Is this maybe the problem to address, then?

Reading this from outeide the US, it's bizarre to me that people don't want a professional, trained teacher who can do a better job than they could.

School is local in the US, so there’s no point in generalizing when discussing things like teacher salary.

That aside, a fantastic highly trained teacher with 30 students, isn’t likely to outperform a mediocre teacher devoting their full time to 1 or 2.

I wasn’t homeschooled myself but I did help my homeschooled younger (by 20 years) sister with math. If I had the time to devote 30 hours a week or so I’m fairly confident I could outperform even the best teacher teaching my own kids—-assuming they had 20+ full time students.

The problem is you’re on HN, which probably means you’re quite intelligent.

A lot of parents that homeschool aren’t, and I sure as hell wouldn’t trust them to teach my kid anything past grade 4.

There’s plenty of teachers who I wouldn’t trust to teach any kid past 4th grade as well. I’m glad that public education exists, but I’m also glad there’s an opt out mechanism for people who don’t feel it’s working.

There will obviously be failures , but I don’t think it’s that hard for an average parent teaching 1-4 kids to outperform a trained teacher with 30.

> there’s no point in generalizing when discussing things like teacher salary.

I bet there isn’t a single US public school district where teacher pay keeps pace with minimum wage when divided by the number of hours spent working.

That’s completely wrong. The state with the absolute lowest average teacher salary is Mississippi. Average salary is $48k. Assuming 12 hour days for 190 days a year, that’s about 3x minimum wage.

There are many districts with much higher averages. Just one example. In a relatively low cost of living state, Fulton county GA—the county Atlanta is in—the starting salary is $56k, and $62k with a masters. It goes up every year from there.

Why would you assume 190 days? However you are correct - minimum wage is WAY less than I assumed in the south (despite living there!)

Also: $62k/yr for a job requiring a masters degree is utterly criminal.

Because that’s the number of days teachers are required to work in Georgia and many other states. School is 180 days and then they have 2 weeks worth of teacher work days etc..

This has nothing to do with the south. Take the highest minimum wage in the country, Washington D.C., at $17 an hour.

The state with the lowest paid teachers pay more than that even assuming 12 hour days.

A masters degree isn’t required, you just start out making a few thousand a year more if you have one. Each year the gap grows though so that it becomes more and more worth it.

Also $62k a year is the starting salary for a teacher with no experience, but it’s only slightly lower than the median salary for anyone with a masters degree.

Also in many states teachers get defined benefit pensions and other benefits which are far better than what nearly anyone in the private sector gets. In Georgia, teachers can retire with their full pension after only 30 years. I know many teachers who retire in their early 50s. 10 years before nearly anyone else.

You're making an "it worked for me" argument, which doesn't mean much.

There are plenty of illiterate people in the US. Evidently teaching kids is, in fact, easy to mess up.

>There are plenty of illiterate people in the US.

And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled. Public education is notoriously inconsistent and frequently produces children that haven't met minimum educational requirements precisely because it lacks the individual attention kids need.

>>There are plenty of illiterate people in the US.

> And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled.

Yeah, I can. Multiple in fact. That's the reason for my initial comment. My experience here isn't exactly unique. Search this threads, there are others raised in these sorts of communities that have similar experiences.

You can find these people to if you like. Simply go attend a fundamentalist religion service and ask around their homeschooling programs. It's really not hard to find if you know where to look.

My ex was raised in the FLDS. They were taught to perform fellatio on bananas in school. Notice I didn't say homeschool because they set up their own private schools. Even so - she could read. Despite this, public schools have well-documented results by the score:

https://www.nuroretention.com/blog/officials-80-percent-of-r...

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121374...

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/i-couldnt-even-read-the...

https://phdessay.com/can-illiterate-students-graduate-from-h...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/...

https://www.highschoolcube.com/the-high-rate-of-functional-i...

And the list goes on. Several of these articles cite a rate of about 20% of adults in the US being functionally illiterate, with about one third unable to read above a 5th-grade level.

If homeschooling produces better results than that, then I'm all for it. Again: Kids need individual attention which they can get more readily in a homeschool environment. In large institutional public education systems, they just get "passed along" as they may be one of 30+ students in a class, and one of 5+ classes a teacher has. Public school teachers don't have enough time in a week to spend one-on-one time with each of their students. In the 90s my high school had class sizes of 35+ and I'm sure it's worse now in some schools.

> And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled.

I'm on board with criticism of government schools, but home-schooling isn't perfect and I have seen examples where kids were kept uneducated, up to functionally illiterate.

Parents have a right to home-school their kids. There will be kids that come out poorly -- it's going to be _fewer_ than if they'd gone to government schools.

My concern is primarily around standards of education.

If you gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.

The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of children that are illiterate. Examples of lazy parents doing things like taking a walk in the park and saying "see, we did biology today!". Examples of parents that "oops, forgot to do school this week/month".

And, in the extreme, "girls don't need eduction, that's for boys".

Perhaps for you, education is not hard and that's wonderful. Truly. But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?

I’m sure all the examples you listed have happened, and that sucks for those kids. Shame on those parents.

> But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?

If it’s too hard, then public school is right there for you take advantage of. I went to public school and it was just fine.

A walk in the park, identifying plants, studying birds and other wildlife, can be "we did biology today". I went to school and I basically learnt zero biology in all 12 years of school. I didn't have a ton of interest and I didn't have good teachers. You learn very little at school in general which is something you find out in your first year of university.

I had to make up a final exam at school for a subject I didn't take. I covered the entire material for 2 years in a couple of weeks and passed the final. That's pretty much my experience of school- 2 weeks worth of material stretched over 2 years. A glorified daycare system. How can you teach a class of 25 young individuals where 90% couldn't care less, anything?

That said I agree this (EDIT: homeschooling) is not for everyone and not everyone does it for the right reasons.

My concern is primarily around standards of education.

If your government school gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.

The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of high school graduates that are illiterate.