The problem with home schooling is that it is a solution for the rich and leaves all of the poor kids behind.
The rich hire tutors or send their kids to $25k-$75k/yr private school. Or both.
Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
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Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#72> Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught. Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?
It is, and article hit pieces like this are exactly why it will continue to expand. Newsflash, there’s an actual large portion of the population that more and more doesn’t want what is taught to their children regulated by the government.
Yeah, there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible. We should all be so lucky as to be a bunch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts.
Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd conveniently ignores the reasons those regulations were created in the first place.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#73Is there a story here beyond the pandemic? The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. Now the rate is gradually declining as some kids return to school and some parents decide it's working well so they'll keep going until their kids are older.
The pandemic is the most obvious cause, and the article notes that "Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth." Obviously test scores are not the only measure of quality, but at least in this article there is no evidence of any cause other than the pandemic. The other possible factor discussed in this comment section, politics, doesn't seem to be relevant either. There is no correlation between homeschooling rates and the politics of the parents or the state.
Also, "fastest-growing" is not very remarkable when the only other categories are public and private. Home-schooling is by far the smallest category, less than 5%, so basically any increase (which has to come from a decrease in at least one of the other categories) will make it the fastest-growing category.
Here are statistics going back further: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a.... Homeschooling gradually increased from 1999 to 2012, and then started to decline a bit until the pandemic.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is exactly the opposite. Homeschooled kids frequently have to learn how to adult all at once, right as they get dumped into the pool with everyone else to go find a way to make a living. The most successful kids that I see are the ones who have professional instructors by day and excellent support at home. Not one or the other, but both.
> Homeschooled kids frequently have to learn how to adult all at once How does sitting in a room with a bunch of kids, all of whom are within one year of you in age, with an authority figure at the front telling you exactly what to do, teach you "how to adult"? It might prepare you for Army boot camp, which is the only "adult" place you're likely to encounter that kind of environment. Even prison usually has a range…
> with an authority figure at the front telling you exactly what to do
This is not an accurate description of school. Maybe, maybe in high school and college you kinda sorta get to something resembling that, but for elementary school and middle school it is nothing at all like your description.
I'll grant you that 40-50 years ago it was a bit more regimented. I'm old too. But I have school age kids in both elementary and middle school, and I have a lot of experience in what their environment looks like. It's very dynamic, lots of hands-on learning opportunities.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#75This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent. It is pretty misleading for this article to talk about homeschooling being a “fundamental change” without mentioning that homeschooling was the default practice for most of human history. If anything, this is just a return to a long-established practice, not a fringe movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
It's interesting that we treat kettling children up indoors by age cohort with little movement and making them solve math problems ad nauseum as if it were the most natural thing in the world and treat those who can't sit still and learn in such an environment (or understand the purpose of doing all of those math problems for 13 years) as if they are an aberration.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#76So .. I was homeschooled for a couple of years, in the UK, and had a relatively normal if solitary experience. But that was because my mother was a qualified teacher who'd stopped working, and I was a smart kid. This left me naturally favourable to the idea. Since then it's become clear that there are basically two categories of homeschoolers: those that want to bring in extra education beyond what the public school…
This too is my experience.
I grew up in a place with a large number of religious organizations and outcome of this is what I would consider abuse in a huge number of cases. Would the children themselves think so at the time, kinda hard when you're taught "spare the rod, spoil the child" and "Of course the Earth is only 6000 years old" daily.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that's one model. The underlying problem is the completely unregulated nature. Similarly, there is household in my neighborhood that home schools. The kids (all 8 of them) never leave the house. They have a 8ft. fence and 1 acre yard where I assume they get some outside time. No one visits. Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's extraordinarily weird.
For this anecdote I can provide you with about 20 anecdotes that are the complete opposite in nature. There is no regulation, but does there need to be? Homeschoolers take the same standardized tests as everyone else - that's about as regulatory as it needs to be (and even that's questionable).
This is just not the case. In many states it's nearly completely unregulated, and the home school lobby is working diligently to strip even those regulations.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#78I would much prefer “backpack funding” aka vouchers. The blue-state city I live in spends almost $25k per student per year and apart from a few magnet schools they are atrociously bad. Like the high school my kids would have to attend if I wasn’t wealthy had a student murdered outside of it a few years ago. If you gave parents even 1/3 of that money the state would save a fortune and parents would be so much better o…
Naïve per-student-spending calculations can misleading. Some students cost a lot more than others. My state spends hundreds of thousands per student in some cases—but that's schools in juvenile detention facilities. Nonetheless, that goes in the stats. Kids in self-contained classrooms ("special ed" kids who can't function in the normal classroom) can be several times as expensive to educate as the median kid. Kids i…
I clearly stated I am fine for the special needs kids getting more funding. The central point is to give me - the parent - the money that would go to the atrociously bad school so I can put my kids (not special needs) into a good school. That is the situation for the majority of students.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that the only relevant question here is how home schooling compares to public schools when it comes to “horror stories.” And there certainly aren’t a lack of public school horror stories…
There are plenty of 'public school' horror stories because these things are public and can be audited in a great number of cases. 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 bu…
> 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.
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
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#80Is there a story here beyond the pandemic? The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. Now the rate is gradually declining as some kids return to school and some parents decide it's working well so they'l…
> The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates.
I think you're forgetting the biggest reason: it turns out zoom school was a disaster and the worst of both worlds.