From one blue-state parent to another, activists in California are warning Illinois families about a bill advancing through their state legislature that would create more regulations, and penalties, for homeschooling parents. It’s the latest high-profile battle dealing with school choice, a campaign issue President Donald Trump ran on.

“Illinois, California, Colorado, they all compete with each other. They’re coming after homeschooling, just like they’ve been coming after public schools,” California parents rights activist Sonja Shaw said in a video posted to X on Wednesday. “They’re attacking families, stripping parental rights, and pushing their radical agendas while our kids are failing at reading, writing and math.”

At issue is HB2827, the Homeschool Act, which would charge parents with a misdemeanor if they fail to register their kids in a “homeschool declaration form” to the nearest public school they would otherwise be attending. Failure to do so would be considered truancy, and parents could face up to 30 days in jail with fines. 

The bill passed a major hurdle passing out of the Democrat-dominated House education committee in a party-line vote on Wednesday, despite having upward of 50,000 witness slips in opposition and only 1,000 in support, including the Illinois State Board of Education.

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California parents opposed a similar bill that failed to make it out of committee in the state legislature in 2018, AB 2756, only after hearing three hours of testimony from parents and homeschoolers. Opponents say the Democrat-led bill would have mandated all homeschooling families in the state to adhere to involuntary home inspections, after the Turpin-family child abuse case.

“This is calculated. This is how they do it. They do it in increments, slowly taking control away while people sit back thinking that their kids are safe and it doesn’t affect them,” said Shaw, who is a school board member in Chino and running for state superintendent of public instruction. “Every parent needs to be in this fight. If we don’t stand up now together, there will be nothing left to fight for our kids in their future. Please get involved. Please speak up. Please show up, because our children are worth this fight.”

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Homeschooling families say they are under attack in Illinois. (IStock via Getty images)

Will Estrada, senior counsel for the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, told Fox News on Wednesday that the bill’s language was left “open-ended for unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to be able to write different sections of regulations.” 

“If this bill is passed into law, it’s going to be expanded in future years to put even more restrictions on homeschool and private school families,” Estrada said after testifying at Wednesday’s hearing. “The record of homeschoolers shows that we do well academically, socially, emotionally and so why are we messing with them? That’s the question. This bill is a solution in search of a problem.” 

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Democrats say the bill – which contains a portion that requires parents to hand over teaching materials if its suspected the child isn’t being educated properly – will strengthen oversight of homeschooling. 

Democratic state Rep. Terra Costa Howard introduced the bill following an investigative story by Pro Publica, which has a left-leaning bias according to the nonpartisan news rating company AllSides, entitled, “How Illinois’ Hands-Off Approach to Homeschooling Leaves Children at Risk.”  The report included cases of abuse that went unnoticed because children were not in school.

Conservatives at the Illinois General Assembly, seen here, have voiced opposition to the bill. (iStock)

But opponents of the bill pushed back, saying in the hearing that there’s no correlation between homeschooled students being more at risk of abuse than those in the public school system.

“I believe this bill will help protect abused and neglected children and leave in place the freedom of parents to decide how to best meet the educational needs of their children,” Tanner Lovett, an opponent of the bill, said Wednesday.

The Illinois homeschool bill will now head to the state House of Representatives for a floor vote. If passed by the House and Senate, it would land on the desk of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat considered a potential 2028 presidential hopeful. 

The bill passed out of the committee as President Trump is expected to sign an executive order Thursday dismantling the federal Department of Education. 

Joe Biden was the first president to join a union picket line and support labor’s side in a number of major disputes. His appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, the principal administrative agency handling labor-management conflict, interpreted the 90-year old National Labor Relations Act so as to enhance the rights of workers to organize. The Biden board promoted workplace democracy more effectively than any of its predecessors.

As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.

President Trump’s second term presages the most anti-labor labor board appointees ever (his first-term NLRB had that same distinction). And equally or more troublesome, Trump, through his arbitrary dismissal of Biden-appointed board member Gwynne Wilcox has joined a position advanced by management labor lawyers at Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and Elon Musk’s Space X, among others. Together they wish to take a wrecking ball to labor law, asserting that the 90-year-old National Labor Relations Act and the independent agency it established are unconstitutional.

On March 6, in a sweeping opinion both eloquent and scholarly, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell pushed back against the president’s unlawful firing of Wilcox. Now, as was surely the plan all along, the question of control of the NLRB can and will go to the Supreme Court. If the conservative, Trump-appointed majority agrees with the president — instead of upholding nearly a century of precedent — independent due process for labor and management will be wiped away.

Of course, politics and labor law have always had an uneasy coexistence. By virtue of the National Labor Relations Act’s system of five-year staggered appointments to the NLRB, presidents are able to influence the board’s direction during their four-year terms, but they cannot dominate it or dictate the outcome of a particular case that is before the labor board.

If, however, board members can be dismissed by a president any time he or she disagrees with their votes on the reinstatement of a dismissed worker, say, or a conclusion that labor or management has not bargained in good faith, the rule of law can easily be denied, along with well-accepted principles of independent conflict resolution.

Such a prospect is an ominous cloud over a labor movement that even during the friendly Biden era lost ground. Today unions represent only 11.1% of employees in the workforce. Does all of this mean that organized labor law is a doomed dinosaur, irrevocably headed toward irrelevance? Not necessarily.

First, as important as legal protections have been to organizing, law has proved to be a subordinate factor in union growth or decline. In the 1930s, union militancy was in place at least four years before the National Labor Relations Act became effective. The 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the act placed restrictions on unions and workers, yet unions continued to grow for nearly a decade after its enactment. Labor won considerably more of its workplace elections in the George W. Bush era than under a more pro-labor board during the Obama administration.

As important, according to U.S. Labor Department data, unions hold $42 billion in financial assets. They can use these monies to finance costly and protracted campaigns in many different businesses, hiring dedicated workers who will give their wholehearted attention to the difficult, time-consuming work of organizing. And these positions could be made more attractive by the promise of advancement to union leadership positions, now too often the province of those who process membership grievances rather than working to widen unions’ reach.

The stage has been set for just such organizing, with recent effective uses of the strike weapon. In 2023, the United Auto Workers new rolling strike strategy against the Big 3 auto companies produced substantial wage and benefit increases. In January, the International Longshoremen’s Assn. obtained more than a 60% pay increase over six years, plus an apparent ban on automation, on the basis of a short stoppage last fall at ports on the East and Gulf coasts.

Further, if Trump is even partially successful in his attempt to rid the country of immigrants, a result will be a shortage of workers, which will slant the labor market toward the sellers. The impact in construction, for instance, a sector that is already short hundreds of thousands of hires, will only improve the prospects for unions.

And lastly, if the Supreme Court uses Wilcox’s case to deem the National Labor Relations Act and an independent NLRB unconstitutional, or contrives to consign them to irrelevance, states such as New York, California, Michigan, Illinois and others can work to occupy the vacuum with more robust labor legislation.

The fight is not over.

William B. Gould IV , a professor of law emeritus at Stanford Law and chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, is the author of “Those Who Travail and Are Heavy Laden: Memoir of a Labor Lawyer.”