private information. Even more alarming, though, is that they would have to align their curriculum and standards with the state’s programs.
In addition to the letter containing private information on the child and family, the bill states that: “the parent or guardian shall submit a copy of the curriculum that will be utilized in the home education program, which shall be aligned with the New Jersey Student Learning Standards.”
As The Newman Report revealed when New Jersey’s Common Core-aligned scheme was adopted in 2020, the state’s “Learning Standards” are among the most radical in the nation. They were developed with key input from sex fiends, perverts, abortionists including Planned Parenthood, and more.
Under the standards, children as young as 4 are bombarded with grotesque sexual propaganda aimed at breaking down moral values and the family. From encouraging children to choose new “gender identities” to normalizing every form of perversion imaginable, the standards are unprecedented in their extremism.
The education scheme also includes an endless barrage of “climate change” propaganda, starting in kindergarten. The goal: convincing children that the gas they exhale, CO2, is pollution that must be taxed and regulated by the United Nations. Al Gore praised the program.
Leader Victoria Jakelsky, N.J. state coordinator for Parental Rights and state director for Team PYC – Protect your Children, slammed the “inappropriate” standards when they were passed.
“It breaks our hearts to that abortion will be taught as a solution to pregnancy and both anal-sex and oral sex included in discussions regarding factors that contribute to making healthy decisions about sex,” she said, calling the “indoctrination” an “an assault on our deeply held religious faith.”
Longtime official with the New Jersey Department of Education Felecia Nace, who was forced out for not agreeing with the extremism, told The Newman Report this week that forcing home educators to follow the government’s lead would be a “terrible idea — a tragedy, in fact.”
Among other concerns, she warned that government schools in New Jersey are required to be saturated in LGBTQ indoctrination, mandatory teaching of anal sex, and so much more that is not acceptable. She also pointed to the “failing academics” of the state’s schools, where less than one third of students are even proficient in any core subject.
Nace, who served as an education program development specialist in the state, has already departed from New Jersey and will homeschool her own child. But she still sounded the alarm and ridiculed the idea of having the state oversee home education, even as victims of its own schools fail so miserably.
“If they can’t provide basic oversight and ensure that children are adept even at the basics in the public schools they already control, what in the world makes them think they can do a better job overseeing homeschooling?” she asked.
One reason for the push to take over homeschooling might be concern about being exposed. “I believe that the biggest fear of the governor is that parents will do a much better job, and the results of homeschoolers are phenomenal — they are very much afraid of that,” she told The Newman Report in an in-person interview at Camp Constitution.
Another critic, Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) attorney Will Estrada, also lambasted the proposed legislation for similar reasons. His organization represents hundreds of thousands of homeschool families nationwide.
“If the public schools in our nation and in New Jersey were doing a good job, you know, maybe they could at least make an argument that families, whether in private or home school, needed to check in with the local public schools,” he was quoted as saying in media reports. “But actually, the reverse is true.”
Estrada also pointed out that families were leaving the government’s schools for a reason. “Many people are withdrawing their children from public school because of failing academics in the local public schools,” he said. Trying to force those families back into a replica of the failing system is doomed to fail, too.
Under the bill, not only will parents have to teach what the government demands, they will have to keep records proving to the government that the children were properly indoctrinated.
Among other demands, the legislation requires a detailed portfolio for each student including lists of reading materials, samples of writing, worksheets, workbooks, and creative materials used or developed by the student. The child will also have to be evaluated by a government-“approved” person to “certify” that “appropriate education is occurring.”
The government’s war on homeschooling in America is just getting started. But as has been the case in multiple nations of Europe, the end goal is to eliminate home education, parental rights, and all choice. That way every child can be indoctrinated to believe what the state wants him or her to believe.
For American parents, parental rights and educational liberty must be non-negotiable. This is a hill to die on.
