I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
> Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
Nearly every time we try to fix this problem with money it fails. The problem is not money. All else being equal there is little to no correlation between spend and outcome. Money get's touted by schools and politicatians as a way of pretending to care but not actually do any of the work to improve outcomes.
What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
I would argue spending less money would actually improve things.
Ultimately it’s a culture problem. America’s attitude toward problems is nothing if not “throw more money at the problem and hope it gets better.” See also, healthcare, military spending, college sports, etc.
cost per student is higher for high school students. So if you take an average across all grades for public schools and then compare that to specific cost per grade at private schools, of course private schools are going to look relatively cheaper for younger students.
I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house. That $200k gets eaten up pretty quick by things like security, janitorial, building maintenance, support staff like principals, librarians, guidance counselors etc etc. If you’re meaning to include total cost for the full time employees (the teachers) in the list, then the salaries are a lot less attractive once you’re done covering benefits, etc.
I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond.
My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).
"I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house."
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
"I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot."
Although I have only one child (in 4th grade), I think about schools a lot, too.
"The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k."
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k. Here is a breakdown by grade level of the number of parochial schools in SF that serve that grade level, and the median tuition among those schools for that grade:
# Median sticker price
Pre-K 7 $16,610
K 29 $11,530
1 29 $11,530
2 29 $11,175
3 29 $11,175
4 29 $11,175
5 29 $11,175
6 30 $11,519
7 30 $11,519
8 30 $11,519
9 4 $31,725
10 4 $31,725
11 4 $31,725
12 4 $31,725
"Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond."
This 'usually start in the $40k range' is also false. For each of the grades K-5, 33-39% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k. For each of the grades 6-8, 30% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k.
"because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper"
Non-parochial private schools don't typically price based on cost. The schools that have high demand (due to parents and student population) can charge more. So they don't need to manage their costs tightly. And they can spend lots of money on marketing.
Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
"because their goal is a good education"
Their goal is happy customers (parents). Different schools achieve this in different ways. Some parents choose a school not based on the expected quality of education but based on the expected networking opportunities for themselves and for their child.
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
I would argue that economies of scale don't apply to education in the same way they apply to other businesses at large. Sure, you theoretically get the benefits of scale with central organization, buildings, centralized services, etc, but once you get to the classrooms themselves most of the cost simply scales linearly with the number of students.
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k.
I'm not sure what we're talking about here anymore. You're using K-8 as the dominating factor for this gotcha a few times in this thread. There are more K-8 parochial schools, yes. "Most parochial schools charge about $12k" is true, unless you're talking about high school. Exactly 1 parochial school is less than $30k (SF Christian, at $16k). From there (limited to religious schools):
- Sacred Heart ($31k)
- Archbishop Riordan ($32k)
- Saint Ignatius ($34.6)
- Sacred Heart ($60k)
- Jewish Community School ($65k)
I might have missed some in here since I'm going by names, but given that SF Christian is the cheapest private high school on SF Chronicle's list[1] I don't think that matters for my point.
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate, and structure most of your argument around the cheapest schools (K-8). Mea culpa on my end, though: you are correct that when I was saying "cheapest I've seen," there was an unfair modifier of "cheapest schools on my personal spreadsheet" which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to. You're absolutely correct that there are cheaper parochial schools available as long as you only need K-8.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school (again, referencing SF Chronicle's data). I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
Sure, that's fair! But we're not talking about income, we're talking about average cost per kid. We can't actually know the details under the hood, but again, those schools specifically in your list are usually subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway.
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate
The reason for this is simple and not nefarious:
- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types
- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).
Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private high schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school
If we look only at non-parochial schools, the means are even higher (e.g. $39k for 5th grade, $41k for 8th grade, $59k for 12th grade).
those schools specifically in your list are subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant when we look at the sticker price for non-parochial schools, we should assume their average revenue per student is less than the sticker price, and the average cost per student is less than or equal to the average revenue per student.
I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?
which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to
If we limit the discussion to only those schools we'd be willing to send our kids to, then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!
BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder
My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?
Your original point was not that it's "not underfunded," it was that it's overfunded (and substantially so, based on other comments). Your top(ish) comment on this thread to the $28k per student average:
I'm saying it's a lot.
My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.
then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!
We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it. There are plenty of SFUSD and private schools that would not be on our list, be it for academic reasons or logistical.
I made a tool to do that
Cool, I dig it! Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)
My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?
We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it.
That's great! At my attendance area school, two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.
Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)
If this is for privacy, don't worry, it's all front end code and your location isn't sent to the server. (You can check the network tab or just look at the code.)
Yes, it was extremely clear that your position is that it’s overfunded.
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?
No, we don’t, I just wasn’t trying to make that point. There’s absolutely debates to be had about SFUSD, including how they spend their budget (personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools), but the thought that $28k/kid is too much in SF just isn’t grounded in reality.
two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.
This type of broad statement is true, but also obscures the realities of the student population SFUSD is mandated to serve. That high level number includes special education, non-English speakers, etc. Generally speaking, the data for kids with a similar socioeconomic background to the one I suspect your kids have are doing fine in SFUSD, particularly in K-8.
For example, a low key popular school with “bad scores,” Flynn[1]. ~30% of the student population met or exceeded the standard for math. That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school. Race is an unfortunate proxy here, but it’s 70.8% for white students.
Not trying to convince you to send your kid to public school, of course, just calling out that there’s nuance required when comparing outcomes and what can work for families.
personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools
Amen.
That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school.
Do you think those kids are learning primarily due to their experience at school, or because their parents teach them? Anecdotally, whenever I've walked past Kumon centers during the weekend they seem busy, and when I was driving the other day I noticed Russian School of Math has added a new location.
Rahim, you should have a blog or other website where you write about your experience with schooling in the Bay Area. Considering that schools here have insisted that exothermic reactions produce oxygen and wood, I am not particularly inspired by them. There's no substitute for the actual experiences of parents here.
I have only one child so my direct experience is very limited. Much of what I know (or think I know!) is from looking at data, conversations with parents, conversations with SFUSD employees, and with educators.
San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s
I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.
Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s
It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!
If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?
Teacher (all-in cost): $150k
Teaching assistant: $100k
Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k
Curriculum, books, supplies: $23k
Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software): $18k
Field trips and enrichment: $10k
Utilities, internet, insurance: $27k
Furniture and equipment: $20k
Admin/legal/accounting: $8k
Total: $416k
That leaves $200k unspent.
AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.
Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.
You're recommending I look at SFUSD's public budget when:
- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend
- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself
The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.
I did some research into this - the public budget is actually reasonably detailed. The biggest gap between your analysis and the actual expenditures are the SFUSD faces much higher facilities costs, higher admin cost due to Teacher coaching, and specialized programs for English language learners and special education
Any specialized teaching: art, languages, in high school I understand they have a different teacher for each subject, a librarian, a substitute teacher on sick days, an individual aide for one of the kids to represent the special education budget…
But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
Providing for my child's educational needs is my job as a parent, not the job of the government 'school system'.
But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.
> Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
> The competition for the best teachers should be fierce.
Our nation needs something on the order of millions of teachers. Competition for the best teachers would work great, if you needed exactly 1 extraordinary teacher. Or even if you needed a dozen. But when you need 40 teachers or more per school district... you're going to end up with alot of mediocre teachers, and more than a few godawful ones.
And, I suspect, that the thing not even extraordinary teachers can do is give a shit. Some teachers give a shit about some students, a few give a shit about many/most students, but even those few will falter in a career that lasts long enough.
Any why do they even want this silver bullet anyway, as impossible as it is? Why would you want a trillion dollar boondoggle that can't possibly ever work? The answer for that is downright frightening.
And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors. Yes, you need 5x as many teachers. But you don't find 1 in 5 are at the level of a median professor. You should actually expect more than 1 in 5, given they require less vocational training. There is something fundamentally wrong when you move from tertiary to secondary education, but it isn't an issue of supply and demand.
>And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors.
Are we talking about the same country? Most of those professors don't even teach if they can help it. Their job is to bring in grant money to the university. The others are paid hourly wages to be adjuncts, and I'm not certain it's accurate to say that they're "much higher-quality". But if it were, then perhaps that's your problem... the million k12 teachers you need are all teaching secondary education in temp positions for temp pay.
Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.
> As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated
No question. No teacher cares more about my child's education than I do.
Really, though, the biggest factor is just being their parent. When they're young, the vast majority of the time you can basically read their mind. When you're teaching your child, you almost instinctively know how well they're understanding things. I was never deliberate about it, I didn't look for things, I never had to. I was able to pace my delivery very tightly with their ability to consume and it was the most natural thing imaginable.
That, and having a class size of two, meant Home Schooling was "30-45 minutes Monday-Friday September to mid-April with generous vacations." And that's not "30-45 minutes but we also went to a museum, the library, co-ops (we did, briefly), and all kinds of other learning activities" (I'm sure I lied and said I did those things), that was 30-45 minutes, do some chores (we don't live on a farm, it's the same stuff most kids do), and play video games.
Parenting-wise, the only elements we were more strict with was we limited "watching a TV show or video content" to an hour (two, on occasion, for movies) a day ... and we were quite rigorous with that. But they could play pretty much any video game they wanted (within reason, but probably far less restrictive than most parents outside of Hacker News). And they didn't get mobile devices until 13 and 15. There was no reason. They had/have computers.
My goal was simply "to teach them at home better than they could get at school and to make them self-learners along the way." I wasn't looking for genius spelling bee winners.
They've been in Public School (since the start of HS for my son, 7th grade for my daughter) for four years. Those 30-45 minute sessions that -- not once -- involved taking a test resulted in them being straight-A students. The first test they took, a placement test, resulted in them landing in advanced classes.
They finish their home work at school (my son works way ahead because he's bored). They study for nothing outside of midterms and finals (and they only do that out of paranoia, it's not really needed).
The majority of the time they were Home Schooled, Mom and I were divorced (and it wasn't "amicable" for the majority of that, it was ... ugly). And while that was hard, actually home schooling the children was not. It was awesome. I'd have been a lot less stressed in the earlier years if I'd have known how easy it was.
It was "get good curriculum, follow it, don't move on until they understand it to what a teacher would grade an 'A'". You do the latter because you have to; anything else is debt and the only one who pays that debt is the you. Your kids will just sob through it. Outside of budgeting because you're likely down to one income, the rest was all upside.
Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
I know several homeschooled students who played varsity sports for their local high school (the one that they would have been attending). I'm not sure about the universality of that, but that's an option for at least some people.
I think it's patchwork & has changed over time. When I was at high school one of my friends who was homeschooled competed with me on our academic team. His older (and far more athletically gifted brother ;-)) lettered in several varsity sports. But now that state's athletic association explicitly says no to homeschool students.
Besides big ones like soccer that you mention, more niche sports are often partially or totally outside of school systems.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
This comment made me curious so I did some research. Of the sports offered by my local school district (in the top 30 for enrollment in the country), I can find an alternative for homeschoolers that offer competitive opportunities for every sport but bowling and football.
Of the others, there are either homeschool alternatives that are explicitly secular or at least not overtly religious, or there are competitive clubs. All the schools have track & field, but there is a large homeschool league. And the district has a few schools with pools and a few more with swim teams that practice at the city pools, but the local swim club is the one turning out the Olympians – but even then, it also seems to have plenty of offerings for kids who won't set a world butterfly record. Football, I imagine, is just so popular that the private/public schools take all the players.
My kids do Taekwondo and church youth groups. My eldest did not want to do robotics but he does run the Dungeons and Dragons group at our library. We do music as a family. My daughter does choir. My son has done drama but declined to participate this year. They have been homeschooled their entire lives. All three of them received something I did not, the ability to converse with adults from a young age. This is of course anecdotal so YMMV but I would love to see a study on the conversational skills of homeschooled students.
Anecdotally, homeschooled children often speak and behave more like adults.
Whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the situation. Being precocious is something adults might think positively about (though not in all situations) but it's not something other kids usually admire.
I think you are right that this is situational. I can understand it potentially hindering relationships with other like aged children who are traditionally educated. I can only say that I like my kids a lot, which is nice as a parent.
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.
To me, this question highlights the whole problem: This is not what schools are for.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
There are tons of clubs for such things. My kids are in a homeschool music program (and learning piano and, until recently, bagpipes); half of my kids are playing competitive sports via homeschool programs that compete with other high schools; one is getting his certification as a welder (as part of a State program that pays for it if one is still in high school). Because class times and locations are more flexible this opens up far more possibilities for extra curricular activities.
i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.
I went to public schools but still did that sort of thing through the YMCA and our church. At the middle school level and lower, most of those types of activities are community based rather than centered around the school, though that varies by area.
Remote learning has also built many methods for success, and absolutely nobody even consulted them before implementing their ad hoc systems for Covid. There are entire online public schools and their staff were just ignored.
And what ensures they utilize those methods, exactly? Many states you, as a kid are 100% educationally off the grid the moments say "We're homeschooling".
COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.
This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
Judgment and sense are not earned... they are taught. Tell me how teachers demand any less than total respect from domineered children? Maybe Pink Floyd had no basis for Another Brick In The Wall? I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense? You might argue that there are morally bankrupt parents but I would counter that there are morally bankrupt teachers and a parent has more incentive to raise their child than a stranger does.
Absolutely agreed. There is likely a much higher proportion of unfit parents vs unfit teachers (though the latter category is a non zero number). There is also an economic element to this scenario. My spouse can stay home with the kids while I go to work, this is not at all common in our modern day and age. There are tremendous sacrifices that a family must make to do this and I think that anyone wanting to homeschool because it will be 'easier' is setting themselves up for hurt. Much like the folks who get into programming because the pay is good... It won't be what you think.
Even if the parents are quite good, I think most humans require a wide variety of inputs and relationships to form their judgement and sense around. No family is capable of providing the broad range of experiences required to form good judgement and sense: that requires some unconstrained experience with the world, seeing much more than what a curated family experience can make happen.
You're just outsourcing the authority you accept to some other group of adults and institutions. They don't have some special moral high ground that makes them better than a child's own parents and non-school social circle. If you care about your kids and have self confidence in your own character, why wouldn't you hold yourself up over strangers?
If the child sees nothing but their parents they have no parallax view to assess and learn for themselves. At a public school they will experience many adult teachers & see which they respect for which reasons. Not respecting your teachers but having to get along anyway is also a thing. It just seems horrific to restrict a child to a single relationship that the parents have such control over. Monstrous.
I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.
I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.
> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.
My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things
We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.
As a parent, your view of socialization being "good" or "bad" is heavily distorted. I think of socialization (I am a parent) as a neutral activity, sometimes a skill, although I really don't think it's needed as we live in a mostly secluded society in the US, and verbal communication has been supplanted by electronic means.
Well it should, yes, given that socialization is the result of shared social experiences.
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
> Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well
Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?
Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.
If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.
> Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?
Because bullying is an extreme example of a common human power dynamic.
> If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society
Fair enough. I was thinking exclusively of non-violent bullying. (It may get physical. But in a roughhousing way. Not one intended to cause pain or injury.)
Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).
Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias in that data. My hypothesis is that the homeschooled folks who take the ACT are more likely to do well on the ACT than the homeschooled folks who don't.
My Title 1 school made the ACT available to all students for free (on one specific date). A lot of kids who were unprepared for the ACT took it because, why not?
I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.
An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.
"fun" story and all, but the statistic in question is about people believing they could beat a bear in a fight with their bare hands, not with firearms.
I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.
> But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
“And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.”
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment.
I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I had the opposite experience. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, but I didn't just spend all my time alone with parents. My family was part of a home-school co-op, I played in the local youth symphony, and I had a job working at the local university when I was 16 and taking college classes there. I also have a large extended family.
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I dunno. I think I could spin a narrative where public middle school dynamics (that is, bullied quite a bit) created issues for me that hampered my ability to succeed in social settings.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that.
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.
Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.
This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.
Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
Because I've met several homeschooled adults over the years, and talking to them that's something most of them had in common when explaining the impact it had on their life. Looking for more objective data I found this one source that seems to be written by people not already convinced of the desirability of homescooling [1], forgive me for being skeptical of the objectivity of places called "national home education research institute". Overall it paints a more positive picture than I had expected, but also highlights it's limitations.
From those slides (I did have to open them via google, the direct link didn't seem to work):
Discussion
• Evidence from this study and others suggest that homeschoolers may not
be a socially isolated group
• Instead, homeschoolers in these samples seem to have peer networks
and social connections that arise in conventional and unconventional
social settings and they report being well-connected later in life
• It is important to note that although this study contributes to the
literature, it has methodological limitations (e.g. small sample, self-reports)
One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.
If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
I've done all 3 of public/private/homeschool with my kids. My daughter's (public) HS chemistry class had exactly one lab that we couldn't do at home. The physics lab had zero. Bio is a bit harder since they had e.g. hundreds of pre-mounted slides for examples of various things. We also lack a biology major in our near-family.
For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])
1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s
This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
My schools were good, just an middle class CA suburb, but still good, especially our high school. And we had moderately impressive facilities and equipment that we could certainly not recreate at home. And of the roughly 30 teachers I had in high school, maybe 5 or 6 were really impressive - mostly in advanced classes - and they made all the difference. They were very smart, some of them overeducated, and they represented an entirely different type of adult in my life that I desperately needed, given the ultra-hierarchical nature of most family units.
> And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
I know a ton of home-schooled kids and this is far from universal.
Yes, kids who were home-schooled because their parents didn't want secular society interfering with them raising their kids in a niche religion are more likely to experience this. Even in those cases, however, I found that the kids adapted rather quickly.
In most other cases[1], the parents were explicitly worried about their kids' socialization, and found many opportunities for the kids to interact with other kids their age (e.g. typical after school activities like sports or such).
Many of the kids I know who were both home-schooled and socially awkward started in public school and were pulled due to bullying &c. To say that the home-schooling stunted their social growth is a counterfactual; it's just as easy to see them ending up worse off.
For the most part, I would say that socializing in public school vs. homeschooling is a bit like communication with in-person companies versus remote; in the former it just "happens" to some degree, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; in the latter it requires intentional work to happen, but can still happen.
1: A notable exception is one person I know who was homeschooled by parents, with a father that traveled a lot for work and took his family with him. She was often in situations where she had fewer than 5 kids around close to her age who also spoke English.
>but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
Citation needed.
If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.
My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.
Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
That's also 4 entirely different curriculums which need to be taught. I volunteer taught CS for about 10 years, and the first year I taught a new class- and this was a single class for high school kids- I always found I was much better at it the second and third time around. I taught about 4 different courses, of varying difficulty- intro to programming with SNAP, "CS Principles" which had a little bit of everything from (very) basic networking to html and a bit of javascript, Javascript/Python, and then the final boss... AP CS in Java, which is a very difficult class.
I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.
Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.
For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.
I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry.
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
Yep, that's definitely true. That being said, figuring out which approach to take requires paying attention (which you did), there's no guarantee that any two people (or any one person at two times) will be in the same cohort.
Did you make a schedule of regularly switching off with other families of four? In other words, those parents teach your kids and you teach their kids? Otherwise I'm not sure how you'd tackle confirmation bias creeping up in all kinds of ways.
I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
> I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
Nobody is saying public high school is worse than homeschooling. They are saying that if you want to claim homeschooling is bad for kids, you have to put in the work to show that it causes problems at a higher rate than the public school system.
I was homeschooled and got a good education, and am now a happy, well adjusted adult. You can't just generalize; you have to consider the individuals and methods involved to judge what the best approach is.
We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.
Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests".
Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.
>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores
>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades
This reads as an inconsistency.
As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
Yeah, that study has been debunked or countered by "... among home-educated students applying for college", and the proportion of home schooled kids who apply for college versus those in the traditional education system is far lower, i.e. this is very self-selecting.
This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
They're not more likely to get into college as a whole. In fact, they apply to college a lot less. But in that subset, against public education as a whole, then yes, they do better.
You may want to look wider afield than homeschooling advocacy and lobbyist groups for your stats.
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children wen parents think they can do as well or better.
I home schooled my children up to High School (and they are very, very successful students). That statement, right there, was the reason, but there was no ambiguity involved. I absolutely knew I could have happier children who were natural self-learners who wouldn't struggle in school when that time came if I did it myself.
It took a lot of research on my end to get to that conclusion but I would have been just as good ignoring it and listening to the experience of a friend I made who home schooled all seven of her children, or talking to her kids. I did both; research led me to talk to her and her husband, talking to them confirmed I was making the right choice.
Though I am Christian, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (we taught the same science everyone else received; no "the Earth is 15,000 years old" or whatever nonsense). I even think there's reasonable evangelical arguments to be made that Christians should put their children in traditional schools, so this wasn't a faith choice for me. I loved High School and I went to a large High School. So "bullying" and the like had nothing to do with it.
Had I not attended Public School, I probably wouldn't be doing what I love for a living and it was a couple of amazing teachers that went to bat for me, creating classes that didn't exist and letting me take HS classes while I was in Middle School, so when I say "I know I can do better" that's doesn't come with "because the public school system and the teachers are garbage." There's problems, there, for sure -- but my kids live in the #4 district and attend the #1 public High School in that district. It's a pretty fantastic school, the kids are friendly and I'm fine with it all around. I didn't think they'd do poorly regardless of how they were schooled, I just knew I could do better.
That's not arrogance; I think the vast majority of parents could do better.
It's because, as a parent, when they're young you can basically read their mind. That's an advantage a teacher doesn't get. You don't even have to "notice" that they're struggling or that they "know it cold and are bored", you just pace things on instinct and you deliver knowledge very close to the actual rate they can easily ingest it.
The other advantage that would be hard to replicate is class size. I had a class of two. Two different grades, but all that meant was my daughter got a preview of (and often just ended up learning completely) whatever she had to do and whatever her brother was learning and her brother got a review every day.
You can pretty much take out every other advantage of Home Schooling. Just those two result in a 6-7 hour whiteboard directed lesson and busy work time down to 45 minutes/child (really ... 30 most of the time). That also gave us a September to mid-April school year with generous vacations (otherwise we'd finish in February).
It wasn't my goal to make genius, spelling-bee winners, or to put them years ahead of public school students. The latter absolutely happened, but we were only ever doing a single grade per year in every subject with pretty formal home school curriculum. There was just a lot of extra time to screw around exploring things beyond the books.
I wanted them to learn better than they would in school and I wanted them to be able to be self-directed in learning. They are successful beyond my expectations in both areas.
They've been in Public School, now, for four years. My son hasn't taken work home from school in ... really ... four years. Homework is assigned, he just finishes it. My daughter is the same way. Outside of midterms and finals (out of fear/paranoia, not necessity), they do not touch schoolwork at home.
Despite not having taken a "real test" in their lives until enrollment, they placed in advanced classes. Despite them never receiving an independently graded assignment (or even one that had a grade written on it[0]), they both have a 4.0 GPA. My daughter had perfect scores in half of her classes last year.
They are happy kids who aren't stressed out at school (because those 45 minute daily sessions, apparently, covered a lot of ground -- my son still talks about things "he did in, like, 7th Grade, Dad!"
Really, though, forget all of the other reasons. It's worth doing it just for the relationship you form with your kids and that they form with their siblings. My teenagers don't act like teenagers. They act like happy young adults (because they are).
It wasn't hard. I did the majority of it with my ex- wife (through a high-conflict divorce and high-conflict early years ... that was hard ... worth it, though).
[0] You don't let your kids rack up debt by learning something less than very proficiently because you're the one that has to pay that debt when the later lesson comes that builds on that part, so yeah, they "got all As" in Home School ... because I don't like misery.
I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids.
All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.
Two graduated early (some with college credits).
My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).
None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.
Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
And yet there are many homeschooling parents in this discussion thread (including a single-income dad of 9 whose kids are homeschooled). But I'm quite aware that I'm the exception on HN.
I've been working from home for nearly 2 decades and have flexible hours.
My wife handles the majority of the grade school years (basic reading/writing/maths) and I teach most of the middle and high school.
They've always been involved in co-ops, church activities, and get plenty of socialization. They're emotionally mature, civically responsible, and others focused. We take them when we volunteer at local non-profits, whether that's sorting clothes at the local thrift store or picking up trash at a local park. An example of service becomes a lifestyle of generosity. It makes for great kids and even greater adults.
Put the time and work in to your kids. Nothing else will provide greater dividends.
None chose to go to college so far. The kind of work they wanted to do didn't require it so they didn't. If they had wanted to be medical doctors, lawyers, or some kind of physical engineer, I'm sure they could have gotten into a good college and found a good job for that.
One is a commercial sheet metal worker and owns his own home.
Another is a Linux sysadmin and owns his own home and has a spouse and a child.
Another is a restaurant equipment repairman and rents.
Finally, my 19 year old just started his airplane mechanic apprenticeship and rents.
My other three are still in school and living in our family home.
The thought at you need college degree to find meaningful employment or to live a joyful life is simply false so I don't consider it a metric for homeschooling success.
I teach my kids how to learn and encourage them to get out there and be productive doing work they enjoy and raising their own families.
Success in my book means they can function as an adult, stand on their own financially, find a good spouse, and bring me some awesome grandkids to spoil.
I don't have a college degree but I make plenty to raise 7 kids while working from home. I got to be there for all their first steps and struggles through Algebra 2 and everything in between. I wouldn't trade working from home and homeschooling for anything. It's been very fulfilling.
Given they are sufficiently successful to be living on their own, married, and some with their own homes, whether they went to college is probably an inappropriate yardstick of success. I mean, be real. If a 25 year old is married and owns a home, but doesn't have a BSc are they a failure? What are we doing here.
Assuming you are Mormon, is home schooling sort of another form of virtue signaling Mormon families employ or is it more of a way to ensure your families don't get excluded? Like, did you really have a choice in the matter once you realized you either go full Mormon or leave the church entirely?
Mormons aren't the only people with large families. Ultra-conservative Jews, Muslims, and many Christians have large families. What I don't think I've ever seen is a couple who is non-religious or atheist and has a large family.
Protestant Christian and most of my Christian brothers and sisters look at how many kids I have and that we homeschool and think I'm a little crazy (just like most non-Christians). I'd say probably 1/3 of the families in our church homeschool though. It's a wonderful community to be a part of and if I sent my remaining kids to public school, I wouldn't be asked to leave.
I'll take the L but it still sorta maps to where I was going with the Mormon angle.
I've been around Mormons, not a religion scholar, but it seems plausible to me the same "one upsmanship" mormons have with missions, large paternalistic families, avoiding "outsiders" (see: homeschooling), etc are common in other religious communities. Like maybe the protestant Christian one you are in?
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.