Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
(newsletter.goodtechthings.com)369 points by forrestbrazeal 5 days ago
369 points by forrestbrazeal 5 days ago
I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation.
Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like this and we've been in the district for 8+ years.
As for skills, my kids are probably 3 years ahead of where I was at the same age. Devices are not a huge component of their schooling, although I am on a parent board that's pushing back on SaaS creep. They're forced to have Google accounts which I'm proposing to remove and/or minimize. Math and reading programs are fantastic. Teachers are great. There have been one or two mediocre teachers but nothing to really complain about.
We also have great private options, but again, we moved to this district to take advantage of the public schools.
As an observation the homeschooled kids that participate in extracurricular activities along with the public school kids are definitely behind. Not only from a traditional education standpoint, but also social skills. It's always an awkward conversation when those parents engage in a conversation asking where our kids are at with respect to reading, math or science.
Our goal is to have our kids be the best version of them that they can be. If they're happier, healthier and better equipped than we were then I'll be happy. I look at a lot of parents who want their kids to be stars and it's painful. Modern day parenting has lost its way in US society on so many levels.
"Expulsion works."
There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view.
For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrators are doing the right thing, from the outside it can look like nothing is being done. Think HR putting you on a PIP.
Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
And then, what does “violent and disruptive” actually mean? How much violence? No tolerance? What about a bullying victim who sticks up for themselves? Playground scuffle? At what point does the dial turn from teaching a child not to hit, to teaching a child that they are bad and do not belong? What about non (physically) violent bullying? What about children who are disruptive, but not violent (surely including a lot of those posting here about how their ADHD was misunderstood)?
Sometimes expulsion is the answer, even keeping in mind that every student expelled before 16 is just going to school someplace else. But the problems are more complex than people often realize.
When I was in high school there was a local school that was notorious. Apparently here the public schools were not allowed to expel kids if they would no longer have local options. This was the worst school, and thus the last place the kids would end up. So it was basically just a prison.
There's a big difference between someone with an IEP (usually massive trauma and mental illness also) doing things and a "regular" student doing them. Expelling a kid usually just means they move to a different school, and all expulsion is doing is moving the burden down the chain, usually from more affluent places where parents are equipped to complain, to less affluent ones. Particularly if the room destroying-violence kiddo's family don't have lawyers.
Administrators are constantly castigated for disciplinary actions, as the "throwing chairs" behavior is not evenly spread among the different cultures that students come from.
Different rates of suspensions leads to accusations of racism, and said accusations lead to Hail Mary attempts to make unequal rates equal, including forbidding any meaningful type of punishment for certain varieties of students.
If this sounds far fetched, public officials in Rotherham became objectively evil in their attempts to avoid racism accusations, "1400 children betrayed" is a extremely understated headline, if you want to learn more.
> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works.
Our local education superintendant _in_ _his_ _program_ _document_ is saying that he will go after any teacher attempting to impose discipline in a "community inappropriate manner".
So basically, nobody gets expelled.
I have friends who were teachers in San Francisco unified School district who quit because students were literally attacking and breaking the bones of teachers and not being expelled.
It was a really hard choice for them because they were a bleeding heart liberal and wanted to use their PHD to help the underprivileged
> a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation
To have a great school district where housing isn't overly expensive is rare these days. I would have to guess it is hard to find a house in such a district unless you waive inpections and pay in cash.
After spending some time on the teachers subreddit I completely understand why so many people are choosing to homeschool. The amount of in-classroom abuse -- verbal and physical -- in addition to the entitled parents is shocking.
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 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. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.
> 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 clearly learning the material, but I wouldn't do my homework, and I'd get bored during class, and as a result I would get bad grades. I don't think the teachers took any joy in giving me a bad grade, but they were kind of forced into it because I didn't really fit into the bureaucratic mold that they needed me to fit in.
This eventually led to me almost flunking out, and eventually dropping out of my first attempt at university. I did eventually finish my bachelors, but it was at Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the American GPA system still kind of gives me anxiety when I think about it.
> 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?
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty.
0. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
There are many volumes on the subject, but I'm honestly tired of debating this with people who doubt ADHD is a thing. If you're legitimately curious, there are myriad sources out there about the differences in ADHD brains.
Suffice it to say that I'm sure. All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
"Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't. I just know that we don't work in the way that the world expects us to.
Why are you so confident that they shouldn't be confident?
Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so.
The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things.
The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.
Certainly a biased view of religious home schoolers. Most of my religious friends who homeschool are college educated and many have postgraduate degrees. Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit. Pretty much all of them are motivated people however. Of course that's just my little bubble.
The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.
> Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit.
That's an absurd belief and any system of education that results in that level of ignorance in science has failed.
The way this is written seems to imply that religious people don't have similar (or the same) reasons as secular people.
I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.
A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.
Schools shouldn't teach neither evolution, nor creationism, nor any other origin story. Because it is something that doesn't matter at all – knowledge without value.
Worse is that the majority pupils around the world will be taught both the Abrahamic creation story, the origin of man according to evolution, and usually a third or even fourth creation story from local pre-Abrahamic mythology. In the same school and from the same teacher. Talk about confusion of the highest order!
I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level.
Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.
It’s easier to see with kids who have stronger behavioral or learning needs.
I was a 3rd grade teachers aide and I saw the distinction first hand. A gifted child was given advanced textbooks and space to work at his own pace. The teacher didn’t really teach much, but the child was learning.
Conversely there was another kid who just got headphones to watch videos in the back of the room. I guess learn st his own pace, except the videos didn’t actually seem educational to me. I think it was mostly just done to keep him preoccupied.
>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students
If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
If you really believe this, then sue your school district.
> Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
It's worth discussing the administrators and the budget (though our budget is much higher than the national average), but why should we reflexively dismiss concerns about the teachers? There are advanced students who only get acknowledged as such when the teachers tell them "don't do that, we haven't learned it yet."
There's a large difference between trying to engage advanced students with limited resources, and not trying to engage or even acknowledge advanced students at all.
| 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 school zone.
And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)
>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 unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars.
Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh.
The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.
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.
What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one.
You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away.
And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
It's a situation like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model
where "voice" never works.
>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English.
This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.
This is exactly the point of the article.
I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.
If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.
Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.
The teachers in this school don't speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking children are struggling, and the rest of the kids cannot proceed at the same rate.
I'm not pretending to have solutions, and I'm certainly empathetic for all involved. Just stating the reality that this is a suboptimal learning environment.
this is the experience i see at our local schools. english as first language kids are bored and not challenged. the class is moving slower because half the kids are only learning english for the first time at school. “modern” progress ideology is to not separate the students by ability anymore and there’s less accelerated tracks
I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.
If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.
for kids in early development, their skill level in all the other subjects later will be essentially determined by their linguistic ability. math is a language. there is research that shows benefit to bilingual programs, but there has to more structure than just dumping esl kids in there with everyone else.
Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?
You think it's useless to be able to communicate to someone directly without the use of an intermediary translation device?
Well, within 30 years or so AI will be better than humans at everything, so…
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 insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it.
Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are...
1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want.
2. Pay for private school.
3. Home school.
4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too.
The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education.
This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas.
Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too.
You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now.
My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
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 failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.
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 read the Quran would be an upgrade.
Why would it give people worse education? Besides who are you or any of us to decide what is and isnt a good education for someone elses kids? It's not your job to police ideas.
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.
Come on, be serious. In a huge country with 50M students attending primary/secondary school you can always dredge up a few horror stories but those are far from the typical case. On the scale of ways that schools damage kids, teaching them the unscientific mythology of certain Christian sects is hardly the worst. The Catholic church, which is one of the largest private school operators, has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
Even if there were more ways to "vote with your wallet" is abundantly clear that a lot of parents, respectively, (a) couldn't care less anyway, and (b) can't actually tell a good charter or voucher school from a bad one.
When the purpose of schooling is ensuring a civic floor amongst citizens the effectiveness of things like the home school co-ops mentioned can't come at the expense of population at large unless we wish to surrender the republican form of government for something else.
You need to contrast suggested ideas to the current systems, not an idealized standard that the current system is nowhere near achieving.
For instance NAEP scores consistently demonstrate only about 25% of students achieve "basic" proficiency in math, reading is even worse. Its going to be difficult to do worse.
And I mean that very literally - some percent of people would become competent in e.g. basic math with 0 public education due to family or personal interests. I can't imagine it's "that" far from 25%.
> A free market fixes anything
Nothing magical about it. It’s pure economics and rational decision making. The institutions we complain about in this country every day are completely insulated from it. Everything else survives or fails on its own merits.
Supply and demand. It’s a natural law.
> 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.
A family member who taught at a title 1 elementary schools encountered chair/desk throwing multiple times in the short time she was there. I think unfortunately YMMV greatly depending on the area where you live
Very expensive suburb of Seattle. I was shocked to hear this as well. Reported to me by my friend who is the school counselor and had to deal with these kids (plural) herself.
The girl in the math class before me would beat the shit out of my desk like clockwork. She hated math, was violent, and very autistic, no apparent other issues nor even hate towards humans. Nothing could be done, just wait for the tantrum to end then take my seat.
Room destroyers are pretty common, but they usually have IEPs.
TBH there's no good choices for many - big mental health issues and trauma, no home or family support, and no real options: kids have to go somewhere, self contained classrooms are at capacity, there are worse kids in line to get put in facilities, and often you can't really do that unless parents push for it anyway.
Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.
A slightly different perspective: schools are mass produced education. Mass produced in the sense that they are the lower cost in terms of person hours to produce an educated child. Like all mass produced products, it's better than 1/2 hearted solo attempts to do the same thing, but a parent that can afford to put a huge amount of time into it can do better job as lots of comments here attest.
If true, that also provides an explanation for the rise home schooling: more people can afford to do it.
> Private schools are outrageously expensive.
I have observed that any two-tier system accentuates inequality, be it health, education, security, or anything. When one group pays to have a system better than a universally provided one, the differences between both tend to increase, as the incentive to keep the universal system only as a fall-back to the private one by investing less on it (or by receiving generous donations from the private sector) is tempting to politicians.
A former colleague of mine, who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, remembered how he cherished summer vacations when kids from different schools went together to state-operated summer camps. I thought this was an excellent way to build inter-group bonds between kids that would never have met in other circumstances, learning to work together in team-building and educational activities. It didn't turn out well for the country, or, at least, it wasn't sufficient to prevent the breakup and the disaster that happened because of it, but still seems like a good idea.
Over time, my opinion changed from a strong supporter of free market economics to more deliberate models. I would support banning homeschooling along private schools completely. If a country wants to build a society that sees itself as a group of individuals with equal rights and obligations, you need to start early.
Of course, this would never pass any legislative body in the US.
Ah, so you just opt out of being around average people. OK.
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.