For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

Some of this is cheating by not dealing with the added expense of special needs kids. But a lot more of it is the explosion of administration and expenses not directly related to education.

It seems to be the trend in local government. Taxes get collected and the bureaucracy grabs the bulk of the dollars leading only a little of the value delivered back to the citizens. Schools are a prime example. 25 kids in a class room are consuming $1 million of tax dollars and less than 10% of that goes to the person educating them.

Like you call $2k bonkers but what do you think APS is consuming in administration to educate my kid?

Mostly, even homeschoolers, aren’t.

They either (and the latter is, I guess, a special case of the former, but worth calling out separately) think the existing public schools available to them are a failure in general or for the specific needs of their children that is unresolvable in time to adequately serve their children without being “against public schools” more generally (I’ve known people who work in public education and homeschool that are in this group with regard to their children’s specific needs), or they are ideologically opposed to education that isn’t guided by indoctrination in their particular religious/ideological beliefs and believe that the current public schools available to them are inadequate on those grounds.

Ask parents who home school. Also, just read the article.

> There are also cases of parents homeschooling for the purpose of religiously or otherwise ideologically indoctrinating their children, something that does not often happen in public schools,

At some level, it definitely happens in schools. People who deny it's happening have a worldview where what they teach is the "norm" or consider it "basic fact". Just ask any parent who has said something along the lines of "I don't want my school teaching my kids X. What does X have to do with education?" - replace X with anything in the social justice sphere.

My daughter would want to spend 6-10 hours a day on art, but wouldn't want to do her French or math homework. My son just told me that alef (in the Hebrew alphabet) was the symbol for Graham's number, but balks when I try to get him to memorize his multiplication tables.

> And since they are different ages, I worry that if I taught them all at the same time, the curriculum would average into something too challenging

If there is a subject where that is the case, I do not know what it would be. Once they're past the age of 7 or 8, most or all children are capable of what they would be at older ages. I don't think, for instance, that an 8 yr old learning to read is slower at it than one learning that for the first time at age 14.

For the record though, didn't get to teach my son to read. With his sister, I tried from age three on up... every few months I'd see if she was more agreeable to it, and she wanted nothing to do with it until sevenish. She could sound words out phonetically if I pushed from the start, but with a look on her face like I was pulling teeth with pliers. So I waited with my son until he was almost seven... and he could just read. I have no idea how. My wife claims she didn't, and his sister certainly didn't either.

I think, really, that public schools doing age segregation has more to do with them trying to perfectly homogenize the product they crank off the assembly line, than it does with making sure each student gets enough learning opportunity.