Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education • Hacker News Board

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#251

Post by bombcar » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

tivert wrote: post #58

jwestbury wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many behaviours which were common throughout human history which would now be fringe movements. Human and/or animal sacrifices, for instance.

> There are many behaviours which were common throughout human history which would now be fringe movements. Human and/or animal sacrifices, for instance. I better example might be freedom from surveillance. It's a totally fringe lifestyle to not be tracked everywhere you go, at least in a developed country. But your rhetoric might be useful for shooting down privacy advocates during the next dust-up. Privacy may have…

What's sad is the "fringe privacy" lifestyle has been getting easier and easier, because so many privacy invading things assume you have a GPS enabled phone on you at every moment, and are constantly connected to the Internet.

Make those two untrue and it's like you never existed.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#252

Post by FireBeyond » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #150

People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept, but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things. There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all very different motivations. Likewise, there a…

> Beyond that, there are parents who are well equipped to homeschool and parents who are not. And there is a small but hard-to-ignore percentage who claim to homeschool but really neglect their kids.

There's such a disparity between states. States like mine require homeschooled kids to occasionally attend actual school for check in or certain classes, and participate in the same testing (regardless of your opinion of such testing).

Other states are more vague and less frequent about such thing.

And then a notable swathe of states, you might as well go off the grid. Tell the state you're homeschooling, and then that's it, you never interact with the state again. Troubling. And there's not just neglect, but active abuse, that that can help hide.

Texas is working on an amendment that ostensibly cuts taxes on child care facilities to make them more affordable. It's very easy to tell that those savings won't be passed on to consumers. In reality, it's very much more a pro-homeschooling thing. "Homeschool your kids and save on your property taxes".

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#253

Post by jewayne » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #189

orochimaaru wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School is parents + school. I would say about 60% parenting and 40% school. If you don’t push your kid academically nothing is going to happen. Peer groups matter. In “good” schools you’re optimizing the peer group. A good/bad school rating has little to do with teacher capability.

I would guess it’s 90% parenting and 10% school. 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 I would say that 50% of parenting is getting your kid into the right school. I don't know about you, but suburban life as I know it is organized entirely around the importance of a good school district.

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.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#254

Post by defgeneric » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #210

defgeneric wrote: post #201

I'm skeptical when these parents their kids cite poor public schools as the primary reason for home schooling. When you look closer, it's almost always lifestyle and ideology that are the main factors. The often-cited failure in socialization extends beyond socialization within peer-groups as well--kids also need exposure to a variety of adults and authority figures. It's not only about learning how to make friends.…

A school-like environment that doesn't indoctrinate their children in values that the parents disagree with, which is what would happen if their children went to public schools.

Sorry, but the parents' "values" are almost always some crackpot nonsense. Public schools at least aim for a measure of neutrality, beyond which children can develop their own ideas. It's just strange to me that people are so intent on having their children mirror their own ideas. Have some humility, entertain the idea that you yourself may be wrong about everything, and let the kids figure out what they think for themselves. The public school gives them a reasonably neutral basis to do that, even as the different ideological fads come and go in the faculty and administration.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#255

Post by Modified3019 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

I’m not surprised, american public schools can end up with a lot of pathologies that can’t be practically addressed by a parent outside of “flee and try literally anything else”.

My public elementary school was outright hostile to my existence, with teachers ignoring/enabling my bullies and then trying to punish me when I started fighting back viciously at the prompting of my exasperated father. “Anarcho-tyranny” is a good way to sum up my experience. You’ll likely find it unsurprising that I am adhd(I) (fully evaluated) and almost certainly autistic to some degree (not fully evaluated as there’s not much for me to gain on a diagnosis), though these revelations wouldn’t come until decades later when I learned what these things actually meant instead of media tropes. Prior to that I was considered “shy/very introverted”.

Homeschool was straight up not an option for me, since we were a single parent/provider household. I’m extremely lucky that a charter middle school opened up around 4th grade. It was amazing to see what sort of environment occurred when both teachers and children were held accountable and can and would be removed. There’s also the effects of the natural bias of having most of the children there having active and concerned parents involved, which I imagine also plays a big role in the ultimate quality of the education homeschoolers now get, as opposed to what seemed to be more prominently religious/paranoid motivations when I was a child.

Also fortunately my public high school was, mostly, tame.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#256

Post by AnimalMuppet » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #150

People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept, but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things. There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all very different motivations. Likewise, there a…

Not only do different parents have different skills, but also different kids have different needs. And different schools have different strengths and weaknesses.

The big thing is this: Parents, the buck stops with you. When one of your kids tells you "Every day when I get ready for school, my stomach hurts", pay attention to that. Homeschooling won't be perfect, no more than public or private or charter schools will be. But pay attention enough to see when something isn't working, and figure out what you have to do to make it better.

This can cut both ways. If you're homeschooling and your kids aren't actually learning things, pay attention to that, too.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#257

Post by darigo » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

torial wrote: post #198

jawns wrote: post #150

People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept, but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things. There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all very different motivations. Likewise, there a…

100% agree with this. Also, with the right community, it is possible to have plenty of "socialization" with other kids. My family participates in a parent-led co-op that allows kids to benefit from different strengths in different parents and to have lots of friends. As my kids are neurodivergent, I think this environment has been safer for them and allows them to focus on their passions. There is still some peer pre…

>it is possible to have plenty of "socialization" with other kids.

I agree. Public school is not a great place for socialization, and it's not hard to create something better. Nothing socializes kids like sitting next to each other motionless in silence for several hours lol

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#258

Post by u32480932048 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #112

tivert wrote: post #15

> 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?

> 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 sounds ideal. But we might want at least some oversight and regulation to, for example, make sure kids aren't being homeschooled on how to build rockets and kill some group of people.

Concerns (or "concerns") like this always make me wonder what kind of terrible environment the commentor grew up in: a war-torn country with child soldiers firing homemade rockets, or maybe a cute little cul-de-sac in an upper-middle class suburb where all problems are hypothetical yet everything is still terrifying.

Maybe modeling the child rocket program[1] on [whatever it is that public high schools are doing] would save us?

  [1] https://estesrockets.com/collections/stem-products

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#259

Post by brightball » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

arrowsmith wrote: post #184

brightball wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your username related to the actual program out of Toronto?

No, I'm not Canadian and have no idea what program you're talking about.

https://www.arrowsmith.ca/

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#260

Post by jewayne » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #123

psychlops wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt if homeschooling would work in Baltimore either.

What "different" schools allow parents to do is pull the top 1% of lucky students out to escape. Maybe most of the parents in the low cost of living areas can't give any time to their children because they've got three jobs, but there are always going to be the few that can. The same goes for a few who can one way or another afford private school. It's better that three percent get through than none.

Well, unless having the three percent get through makes it impossible to improve the condition of the other 97%. Survivorship bias is our favorite logical fallacy here in the US.