Outschooling • Hacker News Board

Re: Outschooling

#121

Post by 1123581321 » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #86

camelNotation wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a problem with homeschooling as much as with a subset of homeschoolers - particularly religious fundamentalists and anarchist types. My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived,…

You present one well-honored experience. I present a stark contrast to it. > My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. My parents told themselves the same thing. I apparently had top percentile test scores in several early years, particularly in math. Despite that, my parents completely failed to provide an education after choosing to homeschool. > She had…

Tying back to your earlier comment, it doesn’t sound like your parents would have fit well with your public school system or stayed involved.

Re: Outschooling

#122

Post by Matticus_Rex » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

ultrarunner wrote: post #113

ekianjo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most schools are just like jails: you are forced to be there, and forced to be there with people who don't want to be there either. A good recipe for disaster as soon as the group becomes large enough. And don't expect the guardians/educators to do anything when someone picks up on you.

> And don't expect the guardians/educators to do anything when someone picks up on you. Well that's not entirely fair. I know of several situations (including my own) where students were punished for fighting when attacked by other students. You can't say that's not "doing something", I guess.

It's "doing something," but it's doing something stupid, which isn't better.

Re: Outschooling

#123

Post by Matticus_Rex » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:29 AM UTC

jpm_sd wrote: post #91

Students can also access "real time group classes taught largely by very experienced K12 teachers" by... going to school.

As a former high school teacher, as intuitive as this seems, it's dubious at best. To truly have "access," you need a lot of things in place (nutrition, sleep, prerequisite learning, a good school, an experienced teacher), and a lot of things not getting in the way (other kids, the institution, the teacher, circumstances). The bar is much lower for Outschool to hit the target.

Re: Outschooling

#124

Post by barry-cotter » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:33 AM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #41

camelNotation wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale. One on one teaching is not remotely the same as teaching in a classroom setting where you have to adapt to multiple learning styles and multiple achievement levels all while using standardized assessment techniques, detailed lesson planning, and classroom management skills. The vast majority of what…

> Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale. Untrue. Any teacher must be familiar with both the subject matter and basic pedagogy, regardless of whether they're teaching one student or many. Yes, there are additional skills necessary when teaching a larger class, but I think you drastically exaggerate how much of a teacher's job that is.

I taught kindergarten for five years and teach small groups and individuals at various levels now. Basic pedagogy is really, incredibly basic and the kind of stuff you pick up by experience relatively quickly even without formal instruction in it. More generally the economics of education literature shows that the only reliable determinants of teacher quality are subject matter expertise and teaching experience. Subject matter expertise is specifically not expertise in pedagogy because teaching qualifications have no discernible effect on students’ education whereas a Math teacher with a Math Master’s gets better results, or a Chemistry teacher with a Chemistry Master’s etc.

Seriously, consider what you’re saying. You’re saying that people without an education in pedagogy are unable to teach. Most of the parents reading this probably taught their children how to read before they got to school. The overwhelming majority of college faculty never have any training in teaching. Many, many people tutor without ever getting an M.Ed.

Re: Outschooling

#125

Post by momokoko » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:41 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #120

momokoko wrote: post #38

I think EdTech forgets that student success has much less to do with schooling(home or otherwise). This is why education has bounced from trend to trend over the last 50 years. Because we constantly think we've found a silver bullet, but then after a decade or so, we realize it was once again correlation. If you really look at the data, student outcomes essentially boil down to parents and the students themselves. We…

Improvements in teaching are very unlikely to change the rank ordering of who learns fastest/most/best. It can absolutely change how much I’d learned and when individual students learn something. Online teaching is far more conducive to mastery learning and ability grouping than offline education. Look at Lambda School for an example. If you have large cohorts starting on a regular basis you can have some people prog…

Lamda school picks winners from the outset. Public education doesn't get that option.

Re: Outschooling

#126

Post by thetopher » Thu, May 30, 2019, 1:46 AM UTC

surge wrote: post #52

carlob wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Literally zero evidence for this. On average, kids that are homeschooled walk away with higher levels achievement and fewer psychological issues than their traditionally schooled peers. They integrate just fine into society. There is plenty of evidence of the contrary though, that kids born in families with low income and educational achievement do much much better when they are in a socially diverse school as oppo…

> There is plenty of evidence of the contrary though, that kids born in families with low income and educational achievement do much much better when they are in a socially diverse school as opposed to a ghetto. Sure maybe homeschooled kids are slightly better off, but that comes at a huge cost for all the kids who have a single parent who works three jobs that will never be able to afford to homeschool them. I was t…

>What if schools teach other misconceptions that get corrected in college. Like brontosauruses are a thing, or T-Rex's hunt prey.

I had no idea there was a debate on the topic of T-Rex hunting. Here's an interesting Nature article that suggests that the T-Rex did hunt live prey: https://www.nature.com/news/tyrannosaurus-rex-hunted-for-liv...

Re: Outschooling

#127

Post by barry-cotter » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:20 AM UTC

momokoko wrote: post #125

barry-cotter wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Improvements in teaching are very unlikely to change the rank ordering of who learns fastest/most/best. It can absolutely change how much I’d learned and when individual students learn something. Online teaching is far more conducive to mastery learning and ability grouping than offline education. Look at Lambda School for an example. If you have large cohorts starting on a regular basis you can have some people prog…

Lamda school picks winners from the outset. Public education doesn't get that option.

So? With one on one to one on three tuition you can get the average child to the 95th percentile for their age group. That’s the Bloom Two Sigma effect[1]. Tutoring is extremely effective when it comes to teaching but it’s not cost effective. With classes finely graded enough by ability and prior knowledge you can get reasonably close to that with much larger numbers of students, or you can just call it Mastery learning[2]. That’s possible without picking winners. It’s not possible in public schools for institutional and historical reasons but we’re talking about education, not public schools.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

Re: Outschooling

#128

Post by souprock » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:22 AM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #112

GuiA wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can read your comment in several, slightly conflicting, ways: - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest - homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my un…

> homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest I am not saying that homeschooling in practice is mostly undesirable. Instead, there can be undesirable elements to it. And those undesirable elements are neither common nor easy to spot. Nor am I saying that it overwhelmingly attracts people with fri…

I certainly know what you mean about "big family" (have 11 so far) and "just how much effort they volunteered of themselves" and "risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades" due to uneven progress.

The out is dual-enrollment, sometimes called running start or concurrent enrollment. In many locations it is free, leading to an AA degree. Because it is scheduled in the style of normal college, with classes chosen as you please, uneven progress is not a problem.

Consider also that the students bear some responsibility and can easily have disasters in public school. If the students choose to dig their heels in, refusing to study, that simply shuts down any kind of education. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Be careful about assuming your parents did worse than a public school would have done, even if things went badly. Some kids just refuse to learn.

Re: Outschooling

#129

Post by eadmund » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:33 AM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #4

jaden wrote: post #2

Homeschooling seems like an ideal solution for those with a parent at home to improve their children's academic learning. But it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system.

> it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system. As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it. Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-govern…

> Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.

That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model.

I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.

Re: Outschooling

#130

Post by pryce » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:38 AM UTC

OrangeMango wrote: post #43

inetknght wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system. As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it. Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-govern…

> Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. My children are homeschooled in a major metro area not in Texas. We also have effectively zero oversight. But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I understand that in rural areas this can mean that such children have all but disappeared from view, but…

> But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has.

I don't think the question of 'whether oversight is a good idea' is usefully explored by piecemeal examples where everything went fine and the motivation of parents is genuine "interest in the success of our children".

This is not to say there is anything particularly wrong with homeschooling per se, I wouldn't accept that examining piecemeal cases where everything went fine would be a good way of inferring "whether oversight is a good idea" in the case of a church or business or academic institution either.