John Oliver talks about lax laws surrounding homeschooling in the U.S.

While U.S. schools are carefully regulated and required to teach to stringent state and federal standards, the same is not true for parents who homeschool. That’s what John Oliver revealed during an investigation on “Last Week Tonight,” where he exposed the powerful lobbying groups that have rolled back homeschooling regulation across the U.S. to the point where it’s essentially nonexistent.

“The ceiling of how good homeschooling can be is admittedly very high,” Oliver explained, noting that there may be around 2 million homeschooled kids in the U.S. “but the floor of how bad it can get is basically nonexistent.”

Oliver went on to explain that we don’t know how many kids are homeschool across the country — or what they’re learning — because many states don’t require parents to notify them when they choose to homeschool their kids, which means they can’t check on them (or their curriculums).

That brings us to his next point: The three largest publishers of homeschooling textbooks and materials in the U.S. are Christian companies that purport to help kids learn through a “Biblical filter.”

“It is absolutely a parent’s right to educate their children with religion if they so choose,” Oliver said. “But the quality of some of these books can be troubling.”

As an example, he pointed to one history textbook that claimed the 1900s saw “a cultural breakdown that threatened to destroy the very roots of western civilization” due to liberalism. Another history book claimed Confederate general Robert E Lee was a “devoted Christian who practiced his Christianity in all his dealings with others.” Several biology textbooks claimed there’s evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.

“While all of that is pretty troubling, the truth is in many states, the rules and oversight can be so lax parents ultimately don’t have to teach their kids anything at all,” Oliver said. That’s thanks to the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association, a powerful lobby that grew during the 1970s and ’80s when homeschooling was so regulated, it was even banned in some places. In recent years, the HLDA has worked hard to roll back as much homeschooling regulation as possible. The group even went so far as defeating a West Virginia measure called Raylee’s Law, named for an eight-year-old child who died of neglect weeks after being withdrawn from school by a father reported for abuse.

“That seems pretty reasonable,” Oliver said. “And if the HSLDA thinks trying to protect kids taken out of school by people convicted of child abuse is an attack on homeschooling, they’re saying quite a bit about what they believe homeschooling to be.”

He added, “At a certain point, it starts to feel like the HSLDA is the homeschooling equivalent of the NRA — an extremely powerful organization that, while it represents a large number of people, pursues an outermost fringe version of their agenda.”

Oliver argued that there should be basic reforms to homeschooling: Parents should have to register their homeschooled kids “so there’s a record that they exist. That is how low the bar is here.” And laws like Raylee’s law, designed to keep homeschooled kids safe, should be allowed to go into effect.

“Basic reforms here just shouldn’t be controversial, because after all, this is about child welfare,” he said. “This isn’t rocket science … all of this is just basic common sense.”