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Homeschooling hits record numbers

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Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#411

Post by brettcvz »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #158
triceratops wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco because of the insane cost of housing and everything else.

$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us? Teacher (all-in cost): $150k Teaching assistant: $100k Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k Curriculum, books, suppli…

Finally, I have no idea where people are getting $28k/year; most schools in CA operate on closer to $14k-$16k per pupil

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#413

Post by jandrese »

sevensor wrote: post #259
nlavezzo wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism? Maybe it's: - the terrible educational state of the school system? - the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by? - they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and…

I’m sure these motivations do play out in some circles. However, every single homeschooler I know personally, and I know quite a few, does so because they want their children to have a very specific kind of religious education. Often the way this plays out is that they homeschool for a while, transition to a denominational school, and then depending on the family they may stay there or make a second transition to pub…

We did the homeschool thing for one year after most kids went back to school after COVID. My wife has underlying medical conditions that made her quite concerned about catching it before the vaccine rollout. We did a few of the homeschool group organized field trips and I got to briefly meet some of the parents. Overall I can't say much about the kids, they seemed fine. The parents were friendly, but when I asked about the curriculum they almost invariably suggested PragerU material, which makes me concerned for their children's future.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#414

Post by rahimnathwani »

brettcvz wrote: post #411
rahimnathwani wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us? Teacher (all-in cost): $150k Teaching assistant: $100k Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k Curriculum, books, suppli…

Finally, I have no idea where people are getting $28k/year; most schools in CA operate on closer to $14k-$16k per pupil

To get the number, you just need to divide two numbers: SFUSD's budget and the number of students.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711345

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#415

Post by brendoelfrendo »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #343
seneca wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it? It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. "The real world" is highly filtered social circles and freedom of association. The idea that it's somehow an automatic good to force healthy kids to mix with everyone who happens to show up, regardless of whether they have severe b…

> It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hosp…

> You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble

I think it's telling that the other responses seem to focus on exactly this; the idea that their child will exist in a class apart from the rabble, and will not have to interact with them.

It seems to speak to two very different views of community. On the one hand, there is community as a collection of all the people in a space: people who share local resources, frequent the same local businesses, and have the same local concerns. On the other, there is a community of choice: people who share the same social class, and possibly the same religion or cultural beliefs. I think it's fair to say that you can have both, but trying to say that you can belong solely to the communities you choose and treat everyone else as beneath notice sounds quite problematic, and it will absolutely not give children a correct or complete view of the world.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#416

Post by rahimnathwani »

brettcvz wrote: post #409
rahimnathwani wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us? Teacher (all-in cost): $150k Teaching assistant: $100k Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k Curriculum, books, suppli…

Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.

You're recommending I look at SFUSD's public budget when:

- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend

- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself

The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#417

Post by brendoelfrendo »

iambateman wrote: post #283

When a social failure happens at a public school - a child fails a class, drugs are found, a teenager gets pregnant, there’s a fight - most people don't question the public school system itself. But when a social failure happens to a homeschooler, we wonder if the system of _homeschooling_ is broken. In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school…

I think this is likely because people (accurately, in my opinion) attribute behavioral problems with kids to the level and quality of involvement of the parents at home, so it would be bizarre to attribute a child getting caught with drugs at school to the public school system itself.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#418

Post by lazyasciiart »

bena wrote: post #407
ecshafer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups. Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their c…

It sounds like school with extra steps.

And control over who else is in it.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#419

Post by kevstev »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #15
jmathai wrote: post #3

I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before. We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools. We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise. But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or bette…

One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class. Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small . That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.

That's also 4 entirely different curriculums which need to be taught. I volunteer taught CS for about 10 years, and the first year I taught a new class- and this was a single class for high school kids- I always found I was much better at it the second and third time around. I taught about 4 different courses, of varying difficulty- intro to programming with SNAP, "CS Principles" which had a little bit of everything from (very) basic networking to html and a bit of javascript, Javascript/Python, and then the final boss... AP CS in Java, which is a very difficult class.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.

Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.

For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#420

Post by rahimnathwani »

mmcclure wrote: post #333
rahimnathwani wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is expensive and underfunded. Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are. San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student. I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.

Are you saying that's a lot or a little? Tuition for most (non-religious) competitive private schools in San Francisco is easily twice that amount.

  "Tuition for most (non-religious) competitive private schools in San Francisco is easily twice that amount."
No it's not 'easily twice that amount'.

For each of the grades K-12, here is the % of non-religious private schools in San Francisco that charge $56k or more:

   K:  0%
   1:  0%
   2:  0%
   3:  0%
   4:  0%
   5:  0%
   6:  3%
   7:  3%
   8:  3%
   9: 71%
  10: 71%
  11: 71%
  12: 71%
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