Focus on District Performance, Not Unfounded Regulation: Respecting Parental Choice and Taxpayer Value

At the March 10, 2026 Kansas State Board of Education meeting, Board Member Betty Arnold said homeschool students who return to public school are “really far behind” — entirely without data to back up the assertion.
Arnold made the statement during a discussion about the progress of the “Blueprint for Literacy” mandated by the Kansas Legislature in 2024.
“I’m going to go off the grid just a little bit, but it comes back now. I hear from a lot of systems that homeschool students that come back to public schools are really far behind,” Arnold said. ” I don’t know where that data comes from. I have no clue, but I hear that consistently.”
Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Home School Researcher, took exception to Arnold’s statement.
“First, when someone makes a claim, the burden of proof is on him to support it with premises or data. The burden of proof is not on the other person to disprove it,” Ray said. “Second, there is a difference between and within homeschooled children. Is a homeschooled child one who has been homeschooled all of his school-age years thus far? Fifty percent of school-age years? Twenty percent of school-age years?”