## Facts

- Arkansas required school attendance through age sixteen and permitted compliance through public, private, parochial, or home schooling.
- The Arkansas Home School Act required parents who homeschool to provide annual written notice to the local superintendent, including each child’s name, age, grade, proposed curriculum, instructional schedule, and teacher qualifications.
- The Act required annual standardized achievement testing, and a minimum performance test at age fourteen, administered under the Arkansas Department of Education.
- Parents could choose a test from a state-provided list of nationally recognized tests and could be present during testing, but testing occurred under supervision of a test administrator.
- If a homeschooled student failed to score within eight months of grade level on designated subjects, the student had to be placed in a public, private, or parochial school.
- The Murphys, evangelical Christians, homeschooled their children in a program they viewed as pervasively religious and asserted a religious duty to control every aspect of their children’s education.
- They contended that state-supervised testing and the possibility of compulsory placement in institutional schools burdened their religious obligations and parental authority.
- They sued state officials in federal court, asserting violations of the Free Exercise Clause, substantive due process parental liberty/privacy, and equal protection.

## Issues

1. Whether the Act’s notice and standardized testing requirements violated the parents’ First Amendment free exercise rights.
2. Whether the Act violated substantive due process by infringing parental liberty/privacy interests in directing their children’s education.
3. Whether the Act violated equal protection by regulating homeschoolers more strictly than private schools.

## Decision

- The Eighth Circuit affirmed judgment for the State and upheld the Act.
- The court accepted the sincerity of the Murphys’ beliefs but concluded the State’s compelling interest in ensuring basic education justified the challenged requirements.
- The court held the Act did not infringe a fundamental parental right to avoid reasonable educational oversight and was rationally related to legitimate state objectives.
- The court applied rational-basis review to the equal protection claim and found a permissible basis for regulating home schools differently from private schools.

## Legal Principles

- A state has a compelling interest in ensuring children receive a basic education and may employ reasonable, generally applicable measures to verify educational adequacy.
- Standardized testing and limited reporting requirements can be treated as narrowly focused, outcome-based regulation where the state does not dictate curriculum or require teacher certification.
- Parental liberty interests in education protect choice among educational options but do not create an absolute right to control every aspect of a child’s education free from state supervision aimed at minimum competence and literacy.
- Absent a suspect classification, discriminatory intent, or an implicated fundamental right as defined by controlling precedent, differential regulation of homeschoolers is reviewed for a rational basis, which may be satisfied by administrative and structural differences between home instruction and private schooling.

## Conclusion

The court upheld Arkansas’s homeschool notice and standardized testing regime, ruling that the requirements were a permissible means of ensuring minimum educational standards and did not violate free exercise, substantive due process parental rights, or equal protection.


Murphy v. Arkansas, 852 F.2d 1039 (8th Cir. 1988)