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

> Is public school really that cruel these days?

This is a good question, but how am I supposed to find out the answer with any real certainty short of exposing my kids to it? Not really a sane option. "Hey, kiddo, go dance on the minefield and see if there are any left" isn't my style of parenting.

> Sure, there's the occasional story of extreme bullying that happens to make the news, but it seems like these are far outliers these days.

It's quite possible that the extremes are just the ones that make the news. The low-intensity torment is in my opinion just as traumatizing, but unless some parent raises a big stink about it then it usually doesn't even rise to the level of neighborhood gossip.

Lol.. reading that article shows us how the establishment really wants to get rid of homeschooling and is afraid of it growing in one of the population.. they can hardly wait for some scandal in homeschooling so that they can exploit it as a crisis to shut down homeschooling

A couple things to pull out…

(1) sometimes alternative education is worse.

There’s no question that, in some cases, alternative school is worse for a child’s development than standard public school. I’ve personally seen children who were falling behind because their parents were not equipped to teach them in high school.

(2) it can sometimes be better.

Alternative school is higher variance than public school - the children who do poorly probably do worse while it can be spectacular for some children.

We shouldn’t ignore that a relatively large percentage of homeschooled kids emerge at or near genius level. For kids for whom homeschooling works, it really works.

(3) policy should encourage choice.

On average, the US public school system is mediocre by world standards and in some parts of the country it’s an utter failure. Parents should be trusted with the care and education of their children because they’re in the best position to know what their child needs. Certainly some regulation around that freedom is in order, but we should expect more competition to produce more growth from a policy standpoint.

Just like capitalism is the best-bad economic system we have, parent-choice is the best-bad educational system. Some parents will fail at their job and others will not. But centrally planned educational systems have massive problems, and parents must be allowed to opt out of those problems as their only real form of accountability.

(4) we should avoid drawing conclusions from individual stories.

When something bad happens at a public school - kid fails, someone gets shot, drugs are found, some one gets pregnant, there’s a fight - we accept those as being part of life, not a problem with public school. But when something bad happens to a homeschooler, we tend to wonder if the _system_ of homeschooling is broken. But the reality is that those stories are likely more surprising but probably not more common than the bad things which happen at a public high school.

In the story, someone is quoted as saying “Eventually, something horrific is going to happen in one of these situations.” Which may be true and I hope we can find a way to avoid anything bad happening to anyone. But let’s not forget how many horrific things happen every week in high schools across America. It is a false promise to say that simply going to a public high school would fix all the problems found in homeschooling.

Finally, if a parent wants to outsource the teaching of their child to a person who is operating out of a house, we should let them. The parent is the person most able to accurately assess their child’s needs, and it has to be their responsibility to make good choices for their children.

For example:

I previously worked in the public schools, and in a museum education program that worked 90% with public school classes. My mom was a public school teacher before I was born. My sister, who I'm quite close to, still works in the public schools. We all went to public schools in my neighborhood. My middle child goes to a public school that I can see from my living room. There's no opposition to public school in my family.

When my oldest finished his public Montessori elementary school and went to the district's Highly Gifted school at age 12, it was a major step back for him. 40 minutes each way on the bus just to be at a school that was cookie-cutter and wasn't able to support his needs, particularly advanced math -- I don't think there's a single teacher in the building who even knows how to assess the gaps in his knowledge; they were trying to teach him what an exponent is when what he actually needed was to fill in gaps in calculus about techniques like Lagrange Multipliers. So he's home with me, because it's better for him. Public school was fine for him as a younger kid, and it's still good for other kids, but it's not a good fit for him now.

The same could be said about regular public schools too, no? I know a number of people that went to a local religious school and they came out with excellent understanding of the bible and quickly married off and started having children rather than pursuing advanced education.