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Todd's Take
My friends, I need to tell you about Jennifer Welch. Until a few weeks ago, I'd never heard of her. I still don't know much about her — she's got a podcast called "I've Had It," and after reading the transcripts and listening to 7 minutes of it, I understand the name. This week she and her co-host, Angie Sullivan, got into it on homeschooling, and I want to walk through it with you, because it's personal, and because the facts here matter more than the insults.
A caller phoned in and accused people who homeschool of being the kids who "coasted through every group project" and never turned in a single homework assignment. Welch ran further than that — she called homeschooling "trickle-down stupidity," "MAGA on steroids," and suggested parents who do it are committing something close to child abuse. That's just plain stupid on multiple levels.
Here's what I'd tell that caller directly. We have homeschooled our 3 kids since Day 1. (But let’s not fool ourselves: my wife does 99% of the work!) Our oldest is heading into his senior year and already successfully runs his own small business, which you can check out here. Our oldest daughter has also successfully operated a small crochet business. And our youngest has focused much of her time on the sport of basketball, accumulating a fair amount success on the court. In fact, she gave former Pacer Benedict Mathurin a run-for-his-money in knockout in early 2025. (You can check that out here — she’s the one in the Caitlin Clark jersey! 😂)
And it's not just us. According to the National Home Education Research Institute, roughly 3.4 million K-12 kids were homeschooled last year, about 6.3% of all school-age children, up from 2.5 million before COVID. That's not a fringe experiment anymore — that's more kids than attend Catholic school in this country. And on the claim that homeschool parents can't actually teach: home-educated students typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school peers on standardized tests, and the majority of peer-reviewed research on this shows homeschoolers outperforming their institutionally schooled counterparts, regardless of household income or parents' own education level.
I have never once personally attacked a public-school family because of the choice they made. I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ve known many wonderful public school teachers — at least of whom I mentioned on the show today.
But I won't pretend that a parent who loves a child more than anyone else on earth is somehow unqualified to teach them, just because a woman with a podcast decided cruelty was good content for a Tuesday. Even the Department of Education couldn't let this one slide, posting bluntly that "the only thing that is stupid is your ignorance."
This is exactly what "conservative, not bitter" is for, my friends. You don't have to match ugliness with ugliness. You just tell the truth, calmly — maybe with just a little bit of spunk— and let the facts do the rest of the work.
Conservative, not bitter.
Todd
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Quote of the Day
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Stack of Stuff
Fox News rounds up exactly what Jennifer Welch said on her podcast, "I've Had It" — "trickle-down stupidity," comparisons to child abuse, the whole segment in her own words.
Newsweek: the U.S. Department of Education clapped back directly on X, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis weighed in defending homeschooled kids too.
NHERI: 3.4 million K-12 kids were homeschooled in 2024-25 — 6.3% of all school-age children, up from 2.5 million before COVID.
NHERI's academic achievement fact sheet: homeschoolers typically score 15-25 percentile points above public-school peers, with the majority of peer-reviewed studies showing statistically better outcomes.
The Fight Over Education
One of the eight battlefronts in our Cold Civil War is academia — and this week it showed up on a podcast. True education is supposed to draw out what's already inside a student, not deprogram the values their parents raised them with and install a new operating system instead. That's the real complaint hiding under Jennifer Welch's "trickle-down stupidity" line: she's not actually arguing homeschooled kids test worse — they don't — she's upset that homeschooling produces kids who weren't handed over to be reshaped by someone else's radically insane and delusional worldview.
I ran into this exact mindset in college 150 years ao. I was in a class with a combination of education majors and political science majors, and during one group discussion, I shared an opinion about public education. A classmate — an education major — told me, "well, the book doesn't say that." I asked what she thought. And she had no idea. In fact, she seemed confused that she should even have an opinion on the matter!
That's the difference between being trained to receive an approved answer and being taught to think for oneself. A lot of academia rewards the former and punishes the latter — and it has for a long time.
Parents who homeschool aren't running from education. They're refusing to outsource the most important part of it — the part where a child learns how to think, not just what to think. That's not stupidity, trickling down or otherwise. That's the God-given assignment.
Behind The Scenes
Something happened in our school district this week that, given the direction of today’s show, I thought would be appropriate to share.
After nearly a year of working with our local school board, administrators, and staff, they school board voted 4-1 to adopt Indiana's policy allowing homeschooled students play public school sports. Our two younger kids have wanted this for a while — soccer and basketball, competitively.
In a nutshell, in order to participate, students have to:
Live in the school district.
Have been homeschooled the previous three years.
Attend one class a day at the school.
Starting this year, our girls get to suit up for our local team. I share this because in today’s evolving world of education, there may be hybrid solutions that didn’t exist just a few short years ago — or in our case, even weeks ago.
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