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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#181

Post by adamsb6 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #152
msluyter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| Private schools are outrageously expensive. Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better scho…

>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values Here's some tangential anecdata. I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall. Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonabl…

Our local schools, like many around the country, spooled up new permanent programs in response to the influx of COVID funding which they always knew to be temporary.

Now that the funding has gone away, they say they have a funding crisis, and will have to cut other things unless they can get the state to "adequately fund" them.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#182

Post by Aurornis »

nosefurhairdo wrote: post #23

I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell. Private schools are outrageously expensive. Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.

> Kids are throwing chairs at teachers.

I don’t know where you live, but kids (plural!) assaulting teachers like that would be very unusual. I have a lot of family and friends in elementary education and management. Stories like that are the kind of thing that get talked about for years if they happen, not something that happens enough to be referred to in the plural.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#183

Post by abtinf »

tombert wrote: post #156
demosthanos wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct. I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains. There's a…

> There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. Doctors aren't sure if I have ADHD or Major Depression or Bipolar II (I've been diagnosed and attempted to be treated for all three), but this fits into my experience. I was consistently frustrating to my high school teachers, because I was clearl…

> Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people

I would very much appreciate it if you could expand on this point a bit. What makes WGU particularly suited for folks with ADHD?

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#184

Post by Terr_ »

rayiner wrote: post #142

American schools just aren’t very good. I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, my mom flipping out about why we were spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math. To this day, my mom, who grew up in Bangladesh but got a classic British education from a tutor, is more well read in western literature than I am (Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Socrates, Plato, etc.) As far as I c…

> spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math

After a bunch of years overseas, I returned to the US to complete my last two years of high school.

I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#185

Post by _DeadFred_ »

vel0city wrote: post #83
brightball wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms. A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insu…

Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service. We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively fai…

They better not teach that. We all know dinosaurs aren't real!

I joke but religious education isn't all bad. One of my smartest friends in High School went to Santa Clara University and really liked it.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#186

Post by defrost »

nataliste wrote: post #63
vodou wrote: post #40

One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.

One thing I've never understood with public schooling: How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis ? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.

Here in this country it's not teachers that assess their own compentence to be educators, it's their mentors that guide and grade them through a university Bachelor of Education Course and their first year trials of "live" teaching in the wild.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#187

Post by croes »

typewithrhythm wrote: post #146
netdevphoenix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of this is that you rely on strangers for critical stuff like ensuring you don't get electrocuted or burned at home or even ensuring that the water that you drink won't make you ill or that your car is a good enough condition to not lead you to a fatal crash. Any of these affects your close relatives. What makes education different?

The cost and timeline to evaluate quality is completely different; I can get multiple opinions for my possessions, and utilities are fairly objective to evaluate (and the cost to do so is small relative to the scale of the operation). Schools are limited for choice, expert evaluation is limited, outcomes are potentially unclear... That's before you get into issues with the politics of a teacher or problem students.

> outcomes are potentially unclear

Same is true for home schooling

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#188

Post by giarc »

I feel like there should be a different word for those that "home school" their child by hiring a private teacher and they learn in the house. For me, homeschooling means one of the parents (often the mother) teaches the child(ren) in their home.

I know many teachers, and they have a very specific set of skills on how to teach. I wouldn't expect any old parent to know this and I suspect home school kids are worse off for it? But I'm happy to be pointed to evidence on the contrary.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#189

Post by GrantMoyer »

daft_pink wrote: post #36

Personally, I have high functioning autism. I would do terrible at interpersonal relationships, but then get near perfect scores on all the tests. Teachers would anticipate that I would be terrible and then when I got perfect scores on all the tests, they would be pissed off. I think there are a lot of tech people that are neurodivergent and had terrible experiences in school and would love to avoid my child having t…

> Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system.

Maybe I'm living under a rock; what extreme views are going through the school system?

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#190

Post by lthornberry »

rayiner wrote: post #161
vel0city wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service. We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively fai…

Being able to read the Bible would be a big improvement on say the Baltimore school system, which spends $22,500 per year per student: https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-baltimore-students-... (“According to the 2022 NAEP test, only 10 percent of fourth-graders and 15 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore’s public schools are proficient in reading.”) Literally, madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to…

Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think. 1st, proficiency on that test is a pretty high bar. There are kids making perfectly adequate progress who don’t score proficient. Second, average per-pupil costs are meaningless. Baltimore city pays for two of my kids’ educations. One costs the city about $8k (the money that a school gets for a kid with no extra needs). The other costs well over $100k, due to significant disabilities. Baltimore has a disproportionate number of kids with significant needs of some sort, including learning disabilities, extreme family poverty, and ESL learners. Those kids need extra resources. A voucher system isn’t going to change that.
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