https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...

You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private. Maybe you'll be a therapist and years later get to talk to one of these people how they are effectively crippled for the rest of their life. Or you'll be like me that grew up in a place that had a bunch of religious organizations that homeschooled most of their children with educations that I'd consider completely and totally deficient, and then pull those same people back into the organization as cheap/uneducated labor they could abuse.

Obviously there’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, and the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century, which is roughly when modern public schools started appearing in the US (based on the “Prussian model”).

There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve. It can be too easy to focus on narrow sets of metrics like test scores, or collect a bunch of anecdotes about bad experiences in public schools (or bad experiences in homeschooling). IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.

Imagine your school district has banned teaching algebra to 8th graders, for reasons of equity. You're upset at this, since you have a child about to attend 8th grade. You go to a school board meeting, express yourself, and are at best ignored or more likely called names. What, from the perspective of a parent with a child who needs an education, do you then do? Fixing the system would be nice and all, but how do you do that before your kid becomes an adult, let alone make up for all the damage public schooling has been doing in the meantime?

Both suggestions require extra time, while still keeping your child "within the system" through attending school and (presumably?) receiving a decent-enough education in other non-math subjects. If the malaise extends to (many) other subjects, then I could see how home schooling becomes a more attractive option.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741653

...so now after your child spends hours every day at school, they have to spend yet more hours learning what they should have learned in school.

You can see why so many parents decide that for more effort, they can save their child a lot of wasted time, effort, resentment, and bad influences. Particularly families where at least one parent can stay at home (and these days, working from home makes that so much easier once kids are old enough to learn by themselves).

This makes the comparison very hard, since one side is has all of its successes and failures critiqued in public, and the other side is only ever talked about with anecdotal data.

Personally I believe there should be some sort of periodic standardized test for homeschooled kids too. Even if it's not for "passing" a grade, so we know in which level of learning they are compared to everyone else.

If we can't compare them, how can we evaluate its merits and flaws?

For the SATs, homeschooled students score ~75 points higher than public school students. We can draw only limited conclusions from that, though. People self select into taking the SATs. And there's the the bigger issue of demographics: given the demographics of homeschoolers who take the SAT, you'd expect them to outperform anyway. Regardless, more data is better.

I would say that "in some states" is the key here. A lot can change depending on the state.

Which has essentially the same incentives and results that the NRA does -- cater to the craziest of your constituents, fan outrage, then push the most extreme views (to protect everyone).

As a result, HSLDA essentially says that no child abuse or sexual assault exists in the home schooling communities, because it's the only way to justify their position that zero regulation is the only appropriate amount of regulation.

Reality, of course, has a non-zero rate of abuse (which the HSLDA then does their best to hide). Warning, pretty terrible stuff: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2013/05/hslda-...

But it's psychological outcomes and averages, so I'd take any study with a grain of salt. It does match my experience having home-schooled friends growing up, it's just so much more efficient to be learning at one's own pace than that of the slowest kid out of 30.

[1]https://epaa.asu.edu/index.php/epaa/article/view/543

Compared to public schools, where most kids are going to take some kind of achievement test. Whether it be the SAT, ACT, or state-level grade advancement test.

Also, the demographics are pretty wonky, as they note:

   - 94% white
   - 97.2% two-parent marriages
   - 93.8% Christian mother (no info on other parent?)
   - 2-3x general pop's attainment of 4 year degree or higher
   - ~2x likelihood to be in the highest income brackets (50k+)
   - Essentially no home schooling families in the lowest income bracket (0.8% vs 12.6% of all families with children)

I honestly think social sciences aren't all that amenable to the scientific method - too hard to control all variables - and I'm sure someone could cherry pick studies to say the opposite of what I'm posting here. But, what else can we do?

It's a miracle even drug development on the harder science side works as well as it does.

Thanks! I'll give this one a read later.

Ostensibly education is why the schools exist. If they're not going to do that, let's at least let the kids go play in the park or something. They'd probably get better socialization that way anyway.

Does anyone actually believe this? It would be more than naive to do so. On r/teachers just the other day, I was reading about one of them complaining that all they really are, are baby-sitters so they parents can work dayshift. Even they know what they're for.

But if everyone were to suddenly be willing to speak this truth aloud, it'd be too absurd to continue. People are shamed and guilted into paying the taxes for education. No one could be shamed or guilted into paying for someone else's teenager daycare.

> The math situation is a clear signal that school administration/education departments do not prioritize education, and in fact find it unfair that some students actually manage to learn something, and want to stop that.

I was in first grade in 1980 (1981?). It was like this for me the entire run of it. Wanting to learn more, hungry for it, with them rationing what I could learn to tiny little crumbs a few times throughout the school year. Studies were paced out for the dumbest kid in class. I think I made it to my sophomore year of highschool before I gave up, and when I did, that was my fault too.

It was bad even then, and at least back then they were still pretending that it was about education.

GP clearly believes it, since they wrote this. I believe it too, and I think this is a mainstream belief, not a "more than naive" one. Your one anecdote based on a Reddit rant (and, I assume, personal bias) is not nearly convincing enough to change my mind.

My anecdote, such as it is, is hardly uncommon. It is in fact, nearly a cliche at this point, or a stereotype. I sincerely doubt that me having communicated it to you is your first encounter with the idea.

As to your mind, I don't wish to change it. I am content with you remaining naive. My own children receive advantage from this. Please continue to screw up the public education system for decades, my entire lineage can only prosper the longer this continues.

So we're clear, when a teacher complains about being daycare, what they mean is they're:

   - an educator
   - an administrative assistant
   - daycare

And so you complain about the unreasonable things, but don't mention the reasonable one... because it's literally the job.

Taking kvetching about ancillary mandates to mean that education isn't happening or isn't still the primary job is weird.

When someone disputes this, what they really mean is that they are uncomfortable with the realization that it is daycare, that it hurts them to consider that something so profoundly part of their status quo is rotten to the core, and it makes their own lives seem dishonest. They would rather than misperception that education still occurs to persist unchallenged.

> because it's literally the job.

Hasn't been, for years. It's not improving/reverting. You're willfully blind to it.

> or isn't still the primary job is weird.

Please don't mistake me. I'm not claiming that education has been secondary to other concerns. I'm saying that it doesn't happen at any significant rate at all, isn't in anyone's list of priorities, and that when it does happen it is accidental and unrepeatable.

Or, they disagree, and they have their own thoughts.

> Please don't mistake me. I'm not claiming that education has been secondary to other concerns. I'm saying that it doesn't happen at any significant rate at all, isn't in anyone's list of priorities, and that when it does happen it is accidental and unrepeatable.

As someone with two parents, multiple family members, and past partners in the profession of education, early childhood and other... we will have to agree to disagree.

I'm sure your opinions are formed from your own experiences.

Mine disagree.

Hehe, this is simply not true. Where did this conspiracy theory come from, and why do you think this poorly of people who are spending their time trying to help kids despite low pay and a constant barrage of harsh critical opinions from parents, law-makers, and hordes of armchair critics on the internet?

You’re making wild assumptions and using the worst possible motivation to build a straw man criticism. If you can do better, maybe you should get involved or consider being a school administrator?

I don’t like it when there is less support for the motivated students, and it happened to me in high school. But you are aware the situation we’re discussing is due to needing to educate 100% of the student body up to a minimum standard, right? Public schools are almost always underfunded and short-staffed. Nobody’s trying to actively prevent the smart kids from learning, they’re trying to avoid using all their resources teaching the kids that don’t need it as badly from leaving the larger group of kids who’s families have less money completely behind. Your comment is completely ignoring what happens to the students who are behind in math already, and how to get them enough help.

What is always true is that what’s best for the group isn’t necessarily best for the individual. In this case, you’re suggesting the opposite of prioritizing education for all, and thus you’re not talking about prioritizing education, you’re talking about prioritizing resources toward students that already meet the minimum standards. Schools, teachers, and administrators are trying to prioritize education for all, and they have an explicit duty to get every last kid up to basic minimum standards. If they don’t meet those goals of getting the bottom half of their classes passing, they could lose their jobs and they would be failing to prioritize education for all.

This is false. Why else ban teaching algebra district-wide to 8th graders? The explicit justification is that it helps some students get too far ahead of other students and causes inequitable access to take calculus classes later on, which is considered a bad thing.

Teachers even complain if you help your child accelerate through the textbook for the year.

If a state did the same thing with LGBT topics or evolution, I suspect you'd take no issue with calling it a ban.

Hahaha you mean the topics that are actually getting banned in states like Florida and Kentucky?

> giving directives that schools are not to devote any resources to teaching 8th grade algebra is in every sense equivalent to “banning teaching algebra”

Again, please provide some specific examples of this happening. Are you getting all worked up over something that is mostly made up or taken completely out of context? No way to know unless you cite the actual problem and demonstrate the magnitude of the problem.

Of course there absolutely is a huge difference between not having the resources for a class and banning it by law, and you know it. You can argue the outcomes might be equivalent, if you want, but it undermines your own argument to exaggerate.

I can't speak to local school board politics outside of SFUSD, but here's a particular example:

https://www.sfexaminer.com/forum/put-algebra-1-back-in-eight...

Opinion piece, but substantive.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sfusd-algebra-ma...

A more recent piece.

Googling it I can see that SFUSD is reconsidering https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...

> The question is not if we can increase acceleration options, but how we can meet that need equitably and while upholding our SFUSD values

Says it all. They have the resources, but still don't want to do it because outcomes will (obviously) diverge.

Why are so many that hate public schools so focused on these two things? I don't think there's an evolution class, but it would be covered in biology.

They do want those things banned in schools and since they can't get them banned have rage quit the system.

Here you go: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/14/metro/cambridge-schoo...

I'm sure you'll move the goalposts and say it doesn't count.

Banning advanced math is just another instance of this. A slower paced class for lower performing students would actually help them. Bringing down advanced students only serves to make the school look more equitable.

> A slower paced class for lower performing students would actually help them.

Agreed, bingo! If you don’t have the resources to cater to people who are ahead, the only choice to help those who need help is to lower the bar.

The thing about tracking is that it doesn't require more resources. If you have 6 classes in a year, you can put e.g. the top 17% together, and they can move at a faster pace than the bottom 17%. Or you can let kids take classes with mixed ages. Gifted kids don't need more resources. Literally you could have them go sit in the library and do what they want and they'd probably learn more than sitting in a class where they're forced to pay attention to something they've already mastered. When I was in calculus I was bored enough that I would also read my uncle's discrete math book that he let me borrow, but most teachers don't like when you ignore them, and when you're in a class with the lower end of the aptitude curve, there's negative peer pressure around being a nerd.

Hehe of course it does. You’re talking about more curriculums, more book and material acquisition, more teachers with more training, etc. And maybe lots of schools don’t have 6 different math classes.

> Gifted kids don’t need more resources.

Agreed! That’s maybe why some schools are focusing on the kids who do need more resources?

In fairness to your argument, I think “gifted” kids do need support though, it’s just that they are statistically better at either having it given to them outside of school, or of finding it on their own. What’s left is just a rather weak argument about not letting them get bored. Solving boredom should take a back seat to solving education for the less fortunate, IMO.

> What’s left is just a rather weak argument about not letting them get bored. Solving boredom should take a back seat to solving education for the less fortunate, IMO.

Okay, then let the advanced kids go sit in the library, go outside and play, or go home. Making them sit in class is, if anything, going to make them anti-social and create resentment toward the "dumb" kids. I don't think torturing a kid making them sit bored out of their mind among people they don't like for 15% of their life for no reason is a "weak" thing to argue against.

But the objection is "inequity". Surely this extra effort creates more inequity?

I always laugh at the people insist it's best to let their kids be guinea pigs while public school systems which aren't even utilized but it's most vocal advocates for their own children are on a multi decade track of "figuring it out".

Your "dogwhistle" is itself a dogwhistle (your obvious implication being "only a racist Trumptard could support allowing students to take algebra in 8th grade"). Ironic, in that the people defending the decision implicitly believe that non-white people are less capable of learning algebra than white people. Which itself is stupid, from a historical point of view. Who, after all, first formulated algebra?

Here's my lived experience: algebra in 7th grade, black boy. I'd have been better off taking it later, and making it up with summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses /certs in between algebra, algebra ii, calc, and diff eq/calc ii in high school. If that meant my classmates could have a better chance of keeping up, all the better; being in the historically lily-white gifted track at my magnet high school didn't do much in the way of convincing my teachers not to give up on me at the first sign of weakness. Yet another nuance you either miss or refuse to acknowledge.

The supplementary courses were provided by the school system, by the way. I would have taken them, but I was working or otherwise predisposed. If you really cared, you'd be advocating for the same (especially since a large portion of the general failure to attain math competency in America is due to our excessively long summer breaks).

That's a bit of an understatement. I'm not great at history, but my understanding is that the mid-19th century was a little lacking in videoconferencing software, educated people with the resources to be on the other end of that video link, population density to have enough other like-minded kids within driving... uh, horse-riding range, up to date books, parents who weren't gone to the factories or fields during the day, etc.

> There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve.

Agreed. There is a smaller set of objectives that they actually do achieve.

> IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.

I would assert that it's impossible to fix this broken system, and I can cite a lot of past history. I would also assert that replacing it entirely with homeschooling (which is not a single thing, but whatever) is also a guaranteed path to failure. The only hope I see is for exploration to be possible, and for people in the different situations to learn from each other. The public school institutions do try to experiment, but are incredibly restricted in all sorts of ways. Homeschoolers have the training wheels off and are much more free to crash straight into the bushes or off a cliff, but in practice plenty don't and plenty come up with a lot of different ways of doing things, some of them that seem to be working quite well in practice — academically, socially, etc.

I agree that sucking resources out of public schools to benefit the privileged few is very troubling and worrisome. But so is the current state and trajectory of public schooling, and holding everyone back may be short term fair but long term disastrous.

We're homeschooling one of our kids (both until recently, when one went to a public charter high school). We've seen the institutional effects firsthand. Simple example: we found excellent math resources, but they weren't "A-G" accredited for University of California entrance requirements. Which gave us pause, since we wanted to leave that option open. We ended up going through a A-G accredited program, the best of what we could identify, for a semester. It was crap: rote memorization of algorithms exactly matching to the state standards, lots of repetitive exercises, minimally useful feedback from teachers and their assistants. My son passed all of their tests and got an A+ grade, and is now a semester behind in math because none of that stuck in a way that is useful for building on. It was a waste of time. We gave up on it and the whole accredited path, and went back to an online program that is far more conceptual, rigorous, and just plain effective. (His earlier public school experience was somewhere in the middle, Again he did quite well there according to the state tests.)

My guess is that it's yet another form of enshittification: A-G accreditation is very valuable, but once you get it there's no profit in increasing quality, only in growing your student base. There aren't enough accredited places to provide any competition on quality, especially when there's so much disagreement about what "quality" is in the first place, and as usual any useful definition ends up being expensive. Non-accredited places have to compete on quality.

(For anyone who finds value in my personal opinions: Silicon Valley High School math bad, Art of Problem Solving math good.)

"Mistakes of this size are never made innocently." ~Ayn Rand

Inequality of education is a symptom of a self reinforcing broken economic system.

Meanwhile, if I can provide a superior education and social experience for my children, Im glad to have the opportunity to do so. I’ve seen bad outcomes and good ones from homeschooling, and in my particular case I am absolutely delighted with the results (now that my children are adults)

But to achieve that my wife and I invested our entire lives, uprooting ourselves and living experiences with our children as part of their education, sailing around on a boat we rebuilt and going to local schools in other languages as their cultural preparation. It was a bit hellish for my wife and I but the 6 years we invested in that paid unbelievable dividends for our children. Most people can’t or won’t do that.

We weren’t (financially) rich, but I have always prioritized my freedom over material wealth, and you can do amazing things on a modest (60k/year was our passive income from contracting at that time) budget if you have complete control of your time.

I suspect that the education kids get at the worst 20% of public schools in the country is still way better than the worst 20% of homeschoolers.

I also would totally believe that the education kids get at the top 20% of homeschools is better than the average public school.

Public schools are far from perfect, but there are minimum standards and there are resources at the state and federal level to try to improve schools that aren't meeting those standards.

My problem with homeschools is that in most states, there aren't any standards being enforced. If homeschools had surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd be fine with it.

It's kind of the democracy versus authoritarianism debate. Authoritarians typically look really good on paper because they can conceal their mistakes, while the democracy bears all to the populace. And yea, there are some benevolent dictatorships with great outcomes, but I don't think that a single one of the homeschoolers would think that would be a valid point because it's also the exception.

> homeschooling has horrific and hidden outcomes

Please tell me more, as a homeschooled and successful software engineer and family guy I'm interested. Several people in my family are or have been homeschooled. I could tell you where they're at right now but I've bragged enough with myself already.

Yes, there can be horrific and hidden outcomes with homeschooling. Also with public education. Also with woodworking. Or having kids. Or cooking.

It's about how you do something, and why you do it.

Sorry for being so condescending, but your statements are offensive in their absurdity.

> Please tell me more

https://www.hsinvisiblechildren.org/fatalities/

The root issue is that the homeschooling community, in their general distrust and suspicion of government authority has pushed hard for zero oversight and regulation (mostly through the HSLDA).

In most states, they've been able to achieve that.

And as potentially valid of a goal as avoiding oversight by someone you don't trust might be, it has willingly created a void.

A void that the homeschooling community itself doesn't police.

Consequently, when you do have the worst of the worst home outcomes... there's no one to turn to. And HSLDA even has specific playbooks to help parents avoid CPS intervention.

These cases are then buried to the extent possible (lobbying, media removal requests) because their very existence threatens the overall goal.

What are a few broken eggs to make an omelette, though?

This is horrific.

> What are a few broken eggs to make an omelette, though?

I hope my comments don't suggest that this is the perspective of my thinking.

However I think we should make an effort of separating extreme cases from the norm. It is unjust to judge homeschooling as a concept by these very unfortunate fringe cases, when there's heaps of proven success cases on the other side, furthermore taking into account that abuse also happens despite kids going to public or even private schools.

And also taking into account that the protection laws that are so mentioned here have also been often abused by the government against innocent and honest people and their families.

Most of this stuff is driven by religion and politics.

As so is the backlash. I get the impression that the emotional foundation to many of the objections to homeschooling is the idea that some kids will get a (home-schooled) education that doesn't conform to the commenter's politics or values. School has long been a mechanism for a dominant group to impose its politics and values on other people's kids. Public schools are just a milder form of that than Indian boarding schools or Chinese boarding preschools (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/china-tibet-board...), but they still perform the same function.

Deficits of empathy like that (and the attendant hypocrisy) are getting really grating to me, even in people I more or less agree with.

IMO, private religious schools with appropriate regulation (ie not some indoctrination academy) are a great thing, and I think supporting families in some way to avail themselves of them is a good compromise.

As I stated elsewhere here, my kids went to catholic schools and did great. I’m not approaching this as a “thou shalt public school” perspective. I also coached baseball to age 15, and I can tell you that kids benefit from someone who isn’t mom or dad instructing them.

Is that "typical"?

It's a leap to assume that it's "typical" that homeschooling parents incompetent and incapable of educating their children. If anything, I'd assume the extra attention and emotional investment that's possible could make up for a lack of a educational credentials.

It's also a leap that the public schools would do better. It's also a common theme here that a motivation for homeschooling lack of academic rigor or outright failure of the public schools. I could see homeschooling as the only realistic option for a parent who lives in a failing school district (which are depressingly common) but is not wealthy enough to afford private school tuition (and has no access to vouchers).

And I'm not really biased here: I send my kids to public school.

These don't need to be exceptional, but they do probably need to be above-average to do a decent job, and obviously time and wealth are entangled (no time if have to work two jobs).

Read the article I linked, which you clearly did not bother to do. You literally don't know what you're talking about.

Yesterday, there was a teach complaining that they weren't allowed to flunk students who did not show up for class. For middle school. They weren't allowed to flunk students who scored 0% on tests, because they would sit at the back of class and play on smartphones the entire time, or disruptively talk to other students.

When they would demand from administration some kind of answer, they'd be told they weren't doing enough to engage the students.

You claim there are minimum standards, and technically that's true... any of us could look those standards up on the internet in only a moment, those standards are ignored for some incredibly large fraction of public schools.

> If homeschools had surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd be fine with it.

The great thing is, I don't have to put up with you being fine with how my wife and I teach our children. We don't have to answer to you.

I'm not just a contrarian here. You are fine with what the public schools are doing, right now. Your oversight, such as it is, doesn't seem to be effective at doing any of the things that I could want. It does lead me to be suspicious about what it is that you want.

If an argument is based on a single specific case, then an extreme argument can be constructed about anything.

E.g. public school teachers duct taping students to desks

E.g. home schooling parents sexually abusing their children

These things happen at non-zero rates, but neither are representative of the general population.

Letting parents opt out of public schools means that the most committed abusers get to sidestep this safety valve.

Any distraction from a school's primary mission to educate disparately impacts the people who need it most.

School's primary mission is to serve the needs of a societies children.

Inactive children don't learn as well as active children (especially boys). Hungry children don't learn as well as feed children. Abused children don't thrive.

I'm deeply curious why you don't want public school children feed or protected from abuse.

My children are more important to me than, well... just about anything. Including your children or anyone else's.

If other people are so subhuman as to harm their own children, then that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make so that my children aren't abused by the public school system, aren't turned into idiots by the public school system, and aren't indoctrinated by the public school system.

Do you think that when there's a string of tweenage suicides, that the contagion didn't spread via public schools? Am I supposed to put my kids at risk of that, just so you can pretend you'll catch the 1-in-10,000 of horrific abuse, which CPS will just ignore anyway?

You offer a bad bargain. I pay everything and get nothing. Fortunately (and I mean this in a way that the words just can't do it justice... "fortune" of the sort like out of Greek mythology where the gods have smiled upon me and bestowed every blessing and boon) I don't have to take that deal.

Primary schooling's mission is to educate children about capabilities to provide for themselves and those in there care as well as operate as how to perform and behave as productive members of society. Ancillary benefits are nice, but not required, to achieve that mission, thus should only be included in the strategy to the point that they support the overall mission.

So kids learn better when both active and not hungry? Yep, we know this, and thus justifies having lunch, cafeterias, gyms, and PE class. (We should have more funding for these things).

So kids learn better when not abused? Yep, we know this, and thus schools are typically required reporters. (And thank goodness they are -- we should fund more training on these things).

What you missed in my prior comment was that the argument wasn't against any of these outcomes. It was bemoaning that society requires these ancillary benefits in schools in order for society to continue operating at all, not that it's nice that schools are available as resources to provide what should be a child's primary caregiver's responsibilities.

Thus my comment. Schools shouldn't have to be police, meal kitchens, exercise facility, or child care in order for society to function. But they too often are. It's a failure of policy to which no one holds others to account. And insisting or expecting that schools provide these as primary responsibilities does harm to the students to whom need these in their lives, but for the school would not have them.

Help the marginal student? Yes, absolutely, we should fund.

Provide long term assistance (disguised welfare) through the schools? Not appropriate, a full change in situation is warranted for basic needs to be met for children by their caregivers.

Consider this. During the pandemic, we could have conscripted all school teachers in the first few weeks to deliver food to everyone within their school operating areas. A ready, idle workforce to solve one of the fundamental problems, allowing virtually everyone but teachers to remain locked down while focusing use of protective gear during its limited availability. Why didn't we rely on the schooling workforce to deliver food during lockdown? Most of the answers I can see apply to long term welfare and social safety net assistance being provided through schools as well -- training, safety, and other elements that simply aren't appropriate to expect of educators.

You said:

> Completely disagree. [...] Any distraction from a school's primary mission to educate disparately impacts the people who need it most.

This response makes it sound like you don't "Completely disagree." after all.

I've explained my disagreement sufficiently. Have a good day.

but even if that's what the author meant, what's wrong with education being a necessary support for other goals?

it's always quite hard to identify tangible skills that traditional education actually teaches, and explain why those are important to the real lives of graduates. the average person needs, day-to-day, pretty minimal R,W&A skills.

Absolutely insane take.

This is a street that goes both ways. I had parents who were caring, nurturing, and not even remotely abusive. The other children at my public school were physically and emotionally merciless, and the school didn't give a shit. When I started standing up to my bullies and fighting back, I was the one who got in trouble, not them.

In my n=1 data set and lived experience, public schools are the evil, twisted abuse enablers, not the parents.

And you don't need n=1, this is extremely common.

Not sure which is worse.

I have an education thanks to my family and despite public education. I was partially homeschooled. It was my family who helped me go through high-school, not the other way around. For the high-school I went to, I could have (and almost did at one point) ended up being dead, for all they cared.

I won't deny there's abuse and cases in which public institutions have helped and saved people, but by assuming that this is the norm you completely overshot it here with your absolutism.

I disagree with your risk assessment, though. Most kids who are abused are most likely to be abused by a parent, not a stranger. (source: https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/nationa...)

Homeschool requirements vary wildly by state, and even in states with more requirements like testing, kids slip through the cracks. I was never required to take a standardize test by either of the states I lived in (Washington and Oregon). I knew a homeschool girl my age (12) who could not read. Her 16 year old brother could read, but could barely do math. They had no learning disabilities, their mom just wanted the welfare paycheck for them and otherwise ignored them. She already had a 5 year old and a newborn as well to keep the gravy train coming.

I had very little access to mandated reporters, and again nothing enforced by law. Those I did have access to, like my annual visit to my doctor, my mother insisted in sitting in the exam room with me. The doctors made no effort to remove her (they asked me in front of her if I was comfortable with her staying. Of course I said yes, I would have been severely punished at home if I admitted I wanted her to leave.)

Safety rules are not made with the 99% of good people in mind, but to catch the 1% of bad actors. Homeschooling is attractive to good parents because they can improve the outcomes for their children. It is also attractive to bad, abusive parents because it removes children from any external oversight and support structures outside their abuser's control.

I am not trying to downplay any risks here, and even less disregard very unfortunate situations and cases that for sure happen more often than they should.

However I can't see how this becomes as absolute as the parent comment is suggesting, in which by default it is assumed that parents are nefarious agents and public school is the saviour.

Which brings me to:

> Safety rules are not made with the 99% of good people in mind, but to catch the 1% of bad actors.

The risk in accepting this, as it happens so often in society, is ending up having to downgrade everyone to the worst case scenario, and working from that.

> The risk in accepting this, as it happens so often in society, is ending up having to downgrade everyone to the worst case scenario, and working from that.

I think most folks would be fine with homeschooling if there were reasonable regulation for it, including sharing your curriculum and schedule with the state, and allowing surprise inspections during your schedule, so that abuses can be found.

The biggest problem with homeschooling right now is that the lobbying group for homeschooling is vehemently opposed to any form of regulation, which makes it the wild west, which allows abusers to flourish.

If homeschooling wants to prevent the worst excesses, it has to standardize oversight and enforcement mechanisms.

"Zero regulation is the only acceptable amount of regulation," the talking point, enables abuse.

Not by the 99% who are doing it well!! But by the few bad apples out there.

By my thinking:

   - Requiring a child be registered with the state as homeschooled
   - Requiring a background check on parents who homeschool, and disqualifying those with child abuse priors
   - Taking annual standardized tests (grade level or better)
   - Surprise inspections (once a year? With parent-requested follow-up surprise inspections, if the first happened on a bad day)

And the homeschooling community should want these things too, because they would provide a firm rebuttal to anyone attacking the practice from a perspective of abuse.

But now... when some abuse happens... but there are continued calls for zero oversight...

That's not a great look.

I'm glad you had a good school experience. I was lucky to avoid the worst of it, but I knew kids who grew up with lifelong PTSD from the bullying / abuse, and complete apathy of the school system.

Likewise, I knew kids at school who had terrible home lives. This was almost a result of drug or alcohol abuse, or just plain neglect on the part of the parents. The children were treated as an annoyance or inconvenience. These parents were glad that school got them out of their sight; I'm sure if boarding schools were free they would happily sent their kids off to one.

I'm convinced that the percentage of parents that would actively make it a full time job to torment their children by homeschooling them is a vanishingly small number. Bad parents simply don't care about their children.

You just described public schools, Universities, and their relationship to the student loan racket. Deficient education followed by indentured servitude through loan repayment. False advertising by public school teachers of a ticket to the easy life through any university degree. If I had a nickel for every person I've met who had their life messed up by that lie, I'd be rich

You're also not going to hear about the homeschooling horrors from the typical HN demographic. Broadly, and obviously with exceptions, there are two groups of parents who choose to homeschool: 1. Parents who have an abundance of educational resources and time and do it to provide a higher quality of education, and 2. Parents who do it for religious separatism reasons because public school gets in the way of their indoctrination. Selection bias means you're going to see a lot of the outcomes from #1 posting here, and not a lot of #2.

For every example who was homeschooled with a high-quality curriculum, had great parent-run extracurriculars, socialized well, and so on, how many examples are invisibly stuck as someone's housewife who can't even be employed because their only textbook was the Bible, and they didn't learn anything past 3rd grade math? They're not posting their horror story here on HN.

I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would not agree with her on, for example, evolution. But she is loving and devoted and her two daughters have received tons of time and investment from her in their education, far more than they would receive in a public school.

I obviously haven't, like, tested her kids, but they do seem smart and well adjusted. I'm not really worried about the limitations on their scientific learning — it's not ideal if they are skipping some evolutionary biology (I actually have no idea but I assume they are) but they are going to leave home, go to college in a very secular country and get to learn that stuff. I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?).

By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.

As for your last statement: in most states there's no oversight. Sure, parents have to file a curriculum that gets reviewed and approved. Parents jump through that hoop by downloading a curriculum and mailing it in. There's nobody checking that they actually follow any of that curriculum. There's no state-run testing as a check and balance.

They’re pretty common, in fact. Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/

“The Bible is the only education you need” is a very common meme among evangelical Christians.

> and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.

Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted curricula, no matter how specious they are. One homeschool lobby has a 24/7 legal hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts at accountability.

> Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/

Contrary to your claim, the linked page implies nothing about the Bible being the "only textbook". It simply offers a set of Bible lessons for homeschoolers ("This exciting curriculum contains homeschool lessons that cover the entire Bible chronologically in four years…").

My kids went to a Catholic elementary school, where I was the school board president. A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum.

The biggest growth in private schooling is in this and similar curriculum. It’s attractive to more reactionary people as they can assert “local control” while using texts that are too old to be considered controversial.

Parents aren’t to blame necessarily, people want what’s good for their kids. But awful elements of society are abusing religion to achieve their social ends. In my case, I was accused of being a “Marxist” for not condemning a fundraiser that provided winter clothing for poor children, including migrants swooped up and shipped across the country. We’ve allowed people to be brainwashed by charlatans.

To be clear, a 'classical education' refers to a traditional form of education where you break up a child's education into grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages and then mainly use primary sources. There's nothing wrong with this system and it was likely the way many people, including Marx, were educated. The idea that this is 'right wing' is bonkers to me.

If you don’t like it, though, there are less successful countries in this world that still persecute people based on religious belief. You are free to try one out. See how it goes.

I don’t agree with parent, but the reasons are vastly more nuanced than “your ancestors were religious so you’re wrong.” And that’s ignoring the even weirder swipe suggesting parent move to a different country.

Instead I simply suggested a reflection: would you still feel this was a good thing to do if it was your great great grandparents having their children seized? Wouldn’t a great many of us have had our families broken?

I’m an atheist and evolutionary biology is my favorite field outside of CS, but unless you are personally working on figuring out how things actually work, I’m not sure how one belief over another benefits the average person.

Evidence, when not absolute, is as useful as the lack of it.

People accept evolution without having a clue about it.

1) The amount of evidence for a claim. 2) The grandiosity of the claim.

If you tell me you have a pet dog named "Spike" I probably would be willing to accept that with as little evidence as a picture of you holding a dog, found in your wallet [i might even take your word for it, if i knew you to be an otherwise mostly honest person]. Because, dogs exist and are plentiful, billions of people own dogs, and "Spike" is a common name. you may be fooling me (it may be the neighbors dog) but i'm still justified in the believe because the evidence rises to the claim.

If on the other hand you claim that you have a pink polka dotted flying dragon as as a pet named "Chester". I would be a fool to believe you. I have no evidence such a thing exists, or that people have them as pets. I would have to see it in person, and even then, i would need to get a report from teams of biologists/zoologists to be willing to accept the claim. It would require tons more evidence.

And yet, the claim STILL isn't _that_ preposterous. The dragon would be an animal, and i know animals exist. I know there are animals with scales, i know some animals fly. I even now there are some with wild coat patterns.

Now if you tell me you believe in an all powerful all knowing god who is responsible for why there is life? I have zero evidence, i have no experience like what you are describing. I've never been given evidence of a being outside of time and space. I don't know that that is even a thing. I don't know what all powerful is, or if that could exist? or all knowing? is that possible? I have no correlary to compare to. It's not like we know King Neptune exists, and while not infinitely powerful, is still pretty boss. Why would i believe that was the explanation for why there are creatures on this planet?

Evolution, on the other hand, has mounds of evidence. We have a powerful fossil record, We went thru a pandemic that shows the power of mutation. Even our own ability to drink milk. And yet even evolution isn't making all that fanciful of predictions. It doesn't claim to know your thoughts, or how you will die. So the evidence rises to claim. Do we know everything there is to know about evolution? Could we be wrong in some areas? Sure. But we are justified in accepting it.

However, I think you either have too high an opinion of how people go about their ideas and beliefs, or you trust too much in the power and protagonism of reasoning.

I'd bet a lot, if not most of the people, don't go as far as you described. They believe in evolution because that's what's believed right now, and they got taught that in school. Try having a critical conversation about evolution with the average Joe, see what you find out.

Truth is everyone has faith in something. I have faith in God, so I believe certain things that might not seem rational to someone. Other people have faith in science and scientists and teachers, so they believe certain things which definitely don't seem rational to me. They don't have proof, they don't understand the reasonings, they haven't seen evidence. They just have faith in "the experts". And so they believe.

Anyway, why is the idea of God being real _that_ preposterous?

as for trusting in experts, there's no question that that is problematic in the extreme. However, it comes back to how the evidence rises to the claim. Can a group of people be experts in a subject? How can we validate that? Can we verify that their are experts in how electrical wiring works? To a large degree we can. We have lots of evidence. Do they know everything, probably not, but i can have confidence that they are mostly correct. Can we verify there are experts in evolution? Again, i think we can. They have produced mountains of evidence. Do they know everything? No. But they are likely largely correct. Can we verify there are experts in God? What are the tests? How do we verify these experts?

You mention faith, and i have to ask, what good is faith? Is there anything you could _not_ believe, based on faith? If faith has no mechanism to filter out anything, does it tell you anything about what is true or likely true?

There's usually low risk in trusting that a contractor is an expert in electrical wiring if they say so, and I usually trust plumbers or tradesmen to know their stuff and do their work. And how many times I've been wrong.

But my point is that most people don't go through this verification process, examining the credentials of scientists, taking a look at the evidencie, studies, papers, reasoning, etc. that backs up evolution. So it's not a rational belief. It's faith in other people, or a system.

If people did that, they would get to the conclusion that a lot of evidence points at the possibility of evolution being true. But by no means it's proven beyond doubt.

I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.

Regarding your questions about faith, I would not say that's how faith works. I have reasons behind what I have faith in. Right now I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.

Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

That something is not visible does not mean it doesn't make sense.

Could I be wrong? I guess I could, by definition, and I would be rejecting a scientific theory. Could you be wrong? What's the consequence of that?

Unlike the natural world, the supernatural cannot be observed nor reproduced so it necessarily requires faith in order to function.

In more concrete terms: I don't know how my microwave oven works. I've never built one and don't have a degree in microwave oven technology. But I still don't need to have faith that it works--I can observe it working and if I wanted to, I could take it apart and observe its subcomponents working. I don't do this, but just the fact that I could means that I don't have to blindly believe in it or conjure up explanations about how it works.

you can still be justified in a belief if the prevailing evidence rises to the claim. We can be wrong about anything, and certainly in the mid 1800's people probably thought they knew how physics worked pretty well. They were wrong, of course, However, until evidence was produced that discounted their existing evidence, they were justified in that belief, and, it mostly worked for all intents and purposes for the tests they proposed/attempted, even tho quantum physics says something quite surprisingly different.

>> I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.

i don't doubt you. However, 9 billion people can use the process of faith to belief things, including things you think are horrendous. How do you discount their beliefs, while being confident in yours, if all you have is faith to discern the difference? If you are discerning a difference, that difference is coming from somewhere else, likely evidence and rationality. So the process of faith, itself, is not trustworthy, as i'm guessing you feel that at least half the planet is using faith and coming to the wrong conclusions.

After her eldest child was bordering on middle school age and still completely illiterate, she wound up sending the lot back to public schools. Thank god, but I still feel awful for those kids.

(Mandatory “not all homeschoolers” of course.)

As you say, learning the basics of evolution is something that can be done on your own in a weekend reading wikipedia. Similarly, you can learn the mainstream scientific explanations of how the universe was created from watching a few youtube videos. That's basically how I learned that stuff as an (atheist) homeschooled kid.

School seems to fail to teach the philosophy of science well anyway - skepticism, evidence, double-blind testing, etc. So I don't think evangelical homeschoolers are missing that much.

The current internet makes it very easy to self-select (intentionally or not) a bubble, and then never see anything outside of it (or only see one-sided takes you agree with about the “debate”). Given the algorithms major platforms use, I suspect it would be relatively easy to create a bubble in which evolution is never treated as real, and where dinosaur bones were planted to fool people.

Public schools themselves indoctrinate children--just with a different set of values than many parents have. The people who built the US system of widespread compulsory public schooling in the US were quite explicit about that being one of the primary purposes of the system. (So were the people who built the Prussian system that was referenced elsewhere in the thread.)

Yale flew me out to interview for a biology graduate program. I had the credentials and test scores to be considered, but was turned down, quite possibly because of those stereotypes (based on the questions I got in the interview process).

You get things like a Christian family whose "curriculum" for their daughters was: listen to classical music, bible listening 20 minutes/day, handwriting, bible memorization, exercise 15/day (not great so far, but wait for it): clean room 6/week, fold laundry 5/week, clean living room 5/week, clear off bar 6/week, tidy shelves in dining room 3/week, tidy stereo cabinet 2/week, clean brown cupboard in pantry 5/week, clean storeroom 1/week, tidy blue chest, dust piano, clean and vacuum, clean hallway, make bed...

Part of good media literacy is being able to discern the facts from the opinion on the part of the reporter. In this case: Yes, it's clear that the LWT team skews pretty liberal, and because of that, they and I are going to disagree on a lot. But you really don't need to spin the fact that numerous groups of extremely christian parents are providing home schooling that borders on (and sometimes crosses into) child abuse. The way children are treated as parents property in this country is fucking disgusting. This is not simply "someone's child" this is what will eventually become a person, a person who will have to work to earn a living the same as the rest of us, a person who will have to reckon with global politics and issues, a person who will have to file taxes and send out their water bill, I could go on for the rest of the day listing off things they will almost certainly have to do, and NONE of them, not a single, sodding, fucking, solitary one of those things, is going to be helped by Jesus.

My wife grew up in an extremely religious household (not fundamentalist thankfully, but very evangelical all the same) and they completely and utterly failed her in terms of preparing her for the real world, in ways too numerous to name here. She learned a whole lot about Jesus though! Not that it did her much because she's an atheist now, and I basically have to run the logistics of the household because she can't do math.

This is among many reasons for my continued slide further from Atheist to Anti-Theist.

The point is they're not trying to not.

> This is not simply "someone's child" this is what will eventually become a person

No; they're already a person. They're also someone's child.

> and NONE of them, not a single, sodding, fucking, solitary one of those things, is going to be helped by Jesus.

This hyper-emotional take seems unrelated to the discussion. I hope things get better, though.

And my point is I think the act of trying to not is overrated.

> This hyper-emotional take seems unrelated to the discussion. I hope things get better, though.

I'm not afraid of my feelings. The notion of children being raised with nothing but their sky friend's manual is terrifying. We are already in the midst of the fallout of a society largely run by people who think the Rapture is coming soon and that the world was created by god six thousand years ago. The effects on long term planning, problem solving, addressing social ills cannot be overstated when the leadership of so many nations is convinced that God is gonna show up sometime in the next 30 years and pack up humanity like a train set, and therefore there's no point in mitigating the effects of climate change, or taking care of people who refuse to take their magical bullshit seriously and/or respect their bigotries as anything other than what they are.

If that doesn't make you emotional to think about, I think that's a you problem.

That would be very odd indeed. Quite an odd thing to claim, though.

> The notion of children being raised with nothing but their sky friend's manual is terrifying. We are already in the midst of the fallout of a society largely run by people who think the Rapture is coming soon and that the world was created by god six thousand years ago. The effects on long term planning, problem solving, addressing social ills cannot be overstated when the leadership of so many nations is convinced that God is gonna show up sometime in the next 30 years and pack up humanity like a train set, and therefore there's no point in mitigating the effects of climate change, or taking care of people who refuse to take their magical bullshit seriously and/or respect their bigotries as anything other than what they are.

This is just raw prejudice and negativity. More people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 100 years that in the previous 10000, and to a standard higher than that of kings and queens of a couple of hundred years ago. We cooperate and interoperate more; we stand our ground together against evils in the world; we fight poverty and hunger more than anyone ever could've dreamed of in history.

> If that doesn't make you emotional to think about, I think that's a you problem.

This is a non sequitur. One can feel emotions without going on hyper-emotional rants.

Absolutely correct, and none of that is achieved by people raised on a strict diet of Jesus. How many borderline illiterate people from the Appalachians are revolutionizing our world? I am not saying people not born of means are incapable of changing the world (beyond the ways in which the world has ensured it anyway) in fact I am mourning, I am mourning the loss of so much human potential, sacrificed on the altar of this anti-social libertarian experiment within which a child is completely unable to advocate for themselves, their desires, and their being until they turn the magic age of 18, at which point they are thrust into the adult world, whether they have been prepared for it or not in the care of people who are not held accountable to performing that task, and if they fail to perform, they will be cast out, they will starve, they will die.

You're damn right I'm prejudiced against these people. I have seen firsthand the hell they inflict upon their children in the course of following their bullshit ideology. I've listened to hours of their intellectually bankrupt and dishonest defenses of ancient texts they insist are the best foundation for a child's learning, texts full of rape, murder, slavery, torture, all performed in the name of a narcissistic unbeing who demands complete obedience to his arbitrary commands, while demonstrating no measurable effect on the world and insisting he is the only truly righteous force. And his followers in turn wield this book as a weapon against the marginalized worldwide, waging an endless war on everyone different from them, based on nothing but their own bigotry.

My only disappointment in being Atheist is I'm fairly certain there is no hell for these people who so desperately deserve it.

The "public schools as a warrantless, ongoing search by the government into parenting" model of schooling.

Why wouldn't everyone want to sign up for that? I mean, it's not even expensive. Just subject your kids to bullying, bureaucracy, and bumblefuckery (call 'em the Three Bs!) and you too can be under suspicion for 13+ years.

That is a pretty serious factor to weight.

https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educa...

Selection effects create a "blind men and the elephant" problem when considering anecdotes about homeschoolers. Homeschool children who return to public school may do so because their parents lack the resources to homeschool them effectively, so they might perform worse (academically & socially) than the average homeschool child. But homeschool children who get jobs in the technology industry and post on Hacker News are probably more successful than the average. It remains for the reader to determine whether the lack of "success" of homeschool children who join the military, in contrast to homeschooler mean success elsewhere, is due to a selection effect or a psychological effect of homeschooling.

It's not that surprising given that the Prussian schooling system upon which ours is based was meant exactly for that.

They were able to franchise a school for, I believe $10-15,000 (certainly under $20K), a background check, and a 2 hour open book test for them both.

I struggle to see how this is acceptable for not just "homeschooling" your own kids, but other people's kids.

Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success.

US schooling has been taken over (at the level of the state legislatures; blame goes to state Congress not to the schools) by companies selling "achievement" test. And also by charter schools whose success is based on only selecting high-achieving problem-free children?

Why do teachers say they are nothing but babysitters? Maybe because they aren't allowed to teach, to inspire love of learning in the children? And their classroom budgets are so tight they buy school supplies out of their own pockets, while living on an income that is close to poverty level? While facing felony charges for having the wrong book in the shelf behind their desk???

When things like "Creme de la Creme Early Learning Center of Excellence" are real institutions instead of something from a comic dystopia, you know you have a problem.

Excuse me for not wanting middle schoolers taught how to use gay hookup apps.

Just the gay ones?

"think of the children" is just the vehicle bigotry. Notice he isn't complaining about straight hook-up apps.

You don't need a need a book to these apps.

Homosexuality is just really disgusting to a lot of people who don't want their children exposed to it. If you also have to remove books about Tinder so gays don't feel singled out, you can do that too.

The rest are a diverse un-hirable band of racists, anti vaxxers and people that fake injuries for money.

I'm not at all conservative but i can see not all conservatives are like this. This is a recent phenomenon.

By definition progress is movement in a direction. Who set the direction? Toward which destination? To achieve which aim and goals? Who benefits? To assume it is the students, the teachers, or "the people" broadly, is a naive and destructive assumption.

Social progress by one definition might include the production of obedient soldiers and factory workers. It might include the limiting of cultural diversity, creating a common core of cultural conformity and homogenization among the youth a country populated by recent immigrants. It might include training the youth to accept authority without question.

If one is interested enough to learn about the actual thinking of the founders and maintainers of public school institutions in the United States and around the world, you can read what they published of their thinking for yourself. John Taylo Gatto unearthed much of this thinking and shared it with the world in his books and lectures.

Here is one transcript you may find enlightening:

https://smarthomeschooler.com/blog/2021/5/28/gatto-six-purpo...

"Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success."

How do you measure such success? There's standardized testing but you don't seem to like that.

Public schools were created in the US to indoctrinate catholic kids - the “unwashed masses of Irish papists.” It was an oppressive institution from the start. They were designed with the same architecture as incarceration systems from France and to this day are mainly serviced by the same companies that service our prisons.

There have been so, so many attempts to recast public schools in the image of our aspirations - most notably Teach for America. I count many of their graduates among my edtech founder friends.

For those of us that have given a portion of our lives to improve these systems, the reality is heartbreaking. Public education is a callous political football whose primary purpose is to make sure children are being babysat so their parents can work. Genuine progress can be made but will be snuffed out by the well oiled grinder for government funding and political promotions.

Administrators determine our children’s future, not teachers, parents, or children. Any of those three would be better.

Yes, there are bright spots. But the vast majority of school systems destroy the aspirations of well-intentioned, newly educated teachers within a couple years. Most teachers leave the profession after less than a decade in it.

The best researchers I’ve found have all reached a stunningly simple conclusion on why better funding does not improve outcomes - students are living in intense poverty. Many students are homeless. Many have no safe place to sleep.

The reason homeschooling is rising is because intelligent, caring parents can give their child a better education simply by not subjecting them to the bizarre social experience that has become most public schools.

The exception to that rule is the proof of what matters - a community of parents/guardians who come together and support a mutual learning center with caring educators.

Co-op, private, public, they all work when you have that.

The real public school horror story is that today, in America, a "good school" is defined as one where your child won't get shot.

I leave the rest of the rant as an exercise to the reader.

One of my friends went to a school where she was beaten every day and the teachers had totally given up and most of them did not teach.

Unfortunately, we need much more data than we have. The article mentions school quality is often not the driving reason for homeschooling, but you can definitely imagine public schools where almost any level of homeschooling is a better alternative.

[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-r....

My children are in public school, but I am not sure if they will stay there. Even in "good" schools, there's many problems (especially in middle schools) and a lot of time is wasted if your kids have any academic ability at all.

Peer groups matter. In “good” schools you’re optimizing the peer group. A good/bad school rating has little to do with teacher capability.

The problem is what you do with the parents who do not care at all.

And for older children, peers tend to influence them more than parents anyway. Turning around a failing student will often require separating them from their current friends. Tough to do when you can't afford to move to a better school district.

All the push just hurt me in the end, I would be a lot better off without traditional school, rarely I learned anything useful there.

It’s not a “do this or else”. It’s basically let’s do it together.

If you search niche.com, you can see proficiency scores correlate exactly with household income. Same school systems, same new facilities, same teacher compensation, same class sizes.

And are you saying they have per-student household income data? Or they just have the household income data for the school district as a whole? Or maybe the household income data for the student body as a whole? Those are very different things.

I think we might be saying the same thing though, since “right” school generally means a school where a large proportion of the other kids have parents who are throwing a lot of resources at the kids (including the parents’ time and attitudes towards academic learning). It just so happens that this group of parents is higher income, so the easily visible statistic will be neighborhoods with higher income households will have higher academic proficiency percentages in the schools.

There is also this old map:

https://opportunityatlas.org/

Schools are a tool to teach people at scale. Tools can be used well or poorly and for various end goals.

This doesn't seem to be so self-evident. Why do I care about the education of those around me?

...generates more economic activity

...understands basic civics and government

The public school system isn't doing that for our fellow citizens already. I fail to see why it would be worse if the failure happens at home rather than in a government building.

And that's a fair criticism of some public schools. And some home-schoolers. And probably some private schools.

That's also why you care about the state of the public school system, even if you have no kids (or they don't attend public school).

It’s just odd that so many people here seem to be so in favor of the “sit down and shut up” style of schooling. Isn’t it pretty widely agreed upon that US public schools suck? Don’t you think there are some parents who are homeschooling their children explicitly because they feel their public school would not prepare them to be good members of society?

Regular interaction with non-custodial adults provides more opportunities for child abuse to be uncovered and stopped. You can go on youtube and hear myriad testimonials from former homeschooled kids that were abused for years on end. And nobody knew. Nobody even had a chance to know.

Varies a lot by states. Some states have no assessment requirement for honeschooled students at all, some have a requirement to keep a portfolio which may or may not be reviewed, some have an standardized testing requirement with more flexibility and lower frequency than public schools, and some have homeschool students take the same standardized tests as everyone else.

https://education.uslegal.com/homeschooling/homeschooling-la...

No that’s literally the main benefit. People actually get to teach their own kids without state indoctrination (either left or right.)

https://www.deccanherald.com/india/scientists-flag-ncerts-mi...

I definitely wouldn't want this kind of "regulated" education for children.

I'd bet a lot on parents caring more about their kids welfare than regulators.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-high-adults-unable-basic-mathe...

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_...

I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them?

> Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's extraordinarily weird.

If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to address that challenge.

Do you actually feel there's abuse happening? Or, is it that you just find them unusual?

One legal theory that may be relevant was brought up long ago for a case on banned books in school: you have the right to raise your kid according to your beliefs, but many states guarantee children the right to education. So the state could regulate homeschooling to ensure all children have access to an actual education.

>If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to address that challenge.

A lot of those resources rely on processes that come after reports from teachers and caregivers. If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation. Children who go to daycare or public school are seen by professionals trained to spot abuse.

We allow anyone to have children, because otherwise we're on a very slippery and short slope towards eugenics. But those children are entitled to the same rights and protections as their parents. It's hard to strike a good balance between a family's freedom and a child's freedom.

Edited out some unnecessary detours in my ramblings

They guarantee the right to /access/ education. This is not at all the same as guaranteeing that all children "must be educated at a state approved school."

> If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation.

I read an incredible number of police reports. There's a lot of abuse that gets detected outside of daycare and schools. Unless the children are literally locked into a basement, I doubt that the parents can continually exercise enough total control to keep whatever other abuse their committing hidden.

To the extent that if it is happening, it's an exceptionally rare case, and I doubt that simply forcing all parents to send their children to a third party for education is going to have any impact on these particularly pernicious cases.

I understand the instinct, but I think the solution is wrong, and it's an inappropriate case to use to defend schooling in general.

That's oversimplifying. You're right about the "at a state approved school", but the right is to access education to a set standard that will equip them for life.

You can't just say "well, they have access to -my- education, so we're good". There should be caveats around quality and deliverability of education.

Because if you (the generic 'you', not singling you out individually) have low/zero value educational material, and no desire to provide it for your children, then that is /not/ them accessing education in any meaninful sense of the concept.

The homeschoolers get a free pass to do literally whatever... don't you see a dichotomy with what you're preaching?

Why can't you just do anything you want, regardless of the effect it has on your dependents?

Second, I do all those things because it's my responsibility, not because the state will come after me if I don't.

> I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them?

Because your children are not your property, they are your responsibility and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.

As a side note I find it fascinating how people who feel strongly about individual freedom, believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership) over their children. Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to children?

I am their _guardian_.

> and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.

And what is that standard? Passing standardized tests? How do you account for the poor performance of American schools in general? How do you account for the differential performance across the country, let alone, wild performance differences across a single city? If a child goes to school but fails to become educated, can the sue the school district? Does the school owe them continued education until they meet the standard?

> believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership) over their children.

If something happens to my children and I'm even just negligent then I will pay the ultimate price. You cannot ensconce in me this responsibility and then deny my authority to exercise control over them to maintain it.

> Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to children?

Why do you think children can't sign contracts or buy alcohol? They have _limited_ freedom, under my _guardianship_. This is more important than the States imputed idealism with respect to "education."

Actually, American schools do not do badly in international comparisons. They are the number one, sure, but they are still pretty good.

There's also some very unsurprising outcomes based on state policy there.

New test scores, known as MCAP (Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program), obtained by Project Baltimore, revealed that 23 schools, including elementary, middle, and high schools, had not one student that could do math at grade level.

Calverton school (https://www.niche.com/k12/calverton-elementary-middle-school...)

  A Calverton educator, who reached out to Fox45, claims to have received that text. “[It instructed me to] go into my grade book, make sure no students are failing, and essentially change the grade if they are failing so they will pass with a 60 percent,” said the teacher, whose identity we are concealing upon request.

  “I was frustrated as a teacher. We’re public servants. And when we see things like grade changing, that’s self-serving. That’s not helping the kids.”

  After watching Fox45’s recent investigations into allegations of grade changing at Calverton, the City Schools employee contacted Project Baltimore to say a couple things. First, according to the teacher, grade changing at Calverton is “very common.”

  Second, the educator told Fox45, changing grades is the easiest and fastest way to pass more students, which makes the school and its administrators look better. But, it does a huge disservice to not just the kids, but our entire community.

  “Teaching a whole generation of kids that they don’t have to be accountable for their actions, or that hard work isn’t valued or valuable when they are in school, is so discouraging and damaging.”

  “There were students on my roster all year that I had never met, had never seen. On paper they passed my class and passed onto the next year.”

  “I love my job and I love my students,” concluded the teacher. “I want to see the students at Calverton and other schools across the city, get a fresh start. And it’s going to be hard because the students are used to this now. But the students deserve better and our city deserve better.”

That's demonstrably false.

You can do plenty of neglectful or negligent things to your children and face zero consequences.

The state dictating and setting the rules is no more free than the parents setting the rules.

This basically comes down to an argument not of freedom, but if the children are property of the state or parents.

When you look at it this way, it makes perfect sense that libertairian minded folks would support homeschooling.

After all, the state isnt offering the freedom of choice and action to children, it is making legal requirements and demands.

Is the purpose of their lives to serve the interests of the state, or society at large? Or should they be live their lives based on their own interests and priorities.

the libertarian perspective is that if you grant the state and society the authority to control the child, it will use that authority to advance the interests of the state or society.

As if public schools provide kids any sort of freedom or autonomy? What is your point here?

Someone has to be in charge of a kid. Either the parent acts as the authority over their child, or the state does.

I couldn’t possibly agree more! They are MY responsibility. Not yours. Not the state’s. Not society’s. I will educate them the way that I see fit. It’s not my responsibility to educate your kids, and it’s not your responsibility to educate mine, no matter how righteous and justified it may feel.

If you are teaching your children to murder all Jews and that red traffic lights mean go, then you are clearly not capable of being responsible for another human being.

I agree, within reason is always necessary, and if those things were being taught then it's time for a visit from CPS, for sure. But it still feels like a potential slippery slope of "You're abusing this child by teaching them things that aren't approved by the state" in the extreme case. I know that may sound silly, but with as polarized as the country has been recently, and with authoritarianism on the rise worldwide (I saw a man get arrested in the UK yesterday because he criticized some protests on Facebook!), I don't see it being an entirely foreign idea.

I bet there's a correlation between this viewpoint and not having any children.

Your kid has a right to education, you don't get to deny them that right. It's funny how these arguments are all "don't tread on my right to tread on my kid."

Because quite frankly, they didn‘t have a say in the matter and rely upon you entirely to provide an adequate education

The issue is that when a kid's at school, there are many people who may notice something's wrong. From teachers, school nurses, school administrators, and even other kids. This is by no means perfect, and many, many cases of abuse slip through the cracks. But it is something, which is more then many home schooled kids have.

While I'd wager most home schooled kids aren't abused, the fact of the matter is it's much easier for an abusive parent to cover up their abuse if their child is home schooled. You may still feel home schooling is a net positive, but this aspect is very hard to deny.

Like the Satanism panics of the 1990s demonstrate, elaborate imaginings of complex sadistic rituals that are necessarily rare[0] bordering on nonexistent, tend to capture the public mind and suck oxygen away from treating the totally unattractive (not even in the capacity of making for a true crime special) real problems.

If you want to see this on TV, the last season of The Wire was about it.

[0] There were actually a spare of ritual killings in Liberia through the 1970s, proving humanity capable at least and making the issue to be one of reasonableness.

One friend’s mom wouldn’t teach him the curriculum for months, and then when she knew a test was coming up she would make him study with her for 14 hours a day to try to cram it in. Then when he naturally performed poorly on state exams he was punished (often physically) for not trying hard enough. She regularly woke him up for classes when she wanted to be awake at 2 or 3 am, then later after her afternoon nap at 6 or 8pm. He grew up constantly tired, without a regular schedule of meals, and never made it to the group outings because he felt sick all the time.

Another friend’s mom just couldn’t be bothered to teach and just took her out on “learning” hikes with other homeschooling moms, never taught her anything, and wound up sending her back to public school with severely (I mean severely) underdeveloped skills after being held back for several years.

Neither of these parents I’m sure “planned” to abuse their children in this way. They just weren’t up for the task of teaching in the way that a child requires, and their own personal issues turned that into a larger problem. But my friends suffered for it.

My honest sympathies to your friends.

> negatively associated with college degree attainment (RR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.88) and possibly with greater risk of posttraumatic stress disorder.

I’m sure I’m just unlucky and that the 3/4 abuse ratio doesn’t hold for the broader population. Higher rate of PTSD is suspect though.

As an anecdote I have close family member that teaches younger elementary school grades. They have told me about signs of possible abuse they've seen but no available recourse.

I'm also aware that school is a also an environment where abuse occurs. How can we say that we are not exposing public school children to more abuse per capita than homeschooled? There is a school in my neighbourhood that often has the police called in. Lockdowns over students bringing in knives and attacking each other.

It would be good to know these things if making an argument that pivots on abuse.

One last anecdote. All the experiences I can remember having that I'd consider abuse occurred in either: school, work or public transit. Some were bad interactions with strangers in passing, other were more chronic (generally at school).

While it is true terrible things can happen to kids at home, you need stats to compare this with the alternative before a stance should be taken.

It's natural to want to stay out of things, especially if one doesn't know the procedure and worries about messing up a family's lives. But it's better for the people in charge of investigating cops abuse to decide the appropriate course.

As for how reporting happens, it depends on the state. In mine (Pennsylvania), all school employees are made well aware they're considered "Mandated Reporters." They are legally required to report any suspicions of child abuse, either through the state's website, phone line, local police, or the county agency responsible for child abuse cases. The suspected abuse victim doesn't need to say they're being abused or anything at all, the reporter doesn't even have to guess who the abuser is. If the reporter thinks there may have been abuse because they saw or learned about physical (e.g. bruises) or behavioral (e.g. afraid to go home) signs, they have to report it. Not reporting can led to misdemeanor or felony charges for the Mandated Reporter. Somebody who reported their suspicion is immune from civil or criminal liability, and protected from retaliation from the institution they work at, for the report (unless it can be shown they're using reports maliciously). They're also tested as confidential informants in any investigation.

The law also encourages "Permissive Reporters" to report suspected child abuse, but without threatening charges for not reporting. These reporters can do so anonymously.

All this info comes from my wife, who was a daycare teacher, and DuckDuckGo-ing "Pennsylvania mandated reporters."

The number of substantiated (court ruling, protective order, etc) child abuse cases in 2022: around 5,000.

No other group, including doctors, police officers, and Child Protective Services themselves, made more reports. Only around 6% of the school employees' reports were substantiated, making their reports least likely to be substantiated. This leads me to believe school employees have a lower threshold for reporting a suspicion compared to other groups.

And they overlook 100x more students beating the shit out of each other. No, I won't cite it. I lived it, and I have relatives working in that system who say nothing has changed.

BTW there are more than 100k school teachers in Pennsylvania. 10k reports a year represents about 1 in 10 teachers making a single report a year. I retract my 100x remark, it's far worse than that.

If you adjust for scale, I would be utterly flabbergasted if home schooling had a higher per capita rate of abuse than actual public schools unless public schools have changed to the point of being utterly unrecognisable from the 80-90's when it was inflicted on me.

The 4th amendment of the Constitution protects all of us from warrantless searches. If you turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches to ferret out criminal activity, then public schools become unconstitutional.

The strange thing is that you can probably turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches without actually codifying that in statute, without making any major changes to school policy. All you have to do is assert that this is one of the major benefits of public education, and get some large fraction of other Americans to believe the same thing.

> You may still feel home schooling is a net positive,

It's a net positive to undermine fundamental human rights?

A lot of people seem to be implying that religious indoctrination is abuse, when it isn't legally, even if you think it should be. I'm personally in between a rock and a hard place here, since I don't want my kids exposed to either religion or LGBT stuff.

From what I can tell, homeschooled kids are given a curriculum with books/workbooks for both the student and the teacher. They are also tested by the state and must meet certain criteria.

so there seems to be guidance and verification.

Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.

And my best classes in uni weren't the massive lectures at the University of Texas but rather small summer school classes I took in a cheap Houston community college during summer break where I could actually interact with the teacher and fellow students.

Finally, HNers overuse "reinventing" as a pejorative. If you use a similar approach found in another option, and the HNer doesn't prefer your option over the other option, you're always "reinventing" it. As if some trivial thing in common between two options are the only would-be differences between them. It's not very thoughtful commentary.

Home-schooling could be 100% identical to public schooling except that it's not the local school system and it would still deliver on its goal of not being the local school system. That's the whole point.

Not the way government tends to work in US.

Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US is controlled at a local level; every town, district, and city etc has its own rules, has to hire its own staff and pay for it all out of local taxes. And because the generally tiny constituency of each district, a very small number of nutcases can change the rules and impose their point of view for the school district.

And because of the local funding, there can be huge resource and quality differences between schools for adjacent locations, just due to crossing some arbitrary jurisdiction line.

It is madness, but it is a madness that is deeply loved/entrenched here.

This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents. The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc. You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources.

And you're only partially right about local control of education. There are many federal and state regulations that dictate school policies in every facet. These would rule out many of the local "nut cases". Much of the funding is provided by the state and federal government too, depending on the state.

It’s only “efficient” because it doesn’t have to scale. Add non-wealthy kids into the mix. Add children with learning disabilities. All of a sudden, homeschooling fails a massive chunk of the population.

Public education has served the US well for most of the post-WWII era. Let’s fix it, not abandon it.

I'm not saying to abandon it. I'm saying if the question is efficiency, that particular homeschooling model is very efficient, even if other arrangements need to be made for certain segments of the population (I would revise your "non-wealthy" statement to be "poor" as much of the middle class could make that system work).

Of course there have been multiple attempts to fix the system already. So far we haven't seemed to find the solution. Back to your "non-wealthy" comment, even the current system tends to fail the poor, since parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success (this is largely tied to two parent households, but income plays a role as well).

But many people, both in this forum and in meat-space are doing just that. Perhaps not directly, but the end result of "school choice" (of which there are several flavors) will be the end of generally good-enough public education for most of the population. Toss in the latest conservative boogeymen (CRT, book bans, etc) and the outlook looks pretty gloomy.

parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success

I often wonder if our schools are fine, but everything else is broken.

Stagnant wages, longer working hours, fewer 2 parent households, other things.

My big question is if the money per student is the same, but the outcomes are better, then what can we emulate from the charter or private schools? Or is it selection bias since the parents are involved enough to get them in?

Selection bias a real problem with charters and privates. We've already selected for "parents who give a shit". And frequently for "no IEP or other learning disability". So, kids who are, at worst, average intellect with parents who care enough to fill out some paperwork and drive them to school - those kids are going to succeed almost anywhere.

And I totally understand the desire to get your own children a high quality education. That's a large part of why I moved back to Fairfax County. But, I also feel strongly that strong public schools are a requirement for a healthy society.

Charter schools are frequently oversubscribed, and admit students via lottery. This makes it pretty easy to run randomized tests that aren't affected by selection bias.

No, it does not, because the following sources of selection bias exist.

(1) Charters select for actively involved parents, because they are not the default-assigned by-residence public schools, and an active choice is necessary to get into the pool,

(2) Charters, because they are not scaled to only take the actively-choosing parents from the catchment area of a typical district school, select for parents with greater means who are able to make a longer travel to the school for drop off, pickup, and other necessary interactions.

(3) There are often biases in the lottery system; even something as simple as giving favorable consideration for having a sibling already in the school reinforces the impact of other biases.

I agree, that we should have good public schools. I feel they do get written off by many of the school choice proposals. I think there could be more support if pairing public school improvements with school choice. If we can improve the public schools to the point of being attractive, then it wouldn't matter if school choice was a thing. It's definitely an unusual paradigm where there is a public option with many people being forced to it for financial reasons, yet the institution is largely unwilling to compete with private offerings.

The system today is optimizing for standardization federally in order to try and fight the natural entropy toward a highly unequal system where rich kids get dramatically better education and there is a downward spiral for poor kids. It's not achieving this goal today, but decentralizing the system would most definitely reinforce unequal outcomes, not avoid it.

That's the goal[1], but what is it constrained by? Primarily that constraint is cost. If you can improve efficiency (improved outcomes per dollar), everyone stands to benefit, especially at the lower end if you can reallocate that money towards them.

The main problem is that school is trying to be utilized to fix multiple issues at home that it simply can't correct for under the current system (yes that other person's example would make it worse). Federal standards and more money won't fix it. Other policy changes might help, but would be difficult to implement.

[1] I'd argue the goal is for each individual to reach their best potential as opposed to equity. Otherwise we end up with perverse systems that limit some upper end students, as we're starting to see innsome areas. That is not good for society/humanity. Equitable resourcing could be good.

The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded. Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason. Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes. Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it.

This feels like youre getting outside the HN guidelines. What framework? Which parts?

"The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded."

Would that money fix anything? Do you have any stats/criteria for how a particular area of the budget is overfunded? Otherwise when taken with your other verbiage, it sounds like just an inflammatory opinion. The US already spends 6.1% of its GDP on education, which is more than most other countries.

"Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason."

This is a bit dramatic given the definition. There are a few states with low teacher pay. However, you have to also look at median income and cost of living. Yeah, the average teacher makes about $50k in MS, but median income for MS is $48k per year with a low cost of living in most of the state. I have friends who have turned down public teaching that would pay more than their private teaching job due to the way the schools are run. Clearly pay is not the main issue in my area.

"Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes."

In general, you are right. In the context of this thread, those would be test scores, graduation rate, job/college placement rates.

"Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it."

No, not everyone knows it. Care to explain? It seems the test measure what the kids are supposed to know at a specific level. Are there some problems with things like teaching to the test instead of teaching for durable knowledge or love of learning, sure. But if you know how to read/write/etc at your grade level, then your scores will be fine. Seem like one of the best comparisons we have. Are there better alternatives?

It is not. Curriculum is decided far above the heads of the districts, as is standardized testing. Funding is a problem, though, how much of a problem is wildly variable depending on where you are.

This article makes a case that the statistics of small sample sizes has bamboozled many different well-intentioned groups, including the small school movement.

The argument is that the fact that many of the best schools are small is an artifact of statistics (de Moivre's equation) rather than evidence small schools are superior.

We all know the worse the ratio the worse the education tends to be. Tutoring is a long established means of compensating for this, by supplementing sessions with a 1:1 ratio, clearly illustrating the problem.

FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing from the community and not-so-great public school system, but I don't because then I'm just another contributor to the inequality problem. We Live In A Society.

It is interesting to think of parents that see their own children as props, like pawns in some larger game rather than as individuals. I think there are subtle ways that this can happen.

I think a lot of people grew up in overly conservative homes. A common story you hear nowadays is a kid who grew up forced to tow the line in some religion and only once they reached maturity did they even realize there was another world out there. They may even promise themselves that they won't allow the same thing to happen to their own kids.

I don't know anything about you or your family or kids, but your attitude made me wonder if there is a backlash coming. If kids raised in forced diverse circumstances may rebel against their parents since they are being coerced into their parents view of "ideal world", much like the parents of stereotypical tiger asian parents or nutty sports dads.

No matter what way you cut it the will of the parent is subjected on the child. In my opinion that’s how it should be.

The decisive factor is what the focus of the parents will is. Is it personal glory? Is it trying to “make the world a better place”?. I would argue that choosing what is best for the child from the perspective of the parent is the best.

Giving them a robust worldview, a good set of morals and the capabilities to effect change when their older are the right way forward.

Our children are not missionaries that go into the world to make it a better place. Our children are to be nurtured so that when they grow up they can make a positive change in the world.

My only chance for a normal life and education was public school.

A huge amount of americans are poor in time and money. The only option their children have is public school. Their future is entirely dependent on a public that is willing to invest in them so that they even have a future, one that isn't just "wage slave at walmart". Sure, it often doesn't work out, it's a struggling system that has been abused and ignored for decades, and it fails millions every year.

You know what doesn't help any of those millions of kids? All the wealthy families sending their kids to private schools or homeschooling and removing their property taxes from the public school system. Society will not be a better place for your kids if they are individually 10% better but 10% of the children born in the US basically have no access to education.

The advocation of "School choice" as conservatives are currently selling it is about taking away the chance I had at a middle class life. It's about saving a few thousand dollars for already privileged individuals at the expense of swathes of people like me who were at least average intelligence who had the audacity to be born to a poor mother.

If you think public schooling in america is deficient, then let us fix it.

But that's not how they think. They believe the bottom 10% deserve their hard lives.

Capitalism needs an oppressed class to function.

The people on top write laws to ensure the oppressed class will exist. Then they sell it to the middle class using scary stories of crime, religion, etc.

You’ll know this by the people who campaign for voucher programs that we’re all told are evil somehow. Yet the goal of vouchers is to make all options available to everyone.

Without vouchers, all options are only available to those with financial options.

You can go to public school, private school or a home school program. If you want a better public school, you have to move to a better rated school district. In order to do that, you have to be able to afford it.

Without vouchers, poor families only option is public school where they currently live. People opposed to vouchers have 1 goal: preserve the status quo. They’ll tell you absolutely anything to convince you otherwise too.

How exactly does that work?

We homeschool and I pay property taxes that fund our local school just like everyone else in town. I pay for services that I don't use and can be used for other children if the powers that be decide to allocate it that way.

School choice/vouchers defund public schools proportional to loss of public school responsibility for students.

Besides, it is pretty said that the best counter argument against charter schools is that parents will take their fair share of funding and use it to buy a much better education for their children.

To your point about charter schools, there is a strong argument to be made that when parents have a choice where there kids go, public schools will have to make sure they are providing more academic opportunities if they don't want to risk losing the academically minded families (and their money). That seems like it would be a good thing for everyone.

I voted to raise property tax where I live specifically to improve the funding situation for our struggling public schools - I attended a great public school district growing up (because, surprise: my parents could afford to move into the district).

The funding situation needs to be fixed across the board, because indeed everyone attending public school deserves as good an education as I received, but the way the system functions currently is that poor areas get poor schools (at least in the midwest where I've lived).

So, while I whole-heartedly support education reform and improving funding as public policies: I still wouldn't send my own kids to the public school district where I live; they're terrible. I wish they weren't.

My freshman year of highschool, I was at a very large school, around 3400 in attendance. The school had been expanded several times, and was more or less at capacity. Some facilities were scaled out well, others weren't. There were fights on a weekly basis, tons of security trying to prevent that, but, they could only do so much. Lunch lines were very long, sometimes I'd be lucky to get 10 minutes to eat, mostly brought my own lunch because of that. The school was locked down a few times that year because of weapon scares. It was hell.

Then my sophomore year, they cut the school in half, sending most of the students, save for the seniors, to a new school across town. That landed the school I attended at around 1400 kids, my junior year, all of the extra seniors had graduated, so, it shrank further to around 1300. From sophomore year on, there was not a single fight, everyone knew eachother and got along, they cut the security team down to just two people and they both were well liked. Test scores were way up, class sizes went from 40+ to consistently under 30, and things overall were fairly good as far as highschool goes. The new school across town was a similar situation from what I gathered from friends who went there.

Now you might write that off as it was simply too crowded, but, they closed about a third of the school, which was held in portable classrooms when the split happened. Some of those were re-purposed for offices and whatnot, most got hauled away. So the actual density of people didn't really change much. We got some extra space to have PE classes in, but that was about it, space wise.

You might also write that off as demographic changes, which was also not true. In fact, the roughest part of town all went to the school I attended, while the nicer, more affluent side of town, mostly got sent to the new school.

The way I see it, the school was simply too large, and managing that many students day to day, and all of their needs and affairs, did not scale well, and bred inefficiency, inefficiency that existed long before I got there and everyone got to keep their job and maintain that as the status-quo. Sure the buildings/campus could physically contain them well enough, yes they were all reasonably well fed and watered, but they'd become unmanageable in such a way that was not likely to be fixed.

In terms of reinvention in public education, smaller schools are a decent model, as are smaller class sizes. The real deciding factor in how well a student does however, is parent buy-in, which homeschool models have in spades, and in addition the class sizes are about as small as you can reasonably go as well. Understand of course that, parents opting to homeschool are paying taxes to public schools, while receiving no benefit, and that in addition to paying for the costs associated with homeschooling. Not all families can afford to effectively pay for schooling twice, hell, most can barely afford to exist while paying once. You could very likely fix your concerns about privilege by simply redirecting money back to homeschool parents that would normally be spent on public school. There are very well defined $/student numbers out there, so, the amounts would be fairly trivial to come up with. You could also really work around the whole right/left politically polarized bullshit factory by perhaps giving a little more to the lower income families and a little less to high income families. I think that'd sufficiently frame the nominally 'right wing' framed homeschool ideals as neutral, or at least dissonant enough that you might get most of everyone on-board provided you could get the right palms greased in state government.

Understand of course that, the public education system is an enormous apparatus, and they're managing unfathomable numbers of students. They're also not setup in fairly clean competency hierarchies either. At the local level, seniority tends to be king, at the broader level, the ability to navigate the political system is the selection factor. Neither of those have anything to do with "who's talented at educating kids", and while you do have means to measure performance, those same means are also decided upon by the very same people being effectively measured, so there's an incentive to make them easier over time, as that looks politically better. So if anything, the incentives we've created are exactly backwards, and the system cannot change until those incentives are fixed. I don't really know how you'd prevent standardized testing from being watered down or trifled with. I don't really know how you'd create sufficient educator turnover with the unions in place to weed out bad teachers. More or less, the system is broken, we need bloodsports to fix it, but they've thought of that, and have prevented it from happening.

I'm not holding by breath of course. People are more than likely going to write it off as "privilege" regardless of the changes proposed, with a whole list of valid enough sounding reasons that they haven't really thought through, most of which won't really have any baring on reality, and nothing will change aside from actual children being mortally wounded by poor education. That'll continue as-is, furthering the class divide, increasing unrest, increasing predatory behavior toward people who, could have been saved by better policy, but were thought more useful as sacrifices on the altar of "the other team's" apparatus.

As for me? I'll be eating beans and rice and driving a 15 year old honda while putting my future children through a homeschool program regardless of what happens.

People are diverse and have diverse needs. That includes kids. AFAIK the most efficient method of education is still one-to-one tutoring, the very opposite of "schools at scale". Unfortunately it is also very expensive.

Efficient in what way? Children in public schools are now doing worse than previous generations. Efficiency does not beget quality education.

> Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.

If we, as a society values families more and enables single income households this wouldn’t be privilege, it could be the norm.

it is like the difference between a commercial child care service, and having your friend's kids or you kid's friends over for the day.

I think it depends largely on who controls the process - the parents of a paid professional.

That said, it is not a typical approach either, nor is schooling by a parent. I have used (and this is typical in the UK, although i do not know about the US) paid face to face tutors, taught my self, provided the kids with textbooks etc. to teach themselves, paid for online courses, helped them find other resources and so on.

The paid tutors are qualified (both of them are qualified in the subjects they teach, one is a former school teacher).

In California the student enrolls in a home school program through a local public school. You are assigned a homeschool liaison and can enroll in public school classes. The kids and parents get a weekly checkin and support. You have to pass public school tests. You get a budget from the public school to use for materials.

My grandsons are getting homeschooled through 6th grade. My daughter decided it was just too hard to duplicate a high school education at home so she is phasing them into public school in middle school.

She gave each child the choice of home school or public school. The Covid lockdown made that choice easy for the kids. They know that if they don't keep up, she will send them back to public school. That is quite the motivator.

Just like your neighbors she works with other parents to keep the kids socialized, take them on field trips, and to form a support system. She also signs the kids up for sports.

The downside (from her observation) is since some of the early homeschoolers were bible based, she had to really review the school material. A surprising number of text books use the bible as history or have questionable science. She also noticed that many parents homeschool their kids because they can't participate in regular school (for various reasons). Her kids homeschool as a choice.

The biggest upside is that time is more flexible and the liaison is flexible. The family took a trip to NYC and the liaison was asking the boys quite a few questions about what they saw and learned.