Homeschooling hits record numbers

I can understand why. When we first moved to our upper midwest state, the district we bought a house in was ranked like #2 in the state overall and has fallen considerably. I have watched with my own two eyes the decline in the past 20 years here. The neighboring district, which was teetering when we first moved here in 2006, fell over completely and remains fallen. That one had a cycle of failed superintendents, all of whom required a buyout to get rid of, which further impoverished that district. Our realtor, who had been a teacher in that district, slyly tried to push us into that one, but we didn't fall for it. Our daughter made it through the more acclaimed district pretty well, our son, however, got tripped up in the decline:

We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.

Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.

One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.

The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.

Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.

I've done all 3 of public/private/homeschool with my kids. My daughter's (public) HS chemistry class had exactly one lab that we couldn't do at home. The physics lab had zero. Bio is a bit harder since they had e.g. hundreds of pre-mounted slides for examples of various things. We also lack a biology major in our near-family.

For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])

1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s

I am really really skeptical of the first bullet point.

  You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate

The reason for this is simple and not nefarious:

- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types

- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).

Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.

  Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private high schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school

If we look only at non-parochial schools, the means are even higher (e.g. $39k for 5th grade, $41k for 8th grade, $59k for 12th grade).

  those schools specifically in your list are subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant when we look at the sticker price for non-parochial schools, we should assume their average revenue per student is less than the sticker price, and the average cost per student is less than or equal to the average revenue per student.

  I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.

My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?

  which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to

If we limit the discussion to only those schools we'd be willing to send our kids to, then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!

BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder

Public schools can't legally kick kids out, but SFUSD has shown it can drive parents away.