Nothing whatsoever - they are technically correct (the best kind of correct). And yet it is also a descriptor that is likely to prime the reader with a negative connotation. There's a reason that witness oaths require not only "nothing but the truth", but first of all "the whole truth".
I read it as acknowledging a preconception the reader is likely to have and therefor building rapport with the reader, not necessarily a sign of bias by the author.
That just sounds like bias with extra steps. Which subset of readers is the author choosing to build rapport with? Which subset are they choosing not to build rapport with? Why one, and not the other? And anyway, why build rapport at all - this isn't an opinion piece.
Is there some misunderstanding in English that “biased” means “factually false”? I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet confuse them as the same thing.
Bias is supposed to mean something that is factual but presenting a one-sided opinion by e.g using a subset of facts and language meant to influence the readers opinion.
It's biased in the same way an unchoked shotgun shoots pellets with wider dispersion. K-12 education done independently, atomized from regional or national institutions, means people come out more different, so the edges of the cluster are further away. Homeschoolers are biased about 43% to white and rural, so it's pretty fair that the fring is going to be on that side of things. I'm kind of stumped as to how that's biased.
You can't tell me with a straight face that public education is a uniform experience in the US.
Just read through the comments other people have posted in subthreads here about their own experiences.
My own school had a wide range of "don't bother learning, get pregnant and drop out" to "goes on to elite university" students, and everything in-between.
Good luck to these people, hope it turns out well. Personally, I can't imagine home-schooling kids. I neither have the time nor patience to do that, which is why I appreciate teachers.
Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-schooled.
Just FYI, while I share the overall sentiment, I think you are not up to date on the socialization aspect of homeschooling. Typical homeschooling today includes activities where most homeschooled kids from the town gather together for PE or art or other enrichment activities, maybe even specialized academic activities.
There is no such thing as typical homeschooling, in my experience in education (decades and decades).
It is extremely dependent on 1. access to wealth, 2. underlying reason for homeschooling (religion/safety/other item), and 3. where in the country you live (rural v suburban v urban).
In that order specifically. Homeschooling is the ultimate class solidification technique. Those with wealth can almost certainly guarantee their children will do really well. Those without don't stand a chance in hell.
1. Religious Home Schoolers. They are primarily homeschooled because the parents are very religious and don't want them in public schools because of fears their kids will become too secular.
2. Wealthy Home Schoolers. These are very well off people who choose to home school their kids for any number of reasons (like their traditional schooling options being poor) but can afford to hire tutors or teachers or if they teach the kids themselves, there were previously teachers.
3. Group Home Schoolers. These are families that have grouped up to split the duties of homeschooling across multiple families. Sometimes for all classes or just a few. The kids are more likely to have more day-to-day connection with other kids/students other than their siblings.
All of these groups have tons of cross over. Religious group home schoolers is a big thing right now. But your opinion on homeschooling is likely heavily built on the type of homeschooling you have witnessed/been involved in.
At the end of the day, everyone has their own experience and biases built into schooling from their own lived experiences. For every, "I was homeschooled and grew up to be very social and successful” story, there is a, "I learned nothing and I don't know how to talk to people" story.
Large part of socialization is what happens outside of structured interactions. During breaks, when being with friends you have choosen by yourself and so on.
The activities you mention are not even thought about as socialization situation outside of homeschooling context - because kids come, engage in highly structured activity and leave.
Ya, this doesn't end well. The data isn't amazing for homeschooling, but what I've seen shows a strong bimodal distribution. Extremely wealthy home schoolers with tons of resources have kids that perform well in college and have strong lifetime earnings. Everyone else not so much, unprepared for college, earnings well below their peers. Pair this with the fairly predatory organizations offering "learning materials" and education online. Could probably make a few million launching an overnight online school run by a bible trained LLM.
> Extremely wealthy home schoolers with tons of resources have kids that perform well in college and have strong lifetime earnings. Everyone else not so much, unprepared for college, earnings well below their peers.
right. what they want is "wealthy home schoolers with tons of resources" to suffer in college and have low lifetime earnings in the same way as "everyone else". That's equality.
I think possibly the worst place to learn and practice social skills is from other kids who are just as in the dark as you are.
In my experience a home schooled child is significantly more likely to be good at social skills than a public schooled child. They are also adept at navigating adult conversation and social situations much sooner.
My experience is the absolute opposite of yours. In all seriousness, there is a trend of homeschooled kids coming to the local large high school for the extracurriculars, and the school offering Autism testing, because they are so far behind socially.
I find it interesting that your experience is the opposite. Where in the world do you live?
I've lived all over the country. I was homeschooled as well and have a number of friends who were.
Anecdotal evidence is going to vary certainly and effect is highly dependent on the parent. But I've been around homeschooling groups for over 30 years now and the balance of them have been significantly ahead of the public schooled.
My experience is exactly the opposite. Homeschooled kids frequently have to learn how to adult all at once, right as they get dumped into the pool with everyone else to go find a way to make a living.
The most successful kids that I see are the ones who have professional instructors by day and excellent support at home. Not one or the other, but both.
> Homeschooled kids frequently have to learn how to adult all at once
How does sitting in a room with a bunch of kids, all of whom are within one year of you in age, with an authority figure at the front telling you exactly what to do, teach you "how to adult"?
It might prepare you for Army boot camp, which is the only "adult" place you're likely to encounter that kind of environment. Even prison usually has a range of age groups.
> with an authority figure at the front telling you exactly what to do
This is not an accurate description of school. Maybe, maybe in high school and college you kinda sorta get to something resembling that, but for elementary school and middle school it is nothing at all like your description.
I'll grant you that 40-50 years ago it was a bit more regimented. I'm old too. But I have school age kids in both elementary and middle school, and I have a lot of experience in what their environment looks like. It's very dynamic, lots of hands-on learning opportunities.
> This is not an accurate description of school. Maybe, maybe in high school and college you kinda sorta get to something resembling that, but for elementary school and middle school it is nothing at all like your description.
Elementary and middle school are even less like being an adult than high school
I think GP's point is that the school environment is nothing like "adulting," so your original point was just plain wrong.
And I agree with the GP: I don't see any reason why home-schooled kids would be at a disadvantage to public school kids when learning to navigate the adult world, because the school environment is strange and not at all focused on "adult life skills."
The main thing I struggled with (K-12 homeschool grad) was having no peer relationships that weren't filtered by my parents. Basically, I had a lot of experience with deferring to authority (my mom/teacher), but no experience choosing my own friends, navigating peer to peer conflict where a parent wasn't going to intervene at the slightest hint of disagreement, or establishing personal boundaries.
It actually made for a very unsafe college experience. I had no experience telling anyone no, or doubting anyone's intentions. It took being lured alone with a man to realize that he didn't want to study Calc I, he wanted to make sexual advances on me when I was alone. I was lucky to learn that lesson without getting sexually assaulted.
Took me another few years to realize that I didn't have to obey everything my boss said, even if it was personally detrimental to my career.
My mom, of course, would tell you how great it was that I wasn't socialized with "an unnatural collection of same aged peers" and how I was always "so polite around adults."
Hmm... so you're saying that students aren't segregated into artificial cohorts of a specific age, and there isn't an authority figure in the classroom telling them what to do?
Perhaps that's the case where you live (though I'm...skeptical), but it certainly is the case here and everywhere else I've ever lived.
> Hmm... so you're saying that students aren't segregated into artificial cohorts of a specific age, and there isn't an authority figure in the classroom telling them what to do?
IIRC that sounds a bit like Montessori (done right), but that's uncommon generally and extremely uncommon in upper grades.
what school age child has access to that? Maybe in the most selective and well funded private schools there's professional instructors put public school? No way.
Probably school districts in close proximity to prestigious schools (Boston/Harvard) who can hire new grads who want to stay within the university bubble.
Same here. And expecting us to just immediately make up the gap in college is... optimistic at best. Going from having your every interaction determined for you by your parents to being expected to arrange your own social calendar is a huge leap. And that assumes your parents actually let the leash slip at all in college. Mine certainly didn't let me stay in a dorm or stay after classes to socialize. Not if I wanted them to fill out my FAFSA, anyway.
home school kids arent locked in a cage. There's all kinds of social engagement activities available to home schoolers, i would argue even more than public school. The social isolation rumor of home schoolers is totally unfounded in my experience. Maybe it was true 30 years ago but it's certainly not true for school age kids toay.
This varies widely, and there just isn't any method for tracking kids whose parents DO isolate them, though. And it isn't just monstrously abusive parents who undersocialize. My mom loved me and made sure I got a good education, but she was a paranoid woman with chronic health conditions that made driving me to friends impossible for her. My dad just figured he was there to make the money and left educating and caring to the woman.
There was a stretch between 14 and 18 where I didn't see anyone other than my mom and dad. Oh, I made small talk to the grocery clerk once a week. Frankly, it was appalling emotional neglect, and my dad has apologized for not stepping up to fix it. My mom remains in denial that it was even a problem.
And meanwhile, anytime someone brings up homeschooling there's always a ton of people saying socialization can't possibly be a problem. Usually people who weren't homeschooled themselves, of course.
When you have kids your perspective on many, many things changes in very big ways. This is more true when the pregnancy is planned for and you and your spouse are both ready to have children.
We don't personally home school but have many friends that do. It's a very common thing in our church and community. It's hard to tell what kids are homeschooled versus the ones that aren't. Many homeschools engage in co-op programs and use curricula to drive personal engagement. For instance in one family we're very good friends with they use a curriculum that requires community service for middle school ages and up. There are several charities that they engage with in addition to the community service activities that the church is doing.
Home schooling doesn’t mean setting up the garage with a chalkboard and two kids at their desks with mom or dad playing teacher. Home schooling doesn’t even have to take place at home! Lots of homeschooling parents will take their kids to the library, the (science, art, natural history) museum, to offices and factories, and out into nature preserves.
It also doesn’t mean just Billy and his little sister Jenny learning all by themselves. Homeschooling parents often join groups where they can bring all the kids together. The kids can socialize and the parents can share responsibility for teaching and supervising.
It also doesn’t mean just the parents participate. At my local public library, the children’s floor has a huge amount of programming aimed at homeschooling families. The librarians run activities with the kids, showing them how to find books in the library for science research, make crafts together (by hand and with library 3D printers), learn about engineering by building cars and robots with electronics components.
Homeschooling can of course be done badly and we should worry about kids in those environments. However, homeschooling done right can be far more dynamic and engaging than the best public schools around. It also doesn’t have to be expensive, it just takes time and commitment from the parents involved.
In Alberta, homeschool is really more akin to "remote school" than homeschool.
The kids are still required to pass the same exams to get their high school diploma, and they still get a package of course work and required reading and such. They also have access to a teacher to ask questions to, who can help explain concepts, projects, and such.
My wife was homeschooled here growing up and she loved it. She would finish her school for the day in the morning then do whatever she wanted for the rest of her time. She would also finish her courses early and have long summers. Now she has a masters degree and leads teams at work.
Definitely not for every family or every kid, but the outcomes don't have to be terrible
When I moved into my current house about 10 years ago, the family next door home schooled. I'd never known any home schoolers before and definitely had some notions about how terrible it must be until I learned about it.
This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, depending on the age. 2 subjects per day, so as a parent your teaching commitment was a half day a week on 1 subject.
They would do field trips. They held a school play in a garage complete with costumes and video. And the kids were smart, well mannered, socially adjusted kids with very happy and normal lives. And there are plenty of sports opportunities as well. As far as I know, they all went to public high school too.
Completely shifted my view of what I thought home schooling was, which was the kids stuck in 1 house with 1 parent all day in social isolation.
The reality was closer to a model of a Montessori school which has a huge amount of success stories.
It seems to me that the only relevant question here is how home schooling compares to public schools when it comes to “horror stories.” And there certainly aren’t a lack of public school horror stories…
There are plenty of 'public school' horror stories because these things are public and can be audited in a great number of cases.
You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private. Maybe you'll be a therapist and years later get to talk to one of these people how they are effectively crippled for the rest of their life. Or you'll be like me that grew up in a place that had a bunch of religious organizations that homeschooled most of their children with educations that I'd consider completely and totally deficient, and then pull those same people back into the organization as cheap/uneducated labor they could abuse.
Sure, I don't think anyone denies that there are some home schooling horror stories. But it really doesn't seem like most public schools do a great job either, so the question is if this broken system damages more people than one dominated by home schooling.
We have some insight into the answer to this, because public schooling is (more or less) a replacement for home schooling. Home schooling has an incredible amount of inequality built in to it. Affluent parents can hire instructors. Poor parents may not even be able to meet their children’s basic schooling needs, if it weren’t for public schools.
Obviously there’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, and the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century, which is roughly when modern public schools started appearing in the US (based on the “Prussian model”).
There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve. It can be too easy to focus on narrow sets of metrics like test scores, or collect a bunch of anecdotes about bad experiences in public schools (or bad experiences in homeschooling). IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.
> IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.
Imagine your school district has banned teaching algebra to 8th graders, for reasons of equity. You're upset at this, since you have a child about to attend 8th grade. You go to a school board meeting, express yourself, and are at best ignored or more likely called names. What, from the perspective of a parent with a child who needs an education, do you then do? Fixing the system would be nice and all, but how do you do that before your kid becomes an adult, let alone make up for all the damage public schooling has been doing in the meantime?
If a family is willing and resourced to (deeply) consider homeschooling because of one subject (you mentioned Algebra for 8th graders[1]), then another less expensive/effortful path could be hiring an afterschool math tutor, or sitting down with your child to work through Khan Academy together.
Both suggestions require extra time, while still keeping your child "within the system" through attending school and (presumably?) receiving a decent-enough education in other non-math subjects. If the malaise extends to (many) other subjects, then I could see how home schooling becomes a more attractive option.
> then another less expensive/effortful path could be hiring an afterschool math tutor, or sitting down with your child to work through Khan Academy together.
...so now after your child spends hours every day at school, they have to spend yet more hours learning what they should have learned in school.
You can see why so many parents decide that for more effort, they can save their child a lot of wasted time, effort, resentment, and bad influences. Particularly families where at least one parent can stay at home (and these days, working from home makes that so much easier once kids are old enough to learn by themselves).
From what I've read, there's almost no data in it since it's all done in private with little to no oversight.
This makes the comparison very hard, since one side is has all of its successes and failures critiqued in public, and the other side is only ever talked about with anecdotal data.
Personally I believe there should be some sort of periodic standardized test for homeschooled kids too. Even if it's not for "passing" a grade, so we know in which level of learning they are compared to everyone else.
If we can't compare them, how can we evaluate its merits and flaws?
I'd be a fan of some nationwide objective test, given once per year, that tracks level of achievement of all students, homeschooled, public, or private. Sadly it seems we're moving away from that as a country, because no one likes to be objectively measured.
For the SATs, homeschooled students score ~75 points higher than public school students. We can draw only limited conclusions from that, though. People self select into taking the SATs. And there's the the bigger issue of demographics: given the demographics of homeschoolers who take the SAT, you'd expect them to outperform anyway. Regardless, more data is better.
Many states is an overstatement. Only 13 require any sort of testing. Even in those 13, not all grades are tested, and often a parent may provide a nonstandardized 'portfolio' in place of testing. The other 37 states have no required testing whatsoever.
We don't even require parents to notify all states that they are homeschooling their kids. Those kids just disappear from the system entirely, no reporting on outcomes. Homeschooling struggles from a deep distrust of any sort of oversight, IMO. It means their best successes get discounted because "of course they'd succeed anyway with involved parents" and their worst abuses get rugswept as "not real homeschooling." No way to numerically make determinations like "is homeschooling as good or better than public school on average" if you refuse to make the population of homeschoolers identifiable.
This is mostly due to the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).
Which has essentially the same incentives and results that the NRA does -- cater to the craziest of your constituents, fan outrage, then push the most extreme views (to protect everyone).
As a result, HSLDA essentially says that no child abuse or sexual assault exists in the home schooling communities, because it's the only way to justify their position that zero regulation is the only appropriate amount of regulation.
"the achievement test scores of this group of home school students are exceptionally high--the median scores were typically in the 70th to 80th percentile; 25% of home school students are enrolled one or more grades above their age-level public and private school peers;"[1]
But it's psychological outcomes and averages, so I'd take any study with a grain of salt. It does match my experience having home-schooled friends growing up, it's just so much more efficient to be learning at one's own pace than that of the slowest kid out of 30.
This is kind of self-selecting. If your kids are poorly taught and don't have any collegiate aspirations, why are you going to subject them to achievement tests. You're not. So the only home school students taking those tests are those who are going to do well.
Compared to public schools, where most kids are going to take some kind of achievement test. Whether it be the SAT, ACT, or state-level grade advancement test.
It was indeed self-selected (parents volunteered to administer the test) and notes itself that it did not attempt to control for variables, and so should not be used for comparison purposes.
Also, the demographics are pretty wonky, as they note:
- 94% white
- 97.2% two-parent marriages
- 93.8% Christian mother (no info on other parent?)
- 2-3x general pop's attainment of 4 year degree or higher
- ~2x likelihood to be in the highest income brackets (50k+)
- Essentially no home schooling families in the lowest income bracket (0.8% vs 12.6% of all families with children)
I honestly think social sciences aren't all that amenable to the scientific method - too hard to control all variables - and I'm sure someone could cherry pick studies to say the opposite of what I'm posting here. But, what else can we do?
Agreed. Social sciences are notoriously difficult to rigorously normalize, mostly due to the natural variation and impracticality of recruiting a valid cohort (in $ or time).
It's a miracle even drug development on the harder science side works as well as it does.
The math situation is a clear signal that school administration/education departments do not prioritize education, and in fact find it unfair that some students actually manage to learn something, and want to stop that. It's not that they don't have the resources or enough interest to fill classes; it's that they don't want kids to learn too much. It's fair to infer that this attitude is not limited to math.
Ostensibly education is why the schools exist. If they're not going to do that, let's at least let the kids go play in the park or something. They'd probably get better socialization that way anyway.
Does anyone actually believe this? It would be more than naive to do so. On r/teachers just the other day, I was reading about one of them complaining that all they really are, are baby-sitters so they parents can work dayshift. Even they know what they're for.
But if everyone were to suddenly be willing to speak this truth aloud, it'd be too absurd to continue. People are shamed and guilted into paying the taxes for education. No one could be shamed or guilted into paying for someone else's teenager daycare.
> The math situation is a clear signal that school administration/education departments do not prioritize education, and in fact find it unfair that some students actually manage to learn something, and want to stop that.
I was in first grade in 1980 (1981?). It was like this for me the entire run of it. Wanting to learn more, hungry for it, with them rationing what I could learn to tiny little crumbs a few times throughout the school year. Studies were paced out for the dumbest kid in class. I think I made it to my sophomore year of highschool before I gave up, and when I did, that was my fault too.
It was bad even then, and at least back then they were still pretending that it was about education.
>Does anyone actually believe this? It would be more than naive to do so.
GP clearly believes it, since they wrote this. I believe it too, and I think this is a mainstream belief, not a "more than naive" one. Your one anecdote based on a Reddit rant (and, I assume, personal bias) is not nearly convincing enough to change my mind.
I would not dispute that it's a mainstream belief. But I don't think that this has ever been a good counter-argument to "it's a naive belief".
My anecdote, such as it is, is hardly uncommon. It is in fact, nearly a cliche at this point, or a stereotype. I sincerely doubt that me having communicated it to you is your first encounter with the idea.
As to your mind, I don't wish to change it. I am content with you remaining naive. My own children receive advantage from this. Please continue to screw up the public education system for decades, my entire lineage can only prosper the longer this continues.
> On r/teachers just the other day, I was reading about one of them complaining that all they really are, are baby-sitters so they parents can work dayshift. Even they know what they're for.
So we're clear, when a teacher complains about being daycare, what they mean is they're:
- an educator
- an administrative assistant
- daycare
The first of those is a reasonable expectation of the job. The second two, less-so.
And so you complain about the unreasonable things, but don't mention the reasonable one... because it's literally the job.
Taking kvetching about ancillary mandates to mean that education isn't happening or isn't still the primary job is weird.
That isn't what the person meant. They pointed out, clearly, multiple times, that though they were trained as an educator, no education takes place. Leaving only the "daycare" part.
When someone disputes this, what they really mean is that they are uncomfortable with the realization that it is daycare, that it hurts them to consider that something so profoundly part of their status quo is rotten to the core, and it makes their own lives seem dishonest. They would rather than misperception that education still occurs to persist unchallenged.
> because it's literally the job.
Hasn't been, for years. It's not improving/reverting. You're willfully blind to it.
> or isn't still the primary job is weird.
Please don't mistake me. I'm not claiming that education has been secondary to other concerns. I'm saying that it doesn't happen at any significant rate at all, isn't in anyone's list of priorities, and that when it does happen it is accidental and unrepeatable.
> When someone disputes this, what they really mean is that they are uncomfortable with the realization that it is daycare, that it hurts them to consider that something so profoundly part of their status quo is rotten to the core, and it makes their own lives seem dishonest. They would rather than misperception that education still occurs to persist unchallenged.
Or, they disagree, and they have their own thoughts.
> Please don't mistake me. I'm not claiming that education has been secondary to other concerns. I'm saying that it doesn't happen at any significant rate at all, isn't in anyone's list of priorities, and that when it does happen it is accidental and unrepeatable.
As someone with two parents, multiple family members, and past partners in the profession of education, early childhood and other... we will have to agree to disagree.
I'm sure your opinions are formed from your own experiences.
> It’s not that they don’t have the resources […] it’s that they don’t want kids to learn too much.
Hehe, this is simply not true. Where did this conspiracy theory come from, and why do you think this poorly of people who are spending their time trying to help kids despite low pay and a constant barrage of harsh critical opinions from parents, law-makers, and hordes of armchair critics on the internet?
You’re making wild assumptions and using the worst possible motivation to build a straw man criticism. If you can do better, maybe you should get involved or consider being a school administrator?
I don’t like it when there is less support for the motivated students, and it happened to me in high school. But you are aware the situation we’re discussing is due to needing to educate 100% of the student body up to a minimum standard, right? Public schools are almost always underfunded and short-staffed. Nobody’s trying to actively prevent the smart kids from learning, they’re trying to avoid using all their resources teaching the kids that don’t need it as badly from leaving the larger group of kids who’s families have less money completely behind. Your comment is completely ignoring what happens to the students who are behind in math already, and how to get them enough help.
What is always true is that what’s best for the group isn’t necessarily best for the individual. In this case, you’re suggesting the opposite of prioritizing education for all, and thus you’re not talking about prioritizing education, you’re talking about prioritizing resources toward students that already meet the minimum standards. Schools, teachers, and administrators are trying to prioritize education for all, and they have an explicit duty to get every last kid up to basic minimum standards. If they don’t meet those goals of getting the bottom half of their classes passing, they could lose their jobs and they would be failing to prioritize education for all.
> Nobody’s trying to actively prevent the smart kids from learning
This is false. Why else ban teaching algebra district-wide to 8th graders? The explicit justification is that it helps some students get too far ahead of other students and causes inequitable access to take calculus classes later on, which is considered a bad thing.
Teachers even complain if you help your child accelerate through the textbook for the year.
Who’s “banning” math, exactly? Give me examples and specifics, and please elaborate on what the difference is between a ban and not offering advanced math. You’re basing your argument on the imaginary hyperbolic terminology of the above comment.
Aside from the ridiculousness of calling 8th grade algebra "advanced math" (I was taking the equivalent in 6th grade where I grew up, in a low-income public school), "giving directives that schools are not to devote any resources to teaching 8th grade algebra" is in every sense equivalent to "banning teaching algebra."
If a state did the same thing with LGBT topics or evolution, I suspect you'd take no issue with calling it a ban.
Due to polarization. People are herded to fight over stupid but controversial things so things never change. That said, parents in general invest and care a lot about their V2s than any government could ever lie about. Inevitably their children will be indoctrinated to believe in things that go against their values and they will be rightfully pissed off and afraid.
> If a state did the same thing with LGBT topics or evolution
Hahaha you mean the topics that are actually getting banned in states like Florida and Kentucky?
> giving directives that schools are not to devote any resources to teaching 8th grade algebra is in every sense equivalent to “banning teaching algebra”
Again, please provide some specific examples of this happening. Are you getting all worked up over something that is mostly made up or taken completely out of context? No way to know unless you cite the actual problem and demonstrate the magnitude of the problem.
Of course there absolutely is a huge difference between not having the resources for a class and banning it by law, and you know it. You can argue the outcomes might be equivalent, if you want, but it undermines your own argument to exaggerate.
Fair enough, I’m not defending SFUSD specifically, I’m arguing from my own experience having seen similar policies made specifically over resource constraints. That text notwithstanding it would still be true that adding options for advanced students does take away resources that could be used for students that are behind, one way or another. It might not be a lot, and it might be reasonable to offer advanced math, but the money is still finite and could be used to further help kids in the most need. In this entire thread we’re still only talking about kids who’ve already met the educational goals, and not talking about how to avoid leaving some kids behind, especially the poorer ones.
Public schools are intentionally harming gifted students in the name of equality. The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, VA intentionally hid merit achievements from students which would have helped in college applications.
Banning advanced math is just another instance of this. A slower paced class for lower performing students would actually help them. Bringing down advanced students only serves to make the school look more equitable.
I had to Google the incident you’re referring to. Sounds like there was a delay in notifications, it only hurt early acceptance applications, and that it won’t happen again because they got a lot of flack. I don’t think this situation is relevant to schools not offering algebra in junior high, because this was specifically a top school that offers advanced classes. You’re bringing up a quite different point about college admissions, and that debate should be focused on colleges, because they themselves have started sometimes discounting or ignoring the academic achievement list of applicants, due to excessive gaming of the application system, and also acknowledgement that meritocracy is living up to its original coined meaning, as a sign that merit is at least as much an outcome of money as it is of talent, in other words so-called talent is a byproduct of having support and we’ve been failing to support people who might have had a chance largely in favor of people lucky enough to have rich parents.
> A slower paced class for lower performing students would actually help them.
Agreed, bingo! If you don’t have the resources to cater to people who are ahead, the only choice to help those who need help is to lower the bar.
Are you claiming that there weren't enough interested kids to put together a full class to teach algebra in middle school? Specifically in large cities like San Francisco or Seattle where this kind of thing started? As far as I know, that justification is not being given, and instead the argument is about how some kids are learning more advanced material than others, and the "fair" thing is to hold back the more advanced students.
The thing about tracking is that it doesn't require more resources. If you have 6 classes in a year, you can put e.g. the top 17% together, and they can move at a faster pace than the bottom 17%. Or you can let kids take classes with mixed ages. Gifted kids don't need more resources. Literally you could have them go sit in the library and do what they want and they'd probably learn more than sitting in a class where they're forced to pay attention to something they've already mastered. When I was in calculus I was bored enough that I would also read my uncle's discrete math book that he let me borrow, but most teachers don't like when you ignore them, and when you're in a class with the lower end of the aptitude curve, there's negative peer pressure around being a nerd.
> The thing about tracking is that it doesn't require more resources.
Hehe of course it does. You’re talking about more curriculums, more book and material acquisition, more teachers with more training, etc. And maybe lots of schools don’t have 6 different math classes.
> Gifted kids don’t need more resources.
Agreed! That’s maybe why some schools are focusing on the kids who do need more resources?
In fairness to your argument, I think “gifted” kids do need support though, it’s just that they are statistically better at either having it given to them outside of school, or of finding it on their own. What’s left is just a rather weak argument about not letting them get bored. Solving boredom should take a back seat to solving education for the less fortunate, IMO.
The curriculum already exists. Textbook selection is already done. The discussion is about delaying teaching a subject, not eliminating it. You don't need more materials, just different ones (one additional algebra book and one fewer remedial book). And you don't need more teachers. Just be more effective about grouping the kids the teachers are already teaching. My suburban school had no problem putting together multiple sections of algebra in middle school. I'm sure a city with 10x the population can do it too. And if a teacher can't teach basic algebra, they probably shouldn't be teaching math at all. Or if you mean later classes like calculus, let the kids leave, and if there's a local community college, allocate some of the money you saved to let the kid take classes there.
> What’s left is just a rather weak argument about not letting them get bored. Solving boredom should take a back seat to solving education for the less fortunate, IMO.
Okay, then let the advanced kids go sit in the library, go outside and play, or go home. Making them sit in class is, if anything, going to make them anti-social and create resentment toward the "dumb" kids. I don't think torturing a kid making them sit bored out of their mind among people they don't like for 15% of their life for no reason is a "weak" thing to argue against.
Lots of gifted kids fall through the cracks because they are bored and get themselves in trouble. Gifted does not mean good life skills or early adulthood
> then another less expensive/effortful path could be hiring an afterschool math tutor, or sitting down with your child to work through Khan Academy together
But the objection is "inequity". Surely this extra effort creates more inequity?
It is and honestly we’re doing that right now with Seattles equity based schooling program but there is a finite number of hours in the day so you can only do 1 or 2 subjects. If you replace math with remedial math, science with social Justice and writing with unstructured scribbling there just isn’t enough time left over to teach that.
You're assuming kids have the extra time for that. Homeschooling also is much more time efficient. There's a lot of time eliminated even you're not trying to get a whole classroom on the same page (literally and figuratively), and leaves more time for play, extra curriculars or special interests and positive socialization, things that existed more prominently in education when there were smaller class sizes. You can also cater more to where the kid is at in a subject, moving faster in subjects they excel at and slower in subjects they struggle with, as well as accommodate any learning disabilities or idiosyncrasies as well as age specific level of brain development (huge differences in comprehension levels with just a six month age difference in certain subjects. It's also what the ultra rich and children celebrities effectively do, purchasing a bespoke individualized education plan just in a class of 4-5 in private school.
I always laugh at the people insist it's best to let their kids be guinea pigs while public school systems which aren't even utilized but it's most vocal advocates for their own children are on a multi decade track of "figuring it out".
The most likely place someone is to experience violence in their lifetime is in a school, sexual abuse and assault rates are higher than in the Catholic Church or BSA by population. You can't be mad at people for opting out while the rest of the advocates figure it out for the 5th decade of objective decline and empty promises when problems they've experienced when they were in school haven't even been addressed or have gotten worse. They may be voting for the right people and are active advocates for better education but their kids are in immediate need of a better education.
Are you claiming that SFUSD did not, in fact, ban teaching algebra in 8th grade, and are you ignoring that the state of California proceeded to then make it part of its state recommendations? Your isolated "hot button incident" is the real lived experience of hundreds of thousands of parents.
Your "dogwhistle" is itself a dogwhistle (your obvious implication being "only a racist Trumptard could support allowing students to take algebra in 8th grade"). Ironic, in that the people defending the decision implicitly believe that non-white people are less capable of learning algebra than white people. Which itself is stupid, from a historical point of view. Who, after all, first formulated algebra?
I'm saying that the issue gets characterized (wrongly) by detractors as pulling down the smart kids so that the other kids won't feel bad, when it's actually a matter of pulling resources for a smaller (parent-driven) "gifted" cohort in order to free those resources for use in improving everyone else's performance. This makes sense because the latter are less likely to be able to place their kids in private tutoring.
Here's my lived experience: algebra in 7th grade, black boy. I'd have been better off taking it later, and making it up with summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses /certs in between algebra, algebra ii, calc, and diff eq/calc ii in high school. If that meant my classmates could have a better chance of keeping up, all the better; being in the historically lily-white gifted track at my magnet high school didn't do much in the way of convincing my teachers not to give up on me at the first sign of weakness. Yet another nuance you either miss or refuse to acknowledge.
That's a massive misrepresentation of what's going on. This isn't dedicating resources to students in need; it's removing opportunities for poor students to take algebra in 8th grade, which is necessary if you want to take calculus in high school. And you might have been rich enough to take supplementary "summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses," but ripping that opportunity from people who don't have those resources is obscene.
You've given it the most unflattering interpretation in order to support your preexisting notions. In other words, it's warped.
The supplementary courses were provided by the school system, by the way. I would have taken them, but I was working or otherwise predisposed. If you really cared, you'd be advocating for the same (especially since a large portion of the general failure to attain math competency in America is due to our excessively long summer breaks).
> the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century
That's a bit of an understatement. I'm not great at history, but my understanding is that the mid-19th century was a little lacking in videoconferencing software, educated people with the resources to be on the other end of that video link, population density to have enough other like-minded kids within driving... uh, horse-riding range, up to date books, parents who weren't gone to the factories or fields during the day, etc.
> There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve.
Agreed. There is a smaller set of objectives that they actually do achieve.
> IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.
I would assert that it's impossible to fix this broken system, and I can cite a lot of past history. I would also assert that replacing it entirely with homeschooling (which is not a single thing, but whatever) is also a guaranteed path to failure. The only hope I see is for exploration to be possible, and for people in the different situations to learn from each other. The public school institutions do try to experiment, but are incredibly restricted in all sorts of ways. Homeschoolers have the training wheels off and are much more free to crash straight into the bushes or off a cliff, but in practice plenty don't and plenty come up with a lot of different ways of doing things, some of them that seem to be working quite well in practice — academically, socially, etc.
I agree that sucking resources out of public schools to benefit the privileged few is very troubling and worrisome. But so is the current state and trajectory of public schooling, and holding everyone back may be short term fair but long term disastrous.
We're homeschooling one of our kids (both until recently, when one went to a public charter high school). We've seen the institutional effects firsthand. Simple example: we found excellent math resources, but they weren't "A-G" accredited for University of California entrance requirements. Which gave us pause, since we wanted to leave that option open. We ended up going through a A-G accredited program, the best of what we could identify, for a semester. It was crap: rote memorization of algorithms exactly matching to the state standards, lots of repetitive exercises, minimally useful feedback from teachers and their assistants. My son passed all of their tests and got an A+ grade, and is now a semester behind in math because none of that stuck in a way that is useful for building on. It was a waste of time. We gave up on it and the whole accredited path, and went back to an online program that is far more conceptual, rigorous, and just plain effective. (His earlier public school experience was somewhere in the middle, Again he did quite well there according to the state tests.)
My guess is that it's yet another form of enshittification: A-G accreditation is very valuable, but once you get it there's no profit in increasing quality, only in growing your student base. There aren't enough accredited places to provide any competition on quality, especially when there's so much disagreement about what "quality" is in the first place, and as usual any useful definition ends up being expensive. Non-accredited places have to compete on quality.
(For anyone who finds value in my personal opinions: Silicon Valley High School math bad, Art of Problem Solving math good.)
I think the mistake you are making is in believing the public schools are failing in any way. You cannot fix something that is not broken. In my opinion the schools are working exactly as intended which is why anyone who can should get their children out of them.
"Mistakes of this size are never made innocently." ~Ayn Rand
There is a huge amount of inequality in the quality of education that home schooling can achieve, that is definitely true. So maybe we work on the inequality.
Inequality of education is a symptom of a self reinforcing broken economic system.
Meanwhile, if I can provide a superior education and social experience for my children, Im glad to have the opportunity to do so. I’ve seen bad outcomes and good ones from homeschooling, and in my particular case I am absolutely delighted with the results (now that my children are adults)
But to achieve that my wife and I invested our entire lives, uprooting ourselves and living experiences with our children as part of their education, sailing around on a boat we rebuilt and going to local schools in other languages as their cultural preparation. It was a bit hellish for my wife and I but the 6 years we invested in that paid unbelievable dividends for our children. Most people can’t or won’t do that.
We weren’t (financially) rich, but I have always prioritized my freedom over material wealth, and you can do amazing things on a modest (60k/year was our passive income from contracting at that time) budget if you have complete control of your time.
Are you comparing the best public schools to the best homeschools? Or the worst to the worst? Or the average to the average?
I suspect that the education kids get at the worst 20% of public schools in the country is still way better than the worst 20% of homeschoolers.
I also would totally believe that the education kids get at the top 20% of homeschools is better than the average public school.
Public schools are far from perfect, but there are minimum standards and there are resources at the state and federal level to try to improve schools that aren't meeting those standards.
My problem with homeschools is that in most states, there aren't any standards being enforced. If homeschools had surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd be fine with it.
The reason why many homeschoolers opt out of public schools is because of those minimum standards. Who wants their children to be taught to a minimal standard? My autistic son would still be completely non-verbal (and probably worse) if we put him into the local public school system. We saw the classroom he would have been in, it was horrific. Instead, he has a speech language pathologist working with him one-on-one three to four hours per day.
The homeschooling crowd is so far up their own butts that they cannot accept homeschooling has horrific and hidden outcomes.
It's kind of the democracy versus authoritarianism debate. Authoritarians typically look really good on paper because they can conceal their mistakes, while the democracy bears all to the populace. And yea, there are some benevolent dictatorships with great outcomes, but I don't think that a single one of the homeschoolers would think that would be a valid point because it's also the exception.
I think you're already receiving the general opinion in the form of downvotes, but for the sake of constructive debate I'll try to respond.
> homeschooling has horrific and hidden outcomes
Please tell me more, as a homeschooled and successful software engineer and family guy I'm interested. Several people in my family are or have been homeschooled. I could tell you where they're at right now but I've bragged enough with myself already.
Yes, there can be horrific and hidden outcomes with homeschooling. Also with public education. Also with woodworking. Or having kids. Or cooking.
It's about how you do something, and why you do it.
Sorry for being so condescending, but your statements are offensive in their absurdity.
The root issue is that the homeschooling community, in their general distrust and suspicion of government authority has pushed hard for zero oversight and regulation (mostly through the HSLDA).
In most states, they've been able to achieve that.
And as potentially valid of a goal as avoiding oversight by someone you don't trust might be, it has willingly created a void.
A void that the homeschooling community itself doesn't police.
Consequently, when you do have the worst of the worst home outcomes... there's no one to turn to. And HSLDA even has specific playbooks to help parents avoid CPS intervention.
These cases are then buried to the extent possible (lobbying, media removal requests) because their very existence threatens the overall goal.
What are a few broken eggs to make an omelette, though?
> What are a few broken eggs to make an omelette, though?
I hope my comments don't suggest that this is the perspective of my thinking.
However I think we should make an effort of separating extreme cases from the norm. It is unjust to judge homeschooling as a concept by these very unfortunate fringe cases, when there's heaps of proven success cases on the other side, furthermore taking into account that abuse also happens despite kids going to public or even private schools.
And also taking into account that the protection laws that are so mentioned here have also been often abused by the government against innocent and honest people and their families.
Comparing homeschools to the worst public schools is a false comparison in the United States, as school quality equates to wealth, and poor people by and large don’t homeschool.
Most of this stuff is driven by religion and politics.
> Most of this stuff is driven by religion and politics.
As so is the backlash. I get the impression that the emotional foundation to many of the objections to homeschooling is the idea that some kids will get a (home-schooled) education that doesn't conform to the commenter's politics or values. School has long been a mechanism for a dominant group to impose its politics and values on other people's kids. Public schools are just a milder form of that than Indian residential boarding schools or Chinese boarding preschools (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/china-tibet-board...), but they still perform the same function.
Homeschooling provides an escape from those functions (and other problems), and that's one I'd certainly want available to myself. I can imagine how nightmarish it'd be to be forced to send my kids to one of those Chinese boarding schools.
Deficits of empathy like those that would deny that escape (and the attendant hypocrisy) are getting really grating to me, even in people I more or less agree with.
The problem is, we’re not talking about Chinese boarding schools, but we are typically talking about moving children to poorly structured and poorly resourced homeschool arrangements with poorly qualified parents or others.
IMO, private religious schools with appropriate regulation (ie not some indoctrination academy) are a great thing, and I think supporting families in some way to avail themselves of them is a good compromise.
As I stated elsewhere here, my kids went to catholic schools and did great. I’m not approaching this as a “thou shalt public school” perspective. I also coached baseball to age 15, and I can tell you that kids benefit from someone who isn’t mom or dad instructing them.
> we are typically talking about moving children to poorly structured and poorly resourced homeschool arrangements with poorly qualified parents or others.
Is that "typical"?
It's a leap to assume that it's "typical" that homeschooling parents incompetent and incapable of educating their children. If anything, I'd assume the extra attention and emotional investment that's possible could make up for a lack of a educational credentials.
It's also a leap that the public schools would do better. It's also a common theme here that a motivation for homeschooling lack of academic rigor or outright failure of the public schools. I could see homeschooling as the only realistic option for a parent who lives in a failing school district (which are depressingly common) but is not wealthy enough to afford private school tuition (and has no access to vouchers).
And I'm not really biased here: I send my kids to public school.
The things that make home schooling viable about (a) parental educational attainment, (b) parental time, and (c) parental wealth.
These don't need to be exceptional, but they do probably need to be above-average to do a decent job, and obviously time and wealth are entangled (no time if have to work two jobs).
Yesterday, there was a teach complaining that they weren't allowed to flunk students who did not show up for class. For middle school. They weren't allowed to flunk students who scored 0% on tests, because they would sit at the back of class and play on smartphones the entire time, or disruptively talk to other students.
When they would demand from administration some kind of answer, they'd be told they weren't doing enough to engage the students.
You claim there are minimum standards, and technically that's true... any of us could look those standards up on the internet in only a moment, those standards are ignored for some incredibly large fraction of public schools.
> If homeschools had surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd be fine with it.
The great thing is, I don't have to put up with you being fine with how my wife and I teach our children. We don't have to answer to you.
I'm not just a contrarian here. You are fine with what the public schools are doing, right now. Your oversight, such as it is, doesn't seem to be effective at doing any of the things that I could want. It does lead me to be suspicious about what it is that you want.
One of the biggest, most important roles of public schools is to pry children away from their parents and give them baseline floor of education and independence (as well as force them to interact with the public, giving them context for what's normal and presenting opportunities for abuse to be discovered), no matter how crazy or abusive their parents are. The education can be pretty mediocre, as long as it achieves this goal.
Letting parents opt out of public schools means that the most committed abusers get to sidestep this safety valve.
Completely disagree. It's an unfortunate outcome of our society, and should not be a celebrated role of schools, to be police, meal kitchens, exercise facility, or child care.
Any distraction from a school's primary mission to educate disparately impacts the people who need it most.
> Any distraction from a school's primary mission to educate disparately impacts the people who need it most.
School's primary mission is to serve the needs of a societies children.
Inactive children don't learn as well as active children (especially boys). Hungry children don't learn as well as feed children. Abused children don't thrive.
I'm deeply curious why you don't want public school children feed or protected from abuse.
> I'm deeply curious why you don't want public school children feed or protected from abuse.
My children are more important to me than, well... just about anything. Including your children or anyone else's.
If other people are so subhuman as to harm their own children, then that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make so that my children aren't abused by the public school system, aren't turned into idiots by the public school system, and aren't indoctrinated by the public school system.
Do you think that when there's a string of tweenage suicides, that the contagion didn't spread via public schools? Am I supposed to put my kids at risk of that, just so you can pretend you'll catch the 1-in-10,000 of horrific abuse, which CPS will just ignore anyway?
You offer a bad bargain. I pay everything and get nothing. Fortunately (and I mean this in a way that the words just can't do it justice... "fortune" of the sort like out of Greek mythology where the gods have smiled upon me and bestowed every blessing and boon) I don't have to take that deal.
Oh, I love strawmen too! I brought my 2024 Easton Ghost Unlimited Pitch Black, what did you bring to the beating?
Primary schooling's mission is to educate children about capabilities to provide for themselves and those in there care as well as operate as how to perform and behave as productive members of society. Ancillary benefits are nice, but not required, to achieve that mission, thus should only be included in the strategy to the point that they support the overall mission.
So kids learn better when both active and not hungry? Yep, we know this, and thus justifies having lunch, cafeterias, gyms, and PE class. (We should have more funding for these things).
So kids learn better when not abused? Yep, we know this, and thus schools are typically required reporters. (And thank goodness they are -- we should fund more training on these things).
What you missed in my prior comment was that the argument wasn't against any of these outcomes. It was bemoaning that society requires these ancillary benefits in schools in order for society to continue operating at all, not that it's nice that schools are available as resources to provide what should be a child's primary caregiver's responsibilities.
Thus my comment. Schools shouldn't have to be police, meal kitchens, exercise facility, or child care in order for society to function. But they too often are. It's a failure of policy to which no one holds others to account. And insisting or expecting that schools provide these as primary responsibilities does harm to the students to whom need these in their lives, but for the school would not have them.
Help the marginal student? Yes, absolutely, we should fund.
Provide long term assistance (disguised welfare) through the schools? Not appropriate, a full change in situation is warranted for basic needs to be met for children by their caregivers.
Consider this. During the pandemic, we could have conscripted all school teachers in the first few weeks to deliver food to everyone within their school operating areas. A ready, idle workforce to solve one of the fundamental problems, allowing virtually everyone but teachers to remain locked down while focusing use of protective gear during its limited availability. Why didn't we rely on the schooling workforce to deliver food during lockdown? Most of the answers I can see apply to long term welfare and social safety net assistance being provided through schools as well -- training, safety, and other elements that simply aren't appropriate to expect of educators.
>>>> One of the biggest, most important roles of public schools is to pry children away from their parents and give them baseline floor of education and independence (as well as force them to interact with the public, giving them context for what's normal and presenting opportunities for abuse to be discovered), no matter how crazy or abusive their parents are.
I've explained my disagreement sufficiently. Have a good day.
The fact that school provides ancillary benefits beyond education is great. But portraying those as the primary mission, and the education as an ancillary benefit, IS pretty jarring. I don't homeschool, but I balk at that argument too.
but even if that's what the author meant, what's wrong with education being a necessary support for other goals?
it's always quite hard to identify tangible skills that traditional education actually teaches, and explain why those are important to the real lives of graduates. the average person needs, day-to-day, pretty minimal R,W&A skills.
> Letting parents opt out of public schools means that the most committed abusers get to sidestep this safety valve.
Absolutely insane take.
This is a street that goes both ways. I had parents who were caring, nurturing, and not even remotely abusive. The other children at my public school were physically and emotionally merciless, and the school didn't give a shit. When I started standing up to my bullies and fighting back, I was the one who got in trouble, not them.
In my n=1 data set and lived experience, public schools are the evil, twisted abuse enablers, not the parents.
I'm at a loss for words. It's as if you assume that a family is by default an abuse mechanism. And that schools are a safe haven?
Not sure which is worse.
I have an education thanks to my family and despite public education. I was partially homeschooled. It was my family who helped me go through high-school, not the other way around. For the high-school I went to, I could have (and almost did at one point) ended up being dead, for all they cared.
I won't deny there's abuse and cases in which public institutions have helped and saved people, but by assuming that this is the norm you completely overshot it here with your absolutism.
I think we can agree that most families aren't abusive towards their children. And that homeschool education can be as good if not better than public school education. I was homeschooled K-12 myself, and I now have a college degree in software.
Homeschool requirements vary wildly by state, and even in states with more requirements like testing, kids slip through the cracks. I was never required to take a standardize test by either of the states I lived in (Washington and Oregon). I knew a homeschool girl my age (12) who could not read. Her 16 year old brother could read, but could barely do math. They had no learning disabilities, their mom just wanted the welfare paycheck for them and otherwise ignored them. She already had a 5 year old and a newborn as well to keep the gravy train coming.
I had very little access to mandated reporters, and again nothing enforced by law. Those I did have access to, like my annual visit to my doctor, my mother insisted in sitting in the exam room with me. The doctors made no effort to remove her (they asked me in front of her if I was comfortable with her staying. Of course I said yes, I would have been severely punished at home if I admitted I wanted her to leave.)
Safety rules are not made with the 99% of good people in mind, but to catch the 1% of bad actors. Homeschooling is attractive to good parents because they can improve the outcomes for their children. It is also attractive to bad, abusive parents because it removes children from any external oversight and support structures outside their abuser's control.
I am not trying to downplay any risks here, and even less disregard very unfortunate situations and cases that for sure happen more often than they should.
However I can't see how this becomes as absolute as the parent comment is suggesting, in which by default it is assumed that parents are nefarious agents and public school is the saviour.
Which brings me to:
> Safety rules are not made with the 99% of good people in mind, but to catch the 1% of bad actors.
The risk in accepting this, as it happens so often in society, is ending up having to downgrade everyone to the worst case scenario, and working from that.
> The risk in accepting this, as it happens so often in society, is ending up having to downgrade everyone to the worst case scenario, and working from that.
I think most folks would be fine with homeschooling if there were reasonable regulation for it, including sharing your curriculum and schedule with the state, and allowing surprise inspections during your schedule, so that abuses can be found.
The biggest problem with homeschooling right now is that the lobbying group for homeschooling is vehemently opposed to any form of regulation, which makes it the wild west, which allows abusers to flourish.
If homeschooling wants to prevent the worst excesses, it has to standardize oversight and enforcement mechanisms.
"Zero regulation is the only acceptable amount of regulation," the talking point, enables abuse.
Not by the 99% who are doing it well!! But by the few bad apples out there.
By my thinking:
- Requiring a child be registered with the state as homeschooled
- Requiring a background check on parents who homeschool, and disqualifying those with child abuse priors
- Taking annual standardized tests (grade level or better)
- Surprise inspections (once a year? With parent-requested follow-up surprise inspections, if the first happened on a bad day)
Those don't seem overly onerous to prevent abuse from taking advantage of homeschooling options.
And the homeschooling community should want these things too, because they would provide a firm rebuttal to anyone attacking the practice from a perspective of abuse.
But now... when some abuse happens... but there are continued calls for zero oversight...
>Letting parents opt out of public schools means that the most committed abusers get to sidestep this safety valve.
I'm glad you had a good school experience. I was lucky to avoid the worst of it, but I knew kids who grew up with lifelong PTSD from the bullying / abuse, and complete apathy of the school system.
Likewise, I knew kids at school who had terrible home lives. This was almost a result of drug or alcohol abuse, or just plain neglect on the part of the parents. The children were treated as an annoyance or inconvenience. These parents were glad that school got them out of their sight; I'm sure if boarding schools were free they would happily sent their kids off to one.
I'm convinced that the percentage of parents that would actively make it a full time job to torment their children by homeschooling them is a vanishingly small number. Bad parents simply don't care about their children.
> educations that I'd consider completely and totally deficient, and then pull those same people back into the organization as cheap/uneducated labor they could abuse.
You just described public schools, Universities, and their relationship to the student loan racket. Deficient education followed by indentured servitude through loan repayment. False advertising by public school teachers of a ticket to the easy life through any university degree. If I had a nickel for every person I've met who had their life messed up by that lie, I'd be rich
I suppose you are talking about the US school system of late, right? Because even there it used to be better, and there's also an entire world outside with many different systems (possibly with their own rackets, just like homeschooling).
> You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private.
You're also not going to hear about the homeschooling horrors from the typical HN demographic. Broadly, and obviously with exceptions, there are two groups of parents who choose to homeschool: 1. Parents who have an abundance of educational resources and time and do it to provide a higher quality of education, and 2. Parents who do it for religious separatism reasons because public school gets in the way of their indoctrination. Selection bias means you're going to see a lot of the outcomes from #1 posting here, and not a lot of #2.
For every example who was homeschooled with a high-quality curriculum, had great parent-run extracurriculars, socialized well, and so on, how many examples are invisibly stuck as someone's housewife who can't even be employed because their only textbook was the Bible, and they didn't learn anything past 3rd grade math? They're not posting their horror story here on HN.
Why do you presume that religious parents necessarily have bad outcomes homeschooling?
I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would not agree with her on, for example, evolution. But she is loving and devoted and her two daughters have received tons of time and investment from her in their education, far more than they would receive in a public school.
I obviously haven't, like, tested her kids, but they do seem smart and well adjusted. I'm not really worried about the limitations on their scientific learning — it's not ideal if they are skipping some evolutionary biology (I actually have no idea but I assume they are) but they are going to leave home, go to college in a very secular country and get to learn that stuff. I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?).
By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.
“The Bible is the only education you need” is a very common meme among evangelical Christians.
> and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.
Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted curricula, no matter how specious they are. One influential homeschool association has a 24/7 legal hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts at accountability.
Contrary to your claim, the linked page implies nothing about the Bible being the "only textbook". It simply offers a set of Bible lessons for homeschoolers ("This exciting curriculum contains homeschool lessons that cover the entire Bible chronologically in four years…").
While you only wrote that that website provides the "tools" it would have been very reasonable to infer from your comment that you were also implying that they agreed with Bible-alone teaching.
I would assume any kind of education that is dependent on strict adherence to a specific ideological doctrine, whose tolerance of free inquiry is similarly constrained, to underperform one without these limitations. This was my experience of attending public schools that were under the thumb of right wing religious nuts vs. attending a state university that was not. I learned much more at the latter than the former.
Not all religious parents who homeschool will have bad outcomes, but it's by far the largest demographic of people who fail to actually educate their children.
As for your last statement: in most states there's no oversight. Sure, parents have to file a curriculum that gets reviewed and approved. Parents jump through that hoop by downloading a curriculum and mailing it in. There's nobody checking that they actually follow any of that curriculum. There's no state-run testing as a check and balance.
Religious groups have broad discretion in curriculum in most states.
My kids went to a Catholic elementary school, where I was the school board president. A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum.
The biggest growth in private schooling is in this and similar curriculum. It’s attractive to more reactionary people as they can assert “local control” while using texts that are too old to be considered controversial.
Parents aren’t to blame necessarily, people want what’s good for their kids. But awful elements of society are abusing religion to achieve their social ends. In my case, I was accused of being a “Marxist” for not condemning a fundraiser that provided winter clothing for poor children, including migrants swooped up and shipped across the country. We’ve allowed people to be brainwashed by charlatans.
> A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum.
To be clear, a 'classical education' refers to a traditional form of education where you break up a child's education into grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages and then mainly use primary sources. There's nothing wrong with this system and it was likely the way many people, including Marx, were educated. The idea that this is 'right wing' is bonkers to me.
If your relative is so indoctrinated by neo-christian ideology that they believe in creationism over evolution, the question is more if they should raise children at all, much less educate them.
As an English speaker on this site, the odds are very high you are descended from someone who believed in creationism. I argue it is good our ancestors weren’t forcibly taken from our other ancestors ala Stalin, Mao etc. simply for being Christians as it was defined a few generations ago.
If you don’t like it, though, there are less successful countries in this world that still persecute people based on religious belief. You are free to try one out. See how it goes.
I don’t agree with parent, but the reasons are vastly more nuanced than “your ancestors were religious so you’re wrong.” And that’s ignoring the even weirder swipe suggesting parent move to a different country.
Not a question of anyone being wrong. Having the opinion that my relative should have her children taken by the state might be repulsive to me but it is a statement of values, not something that can be refuted.
Instead I simply suggested a reflection: would you still feel this was a good thing to do if it was your great great grandparents having their children seized? Wouldn’t a great many of us have had our families broken?
Is there utility in believing in evolution over creationism in the average person’s life? If so, what is it?
I’m an atheist and evolutionary biology is my favorite field outside of CS, but unless you are personally working on figuring out how things actually work, I’m not sure how one belief over another benefits the average person.
The idea of believing things without evidence is a dangerous pattern to fall into. It may not matter as you say, if you don't see evolution as most likely correct, but if your mind is willing to accept things without proper evidence, you are going to be a shill.
1) The amount of evidence for a claim.
2) The grandiosity of the claim.
If you tell me you have a pet dog named "Spike" I probably would be willing to accept that with as little evidence as a picture of you holding a dog, found in your wallet [i might even take your word for it, if i knew you to be an otherwise mostly honest person]. Because, dogs exist and are plentiful, billions of people own dogs, and "Spike" is a common name. you may be fooling me (it may be the neighbors dog) but i'm still justified in the believe because the evidence rises to the claim.
If on the other hand you claim that you have a pink polka dotted flying dragon as as a pet named "Chester". I would be a fool to believe you. I have no evidence such a thing exists, or that people have them as pets. I would have to see it in person, and even then, i would need to get a report from teams of biologists/zoologists to be willing to accept the claim. It would require tons more evidence.
And yet, the claim STILL isn't _that_ preposterous. The dragon would be an animal, and i know animals exist. I know there are animals with scales, i know some animals fly. I even now there are some with wild coat patterns.
Now if you tell me you believe in an all powerful all knowing god who is responsible for why there is life? I have zero evidence, i have no experience like what you are describing. I've never been given evidence of a being outside of time and space. I don't know that that is even a thing. I don't know what all powerful is, or if that could exist? or all knowing? is that possible? I have no correlary to compare to. It's not like we know King Neptune exists, and while not infinitely powerful, is still pretty boss. Why would i believe that was the explanation for why there are creatures on this planet?
Evolution, on the other hand, has mounds of evidence. We have a powerful fossil
record, We went thru a pandemic that shows the power of mutation. Even our own ability to drink milk. And yet even evolution isn't making all that fanciful of predictions. It doesn't claim to know your thoughts, or how you will die. So the evidence rises to claim. Do we know everything there is to know about evolution? Could we be wrong in some areas? Sure. But we are justified in accepting it.
I might agree in principle on what you're saying, although not on the conclusions or consequences.
However, I think you either have too high an opinion of how people go about their ideas and beliefs, or you trust too much in the power and protagonism of reasoning.
I'd bet a lot, if not most of the people, don't go as far as you described. They believe in evolution because that's what's believed right now, and they got taught that in school. Try having a critical conversation about evolution with the average Joe, see what you find out.
Truth is everyone has faith in something. I have faith in God, so I believe certain things that might not seem rational to someone. Other people have faith in science and scientists and teachers, so they believe certain things which definitely don't seem rational to me. They don't have proof, they don't understand the reasonings, they haven't seen evidence. They just have faith in "the experts". And so they believe.
Anyway, why is the idea of God being real _that_ preposterous?
it is preposterous because
a) we have no known comps
b) we have no evidence of the claims
c) we have no reason to believe the claims are even possible.
as for trusting in experts, there's no question that that is problematic in the extreme. However, it comes back to how the evidence rises to the claim. Can a group of people be experts in a subject? How can we validate that? Can we verify that their are experts in how electrical wiring works? To a large degree we can. We have lots of evidence. Do they know everything, probably not, but i can have confidence that they are mostly correct. Can we verify there are experts in evolution? Again, i think we can. They have produced mountains of evidence. Do they know everything? No. But they are likely largely correct. Can we verify there are experts in God? What are the tests? How do we verify these experts?
You mention faith, and i have to ask, what good is faith? Is there anything you could _not_ believe, based on faith? If faith has no mechanism to filter out anything, does it tell you anything about what is true or likely true?
Again, I agree with several things you're saying, and because of that I insist in the presence of faith within what you're presenting.
There's usually low risk in trusting that a contractor is an expert in electrical wiring if they say so, and I usually trust plumbers or tradesmen to know their stuff and do their work. And how many times I've been wrong.
But my point is that most people don't go through this verification process, examining the credentials of scientists, taking a look at the evidencie, studies, papers, reasoning, etc. that backs up evolution. So it's not a rational belief. It's faith in other people, or a system.
If people did that, they would get to the conclusion that a lot of evidence points at the possibility of evolution being true. But by no means it's proven beyond doubt.
I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.
Regarding your questions about faith, I would not say that's how faith works. I have reasons behind what I have faith in. Right now I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.
Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
That something is not visible does not mean it doesn't make sense.
Could I be wrong? I guess I could, by definition, and I would be rejecting a scientific theory. Could you be wrong? What's the consequence of that?
One doesn't need to personally run experiments to reproduce science in order for the reproducibility of science to be effective at explaining the world. The fact that one can reproduce and observe is itself evidence. The great thing about the natural world is that we aren't required have to have faith in it, it exists as it is and if we want, we can pick it up and examine it. People don't have "faith" in science because science doesn't require it.
Unlike the natural world, the supernatural cannot be observed nor reproduced so it necessarily requires faith in order to function.
In more concrete terms: I don't know how my microwave oven works. I've never built one and don't have a degree in microwave oven technology. But I still don't need to have faith that it works--I can observe it working and if I wanted to, I could take it apart and observe its subcomponents working. I don't do this, but just the fact that I could means that I don't have to blindly believe in it or conjure up explanations about how it works.
>>I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.
you can still be justified in a belief if the prevailing evidence rises to the claim. We can be wrong about anything, and certainly in the mid 1800's people probably thought they knew how physics worked pretty well. They were wrong, of course, However, until evidence was produced that discounted their existing evidence, they were justified in that belief, and, it mostly worked for all intents and purposes for the tests they proposed/attempted, even tho quantum physics says something quite surprisingly different.
>> I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.
i don't doubt you. However, 9 billion people can use the process of faith to believe things, including things you think are horrendous. How do you discount their beliefs, while being confident in yours, if all you have is faith to discern the difference? If you are discerning a difference, that difference is
coming from somewhere else, likely evidence and rationality. So the process of faith, itself, is not trustworthy, as i'm guessing you feel that at least half the planet is using faith and coming to the wrong conclusions.
A few friends shared with me some of the textbooks that their extremely religious sister uses to homeschool her children. They were hilarious! Extremely inaccurate and full of indoctrination garbage. Then we all realized that this is what these kids’ “education” amounts to… not as funny anymore. Maybe their only textbook isn’t the Bible, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good.
After her eldest child was bordering on middle school age and still completely illiterate, she wound up sending the lot back to public schools. Thank god, but I still feel awful for those kids.
Much more important to worry about how well the kids understand math, and secondarily, physics (aka applied math!) and/or similarly math-using subjects (accounting, baking, chemistry, economics, programming, etc. etc. etc.) Those subjects are genuinely hard to master, and everyone should understand the basics because they're useful for so many careers.
As you say, learning the basics of evolution is something that can be done on your own in a weekend reading wikipedia. Similarly, you can learn the mainstream scientific explanations of how the universe was created from watching a few youtube videos. That's basically how I learned that stuff as an (atheist) homeschooled kid.
School seems to fail to teach the philosophy of science well anyway - skepticism, evidence, double-blind testing, etc. So I don't think evangelical homeschoolers are missing that much.
> I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?).
The current internet makes it very easy to self-select (intentionally or not) a bubble, and then never see anything outside of it (or only see one-sided takes you agree with about the “debate”). Given the algorithms major platforms use, I suspect it would be relatively easy to create a bubble in which evolution is never treated as real, and where dinosaur bones were planted to fool people.
> public school gets in the way of their indoctrination
Public schools themselves indoctrinate children--just with a different set of values than many parents have. The people who built the US system of widespread compulsory public schooling in the US were quite explicit about that being one of the primary purposes of the system. (So were the people who built the Prussian system that was referenced elsewhere in the thread.)
Assumptions about homeschooling are just a socially acceptable form of stereotyping. I was homeschooled and I'm a computational evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D from a reasonably well known state university.
Yale flew me out to interview for a biology graduate program. I had the credentials and test scores to be considered, but was turned down, quite possibly because of those stereotypes (based on the questions I got in the interview process).
Very much so. Watching the Last Week Tonight segment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI) on this recently, in a startling number of states, a one time declaration that you're homeschooling effectively drops the kids out of the system with zero oversight from that point on.
You get things like a Christian family whose "curriculum" for their daughters was: listen to classical music, bible listening 20 minutes/day, handwriting, bible memorization, exercise 15/day (not great so far, but wait for it): clean room 6/week, fold laundry 5/week, clean living room 5/week, clear off bar 6/week, tidy shelves in dining room 3/week, tidy stereo cabinet 2/week, clean brown cupboard in pantry 5/week, clean storeroom 1/week, tidy blue chest, dust piano, clean and vacuum, clean hallway, make bed...
That's every LWT. The whole infotainment genre does it but IMO that show is one of the worst in terms of fairness despite being very well made. It's hard to make a funny video about how obvious a complex issue is while not being very one sided.
I've grown so weary of this reflexive desire on the part of a certain kind of person who feels any news source or factual content that clearly has an ideological bent or a certain lean on an issue is therefore inherently less credible. 100% unbiased reporting is simply not possible. As a person, a journalist brings a lifetime of bias, experiences and yes even prejudices into their work, they can't not. I follow plenty of journalists with whom I agree with on pretty much anything and plenty with whom I have numerous disagreements, but I follow them because they report the facts as they exist in reality, yes, with their given view layered over top.
Part of good media literacy is being able to discern the facts from the opinion on the part of the reporter. In this case: Yes, it's clear that the LWT team skews pretty liberal, and because of that, they and I are going to disagree on a lot. But you really don't need to spin the fact that numerous groups of extremely christian parents are providing home schooling that borders on (and sometimes crosses into) child abuse. The way children are treated as parents property in this country is fucking disgusting. This is not simply "someone's child" this is what will eventually become a person, a person who will have to work to earn a living the same as the rest of us, a person who will have to reckon with global politics and issues, a person who will have to file taxes and send out their water bill, I could go on for the rest of the day listing off things they will almost certainly have to do, and NONE of them, not a single, sodding, fucking, solitary one of those things, is going to be helped by Jesus.
My wife grew up in an extremely religious household (not fundamentalist thankfully, but very evangelical all the same) and they completely and utterly failed her in terms of preparing her for the real world, in ways too numerous to name here. She learned a whole lot about Jesus though! Not that it did her much because she's an atheist now, and I basically have to run the logistics of the household because she can't do math.
This is among many reasons for my continued slide further from Atheist to Anti-Theist.
For every one of your wife there's another who did just fine. Given that the majority of universities up until just recently were religious, I find it difficult to understand your conflation of religion with ignorance. Are there extremists? Of course... but overall, the idea that just because something is religious it's less educational is... bad. I mean, before public schools in America (and still in Canada), Catholic parochial schooling was the largest school system, and still is the largest private one.
A religious school system is still required to adhere to a modicum of technical standards for the various studies, and what makes home schooling both worse and dangerous is how incredibly unregulated it is. See the above itinerary as described in the LWT piece: nothing but bible readings and chores. This is not how you raise capable people, this is how you raise house servants.
And my point is I think the act of trying to not is overrated.
> This hyper-emotional take seems unrelated to the discussion. I hope things get better, though.
I'm not afraid of my feelings. The notion of children being raised with nothing but their sky friend's manual is terrifying. We are already in the midst of the fallout of a society largely run by people who think the Rapture is coming soon and that the world was created by god six thousand years ago. The effects on long term planning, problem solving, addressing social ills cannot be overstated when the leadership of so many nations is convinced that God is gonna show up sometime in the next 30 years and pack up humanity like a train set, and therefore there's no point in mitigating the effects of climate change, or taking care of people who refuse to take their magical bullshit seriously and/or respect their bigotries as anything other than what they are.
If that doesn't make you emotional to think about, I think that's a you problem.
That would be very odd indeed. Quite an odd thing to claim, though.
> The notion of children being raised with nothing but their sky friend's manual is terrifying. We are already in the midst of the fallout of a society largely run by people who think the Rapture is coming soon and that the world was created by god six thousand years ago. The effects on long term planning, problem solving, addressing social ills cannot be overstated when the leadership of so many nations is convinced that God is gonna show up sometime in the next 30 years and pack up humanity like a train set, and therefore there's no point in mitigating the effects of climate change, or taking care of people who refuse to take their magical bullshit seriously and/or respect their bigotries as anything other than what they are.
This is just raw prejudice and negativity. More people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 100 years that in the previous 10000, and to a standard higher than that of kings and queens of a couple of hundred years ago. We cooperate and interoperate more; we stand our ground together against evils in the world; we fight poverty and hunger more than anyone ever could've dreamed of in history.
> If that doesn't make you emotional to think about, I think that's a you problem.
This is a non sequitur. One can feel emotions without going on hyper-emotional rants.
> This is just raw prejudice and negativity. More people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 100 years that in the previous 10000, and to a standard higher than that of kings and queens of a couple of hundred years ago. We cooperate and interoperate more; we stand our ground together against evils in the world; we fight poverty and hunger more than anyone ever could've dreamed of in history.
Absolutely correct, and none of that is achieved by people raised on a strict diet of Jesus. How many borderline illiterate people from the Appalachians are revolutionizing our world? I am not saying people not born of means are incapable of changing the world (beyond the ways in which the world has ensured it anyway) in fact I am mourning, I am mourning the loss of so much human potential, sacrificed on the altar of this anti-social libertarian experiment within which a child is completely unable to advocate for themselves, their desires, and their being until they turn the magic age of 18, at which point they are thrust into the adult world, whether they have been prepared for it or not in the care of people who are not held accountable to performing that task, and if they fail to perform, they will be cast out, they will starve, they will die.
You're damn right I'm prejudiced against these people. I have seen firsthand the hell they inflict upon their children in the course of following their bullshit ideology. I've listened to hours of their intellectually bankrupt and dishonest defenses of ancient texts they insist are the best foundation for a child's learning, texts full of rape, murder, slavery, torture, all performed in the name of a narcissistic unbeing who demands complete obedience to his arbitrary commands, while demonstrating no measurable effect on the world and insisting he is the only truly righteous force. And his followers in turn wield this book as a weapon against the marginalized worldwide, waging an endless war on everyone different from them, based on nothing but their own bigotry.
My only disappointment in being Atheist is I'm fairly certain there is no hell for these people who so desperately deserve it.
The "public schools as a warrantless, ongoing search by the government into parenting" model of schooling.
Why wouldn't everyone want to sign up for that? I mean, it's not even expensive. Just subject your kids to bullying, bureaucracy, and bumblefuckery (call 'em the Three Bs!) and you too can be under suspicion for 13+ years.
This goes both way. Public school success cases will be exaggerated and amplified by authorities where parents will prefer to keep their lives private.
I don't know if that is the only relevant question. If you have a terrible time in public/traditional school, you may resent and blame a whole slew of factors. If you have a terrible time while homeschooled, you are likely to resent and blame the people teaching you or the ones who made that decision for you. Your parents.
Research on the question is limited. One review found weakly positive average outcomes for homeschooled children, although they performed worse in one interesting dimension: they were considered inferior military recruits.
Selection effects create a "blind men and the elephant" problem when considering anecdotes about homeschoolers. Homeschool children who return to public school may do so because their parents lack the resources to homeschool them effectively, so they might perform worse (academically & socially) than the average homeschool child. But homeschool children who get jobs in the technology industry and post on Hacker News are probably more successful than the average. It remains for the reader to determine whether the lack of "success" of homeschool children who join the military, in contrast to homeschooler mean success elsewhere, is due to a selection effect or a psychological effect of homeschooling.
An acquaintance of mine and his wife just started an alternative, semi-home school (hybrid system). Neither of them have any education experience, just a libertarian/anti-government mindset.
They were able to franchise a school for, I believe $10-15,000 (certainly under $20K), a background check, and a 2 hour open book test for them both.
I struggle to see how this is acceptable for not just "homeschooling" your own kids, but other people's kids.
The biggest US public school horror story is how we have taken a great instrument of social progress and decimated it.
Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success.
US schooling has been taken over (at the level of the state legislatures; blame goes to state Congress not to the schools) by companies selling "achievement" test. And also by charter schools whose success is based on only selecting high-achieving problem-free children?
Why do teachers say they are nothing but babysitters? Maybe because they aren't allowed to teach, to inspire love of learning in the children? And their classroom budgets are so tight they buy school supplies out of their own pockets, while living on an income that is close to poverty level? While facing felony charges for having the wrong book in the shelf behind their desk???
When things like "Creme de la Creme Early Learning Center of Excellence" are real institutions instead of something from a comic dystopia, you know you have a problem.
"Notice he isn't complaining about straight hook-up apps."
Homosexuality is just really disgusting to a lot of people who don't want their children exposed to it. If you also have to remove books about Tinder so gays don't feel singled out, you can do that too.
Anecdotally one of the people protesting these books in my area is well known for being a hyper religious wife beater who is no longer allowed see his children.
The rest are a diverse un-hirable band of racists, anti vaxxers and people that fake injuries for money.
I'm not at all conservative but i can see not all conservatives are like this. This is a recent phenomenon.
"Excuse me for not wanting middle schoolers taught how to use gay hookup apps."
Just the gay ones?
I don't want kids using either hookup or dating apps. But the UI's are are very simple so I don't see why removing a book from a library would prevent this?
You can google app tutorials if "swipe left, swipe right" is too complicated for you.
I believe you are correct that public schools are instruments of social progress, but to assume that this is good for the students is a terrible assumption. A society may "progress" at the great expense of the people it's institutions purport to care for.
By definition progress is movement in a direction. Who set the direction? Toward which destination? To achieve which aim and goals? Who benefits? To assume it is the students, the teachers, or "the people" broadly, is a naive and destructive assumption.
Social progress by one definition might include the production of obedient soldiers and factory workers. It might include the limiting of cultural diversity, creating a common core of cultural conformity and homogenization among the youth a country populated by recent immigrants. It might include training the youth to accept authority without question.
If one is interested enough to learn about the actual thinking of the founders and maintainers of public school institutions in the United States and around the world, you can read what they published of their thinking for yourself. John Taylo Gatto unearthed much of this thinking and shared it with the world in his books and lectures.
If you look at actual numbers, spending on education in the US is dwarfed by other spending (such as defense) to an extent that it's inconsistent with our stated values.
The narrative of social progress, unfortunately, is a fantasy.
Public schools were created in the US to indoctrinate catholic kids - the “unwashed masses of Irish papists.” It was an oppressive institution from the start.
They were designed with the same architecture as incarceration systems from France and to this day are mainly serviced by the same companies that service our prisons.
There have been so, so many attempts to recast public schools in the image of our aspirations - most notably Teach for America. I count many of their graduates among my edtech founder friends.
For those of us that have given a portion of our lives to improve these systems, the reality is heartbreaking. Public education is a callous political football whose primary purpose is to make sure children are being babysat so their parents can work. Genuine progress can be made but will be snuffed out by the well oiled grinder for government funding and political promotions.
Administrators determine our children’s future, not teachers, parents, or children. Any of those three would be better.
Yes, there are bright spots. But the vast majority of school systems destroy the aspirations of well-intentioned, newly educated teachers within a couple years. Most teachers leave the profession after less than a decade in it.
The best researchers I’ve found have all reached a stunningly simple conclusion on why better funding does not improve outcomes - students are living in intense poverty. Many students are homeless. Many have no safe place to sleep.
The reason homeschooling is rising is because intelligent, caring parents can give their child a better education simply by not subjecting them to the bizarre social experience that has become most public schools.
The exception to that rule is the proof of what matters - a community of parents/guardians who come together and support a mutual learning center with caring educators.
Co-op, private, public, they all work when you have that.
Similarly, there are many public school horror stories. For example, despite spending $21k/student, making it the third-highest funded school system in the country, 23 Baltimore schools failed to produce a single student with basic math proficiency.[1]
One of my friends went to a school where she was beaten every day and the teachers had totally given up and most of them did not teach.
Unfortunately, we need much more data than we have. The article mentions school quality is often not the driving reason for homeschooling, but you can definitely imagine public schools where almost any level of homeschooling is a better alternative.
My children are in public school, but I am not sure if they will stay there. Even in "good" schools, there's many problems (especially in middle schools) and a lot of time is wasted if your kids have any academic ability at all.
So when do we start blaming parents instead of schools? And saying, “this is what you get, take it or leave it, you have to put effort in too”? Parents treat themselves as customers expecting a turnkey service, when instead they are stakeholders with their own book of work and responsibilities they need to be accountable for to deliver the environment and education their child will need to become a functioning member of society.
This aspect is so different from South and East Asian society. We expect little from the teachers (not to say they’re bad), the majority of the onus and blame lies with the parent.
It sounds like the article is about parents holding themselves fully accountable for their children’s education.
The problem is what you do with the parents who do not care at all. People making these statements that “it’s about the parents” - well, it has some truth to it. But when 10% of the students are running the halls, screaming and fighting, beating random kids, having sex and doing drugs in the bathrooms, and assaulting teachers who don’t care anymore, then it doesn’t matter what the other 90% of the parents are doing.
We started blaming parents long, long ago and never stopped. Unfortunately that's not effective in many cases. A lot of parents are ineffectual, apathetic, or shameless. Blaming them might make the rest of us feel morally superior but it doesn't improve outcomes for their children.
And for older children, peers tend to influence them more than parents anyway. Turning around a failing student will often require separating them from their current friends. Tough to do when you can't afford to move to a better school district.
Just a personal anectode: I'm pretty sure that this wasn't true for me. I think some humans have an instinct for survival, maybe all of them, if a persons emotional needs are met then developing, advancing, learning is a natural byproduct without any external pressure. Just like we learn to talk and walk without someone telling us to do.
All the push just hurt me in the end, I would be a lot better off without traditional school, rarely I learned anything useful there.
Push for me isn’t edicts. It’s providing support and opportunity. I send my daughter to extra math lessons. She didn’t need them she was solidly an average. But getting those has really improved her level. I have to spend time with her, make learning fun, help with homework, coax reasoning out of an opinionated 12 yr old, etc, etc.
It’s not a “do this or else”. It’s basically let’s do it together.
I love to do homework with my oldest. But it's still like pulling teeth. I've had to do less of it this year because the teacher is actually keeping track of how kids are doing. Last year I would get back classwork with a giant star at the top where literally everything was wrong.
If you search niche.com, you can see proficiency scores correlate exactly with household income. Same school systems, same new facilities, same teacher compensation, same class sizes.
And I would say that 50% of parenting is getting your kid into the right school. I don't know about you, but suburban life as I know it is organized entirely around the importance of a good school district.
And are you saying they have per-student household income data? Or they just have the household income data for the school district as a whole? Or maybe the household income data for the student body as a whole? Those are very different things.
I assume niche.com is using household incomes for a specific school’s surrounding neighborhoods, although I cannot attest to how accurate it is compared to actual school boundaries.
I think we might be saying the same thing though, since “right” school generally means a school where a large proportion of the other kids have parents who are throwing a lot of resources at the kids (including the parents’ time and attitudes towards academic learning). It just so happens that this group of parents is higher income, so the easily visible statistic will be neighborhoods with higher income households will have higher academic proficiency percentages in the schools.
What "different" schools allow parents to do is pull the top 1% of lucky students out to escape. Maybe most of the parents in the low cost of living areas can't give any time to their children because they've got three jobs, but there are always going to be the few that can. The same goes for a few who can one way or another afford private school. It's better that three percent get through than none.
Well, unless having the three percent get through makes it impossible to improve the condition of the other 97%. Survivorship bias is our favorite logical fallacy here in the US.
There are many public school horror stories, and a few public school mediocrity stories (for those who can afford to move to a district where the homes are all $800,000 median now).
Sure, that's one model. The underlying problem is the completely unregulated nature. Similarly, there is household in my neighborhood that home schools. The kids (all 8 of them) never leave the house. They have a 8ft. fence and 1 acre yard where I assume they get some outside time. No one visits. Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's extraordinarily weird.
For this anecdote I can provide you with about 20 anecdotes that are the complete opposite in nature. There is no regulation, but does there need to be? Homeschoolers take the same standardized tests as everyone else - that's about as regulatory as it needs to be (and even that's questionable).
This is just not the case. In many states it's nearly completely unregulated, and the home school lobby is working diligently to strip even those regulations.
What we see in the education debate is a consistent lack of care for the kids who get ahead (why'd they get ahead of my kids?) and a consistent care for the kids being left behind, and that produces a trend to regulation and centralization that extinguishes anything good. The same forces that take children away from highly dedicated parents and put them into underfunded districts take advanced course tracks and the creativity of teachers away from them when they get there.
This is an insightful way of framing things. It had not occurred to me to look at it this way. It describes my own issues with school growing up and my own interest in homeschooling — the chance to provide individualized instruction and to tap into play and creativity. Schools can provide a baseline but for bright, motivated students they can be like a straightjacket. It's interesting and I suppose logical that the arguments against homeschooling focus on the idea that the practice dangerously removes that baseline. (I don't find those arguments particularly convincing because I had troubled peers who I went to public school with, and the school system helped precisely none of them substantially improve their lives.)
On top of that there is an element of "liability control" where putting troubled kids in the same unsuccessful system as the other troubled kids makes the kids the problem, while putting them in a different unsuccessful system, which counts as an action in the non-utilitarian trolley problem ethics of our culture, and leads to some fraction of blame falling on the individual who tried to change the outcome.
Because one day those children are going to grow up, leave the home, and interact with other members of society. At that point it becomes a public interest.
The public school system isn't doing that for our fellow citizens already. I fail to see why it would be worse if the failure happens at home rather than in a government building.
Sure. I just don’t think this argument that any child who is homeschooled is going to grow up and be a complete idiot and never contribute to society is a good one, especially since all of the comments in this thread making that argument are using anecdotes as evidence. I recently found out the band director at my high school was fucking kids. Can I use that to argue against all public schools? Of course not, so others should not be able to say “well I knew a kid who was homeschooled by a religious weirdo so all homeschooling is bad.”
It’s just odd that so many people here seem to be so in favor of the “sit down and shut up” style of schooling. Isn’t it pretty widely agreed upon that US public schools suck? Don’t you think there are some parents who are homeschooling their children explicitly because they feel their public school would not prepare them to be good members of society?
Yes, absolutely it is pretty widely agreed that US public schools suck. We have cities and states with no math and english competency attainment requirements. Let that sink in!
You're assuming that these existing regulations (assuming the ones in public education) produce a net good. Based on what I'm seeing from here that's not so much the case.
Because one of the biggest ways that child abuse is detected and abated is by interaction between students and children. Isolating children in insular communities is a really great way to abuse them and hide the evidence of it.
Regular interaction with non-custodial adults provides more opportunities for child abuse to be uncovered and stopped. You can go on youtube and hear myriad testimonials from former homeschooled kids that were abused for years on end. And nobody knew. Nobody even had a chance to know.
Because children aren’t parental property and their education is a obligation parents have to them, not a service for the benefit of the parent. Standards for education of children in the home are needed for the same reason as other standards for care, conditions, and treatment of children in the home are.
Homeschooling famillies do not do the same tests. And especially families whose kids are less likely to ace those tests will avoid them when they are voluntary.
In most states, they absolutely do the same tests. We are, most often, required to by the state. The tests are provided (mostly) by the same two companies that provide the testing materials for the majority of end of year public school testing.
> Homeschoolers take the same standardized tests as everyone else
Varies a lot by states. Some states have no assessment requirement for honeschooled students at all, some have a requirement to keep a portfolio which may or may not be reviewed, some have an standardized testing requirement with more flexibility and lower frequency than public schools, and some have homeschool students take the same standardized tests as everyone else.
I love that when a parent tells a kid that Jesus rode a velociraptor it's "teaching" but when a school tells a kid the universe probably started with a big bang, it's "indoctrination".
I guess it depends on how you measure it. If we go by percent of kids meeting the standards and a passing grade being 70%, you could justifiable say the schools are horrible on average.
40% of American adults can't do basic arithmetic[0], which seems like a disaster to me. 88% are apparently incapable of doing things like reading a simple table or comparing two documents and identifying sentences that express the same ideas between them[1][2]. Over 50% apparently can't scroll through a list of information about books and identify the author of a specific book they're told to find. I'll never forget that in 12th grade I took non-AP government, and we were still spending significant time going over the three branches of government again (I'm quite sure this was covered in elementary school) and somehow people were not getting 100% on everything. Other tasks included--not joking--coloring pictures of animals, which the teacher put up around the room.
My school was actually rated decently for the area. Not the best, but pretty good.
This is my thing, like what right does a public school have to regulate when I can and won't send my kids to school? If I decide to take a trip abroad for a month, that's on me... why do i have to worry about truancy court and CPS breathing down my neck?
Your kid has a right to education, you don't get to deny them that right. It's funny how rugged individualism seems to end with self and extend to happily stomping on others.
Why should you have to feed your kid when they're hungry? Why should you have to make a space on your home for them to sleep and be warm? Why should you have to get them medical care when they are sick?
Why can't you just do anything you want, regardless of the effect it has on your dependents?
>I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them?
One legal theory that may be relevant was brought up long ago for a case on banned books in school: you have the right to raise your kid according to your beliefs, but many states guarantee children the right to education. So the state could regulate homeschooling to ensure all children have access to an actual education.
>If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to address that challenge.
A lot of those resources rely on processes that come after reports from teachers and caregivers. If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation. Children who go to daycare or public school are seen by professionals trained to spot abuse.
We allow anyone to have children, because otherwise we're on a very slippery and short slope towards eugenics. But those children are entitled to the same rights and protections as their parents. It's hard to strike a good balance between a family's freedom and a child's freedom.
Edited out some unnecessary detours in my ramblings
People just assume that other people must be abusing their kids. Sheesh. The commenter is describing a two-parent household with 8 children and a massive backyard -- the odds are that they're extremely happy and our commenter is just a grouch.
> but many states guarantee children the right to education
They guarantee the right to /access/ education. This is not at all the same as guaranteeing that all children "must be educated at a state approved school."
> If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation.
I read an incredible number of police reports. There's a lot of abuse that gets detected outside of daycare and schools. Unless the children are literally locked into a basement, I doubt that the parents can continually exercise enough total control to keep whatever other abuse their committing hidden.
To the extent that if it is happening, it's an exceptionally rare case, and I doubt that simply forcing all parents to send their children to a third party for education is going to have any impact on these particularly pernicious cases.
I understand the instinct, but I think the solution is wrong, and it's an inappropriate case to use to defend schooling in general.
> They guarantee the right to /access/ education. This is not at all the same as guaranteeing that all children "must be educated at a state approved school."
That's oversimplifying. You're right about the "at a state approved school", but the right is to access education to a set standard that will equip them for life.
You can't just say "well, they have access to -my- education, so we're good". There should be caveats around quality and deliverability of education.
Because if you (the generic 'you', not singling you out individually) have low/zero value educational material, and no desire to provide it for your children, then that is /not/ them accessing education in any meaninful sense of the concept.
> > The underlying problem is the completely unregulated nature.
> I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them?
Because your children are not your property, they are your responsibility and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.
As a side note I find it fascinating how people who feel strongly about individual freedom, believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership) over their children. Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to children?
> Because your children are not your property, they are your responsibility
I am their _guardian_.
> and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.
And what is that standard? Passing standardized tests? How do you account for the poor performance of American schools in general? How do you account for the differential performance across the country, let alone, wild performance differences across a single city? If a child goes to school but fails to become educated, can the sue the school district? Does the school owe them continued education until they meet the standard?
> believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership) over their children.
If something happens to my children and I'm even just negligent then I will pay the ultimate price. You cannot ensconce in me this responsibility and then deny my authority to exercise control over them to maintain it.
> Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to children?
Why do you think children can't sign contracts or buy alcohol? They have _limited_ freedom, under my _guardianship_. This is more important than the States imputed idealism with respect to "education."
Baltimore City Schools received 29 federal Covid grants totaling $799M to fight learning loss. Yet, in 2023, just 9.1% of all 3rd-8th graders tested proficient in math. MEANING, taxpayers gave an additional $799M and 91% of Baltimore students are NOT math proficient.
New test scores, known as MCAP (Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program), obtained by Project Baltimore, revealed that 23 schools, including elementary, middle, and high schools, had not one student that could do math at grade level.
A Calverton educator, who reached out to Fox45, claims to have received that text. “[It instructed me to] go into my grade book, make sure no students are failing, and essentially change the grade if they are failing so they will pass with a 60 percent,” said the teacher, whose identity we are concealing upon request.
“I was frustrated as a teacher. We’re public servants. And when we see things like grade changing, that’s self-serving. That’s not helping the kids.”
After watching Fox45’s recent investigations into allegations of grade changing at Calverton, the City Schools employee contacted Project Baltimore to say a couple things. First, according to the teacher, grade changing at Calverton is “very common.”
Second, the educator told Fox45, changing grades is the easiest and fastest way to pass more students, which makes the school and its administrators look better. But, it does a huge disservice to not just the kids, but our entire community.
“Teaching a whole generation of kids that they don’t have to be accountable for their actions, or that hard work isn’t valued or valuable when they are in school, is so discouraging and damaging.”
Adding insult to injury, the same teacher said that he even passed kids who had been on his roster all year but didn’t bother to show up for a single day of class.
But this teacher says grade changing at Calverton goes much further than just taking a failing grade and making it a 60. Some students who pass, according to this educator, don’t even have grades because they’ve never showed up to class.
“There were students on my roster all year that I had never met, had never seen. On paper they passed my class and passed onto the next year.”
“I love my job and I love my students,” concluded the teacher. “I want to see the students at Calverton and other schools across the city, get a fresh start. And it’s going to be hard because the students are used to this now. But the students deserve better and our city deserve better.”
> If something happens to my children and I'm even just negligent then I will pay the ultimate price. You cannot ensconce in me this responsibility and then deny my authority to exercise control over them to maintain it.
That's demonstrably false.
You can do plenty of neglectful or negligent things to your children and face zero consequences.
Obviously not. The question remains of who gets to shape and control their identity and future.
Is the purpose of their lives to serve the interests of the state, or society at large? Or should they be live their lives based on their own interests and priorities.
the libertarian perspective is that if you grant the state and society the authority to control the child, it will use that authority to advance the interests of the state or society.
> Because your children are not your property, they are your responsibility
I couldn’t possibly agree more! They are MY responsibility. Not yours. Not the state’s. Not society’s. I will educate them the way that I see fit. It’s not my responsibility to educate your kids, and it’s not your responsibility to educate mine, no matter how righteous and justified it may feel.
If you are teaching your children to murder all Jews and that red traffic lights mean go, then you are clearly not capable of being responsible for another human being.
But surely you can recognize the difference between simply teaching your child an evidence-dry religious worldview, and teaching them to actively hate and murder people or break laws that would endanger others?
I agree, within reason is always necessary, and if those things were being taught then it's time for a visit from CPS, for sure. But it still feels like a potential slippery slope of "You're abusing this child by teaching them things that aren't approved by the state" in the extreme case. I know that may sound silly, but with as polarized as the country has been recently, and with authoritarianism on the rise worldwide (I saw a man get arrested in the UK yesterday because he criticized some protests on Facebook!), I don't see it being an entirely foreign idea.
>why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them
Your kid has a right to education, you don't get to deny them that right. It's funny how these arguments are all "don't tread on my right to tread on my kid."
I have got bad news about that, the majority of abusive households send the kids to school and scare them into silence. Regulations against abusive households do exist but enforcing them completely would require a degree of inescapable surveillance that cannot exist.
That may be true, but way more kids get sent to school then are home schooled, so that doesn't mean much on its own.
The issue is that when a kid's at school, there are many people who may notice something's wrong. From teachers, school nurses, school administrators, and even other kids. This is by no means perfect, and many, many cases of abuse slip through the cracks. But it is something, which is more then many home schooled kids have.
While I'd wager most home schooled kids aren't abused, the fact of the matter is it's much easier for an abusive parent to cover up their abuse if their child is home schooled. You may still feel home schooling is a net positive, but this aspect is very hard to deny.
Homeschooling requires some degree of investment in the child, even just to keep them occupied or tolerate their presence. School provides free childcare for long periods of time. I don't think the majority of abusive parents will ever homeschool their children, because most are not believers in teaching an abusive ideology but rather have simple personality disorders. "Homeschool makes it easier to hide abuse" presupposes that abusive parents are planning or organizing abuse which is plainly not true in the majority of cases.
Like the Satanism panics of the 1990s demonstrate, elaborate imaginings of complex sadistic rituals that are necessarily rare[0] bordering on nonexistent, tend to capture the public mind and suck oxygen away from treating the totally unattractive (not even in the capacity of making for a true crime special) real problems.
If you want to see this on TV, the last season of The Wire was about it.
[0] There were actually a spate of ritual killings in Liberia through the 1970s, proving humanity capable at least and making the issue to be one of reasonableness.
Unfortunately, of the 4 people I know personally who were homeschooled, it was a vehicle for abuse for 3 of them.
One friend’s mom wouldn’t teach him the curriculum for months, and then when she knew a test was coming up she would make him study with her for 14 hours a day to try to cram it in. Then when he naturally performed poorly on state exams he was punished (often physically) for not trying hard enough. She regularly woke him up for classes when she wanted to be awake at 2 or 3 am, then later after her afternoon nap at 6 or 8pm. He grew up constantly tired, without a regular schedule of meals, and never made it to the group outings because he felt sick all the time.
Another friend’s mom just couldn’t be bothered to teach and just took her out on “learning” hikes with other homeschooling moms, never taught her anything, and wound up sending her back to public school with severely (I mean severely) underdeveloped skills after being held back for several years.
Neither of these parents I’m sure “planned” to abuse their children in this way. They just weren’t up for the task of teaching in the way that a child requires, and their own personal issues turned that into a larger problem. But my friends suffered for it.
I don't think it's ever going to be possible to separate the outcomes of homeschooling from the selection of parents who desire to homeschool, but this overall neutral study (I'm not really arguing that homeschooling is a great thing just that it is okay) doesn't find evidence of the three out of four thing that you encountered extending to the whole population. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580227/
> negatively associated with college degree attainment (RR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.88) and possibly with greater risk of posttraumatic stress disorder.
I’m sure I’m just unlucky and that the 3/4 abuse ratio doesn’t hold for the broader population. Higher rate of PTSD is suspect though.
I've seen this sentiment mentioned many times. That at school "abuse is more likely to be noticed". But how much more likely? How likely is noticed abuse to be resolved in a meaningful way?
As an anecdote I have close family member that teaches younger elementary school grades. They have told me about signs of possible abuse they've seen but no available recourse.
I'm also aware that school is a also an environment where abuse occurs. How can we say that we are not exposing public school children to more abuse per capita than homeschooled? There is a school in my neighbourhood that often has the police called in. Lockdowns over students bringing in knives and attacking each other.
It would be good to know these things if making an argument that pivots on abuse.
One last anecdote. All the experiences I can remember having that I'd consider abuse occurred in either: school, work or public transit. Some were bad interactions with strangers in passing, other were more chronic (generally at school).
While it is true terrible things can happen to kids at home, you need stats to compare this with the alternative before a stance should be taken.
>As an anecdote I have close family member that teaches younger elementary school grades. They have told me about signs of possible abuse they've seen but no available recourse.
It's natural to want to stay out of things, especially if one doesn't know the procedure and worries about messing up a family's lives. But it's better for the people in charge of investigating cops abuse to decide the appropriate course.
As for how reporting happens, it depends on the state. In mine (Pennsylvania), all school employees are made well aware they're considered "Mandated Reporters." They are legally required to report any suspicions of child abuse, either through the state's website, phone line, local police, or the county agency responsible for child abuse cases. The suspected abuse victim doesn't need to say they're being abused or anything at all, the reporter doesn't even have to guess who the abuser is. If the reporter thinks there may have been abuse because they saw or learned about physical (e.g. bruises) or behavioral (e.g. afraid to go home) signs, they have to report it. Not reporting can led to misdemeanor or felony charges for the Mandated Reporter. Somebody who reported their suspicion is immune from civil or criminal liability, and protected from retaliation from the institution they work at, for the report (unless it can be shown they're using reports maliciously). They're also tested as confidential informants in any investigation.
The law also encourages "Permissive Reporters" to report suspected child abuse, but without threatening charges for not reporting. These reporters can do so anonymously.
All this info comes from my wife, who was a daycare teacher, and DuckDuckGo-ing "Pennsylvania mandated reporters."
Those same Pennsylvanian school teachers turn a blind eye to the abuse that happens right in front of them in their own classrooms. The law may require them to report abuse but it can't actually force them to; the teachers just pretend they didn't see anything and there is no penalty for this because how can you prove the teacher recognized something? It's a farce.
The number of substantiated (court ruling, protective order, etc) child abuse cases in 2022: around 5,000.
No other group, including doctors, police officers, and Child Protective Services themselves, made more reports. Only around 6% of the school employees' reports were substantiated, making their reports least likely to be substantiated. This leads me to believe school employees have a lower threshold for reporting a suspicion compared to other groups.
> over 10,000 Pennsylvanian school employees reported suspected child abuse to the state in 2022 alone
And they overlook 100x more students beating the shit out of each other. No, I won't cite it. I lived it, and I have relatives working in that system who say nothing has changed.
BTW there are more than 100k school teachers in Pennsylvania. 10k reports a year represents about 1 in 10 teachers making a single report a year. I retract my 100x remark, it's far worse than that.
When I read these kinds of comments, I can't help but wonder: did you attend a US public school? I went to probably an above average number of public schools growing up since my parents moved around a lot. There were differences between the big city and small town ones but there was one constant: violence and abuse. How should I expect teachers to notice a child being abused by parents when they turn the other way to abuse by other children happening, daily, right in front of them (sometimes even egged on by the teachers themselves).
If you adjust for scale, I would be utterly flabbergasted if home schooling had a higher per capita rate of abuse than actual public schools unless public schools have changed to the point of being utterly unrecognisable from the 80-90's when it was inflicted on me.
Thank you for stating the truth. No, if anything, the schools have gotten only worse from the statements we hear and behavior we see of our kids' public-schooled friends. I'm amazed at how normalized social abuse is in public schools in the US. When I talk to other parents about my amazement, they just stare, blink, and respond with "I don't think it is a big deal. This is how we all talk and treat each other.". :-O
My wife and I have home schooled our kids from their educational beginnings because of how bat-shit crazy and anti-social public schools were and continue to be.
Your opinion is anti-American and anti-human-rights. You get that, don't you?
The 4th amendment of the Constitution protects all of us from warrantless searches. If you turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches to ferret out criminal activity, then public schools become unconstitutional.
The strange thing is that you can probably turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches without actually codifying that in statute, without making any major changes to school policy. All you have to do is assert that this is one of the major benefits of public education, and get some large fraction of other Americans to believe the same thing.
> You may still feel home schooling is a net positive,
It's a net positive to undermine fundamental human rights?
Most abusive households are not going to homeschool because they're people who couldn't care less about their kids' education and wouldn't turn away the chance for free daycare.
A lot of people seem to be implying that religious indoctrination is abuse, when it isn't legally, even if you think it should be. I'm personally in between a rock and a hard place here, since I don't want my kids exposed to either religion or LGBT stuff.
From what I can tell, homeschooled kids are given a curriculum with books/workbooks for both the student and the teacher. They are also tested by the state and must meet certain criteria.
This article makes a case that the statistics of small sample sizes has bamboozled many different well-intentioned groups, including the small school movement.
The argument is that the fact that many of the best schools are small is an artifact of statistics (de Moivre's equation) rather than evidence small schools are superior.
It is wild that this is the take. This eep distrust of government is at the root of many American problems. It is deliberately created and fed, and it directly leads to some truly awful results: bad education, bad healthcare, virtually no public benefit for all the taxes we pay. But we do get world's largest military, large corporate subsidies, highest per capita healthcare costs.
Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US is controlled at a local level; every town, district, and city etc has its own rules, has to hire its own staff and pay for it all out of local taxes. And because the generally tiny constituency of each district, a very small number of nutcases can change the rules and impose their point of view for the school district.
And because of the local funding, there can be huge resource and quality differences between schools for adjacent locations, just due to crossing some arbitrary jurisdiction line.
It is madness, but it is a madness that is deeply loved/entrenched here.
It's not really a wild take - that's the reality. It's not really distrust in this case either. The question was can we educate more efficiently.
This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents. The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc. You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources.
And you're only partially right about local control of education. There are many federal and state regulations that dictate school policies in every facet. These would rule out many of the local "nut cases". Much of the funding is provided by the state and federal government too, depending on the state.
You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources.
It’s only “efficient” because it doesn’t have to scale. Add non-wealthy kids into the mix. Add children with learning disabilities. All of a sudden, homeschooling fails a massive chunk of the population.
Public education has served the US well for most of the post-WWII era. Let’s fix it, not abandon it.
I'm not saying to abandon it. I'm saying if the question is efficiency, that particular homeschooling model is very efficient, even if other arrangements need to be made for certain segments of the population (I would revise your "non-wealthy" statement to be "poor" as much of the middle class could make that system work).
Of course there have been multiple attempts to fix the system already. So far we haven't seemed to find the solution. Back to your "non-wealthy" comment, even the current system tends to fail the poor, since parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success (this is largely tied to two parent households, but income plays a role as well).
But many people, both in this forum and in meat-space are doing just that. Perhaps not directly, but the end result of "school choice" (of which there are several flavors) will be the end of generally good-enough public education for most of the population. Toss in the latest conservative boogeymen (CRT, book bans, etc) and the outlook looks pretty gloomy.
parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success
I often wonder if our schools are fine, but everything else is broken.
Stagnant wages, longer working hours, fewer 2 parent households, other things.
Is school choice driving the end result, or is it a symptom of that end result?
My big question is if the money per student is the same, but the outcomes are better, then what can we emulate from the charter or private schools? Or is it selection bias since the parents are involved enough to get them in?
A bit of both, probably. But the school choice movement is largely being driven by wealthy people who could afford private schools or homeschooling without any need to destroy public education.
Selection bias a real problem with charters and privates. We've already selected for "parents who give a shit". And frequently for "no IEP or other learning disability". So, kids who are, at worst, average intellect with parents who care enough to fill out some paperwork and drive them to school - those kids are going to succeed almost anywhere.
And I totally understand the desire to get your own children a high quality education. That's a large part of why I moved back to Fairfax County. But, I also feel strongly that strong public schools are a requirement for a healthy society.
> Selection bias a real problem with charters and privates.
Charter schools are frequently oversubscribed, and admit students via lottery. This makes it pretty easy to run randomized tests that aren't affected by selection bias.
There’s still bias. Parent has to care. Transport is often an issue. And the school usually gets to reject children with any sort of disability or other negative trait.
Most of the lotteries aren't automatic entry, etc. You still need a parent to fill out the forms and stuff. Some even rely on GPA, diversity metrics, or entrance essays. There's definitely selection bias, you just encounter it prior to the lottery drawing (or other selection process).
> Charter schools are frequently oversubscribed, and admit students via lottery. This makes it pretty easy to run randomized tests that aren't affected by selection bias.
No, it does not, because the following sources of selection bias exist.
(1) Charters select for actively involved parents, because they are not the default-assigned by-residence public schools, and an active choice is necessary to get into the pool,
(2) Charters, because they are not scaled to only take the actively-choosing parents from the catchment area of a typical district school, select for parents with greater means who are able to make a longer travel to the school for drop off, pickup, and other necessary interactions.
(3) There are often biases in the lottery system; even something as simple as giving favorable consideration for having a sibling already in the school reinforces the impact of other biases.
Maybe some private schools don't admit IEP students, but I've seen many that do. Depending on the state and other factors, oftentimes the district is required to provide IEP related resources to private schools that need them.
I agree, that we should have good public schools. I feel they do get written off by many of the school choice proposals. I think there could be more support if pairing public school improvements with school choice. If we can improve the public schools to the point of being attractive, then it wouldn't matter if school choice was a thing. It's definitely an unusual paradigm where there is a public option with many people being forced to it for financial reasons, yet the institution is largely unwilling to compete with private offerings.
Education is not a market, efficiency is not the primary goal. Quality and equity of outcomes for students is the goal.
The system today is optimizing for standardization federally in order to try and fight the natural entropy toward a highly unequal system where rich kids get dramatically better education and there is a downward spiral for poor kids. It's not achieving this goal today, but decentralizing the system would most definitely reinforce unequal outcomes, not avoid it.
"Quality and equity of outcomes for students is the goal."
That's the goal[1], but what is it constrained by? Primarily that constraint is cost. If you can improve efficiency (improved outcomes per dollar), everyone stands to benefit, especially at the lower end if you can reallocate that money towards them.
The main problem is that school is trying to be utilized to fix multiple issues at home that it simply can't correct for under the current system (yes that other person's example would make it worse). Federal standards and more money won't fix it. Other policy changes might help, but would be difficult to implement.
[1] I'd argue the goal is for each individual to reach their best potential as opposed to equity. Otherwise we end up with perverse systems that limit some upper end students, as we're starting to see innsome areas. That is not good for society/humanity. Equitable resourcing could be good.
The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded. Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason. Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes. Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it.
This feels like youre getting outside the HN guidelines. What framework? Which parts?
"The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded."
Would that money fix anything? Do you have any stats/criteria for how a particular area of the budget is overfunded? Otherwise when taken with your other verbiage, it sounds like just an inflammatory opinion. The US already spends 6.1% of its GDP on education, which is more than most other countries.
"Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason."
This is a bit dramatic given the definition. There are a few states with low teacher pay. However, you have to also look at median income and cost of living. Yeah, the average teacher makes about $50k in MS, but median income for MS is $48k per year with a low cost of living in most of the state. I have friends who have turned down public teaching that would pay more than their private teaching job due to the way the schools are run. Clearly pay is not the main issue in my area.
"Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes."
In general, you are right. In the context of this thread, those would be test scores, graduation rate, job/college placement rates.
"Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it."
No, not everyone knows it. Care to explain? It seems the test measure what the kids are supposed to know at a specific level. Are there some problems with things like teaching to the test instead of teaching for durable knowledge or love of learning, sure. But if you know how to read/write/etc at your grade level, then your scores will be fine. Seem like one of the best comparisons we have. Are there better alternatives?
>Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US is controlled at a local level
It is not. Curriculum is decided far above the heads of the districts, as is standardized testing. Funding is a problem, though, how much of a problem is wildly variable depending on where you are.
Scale isn't necessarily good. I went to a massive highschool in Texas and suspect I would have had a far better experience in a much smaller school whether it be a homeschooling co-op or a small public school (the latter didn't exist in my hometown, only massive Texan highschools).
And my best classes in uni weren't the massive lectures at the University of Texas but rather small summer school classes I took in a cheap Houston community college during summer break where I could actually interact with the teacher and fellow students.
Finally, HNers overuse "reinventing" as a pejorative. If you use a similar approach found in another option, and the HNer doesn't prefer your option over the other option, you're always "reinventing" it. As if some trivial thing in common between two options are the only would-be differences between them. It's not very thoughtful commentary.
Home-schooling could be 100% identical to public schooling except that it's not the local school system and it would still deliver on its goal of not being the local school system. That's the whole point.
They're not reinventing anything, they're just doing education with a better instructor:student ratio.
We all know the worse the ratio the worse the education tends to be. Tutoring is a long established means of compensating for this, by supplementing sessions with a 1:1 ratio, clearly illustrating the problem.
I had someone (childless i might add) try to make me feel guilty for pulling my kids out of a school circling the drain and into a high performing one in the name of diversity. I told them, when the time comes, if they want to sacrifice their child on that altar then it's their decision but don't ask me to sacrifice mine.
Kind of wild and weirdly refreshing to finally see the "everyone is in it for themselves and their own" attitude on fully overt display in this article's comments. Usually it's masked behind talk of "freedom" and "individuality," but here, it's raw and out there in the open!
FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing from the community and not-so-great public school system, but I don't because then I'm just another contributor to the inequality problem. We Live In A Society.
There's a bit of a curve there. You may invest in a school for many community reasons if the school is near the same quality as the other option. If the quality is way below then the logic of family protection basically demands a move.
So you're shocked, just shocked, that someone would openly admit to doing something that . . . is common practice and has always been legal? (in the US, where I'm guessing we all live)
A common trope in movies is parents living vicariously through their children. Like the parents that pressure their kids to go to medical school even though the kid wants to be an artist. Or the parent who forces their kid in sports and ends up screaming at the coaches and referees.
It is interesting to think of parents that see their own children as props, like pawns in some larger game rather than as individuals. I think there are subtle ways that this can happen.
I think a lot of people grew up in overly conservative homes. A common story you hear nowadays is a kid who grew up forced to tow the line in some religion and only once they reached maturity did they even realize there was another world out there. They may even promise themselves that they won't allow the same thing to happen to their own kids.
I don't know anything about you or your family or kids, but your attitude made me wonder if there is a backlash coming. If kids raised in forced diverse circumstances may rebel against their parents since they are being coerced into their parents view of "ideal world", much like the parents of stereotypical tiger asian parents or nutty sports dads.
No matter what way you cut it the will of the parent is subjected on the child. In my opinion that’s how it should be.
The decisive factor is what the focus of the parents will is. Is it personal glory? Is it trying to “make the world a better place”?. I would argue that choosing what is best for the child from the perspective of the parent is the best.
Giving them a robust worldview, a good set of morals and the capabilities to effect change when their older are the right way forward.
Our children are not missionaries that go into the world to make it a better place. Our children are to be nurtured so that when they grow up they can make a positive change in the world.
Answer this, how does sending your child to public school benefit others? It’s pretty clear schools do not work at scale. Focusing on small cooperatives where teachers, students and parents are valued is the way forward.
I only exist as an educated person who can make a middle class income and live a normal life because of public education. My single mother is an experienced and gifted teacher, but would not have had the time to educate me. We could never have afforded to send me to any private school.
My only chance for a normal life and education was public school.
A huge amount of americans are poor in time and money. The only option their children have is public school. Their future is entirely dependent on a public that is willing to invest in them so that they even have a future, one that isn't just "wage slave at walmart". Sure, it often doesn't work out, it's a struggling system that has been abused and ignored for decades, and it fails millions every year.
You know what doesn't help any of those millions of kids? All the wealthy families sending their kids to private schools or homeschooling and removing their property taxes from the public school system. Society will not be a better place for your kids if they are individually 10% better but 10% of the children born in the US basically have no access to education.
The advocation of "School choice" as conservatives are currently selling it is about taking away the chance I had at a middle class life. It's about saving a few thousand dollars for already privileged individuals at the expense of swathes of people like me who were at least average intelligence who had the audacity to be born to a poor mother.
If you think public schooling in america is deficient, then let us fix it.
> Society will not be a better place for your kids if they are individually 10% better but 10% of the children born in the US basically have no access to education.
But that's not how they think. They believe the bottom 10% deserve their hard lives.
Capitalism needs an oppressed class to function.
The people on top write laws to ensure the oppressed class will exist. Then they sell it to the middle class using scary stories of crime, religion, etc.
Or, people believe that the school system as it exists now has serious problems under layers of unchangeable management so the best solution is a different option.
You’ll know this by the people who campaign for voucher programs that we’re all told are evil somehow. Yet the goal of vouchers is to make all options available to everyone.
Without vouchers, all options are only available to those with financial options.
You can go to public school, private school or a home school program. If you want a better public school, you have to move to a better rated school district. In order to do that, you have to be able to afford it.
Without vouchers, poor families only option is public school where they currently live. People opposed to vouchers have 1 goal: preserve the status quo. They’ll tell you absolutely anything to convince you otherwise too.
> All the wealthy families sending their kids to private schools or homeschooling and removing their property taxes from the public school system.
How exactly does that work?
We homeschool and I pay property taxes that fund our local school just like everyone else in town. I pay for services that I don't use and can be used for other children if the powers that be decide to allocate it that way.
The above poster is talking about "school choice" which is making its rounds through legislatures in red states. The legislation effectively defunds public schools if people decide to homeschool or can afford to send their children to private school.
Yes, but the argument goes that parents who are likely to move their kids elsewhere have kids where the cost to educate them is just a fraction of what is being spent on the average kid. Imagine a school system that spends $15k per student per year. But that is just the average. Some of the kids are only consuming $5k of resources while others require $60k per year. If the kids who are only costing $5k go to another school and take the $15k with them, they will presumably get a better education where more of the $15k will be allocated to them. Meanwhile at the school that was used to spending $60k on some students, they will presumably need to have less disparity in the amount they spend on each student.
Well maybe we shouldnt be paying schools the same for disabled and average students to begin with.
Besides, it is pretty said that the best counter argument against charter schools is that parents will take their fair share of funding and use it to buy a much better education for their children.
I believe that most school systems do get more money for disabled kids. But kids that do their homework, pay attention in class, etc. cost a lot less to educate than a kid who isn't really interested in learning--even without any disabilities.
To your point about charter schools, there is a strong argument to be made that when parents have a choice where there kids go, public schools will have to make sure they are providing more academic opportunities if they don't want to risk losing the academically minded families (and their money). That seems like it would be a good thing for everyone.
Couldn't there be a scheme by which parents could reduce their taxes by privately educating their children, but only up to some portion of the public schools' savings from not having to educate those children?
Yeah, school choice is a bullshit policy, typical of the fuck-you, got-mine neocon movement.
I voted to raise property tax where I live specifically to improve the funding situation for our struggling public schools - I attended a great public school district growing up (because, surprise: my parents could afford to move into the district).
The funding situation needs to be fixed across the board, because indeed everyone attending public school deserves as good an education as I received, but the way the system functions currently is that poor areas get poor schools (at least in the midwest where I've lived).
So, while I whole-heartedly support education reform and improving funding as public policies: I still wouldn't send my own kids to the public school district where I live; they're terrible. I wish they weren't.
Scale for scale's sake isn't necessarily ideal, or efficient.
My freshman year of highschool, I was at a very large school, around 3400 in attendance. The school had been expanded several times, and was more or less at capacity. Some facilities were scaled out well, others weren't. There were fights on a weekly basis, tons of security trying to prevent that, but, they could only do so much. Lunch lines were very long, sometimes I'd be lucky to get 10 minutes to eat, mostly brought my own lunch because of that. The school was locked down a few times that year because of weapon scares. It was hell.
Then my sophomore year, they cut the school in half, sending most of the students, save for the seniors, to a new school across town. That landed the school I attended at around 1400 kids, my junior year, all of the extra seniors had graduated, so, it shrank further to around 1300. From sophomore year on, there was not a single fight, everyone knew eachother and got along, they cut the security team down to just two people and they both were well liked. Test scores were way up, class sizes went from 40+ to consistently under 30, and things overall were fairly good as far as highschool goes. The new school across town was a similar situation from what I gathered from friends who went there.
Now you might write that off as it was simply too crowded, but, they closed about a third of the school, which was held in portable classrooms when the split happened. Some of those were re-purposed for offices and whatnot, most got hauled away. So the actual density of people didn't really change much. We got some extra space to have PE classes in, but that was about it, space wise.
You might also write that off as demographic changes, which was also not true. In fact, the roughest part of town all went to the school I attended, while the nicer, more affluent side of town, mostly got sent to the new school.
The way I see it, the school was simply too large, and managing that many students day to day, and all of their needs and affairs, did not scale well, and bred inefficiency, inefficiency that existed long before I got there and everyone got to keep their job and maintain that as the status-quo. Sure the buildings/campus could physically contain them well enough, yes they were all reasonably well fed and watered, but they'd become unmanageable in such a way that was not likely to be fixed.
In terms of reinvention in public education, smaller schools are a decent model, as are smaller class sizes. The real deciding factor in how well a student does however, is parent buy-in, which homeschool models have in spades, and in addition the class sizes are about as small as you can reasonably go as well. Understand of course that, parents opting to homeschool are paying taxes to public schools, while receiving no benefit, and that in addition to paying for the costs associated with homeschooling. Not all families can afford to effectively pay for schooling twice, hell, most can barely afford to exist while paying once. You could very likely fix your concerns about privilege by simply redirecting money back to homeschool parents that would normally be spent on public school. There are very well defined $/student numbers out there, so, the amounts would be fairly trivial to come up with. You could also really work around the whole right/left politically polarized bullshit factory by perhaps giving a little more to the lower income families and a little less to high income families. I think that'd sufficiently frame the nominally 'right wing' framed homeschool ideals as neutral, or at least dissonant enough that you might get most of everyone on-board provided you could get the right palms greased in state government.
Understand of course that, the public education system is an enormous apparatus, and they're managing unfathomable numbers of students. They're also not setup in fairly clean competency hierarchies either. At the local level, seniority tends to be king...
If everyone was force-fed the same dinner and compelled to wear the same clothes, there would be a lot of societal efficiency to unlock. It would also be a nightmare.
People are diverse and have diverse needs. That includes kids. AFAIK the most efficient method of education is still one-to-one tutoring, the very opposite of "schools at scale". Unfortunately it is also very expensive.
It's not necessarily that expensive - at least I'd say it's within 50%. At Oxford where I did 1:1, I believe the total time with the tutors was around 5 hours per week and each tutor was probably investing 2 hours (max) per student. That would mean a tutor could handle let's say 15 students on a full load. This is about the same ratio as a teacher at a well-resourced school.
At what point does this become not "homeschool", but "school, with different licensing requirements for the teachers"? It doesn't seem right to discuss this setup in the same breath as children schooled by their own parent.
it is like the difference between a commercial child care service, and having your friend's kids or you kid's friends over for the day.
I think it depends largely on who controls the process - the parents of a paid professional.
That said, it is not a typical approach either, nor is schooling by a parent. I have used (and this is typical in the UK, although i do not know about the US) paid face to face tutors, taught my self, provided the kids with textbooks etc. to teach themselves, paid for online courses, helped them find other resources and so on.
The paid tutors are qualified (both of them are qualified in the subjects they teach, one is a former school teacher).
We’ve seen something similar here with co-op schools. Not done in the home, but the teaching is handled by parents of the students. They are very happy with their school.
California provides awesome homeschool support. A lot depends on where you live.
In California the student enrolls in a home school program through a local public school. You are assigned a homeschool liaison and can enroll in public school classes. The kids and parents get a weekly checkin and support. You have to pass public school tests. You get a budget from the public school to use for materials.
My grandsons are getting homeschooled through 6th grade. My daughter decided it was just too hard to duplicate a high school education at home so she is phasing them into public school in middle school.
She gave each child the choice of home school or public school. The Covid lockdown made that choice easy for the kids. They know that if they don't keep up, she will send them back to public school. That is quite the motivator.
Just like your neighbors she works with other parents to keep the kids socialized, take them on field trips, and to form a support system. She also signs the kids up for sports.
The downside (from her observation) is since some of the early homeschoolers were bible based, she had to really review the school material. A surprising number of text books use the bible as history or have questionable science. She also noticed that many parents homeschool their kids because they can't participate in regular school (for various reasons). Her kids homeschool as a choice.
The biggest upside is that time is more flexible and the liaison is flexible. The family took a trip to NYC and the liaison was asking the boys quite a few questions about what they saw and learned.
This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent.
It is pretty misleading for this article to talk about homeschooling being a “fundamental change” without mentioning that homeschooling was the default practice for most of human history. If anything, this is just a return to a long-established practice, not a fringe movement.
There are many behaviours which were common throughout human history which would now be fringe movements. Human and/or animal sacrifices, for instance.
If animal sacrifice became common again, I would expect articles to mention the fact that it was a human practice for millennia – and not pretend it's just a fringe thing those pesky Other People invented.
Homeschooling was also the default thing a ±century ago, while you'd need to go back pretty far to find true animal/human sacrifice in European/European-American culture.
The default thing in preindustrial societies was no formal education for the vast majority of the population. The elite - a small slice of the population - was homeschooled by private tutors, and artisans (also small % of population) went into apprenticeships. This isn't really analogous to a vision of the world where the majority of the population is schooled at home.
What a weird example. Sacrifices have not been common in the west for thousands of years and the majority in the Middle East for over half that time as well. Seems like a bad faith gotcha
> There are many behaviours which were common throughout human history which would now be fringe movements. Human and/or animal sacrifices, for instance.
I better example might be freedom from surveillance. It's a totally fringe lifestyle to not be tracked everywhere you go, at least in a developed country.
But your rhetoric might be useful for shooting down privacy advocates during the next dust-up. Privacy may have been common in the past but now its fringe, just like animal sacrifice. Key escrow is the future!
What's sad is the "fringe privacy" lifestyle has been getting easier and easier, because so many privacy invading things assume you have a GPS enabled phone on you at every moment, and are constantly connected to the Internet.
Make those two untrue and it's like you never existed.
>It's a totally fringe lifestyle to not be tracked everywhere you go, at least in a developed country.
You're proving GP's point, that was the norm in developed countries 100 years ago and to a relative degree 50 years ago. The organs of the state and of capital which effected surveillance or tracking were tiny and isolated compared to what they are now.
Human sacrifice is an interesting example, since there are several public school proponents throughout this discussion arguing that good parents have an obligation to send their bad schools to thereby improve the quality of those schools for the other children. This amounts to human sacrifice.
It's constantly going to be with us. These systems weren't "put into place" they generated "higher profits" when implemented. As such, the people profiting from their existence are willing to use some of those profits in preventing the advantages of technological advancement from reaching the populations they currently enjoy power over.
This is part of the reason why business monopolies are social poison.
It's interesting that we treat kettling children up indoors by age cohort with little movement and making them solve math problems ad nauseum as if it were the most natural thing in the world and treat those who can't sit still and learn in such an environment (or understand the purpose of doing all of those math problems for 13 years) as if they are an aberration.
Surely, this can't be true. For most of human history, children may have learned to do whatever their parents did behaviorally or vocationally, whether that be to become a forager, farmer, peasant, nobility, whatever, but almost nobody ever received any kind of general-purpose, primarily academic education, and whatever they learned, they learned by following their parents around and doing it, not by structured, formal curricula.
I'm sure homeschooling can work out fine, but that is hardly assured by simply being inline with historical tradition. If you go to war with broadswords and spears, you're going to lose. If you insist on living without indoor plumbing or refrigerated food storage, you're likely going to have your kids taken away, and rightfully so, in spite of the fact humans lived that way by default longer than not.
Default state for most human history was that only small minority of people can read and write. It also meant that majority of people have no say in public affairs.
> Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.
Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?
The college I most recently consulted with had to take a homeschool "transcript" that can literally be a signed paper from the parent handwritten with nothing to back it up.
It's astounding. I don't know if that's just because that particular state doesn't have very strict rules around homeschooling, or if that's standard; I just haven't done the research.
Because they have some kind of accreditation body that monitors and approves the schools with established standards and approved/documented practices, whereas homeschool does not?
And ACT/SAT has become optional since covid for most institutions.
> Because they have some kind of accreditation body that monitors and approves the schools with established standards and approved/documented practices, whereas homeschool does not?
There are "accredited" homeschool programs, and the "accreditation" means probably about as much as it does for "accredited" private schools, many of whom don't even bother.
Elsewhere in the comments I mentioned the Baltimore public school system, where clearly whatever "accreditation" it has is completely and utterly worthless.
Heck, even my ABET accredited university, although overall of high quality, had a few teachers that taught me nothing at all and who had no checks on their failure to teach.
I don't think it's the case that if you show up with a transcript written in crayon and don't bother to submit a standardized test score, your college admission prospects are likely to be very good. The tests may be optional, but I don't think that means they have to assume you'd have done well on them, if other evidence looks iffy.
>Presumably the students are also applying with ACT/SAT scores in hand, which do have an established meaning.
Except...
>More Than 80% Of Four-Year Colleges Won’t Require Standardized Tests For Fall 2023 Admissions
>An additional 85 schools will be test-blind or score-free, meaning that applicants’ standardized exam results are not considered even if they are submitted. Included in that number is the entire California public university system....
>[And] at least 1,450 colleges and universities have made their test-optional and test-blind policies permanent.
One imagines that students with any reason to suspect the university they're applying to will not know enough about their high school, or possibly derogatory information about their high school, will submit an application with test scores attached in the "optional" cases.
One of the other reasons for this is because students completely unprepared for college from public schools are an increasing problem. This is also why they now all offer remedial classes under varying names and programs, and why first-year university programs are much easier than they were in say, 1940.
"Test-optional" and "test-blind" are vastly different. If I can get a leg up on the competition by taking the test, then it's basically required even if it's technically optional.
True. I find the ideological movement against standardized testing really disturbing. Their basic point is that students from affluent families are more likely to do well on standardized tests (which is true), and that therefore eliminating the tests as enrollment requirements will level the playing field (which does not follow).
For instance - to use your example - which student is more likely to be given your advice: the one from an affluent family attending a well-funded school, or the (let's posit much smarter) one from a family of non-college attendees living in an under-funded district? When the SAT was a formal requirement they'd be more likely to be judged on an actually level playing field.
How is that any different from someone who attended a rural public high school?
Many of the school districts in my area have consolidated, and it's not even possible to verify attendance of students from the small schools that no longer exist.
To my knowledge, there is no "accreditation" that matters for public high schools - there are only thresholds for which state funding is available.
how is this worse than some schools not even requiring students to be able to read, write and do some mathematics in order to graduate with a HS diploma?
Difference is thatbin one case it is a scandal that is investigated. In the other, there is no one to investigate, no rules are broken, it is just homeschooling exactly as meant to be per law.
It is, and article hit pieces like this are exactly why it will continue to expand. Newsflash, there’s an actual large portion of the population that more and more doesn’t want what is taught to their children regulated by the government.
Yeah, there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible. We should all be so lucky as to be a bunch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts.
Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd conveniently ignores the reasons those regulations were created in the first place.
People are making a choice for their kids, whether they want the after effects of religious or public school 'brainwashing'. For many, its a clear cut choice, one way or the other.
It's weird to strip the kids of any agency or consideration, but you've phrased it well. People are making a choice for their kids -- parents don't own their kids, they have something akin to justified paternalism over them. Society should care whether parents are providing a base level of education and opportunity to these kids. It's pretty apparent from the discussion here who grew up around e.g. fundamentalist Mormons or Baptists where homeschool kids were often abused as a matter of 'doctrine' and those whose experience with homeschool kids is more like the Bay Area version of precocious children learning in nature.
> Society should care whether parents are providing a base level of education and opportunity to these kids.
And society should also care whether government-run public schools are doing this--not to mention whether they are indoctrinating children with values that many parents disagree with.
The standards are public, yes, but that does not mean they are standards that a majority of the public agrees with. They are set by unelected bureaucrats.
School boards are elected, but I don't think "broad democractic oversight" is a fair description.
In any case, none of the things you mention prevented the US public school system from being explicitly set up to indoctrinate children, as explicitly described by the people who set it up. So to the extent that society in the US cares about educating children, it cares about educating them according to a particular political agenda that many people do not agree with. That is a major reason why homeschooling continues to increase in popularity.
I'm sure this varies by state, but where I live in MN home schooling parents have to register with the state and meet certain curriculum standards. Homeschooled students also have to take standardized tests and show certain standards of proficiency. The parents need to keep diligent records and be in regular communication with the school district. We have a lot of friends that homeschool (although we don't ourselves), and in general most homeschooled kids seem to be meeting or exceeding where their public- or private-schooled peers are at.
> there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible
Not all homeschoolers are like this. There are plenty of other good reasons for parents not to want their kids to go to public schools.
> society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated
Yes, but for whose definition of "educated"? In the US, at least, the government was not supposed to decide that. Individual families and communities were. And, as I have posted elsewhere in this thread, the people who set up the US system of widespread, compulsory public education were quite explicit about what they meant by "educated", and that included plenty of things that any reasonable person would consider to be indoctrination, not education--and that was on purpose.
With the laws Florida is toying with around trans youth in education, you think people here would be more understanding of the desire to be able to give the government's regulations the finger.
Saying that the cost of giving persecuted minorities an out is "then we might not be able to persecute the minorities that I've decided actually deserve it" just feels fundamentally unconvincing.
Will it continue to expand? This article makes the case that the large increase in 2020 was driven by temporary pandemic conditions, and explicitly not by politics or school quality. The graph shows it has already started to decline. Longer-term data shows a small peak in 2012 followed by a slow decline until the pandemic: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a.... In the article's district lookup tool, most districts follow this same pattern of a pandemic spike that begins to decline, whether you pick a stereotypically liberal or conservative district.
> Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?
It sounds ideal.
But we might want at least some oversight and regulation to, for example, make sure kids aren't being homeschooled on how to build rockets and kill some group of people.
> They generally aren't brainwashed to kill people.
Lmao, yes they are. You couldn't be more wrong, kids who attend public school make better military recruits. Public schools teach kids how to conform to institutional systems and follow orders. These are essential skills for effective killers.
Btw, since you're so scared of kids learning how to build rockets.. I learned how to build rockets in public school through a program called TARC. The same design principles I learned for model rockets could be applied to homemade weaponized rockets. Does that frighten you? Do you think that makes me Hamas or something? (Hamas is who you're thinking of right? America doesn't have a domestic rocket attack problem, I'm sure you know that.) You should know that most people in the MIC went through public school. If you're actually afraid of people learning these sort of skills, shouldn't you be advocating for kids receiving a bible-only education that renders them incapable of engineering, and therefore weapon design, and unfit for military recruitment?
Concerns (or "concerns") like this always make me wonder what kind of terrible environment the commentor grew up in: a war-torn country with child soldiers firing homemade rockets, or maybe a cute little cul-de-sac in an upper-middle class suburb where all problems are hypothetical yet everything is still terrifying.
Maybe modeling the child rocket program[1] on [whatever it is that public high schools are doing] would save us?
But should you be able to totally escape from scrutiny? To me it seems very wrong to deny a child the opportunity to learn the things they'd need to function in society like reading, math, and science. Most homeschooling parents are teaching these things to there kids, but there are some who aren't. That ought to be stopped.
> Isn't it some comfort that you can see there is something to stop or change?
No, of course not. Is being helpless comforting to you? How often does anyone actually fix a serious problem with an institution? Sure it happens sometimes, but the best almost everyone can hope for it to muddle through being subjected to the problems.
The impulse to put homeschooling under the thumb of government officials is not comforting, because it would remove the agency of parents to respond to problems they experience or fear in the school system.
Can't there be a middle ground? I'm not saying the government should mandate particular curriculums. What I'd actually propose is something like random checks to make sure that homeschooled kids are actually learning at some point during the day and to check for signs of abuse.
If I choose to send my mail using FedEx instead of USPS, should the government investigate me solely on the grounds that I chose an alternative to a government service? Personally, I don’t think so.
If you're trying to make an analogy between mail and school, I think FedEx would be more equivalent to a private school than home schooling. And FedEx, much like private schools, has to to comply with a bunch of government regulation. In the case of FedEx, they have to check to see whether there are drugs or bombs in the packages. FedEx also has to deliver the package, you can sue them if they fail to perform their contractual obligations. Private schools have legal requirements and report evidence of child abuse and have to provide actual education.
In this child = cardboard box analogy, I guess home-school would be equivalent to transporting the box in your own car. In this case, the box would also be subject to scrutiny, for example at border crossings.
I don't think "of course" belongs in that sentence. Not everybody feels so defeated, or would feel better seeing the manifest evidence of societal dysfunction (if it happened, I've not foreclosed on it) emerging from black boxes concealing different interpretations of a good and complete education as numerous as there are families.
And I can't argue with your position on how often things are fixed. It wouldn't matter what evidence I found, the goal post would just move a little bit farther. Sure, "it happens sometimes," but never enough to satisfy.
But I can counter with, how often can you fix broken homeschooling that has no auditing or oversight?
And part of the point of schools, at least in the modern era, is that kids have access to authority figures if they are being abused at home. That access often ends with home schooling.
The statement implies the students being taught in schools today are learning at a level they should be. With all the exceptions made and dumbing down of curriculum, most classes teach to the least abled in the class holding back many.
That said, I don't think home schooling is an option for all either. Covid showed how difficult it could be for many families.
The Post has a vague undercurrent of bafflement, a wide-eyed, "What could it possibly be?" and really only bothers to speculate toward the end.
I was on Facebook, idly scrolling, and I received an ad for a nearby Montessori school. The ad was a simple lavender square, with the name of the school on it (no photo), and simply the text "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Of all of the letters, the "three Rs" weren't in evidence. Nothing about how the school will teach the child how to learn, prepare them for high school, or provide a rounded education. Just "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Upon some mental reflection, I recalled some recent radio ads for local universities, and the first sentence was about how they were diverse, and then there was something about inclusion and equality. No mention was made of "we will prepare you to be an adult" or "we will get you a good job."
Unfortunately, I cannot have children, but if I were in a position to, I would like to think I would be interested in their education to the extent that I would make serious choices. And right now, that educational institutions consider their highest advertising priority is to display a relentless laser focus on DIE to the exclusion of, well, education does give a little pause to their selection.
As I recall just how ill-served I was by the many schools I attended (we moved quite a lot), both for education and socialization, I can only imagine that diverting the already-anemic school efforts away from the core mission it even-then was not doing a great job at would only make these institutions even less-suited to their supposed task.
We're homeschooling our kids. I was pretty against it at first, but seeing our education system degrade to the state it is today, and being honest about my schooling experience definitely opened me up to it.
I think the biggest argument for schooling is the socialization aspect of it. I don't know about the rest of you but I was bullied pretty relentlessly throughout grade school and it completely changed my personality. I became much more of a loner, reserved, quiet, and just defeated. I'm still working through some of that baggage 30 years later. That's not the socialization that I want for my kids.
I work remotely, my wife freelances. We have lots of friends and family with children our kids age, why not surround them by people who love them?
I think I have basically the same opinion. It's not so much that I believe homeschooling is amazing in-itself, but rather that the public education system has so clearly deteriorated that it seems borderline criminal to subject your kids to it.
The question for me, personally, is private school vs. homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public education via choosing the right private school (and being able to afford it), I do wonder if that would be superior to most homeschooling setups.
We didn’t go full home-school, but my wife and I intentionally left our city to go raise our kids out in a rural area so they could grow up in and around nature and with a nice, small school district that smokes anything we had back in the city. Better test scores, smaller classes, minimal major discipline issues.
Prior to moving, our only “good” option for realistic schooling was putting our children in a local Catholic school with high fees. Given our state is in the midst of legal battles with activist groups fighting to overturn a recent school-choice voucher program, seemed moving was the safe choice.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone but a public-sector teacher being finally held to account would fight against giving parents options to place their kids in a school they see fit.
> For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone but a public-sector teacher being finally held to account would fight against giving parents options to place their kids in a school they see fit.
Because they want to indoctrinate your kids. A lot of teachers get into the profession because of a compelling social justice urge, much like a missionary from the church. When they are outside the public school system they are harder to reach.
Additionally, the more kids in the system equates to more political power for the teachers unions since they get to expand.
After going through something like this[0], it seems similar to what we do in tech. Try the fancy new thing! Don't worry that the creators aren't particularly qualified and mostly want to sell you stuff.
Hard to disentangle good change from bad; some of the initiative is good, but negative feedback seems to have been translated to "ignore those haters, they have no valid points."
I don't understand this talk about "the public education system". Every school and school district is going to be different. Some are great and others are not. I understand if you live in an area with middling-to-poor schools, but lots of people live near great public schools.
I’m sure there are good public schools, but my experience and the experience of everyone I’ve ever known has not been positive. Combined with policies like California’s [1], I don’t think it’s unreasonable to just be skeptical of most American public education.
The educators that stood out in my life were the ones who were passionate and interesting and added their own experiences and perspectives. We have somewhere between 40-60 teachers over the course of a typical public education. I'd hope at least a good cross-section of those bring something to the table other than rote explanations of test questions.
>Why is there an assumption that what is on the test is inherently worthless but every individual teacher is qualified to design an entire curriculum?
Because my mother went to school for six years for exactly that purpose? Some states have pretty high requirements for teachers, and they tend to do well.
Also, the "teach to test" BS is extremely locality dependent. There are zero things you can generalize across all public schools in the US.
For what it's worth my bar is higher. Can we expect every teacher to design a top-tier curriculum independently?
Or, in other words, do we need hundreds of thousands of curricula? Doesn't that leave a lot of by definition below average curricula. Would selecting among even dozens of well-designed options make sense instead?
Years ago, like right before khan academy became popular, I had started making a math education platform. The idea would have been to have many instructors and lessons/sections votes and scores that lead to the best courses that students could choose from based on any further preferences. It would have also provided a skill tree and automated assessments for placement and assessment. As new, better instructors got traction, they could have courses promoted. The financial incentives would be profit sharing between the platform and top educators. Never got it close enough to launching and then started a new gig and never got back to it.
The cows are not putting on enough weight, better weigh them more often.
Teaching to the test is akin to teaching music only through sheet music; no instruments. The test is a mile wide and an inch deep and instead of helping students appreciate and understand topics and apply that knowledge creatively, we rush temporary memorization and regurgitation.
Like all measures, once they become a target, they become a poor measure.
Check for homeschooling groups in your area. Meet and talk to parents, you’ll find out all about it including resource centers for when your child needs to learn topics where you are weak.
We’ve been homeschooling for 7 years. Our child’s social experience has increased both quantitatively and qualitatively. From few/constantly bullied physically and sexually, to many/nice thoughtful friends who will jump in and defend her instead of filming her, should things go down. She’s also a leader, does service for her community, and (proud papa moment here) at her 4th debate competition (3 per year in this league) won 9th place speaker and 3rd place team. Her team swept the series of 4 rounds. The only way their team could do that…wait for it…lots of practice aka socialization.
The “socialization” boogeyman is one of the most overplayed red herrings about homeschooling IMO.
I think anyone who has been seriously bullied would definitely agree - being bullied as a child can severely fuck up the rest of your life. Sure, many/most eventually move on, but like you, 30 years later I've got the therapy bills to show for it.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty feeling envious about my nieces' upbringing. They went to private school that ran from 1-8 grade, so they essentially skipped the middle school experience that was detrimental to so many. Honestly, I believe middle school as I experienced it (a whole bunch of elementary "feeder" schools that fed into one giant middle school for 7-8 grade) is the dumbest invention in the history of humanity. It sticks together kids, at wildly different stages of development, in an unfamiliar environment where everyone is trying to find their place in the social hierarchy - Lord of the Flies should have been set in middle school. Much better IMO to just have kids stay together 1-8th grade, and by then most folks are at least well into puberty by the time they get to high school. Not saying of course bullying doesn't happen in high school, but I think by then more kids are able to find their "tribe", so if they are bullied they have friends to fall back on (again, I'm of course painting with broad strokes).
I've heard a professor describe high school the same way. We throw a bunch of hormonal, identity-discovering, stressed teenagers together and then wonder why incidents happen.
> That's not the socialization that I want for my kids.
On the other hand, I'd definitely want my children to be familiar with it. Bullying is not something isolated to schools. I've seen it in nearly every social and political situation that exists at nearly every age group. In my estimation people are getting worse at identifying it and collectively we're getting worse at punishing it.
If it's a peer in a more professional setting, simply calling them out generally makes you less a target, especially if calling out their behaviour is done in a group setting. It comes down to the old "stand up for yourself" rule we've all heard. Also, calm confidence tends to work with adults too.
If the bullying is coming from above, time to move on. I have zero patience for it, and there's likely no stopping them.
Also, I'm not suggesting you take them outside, although I know a couple guys who've been through fights between coworkers in their workplaces. Grown men (in their 30s) sure can take a long time to grow.
> Bullying is not something isolated to schools. I've seen it in nearly every social and political situation that exists at nearly every age group.
Unless you live in prison or a war zone I highly doubt you've witnessed "adult" bullying that remotely approaches the ferocity and cruelty some kids have to endure on a daily basis.
Public schools teach you all the wrong ways to deal with bullies, and forbid the correct ways. They teach kids to run to teachers for help whenever they get bullied; in the real world that doesn't work because there's no teacher to run to. And when a kid stands up to a bully themselves, the school punishes him for exercising precisely the skills he'll need later in life. Schools don't teach kids how to deal with bullies, they teach kids how to be docile victims.
As someone with a toddler, I've found myself annoyed with this already with Ms Rachel videos on youtube.
"If another kid is throwing sand at you and won't stop when you ask, tell a grown up."
No, grown ups were also raised on this garbage and won't do anything. What's the teacher going to do if the other kid won't stop? Go tell the principal? And what will they do? Nothing.
The correct thing to do is to shove the other kid. Don't hurt them; just indicate they need to back off. If they still don't, throw sand at them, and then while they're recoiling, shove them down and kick them.
Society has a major problem where proper, proportionate, defensive violence is punished, and it traces back to this kind of crap.
Yes, they'll encounter it later, but the later they encounter is is probably better. They can then face it with a more mature brain, relatively speaking, and hopefully avoid forming deep pathways in their minds related to trauma.
Are you both working full-time? What's the arrangement? How do you fit the homeschooling in around your jobs?
My wife and I have talked about this a lot. We don't have kids yet, but we're very open to the idea of homeschooling when the time comes. I'm not sure how we'll do it though - we're in a better position than most (we make good money and both wfh) but there are only so many hours in the day. I'm interested to know how other people make it work.
Kids are in school for 5 or so hours per day, but for many kids (especially those who are bright), they are learning for perhaps 1 hour of that time. If you can take an hour to teach them something, and another 10 minutes to assess their progress later in the day, they will learn at least as much as they would have in school. Of course, the time commitment also varies by grade; younger kids need lots of attention, whereas older kids are more self-sufficient. It depends on lot based on your particular kids.
I taught PE for homeschool kids when I was a young man, at a YMCA. It was a small program we ran during some seasons. I'd get 6-15 kids every week for about an hour, and since it was daytime, we could use any facilities we wanted, so we spent a lot of time on the rock wall, at the skate park, and in the pool.
The kids were great, and the parents were mostly great, too.
Anyway, maybe there's some similar local programs. If not, I bet you could run one yourself. I bet youtube would make it super easy, actually.
Even when I taught, sometimes the parents would organize something else for a week, like a local hike.
I'm glad that I grew up in {shithole} (as Trump would put it) where I was able to threaten to (and follow up on in one case) beating the shit out of my bullies in school. It didn't magically stop the bullying, but it made it much less effective when I could lunge at him/fake him out and make him flinch back in fear of a repeat.
So .. I was homeschooled for a couple of years, in the UK, and had a relatively normal if solitary experience. But that was because my mother was a qualified teacher who'd stopped working, and I was a smart kid. This left me naturally favourable to the idea.
Since then it's become clear that there are basically two categories of homeschoolers: those that want to bring in extra education beyond what the public school system can deliver, and those that want to bring in less education than the public system. Usually in the name of "protecting" them from some information for religious reasons. That's where all the attention and concern is. Because children can't advocate for themselves, especially against their parents.
I grew up in a place with a large number of religious organizations and outcome of this is what I would consider abuse in a huge number of cases. Would the children themselves think so at the time, kinda hard when you're taught "spare the rod, spoil the child" and "Of course the Earth is only 6000 years old" daily.
I guarantee you (and the data backs this up) that the home schooled religious kids that are taught the earth is 6,000 years old and were spanked can run circles academically around the average public school kid.
The data has been posted elsewhere in this post but here is some more below [0]. Why do you assume religious homeschoolers would perform worse than non-religious homeschoolers? Thanks for downvote :)
[0] 78% of peer-reviewed studies on academic achievement show homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in institutional schools (Ray, 2017). Source and lots of other good tidbits: https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:te....)
I’m not sure why you would even distinguish religious home schoolers from non religious. Some quick googling shows that 90% of home school parents are religious which would back up my claim. I’m sorry you hate religious people?
Yes it is. People forget this because they live in a bubble. It’s like remote work, nice for the laptop class, but not possible for the person growing your food and manufacturing your tesla.
We've looking into this, as deeply as we can as "outsiders". We homeschool, but are firmly "middle class" from a national perspective and easily in the top 1% income in our county.
Regardless of income, the key factor seems to be the rationale. If parents want to homeschool because they're involved with their kids' lives and want them to succeed, they'll do well relative to the available public school options.
It is almost exclusively a middle class activity. Also not that expensive if one parent is home. I knew many homeschooled kids who were just given a math textbook and worked through it. You only go to math class in public school for about 182 hours a year, so a diligent kid can do a year of math in a few months no problem.
Rich families already do this by sending their kids to private schools. Have you seen how expensive and competitive these schools are, even starting as early as Kindergarten?
There’s a whole spectrum of “home schooling”. At one end you have parents teaching their own kids, maybe using some online resources, libraries etc. but for many it is more like group schooling which is almost like a charter or private school where you join with other “home” schoolers but don’t have a traditional teacher and administration, it’s basically the remote work approach of school vs the in-office approach. Then you have actual private schools with a more traditional building and teaching method. And finally you have public schools, the default choice which used to be seen as the gold standard in terms of equal opportunity, but let’s forget about that because schools are “indoctrinating” kids now.
I would much prefer “backpack funding” aka vouchers. The blue-state city I live in spends almost $25k per student per year and apart from a few magnet schools they are atrociously bad. Like the high school my kids would have to attend if I wasn’t wealthy had a student murdered outside of it a few years ago.
If you gave parents even 1/3 of that money the state would save a fortune and parents would be so much better off. The monopoly system of education we have is just so awful. I’m fine with having bonus benefits for special needs kids, and public schools should always exist to educate the high-needs students. But the system we have now is so laughably bad and segregated that anyone who defends it must have a financial stake in keeping it running.
Naïve per-student-spending calculations can misleading. Some students cost a lot more than others. My state spends hundreds of thousands per student in some cases—but that's schools in juvenile detention facilities. Nonetheless, that goes in the stats. Kids in self-contained classrooms ("special ed" kids who can't function in the normal classroom) can be several times as expensive to educate as the median kid. Kids in ordinary classrooms who get a dedicated assistant, they've got all the usual spending plus the fully-loaded cost of the assistant, so that's easily over $50k total. Kid in a gifted program? Add low-five figures to the cost. Fancy selective-admission public schools, which some states have? Typically higher spending per student than other schools, which drags up the average.
They also have bussing costs, which (e.g.) private schools don't, which further complicates comparisons. That's not a small amount of money.
I clearly stated I am fine for the special needs kids getting more funding. The central point is to give me - the parent - the money that would go to the atrociously bad school so I can put my kids (not special needs) into a good school. That is the situation for the majority of students.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I already pay via my tax dollars $25k on average per student. I’m suggesting reducing that spend, for those that want it for non-special needs kids, and giving the reduced amount to parents to spend on any school they want - or staying in their public school they already have.
The problem is the local public school where everyone in my neighborhood is forced to go (unless they are rich) is dangerous and ranked bottom 5%. That is extremely racist, inequitable, and unfair to people who are forced to attend.
We started homeschooling our kids during the pandemic with a neighborhood group, and it went really well. Everything about them improved, not just their academic performance, but also their mood got way more positive about learning. Now we have them in private school and.. it seems to be going fairly well. They don't have the irritability that they did in public schools, and I think my children are much happier. From my perspective, there's just too much chaos in public education for healthy learning.
If you home school, you don't get the money back. Public school is something like $12k/yr. That's a lot of money that you're essentially opting out of.
For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons, that must seem profoundly unfair. To be driven out of the public schools means to be denied resources.
Public schools using public money should be especially sensitive and as neutral as possible on political or culture war issues. That's increasingly difficult, but without that, public school doesn't have a good future.
Normally schools are thought of as Democrat-controlled, but that's not true everywhere. So rather than just saying that everything is OK the way it is, think about how it will be when your political opponents are in control.
Our state does - we did not take it, because the money comes with enough strings to make it distasteful.
We homeschool to keep our kids out of government schools. Inviting that same government into our home for a bit of money would make no sense whatsoever.
> as neutral as possible on political or culture war issues
I don't think it's really possible to be neutral about culture war issues, sort of by definition, especially when many of the wars are about schools themselves. A school is part of American culture, it can't somehow choose not to participate. To use a historical example, there was a culture war over teaching evolution in schools. A teacher at the time could describe the history and facts of the controversy without stating their opinion on it, but when the students leave that classroom, they are still in a school that either teaches evolution or doesn't. By existing and having a curriculum, the school takes a position in the culture war.
Imagine if your country held a referendum on a certain issue, and said "if more than 50% of citizens vote yes, the law passes, otherwise it fails". You could have a genuinely neutral opinion on the issue ("I don't care which side wins"), but you cannot take a neutral action, because not voting makes the law less likely to pass. This is unfair, and you can be mad about it, but the only way to be "neutral" would be to leave the country and renounce your citizenship so that you are no longer part of the equation. Similarly, in a culture war, the only way to be neutral would be to not participate in the culture in question, which is even more difficult than leaving a country.
Let me give one more example: whether or not to tip your server in a restaurant. Tipping 10% instead of 20% is not neutral. Tipping 50% of the time you go to a restaurant is not neutral. You could say "I don't wish to take a position, so I will no longer go to restaurants", but I'm confident the anti-tipping side would claim you as one of their own. Again it feels unfair, but it's just how culture works.
Lack of perfection doesn't mean you shouldn't try to be more neutral. Trying by itself (even if failing) earns the trust of voters.
And if you live in an area where evolution is a controversial topic, then you should leave it up to the parents. You don't have a right to use their money to teach something that a lot of people don't want to be taught. Of course, there's some line where something is fringe enough and you don't have to accommodate every last person. Again, try to be neutral, don't aim for perfection.
And you know what? Evolution is a nuanced topic. The actual claims that can be backed up by first principals using the scientific method are fairly narrow. Much of the reasoning is very prone to confirmation bias and all kinds of after-the-fact fitting rather than forward-looking predictions. To stick to the science on the topic of evolution you have to be pretty careful and most teachers are not. Not saying it shouldn't be taught... I think it has a lot of explanatory power outside of pure science and represents a large body of important observations. But I don't think it's a good example of science-vs-idiots.
Okay, but there are claims like: "Dinosaurs existed over 100 million years ago, before humans existed" which are controversial enough that it's part of the "culture war". And teaching it (and carbon dating) counts as taking a side.
We aren't talking about fine points of evolution, we are talking about the earth being older than mankind at all.
As someone who was taught all of the silly, unscientific religious “theories” like Creationism as a child, and then had to unlearn it as an adult, my position is that it is absolutely never the governments place to tell a parent what they are allowed to teach their child. It is not the responsibility of the state, in any way, shape, or form, to dictate information to a child that the parents take issue with, even if that topic is something with no scientific basis akin to creationism.
Parents should always have the final say in what their children are being taught, even if it’s patently unscientific. Anything else feels like an incredibly slippery slope of, “Daddy Government knows what’s best for your kids better than you do, so we’re chipping away at your parental rights until we can save your child from your non-governmentally approved ideas!”
I mostly agree. The fallacy of the government knows best approach is the “who watches the watchers?” problem.
What happens when the government decides to teach nonsense?
There is nothing magical about the state that makes it a better arbiter of truth than other institutions. Historically states have a pretty poor record. They tend to push ideas that benefit the people who control them, whether that’s a nobility or a majority faction in the electorate (or both).
> it is absolutely never the governments place to tell a parent what they are allowed to teach their child
Essentially everyone in America agrees with you. This is written into our Constitution.
> It is not the responsibility of the state, in any way, shape, or form, to dictate information to a child that the parents take issue with
This is an impossible standard. We have to make public schooling available, and we can't provide individual tutors for every student, so they must be taught in groups. This guarantees that some students will be taught things that their parents take issue with. To compensate for this we make some escape hatches available like homeschooling, private schooling, or moving to a different school district, but these are all difficult or impossible for most parents. Some schools have offered to let parents take their kids out of class when certain topics are taught, but this approach can't scale to all subjects and topics. It also can't address parents upset about what their child is NOT being taught.
I'm not aware of any educational model that gives all parents complete control over their children's education.
Oh yes, I didn’t mean that there would be nothing parents take issue with at all. Rather, if a parent is upset enough at the idea of their child learning about evolution rather than creationism, I believe it’s within that parent’s rights to put their child in a school that more closely aligns with their beliefs.
No school curriculum will ever be 100% satisfactory to 100% of people, but I believe that the state has no obligation to enforce a certain educational model simply because it is “correct”. That probably sounds a bit silly, but I just believe that people have the right to believe and teach ideas that run counter to the state-approved message, even if the state is empirically correct.
Ok, I don't think that's particularly controversial. Most of the controversy arises from parents (or influential people without kids) trying to influence the shared public school system to match their particular standard, rather than having their kids taught elsewhere as you recommend.
So if the shared public school system is teaching something wacky (creationism or whatever), how should that be changed? If not parents or influential people, who would cause the change to happen?
Teaching something wacky in homeschooling is far more damaging to the student than teaching something wacky in a public school.
School does not occupy all the time of a child. If a school teaches something parents disagree with, parents can debunk that when the kids are home. They can bring arguments and kids will eventually make up their own minds.
Homeschooling presents a single view, that of the parents. There is no debate.
Being neutral could also mean striving to make decisions based on independent standards, as opposed to a bias toward one side. For example, a judge who bases decisions on evidence and the law is typically considered neutral -- even when they rule guilty.
That's true, but another property of culture wars is that there generally is no authority or standard that all sides consider independent. Only in the most clearcut cases can you get away with saying "it's not up to me, I'm just following the law." Often there is no law or it's vaguely written, and it really is up to you.
> For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons, that must seem profoundly unfair.
I homeschooled my daughter for reasons other than culture wars or politics (she’s a violinist and public schools didn’t regard practice time as particularly important.)
But I never thought of public school funding as transactional. We did not take direct advantage of the benefit; but a reasonably well educated populace benefits me in a host of other ways. So I harboured no resentment when paying my public school levy.
"We did not take direct advantage of the benefit; but a reasonably well educated populace benefits me in a host of other ways."
But that's precisely the point: what does "well-educated" mean? If the money is going toward reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, then few will disagree. When the curriculum, environment, or manner of teaching drift into more controversial areas, then you might start to see things differently.
Imagine the school starts teaching things that don't align with your values, and they leave out things that do. How would you feel about the way your tax dollars are spent?
> If you home school, you don't get the money back. Public school is something like $12k/yr. That's a lot of money that you're essentially opting out of.
That's not money you have a right to as a parent. I don't take part in all the social programs my government offers, but I don't get all that money back.
Public schools don't have some inalienable right to that money either -- they are entrusted with the money by popular vote. If we want that to continue, then there needs to be very broad consensus that the things teachers are teaching are the right things, or at least not the wrong things.
Schools are one area where there's a lot of money involved, it's a direct service to normal people, and those people actually can do a pretty good job without the school (not saying that everyone can or that it's easy).
Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police attempted to defund and/or defunded their department. That's not a great example because self-service policing doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.
Ultimately, if you want the voters' money, you need to convince them that you at least won't use it against them. And it's really easy for people to start thinking that it's being used against them when engaging in culture war or political issues.
> Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police attempted to defund and/or defunded their department. That's not a great example because self-service policing doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.
This is a great example for what should happen - demands for systemic reform, not taking what you think is "your" money and going home.
It's one thing to opt out of a system, it's another to think you're justified to get money back for it. As someone without any children am I justified in getting 24k/year back because I'm not using the school system for my (average) 2 non-kids? Of course not, but I do pay taxes for that service.
Tax money is a collective "yours" and when it stops aligning with the values of the voters then they will vote to make some serious changes. Without some widespread consensus on what the system should be about it's going to look more like a collapse than a reform.
Ideally, it would be a back-to-basics reform that would be more neutral. But probably what would happen is a slow draining of the best students along with money until it spirals.
You can say that shouldn't happen, or be mad at the people who opt out, or be mad at the people who underfund it. But it would be better to save it by at least making an effort to be neutral before it gets to that point. Too many teachers look at students as their children to mold according to their personal or party values rather than educating them according to collective or neutral values.
Why are you assuming everyone pays into the system? In fact ide argue the people trying to claw back the money for a better outcome are the people actually paying into the system and the people that aren't are the ones causing the system to degrade.
Well, that's an emotionally satisfying theory for some I'm sure, but one that requires evidence unless you're more invested in the ideology than the reality.
> If you home school, you don't get the money back. Public school is something like $12k/yr. That's a lot of money that you're essentially opting out of.
Money spent ≠ value provided. My kid's class has over half a million dollars spent on it per year. But many parents see it as merely childcare, and then spend more money on after school tutoring and activities.
I can see the appeal of skipping the schooling and doing the other activities during the school day. It's probably much easier/cheaper to get appointments before 2, when most kids are in school. And there's more flexibility in terms of scheduling. I just heard today that a family was threatened with being kicked out of our local school if they accrued 10 days of unexcused absences (which includes vacation days). While I don't think the school would actually kick the family out, the fact that this is even floated as an idea sounds crazy.
I was homeschooled in the 90s/early 00s in the conservative Christian wing of the movement. Personally, I think it was a great experience (despite the conservative, religious aspect which I later rejected) and made me a more unique person. I would not have done well socially in school as a child anyway. My brother though, raised in the same environment, resents our upbringing. I also meet many homeschoolers raised in conservative Christian households who disliked the experience.
Overall, it's a very high variance method of education. For every Judit Polgar, you have a woman told her highest calling must be to reproduce and be subservient to her husband (I know these people personally).
If you have the resources and have intellectually precocious children, especially if they are a bit odd, they will likely enjoy it and benefit from it. If you have kids that really want to play sports at a high level or are socially very successful, they might later resent the opportunities they missed and the shared experiences they lack. Obviously, this is reductive, but I think something like this is true.
Is there a story here beyond the pandemic? The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. Now the rate is gradually declining as some kids return to school and some parents decide it's working well so they'll keep going until their kids are older.
The pandemic is the most obvious cause, and the article notes that "Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth." Obviously test scores are not the only measure of quality, but at least in this article there is no evidence of any cause other than the pandemic. The other possible factor discussed in this comment section, politics, doesn't seem to be relevant either. There is no correlation between homeschooling rates and the politics of the parents or the state.
Also, "fastest-growing" is not very remarkable when the only other categories are public and private. Home-schooling is by far the smallest category, less than 5%, so basically any increase (which has to come from a decrease in at least one of the other categories) will make it the fastest-growing category.
> The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates.
I think you're forgetting the biggest reason: it turns out zoom school was a disaster and the worst of both worlds.
Yes thank you, definitely should have mentioned that. My point is that there were a wide variety of pandemic-driven reasons that parents decided to homeschool. Even if all these reasons disappeared when the pandemic culturally ended, we wouldn't expect homeschooling rates to suddenly drop back down to the pre-pandemic level. Switching to homeschooling is a huge change, and so is switching back. I would expect the rates to gradually decline as fewer new students enter homeschool, existing students age out of it, and some students switch back to public or private school, and that's exactly what the data looks like.
Feels like there is a big homeschooling article once every other week here and a whole slew of parents saying, "We homeschool and its great and our kids love it" and then a bunch of adults saying, "I was homeschooled and it was not great, and I did not love it"
Regular schooling isn't ideal. But homeschooling is a pretty major reaction to that, and it shouldn't be done without serious consideration for the non-zero chance that your kids will resent you for that decision.
> But homeschooling is a pretty major reaction to that, and it shouldn't be done without serious consideration for the non-zero chance that your kids will resent you for that decision.
As a parent of two daughters who are homeschooled - unschooled, actually - I 100% agree.
As with everything, our approach is intentional and we're open with our kids about it. If they wanted to go to a school - public, private, or religious - we would make that happen.
Our eldest is currently taking three hours per day at the local public high school. She's 15, wants to own a equine stud farm, and is taking every agriculture class she can find. After this year she will have exhausted their offerings in that subject, so she'll likely start at the local community college in the fall.
It’s HN, we have to keep in mind there is a huge self-selection bias that’s happening. In general, I consider good public schools can be good, bad ones can be bad. But even in the worst case you somewhat interact with other people at the least.
Same goes to the homeschooling — some can be successful, some can be disastrous. The majority of homeschooled kids that would fail, definitely wouldn’t be on these forums. So we’ll hear mostly success stories that came out of it.
It’s hard to apply the comments to a generalized idea from HN.
Yeah, I have definitely run into other formerly homeschooled students who really enjoyed it. Usually they had some choice in being homeschooled (either requested it or were given a yearly option to opt out). I myself would say I had a mixed experience. I did well academically because my parents prioritized academics and had college as a strong goal for me, but the religious indoctrination and utter lack of social experiences was awful for me. It also seriously strained my relationship with my mom, who did not manage her chronic illness, extended family issues, and homeschooling me well. Another family I knew had a 16 year old who could barely do 5th grade level math, a girl my age who couldn't read, and two more kids who were also going to be 'unschooled' by their IMO neglectful mother.
HSLDA has successfully lobbied against even tracking if a child is homeschooled, so there is no way to truly statistically tell which experience is the representative one. All you get are anecdotes, mostly from the parent's point of view.
Probably one of the most biased formats you can find. Mixing comedy with pseudo-facts and personal opinions to push an agenda/narrative.
I wish we could only see what he produces as comedy but way too often people love to share his clips/narrative as a semi-reliable source of information.
Anecdotally I have worked with many colleagues who were homeschooled. I suspect a correlation with home school children and programmers. Also, just met a ninth grader who enrolled at our local high school after being home schooled. He is programming Rust and taking Calculus with a bunch of seniors. Not sure if he is exceptional or simply was able to fast forward due to being homeschooled.
I find it rather unlikely homeschool process had anything to do with, esp. Rust. At that age I did mostly assembly but that was just personal search/no teaching. Overall the kid is just an anecdote.
I wonder how this all turns out. I know some people will do a great job at educating their kids but I have a feeling that on the average most of these kids will have been better off not home schooled. I think it takes a pretty special type of kid to do the work when the only pressure comes from your mom and dad.
I wasn't homeschooled and it's not legal to do it in my country even, so I have a bias. That being said it seems weird to me that parents in the US seem to consider that they "own" their kids to a much bigger degree than some places in Europe at least. I don't have kids but I think most parents around me growing up had a sense that their kid also belongs "to society" in a way, and going to school and learning about what society "wants you to" is expected, in the same way you also are just simply required to vaccinate and that's it, because you also "belong to society" in some way other than just belonging to your parents.
I wonder how much of the whole debate is mostly about difference of opinions between people on both sides of this specific subject rather than the ones the media focuses on.
So grown ups in a country where children aren't allowed to be home schooled generally believe that their children "belong to society"?
At what point do we call it culture and "difference of opinion" as opposed to just plain old indoctrination or brainwashing?
It's not a left vs right issue, this is freedom vs tyranny. Right now the left isn't able see it as Tyranny or indoctrination because their predominant opinions and values are being taught to children, so it's convenient. It's another form of "civilizing those barbarian <insert unfavorable group here>".
At the end of the day, I don't belong to society, and neither do my children. They belong to themselves and can choose for themselves how they see fit. Until then, I'll instill my values to them, and make sure they treat their fellow beings better than the way "society" treats them.
Well the issue is that the United States is very diverse. Most countries are basically monocultural ethnostates. My kids do not belong to American society but they definitely belong to a particular culture. And within that culture, and families who partake, we do 'share' our children.
But, to bring the culture wars into this, how do you feel that you have joint guardianship of a child whose parent fundamentally disagrees with you? With our church group, I trust the parents to discipline, to entertain and to teach in a way consistent with my beliefs, even if they're very different people. On the other hand, my next door neighbor is convinced my daughter is a boy because she likes trucks and would like her to be trans, like she has already transed her son. When you perceive other adults attempting to abuse your child and this is a common enough movement you're not going to be able to feel any joint sense of guardianship. And it's not just culture issues. Unsurprisingly, neighbors children are also poorly behaved, disrespectful, and never get told no.
America has fully embraced multiculturalism without assimilation, so there are now dozens of cultures, so no sense of joint guardianship over children.
1,491 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadTell me your bias without telling me you're biased.
Bias is supposed to mean something that is factual but presenting a one-sided opinion by e.g using a subset of facts and language meant to influence the readers opinion.
Just read through the comments other people have posted in subthreads here about their own experiences.
My own school had a wide range of "don't bother learning, get pregnant and drop out" to "goes on to elite university" students, and everything in-between.
No one claimed that "public education is a uniform experience in the US". Did you reply to the wrong comment?
Do you think the variability is wider among public schools, or among homeschools?
Is that snippet most likely an expression of bias, or is it most likely setting up to challenge bias?
Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-schooled.
It is extremely dependent on 1. access to wealth, 2. underlying reason for homeschooling (religion/safety/other item), and 3. where in the country you live (rural v suburban v urban).
In that order specifically. Homeschooling is the ultimate class solidification technique. Those with wealth can almost certainly guarantee their children will do really well. Those without don't stand a chance in hell.
In what ways that are different from any public or private school?
1. Religious Home Schoolers. They are primarily homeschooled because the parents are very religious and don't want them in public schools because of fears their kids will become too secular.
2. Wealthy Home Schoolers. These are very well off people who choose to home school their kids for any number of reasons (like their traditional schooling options being poor) but can afford to hire tutors or teachers or if they teach the kids themselves, there were previously teachers.
3. Group Home Schoolers. These are families that have grouped up to split the duties of homeschooling across multiple families. Sometimes for all classes or just a few. The kids are more likely to have more day-to-day connection with other kids/students other than their siblings.
All of these groups have tons of cross over. Religious group home schoolers is a big thing right now. But your opinion on homeschooling is likely heavily built on the type of homeschooling you have witnessed/been involved in.
At the end of the day, everyone has their own experience and biases built into schooling from their own lived experiences. For every, "I was homeschooled and grew up to be very social and successful” story, there is a, "I learned nothing and I don't know how to talk to people" story.
are you a public school teacher by chance? your view seems biased against anyone who does not send their kids to public school.
The activities you mention are not even thought about as socialization situation outside of homeschooling context - because kids come, engage in highly structured activity and leave.
So... exactly the same as public schools, then?
In my experience a home schooled child is significantly more likely to be good at social skills than a public schooled child. They are also adept at navigating adult conversation and social situations much sooner.
I find it interesting that your experience is the opposite. Where in the world do you live?
Anecdotal evidence is going to vary certainly and effect is highly dependent on the parent. But I've been around homeschooling groups for over 30 years now and the balance of them have been significantly ahead of the public schooled.
Do you have any published evidence for this?
The most successful kids that I see are the ones who have professional instructors by day and excellent support at home. Not one or the other, but both.
How does sitting in a room with a bunch of kids, all of whom are within one year of you in age, with an authority figure at the front telling you exactly what to do, teach you "how to adult"?
It might prepare you for Army boot camp, which is the only "adult" place you're likely to encounter that kind of environment. Even prison usually has a range of age groups.
This is not an accurate description of school. Maybe, maybe in high school and college you kinda sorta get to something resembling that, but for elementary school and middle school it is nothing at all like your description.
I'll grant you that 40-50 years ago it was a bit more regimented. I'm old too. But I have school age kids in both elementary and middle school, and I have a lot of experience in what their environment looks like. It's very dynamic, lots of hands-on learning opportunities.
Elementary and middle school are even less like being an adult than high school
I think GP's point is that the school environment is nothing like "adulting," so your original point was just plain wrong.
And I agree with the GP: I don't see any reason why home-schooled kids would be at a disadvantage to public school kids when learning to navigate the adult world, because the school environment is strange and not at all focused on "adult life skills."
It actually made for a very unsafe college experience. I had no experience telling anyone no, or doubting anyone's intentions. It took being lured alone with a man to realize that he didn't want to study Calc I, he wanted to make sexual advances on me when I was alone. I was lucky to learn that lesson without getting sexually assaulted.
Took me another few years to realize that I didn't have to obey everything my boss said, even if it was personally detrimental to my career.
My mom, of course, would tell you how great it was that I wasn't socialized with "an unnatural collection of same aged peers" and how I was always "so polite around adults."
Hmm... so you're saying that students aren't segregated into artificial cohorts of a specific age, and there isn't an authority figure in the classroom telling them what to do?
Perhaps that's the case where you live (though I'm...skeptical), but it certainly is the case here and everywhere else I've ever lived.
IIRC that sounds a bit like Montessori (done right), but that's uncommon generally and extremely uncommon in upper grades.
I wasn't even sure what an upper-grade Montessori program would look like, and I found this: https://amshq.org/About-Montessori/Inside-the-Montessori-Cla....
what school age child has access to that? Maybe in the most selective and well funded private schools there's professional instructors put public school? No way.
And they are often worse at navigating interactions with children who are not homeschooled (at least I was). Specificity is king.
There was a stretch between 14 and 18 where I didn't see anyone other than my mom and dad. Oh, I made small talk to the grocery clerk once a week. Frankly, it was appalling emotional neglect, and my dad has apologized for not stepping up to fix it. My mom remains in denial that it was even a problem.
And meanwhile, anytime someone brings up homeschooling there's always a ton of people saying socialization can't possibly be a problem. Usually people who weren't homeschooled themselves, of course.
We don't personally home school but have many friends that do. It's a very common thing in our church and community. It's hard to tell what kids are homeschooled versus the ones that aren't. Many homeschools engage in co-op programs and use curricula to drive personal engagement. For instance in one family we're very good friends with they use a curriculum that requires community service for middle school ages and up. There are several charities that they engage with in addition to the community service activities that the church is doing.
It also doesn’t mean just Billy and his little sister Jenny learning all by themselves. Homeschooling parents often join groups where they can bring all the kids together. The kids can socialize and the parents can share responsibility for teaching and supervising.
It also doesn’t mean just the parents participate. At my local public library, the children’s floor has a huge amount of programming aimed at homeschooling families. The librarians run activities with the kids, showing them how to find books in the library for science research, make crafts together (by hand and with library 3D printers), learn about engineering by building cars and robots with electronics components.
Homeschooling can of course be done badly and we should worry about kids in those environments. However, homeschooling done right can be far more dynamic and engaging than the best public schools around. It also doesn’t have to be expensive, it just takes time and commitment from the parents involved.
The kids are still required to pass the same exams to get their high school diploma, and they still get a package of course work and required reading and such. They also have access to a teacher to ask questions to, who can help explain concepts, projects, and such.
My wife was homeschooled here growing up and she loved it. She would finish her school for the day in the morning then do whatever she wanted for the rest of her time. She would also finish her courses early and have long summers. Now she has a masters degree and leads teams at work.
Definitely not for every family or every kid, but the outcomes don't have to be terrible
This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, depending on the age. 2 subjects per day, so as a parent your teaching commitment was a half day a week on 1 subject.
They would do field trips. They held a school play in a garage complete with costumes and video. And the kids were smart, well mannered, socially adjusted kids with very happy and normal lives. And there are plenty of sports opportunities as well. As far as I know, they all went to public high school too.
Completely shifted my view of what I thought home schooling was, which was the kids stuck in 1 house with 1 parent all day in social isolation.
The reality was closer to a model of a Montessori school which has a huge amount of success stories.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...
You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private. Maybe you'll be a therapist and years later get to talk to one of these people how they are effectively crippled for the rest of their life. Or you'll be like me that grew up in a place that had a bunch of religious organizations that homeschooled most of their children with educations that I'd consider completely and totally deficient, and then pull those same people back into the organization as cheap/uneducated labor they could abuse.
Obviously there’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, and the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century, which is roughly when modern public schools started appearing in the US (based on the “Prussian model”).
There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve. It can be too easy to focus on narrow sets of metrics like test scores, or collect a bunch of anecdotes about bad experiences in public schools (or bad experiences in homeschooling). IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.
Imagine your school district has banned teaching algebra to 8th graders, for reasons of equity. You're upset at this, since you have a child about to attend 8th grade. You go to a school board meeting, express yourself, and are at best ignored or more likely called names. What, from the perspective of a parent with a child who needs an education, do you then do? Fixing the system would be nice and all, but how do you do that before your kid becomes an adult, let alone make up for all the damage public schooling has been doing in the meantime?
Both suggestions require extra time, while still keeping your child "within the system" through attending school and (presumably?) receiving a decent-enough education in other non-math subjects. If the malaise extends to (many) other subjects, then I could see how home schooling becomes a more attractive option.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741653
...so now after your child spends hours every day at school, they have to spend yet more hours learning what they should have learned in school.
You can see why so many parents decide that for more effort, they can save their child a lot of wasted time, effort, resentment, and bad influences. Particularly families where at least one parent can stay at home (and these days, working from home makes that so much easier once kids are old enough to learn by themselves).
This makes the comparison very hard, since one side is has all of its successes and failures critiqued in public, and the other side is only ever talked about with anecdotal data.
Personally I believe there should be some sort of periodic standardized test for homeschooled kids too. Even if it's not for "passing" a grade, so we know in which level of learning they are compared to everyone else.
If we can't compare them, how can we evaluate its merits and flaws?
For the SATs, homeschooled students score ~75 points higher than public school students. We can draw only limited conclusions from that, though. People self select into taking the SATs. And there's the the bigger issue of demographics: given the demographics of homeschoolers who take the SAT, you'd expect them to outperform anyway. Regardless, more data is better.
I would say that "in some states" is the key here. A lot can change depending on the state.
Which has essentially the same incentives and results that the NRA does -- cater to the craziest of your constituents, fan outrage, then push the most extreme views (to protect everyone).
As a result, HSLDA essentially says that no child abuse or sexual assault exists in the home schooling communities, because it's the only way to justify their position that zero regulation is the only appropriate amount of regulation.
Reality, of course, has a non-zero rate of abuse (which the HSLDA then does their best to hide). Warning, pretty terrible stuff: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2013/05/hslda-...
But it's psychological outcomes and averages, so I'd take any study with a grain of salt. It does match my experience having home-schooled friends growing up, it's just so much more efficient to be learning at one's own pace than that of the slowest kid out of 30.
[1]https://epaa.asu.edu/index.php/epaa/article/view/543
Compared to public schools, where most kids are going to take some kind of achievement test. Whether it be the SAT, ACT, or state-level grade advancement test.
Also, the demographics are pretty wonky, as they note:
I honestly think social sciences aren't all that amenable to the scientific method - too hard to control all variables - and I'm sure someone could cherry pick studies to say the opposite of what I'm posting here. But, what else can we do?
It's a miracle even drug development on the harder science side works as well as it does.
Thanks! I'll give this one a read later.
Ostensibly education is why the schools exist. If they're not going to do that, let's at least let the kids go play in the park or something. They'd probably get better socialization that way anyway.
Does anyone actually believe this? It would be more than naive to do so. On r/teachers just the other day, I was reading about one of them complaining that all they really are, are baby-sitters so they parents can work dayshift. Even they know what they're for.
But if everyone were to suddenly be willing to speak this truth aloud, it'd be too absurd to continue. People are shamed and guilted into paying the taxes for education. No one could be shamed or guilted into paying for someone else's teenager daycare.
> The math situation is a clear signal that school administration/education departments do not prioritize education, and in fact find it unfair that some students actually manage to learn something, and want to stop that.
I was in first grade in 1980 (1981?). It was like this for me the entire run of it. Wanting to learn more, hungry for it, with them rationing what I could learn to tiny little crumbs a few times throughout the school year. Studies were paced out for the dumbest kid in class. I think I made it to my sophomore year of highschool before I gave up, and when I did, that was my fault too.
It was bad even then, and at least back then they were still pretending that it was about education.
GP clearly believes it, since they wrote this. I believe it too, and I think this is a mainstream belief, not a "more than naive" one. Your one anecdote based on a Reddit rant (and, I assume, personal bias) is not nearly convincing enough to change my mind.
My anecdote, such as it is, is hardly uncommon. It is in fact, nearly a cliche at this point, or a stereotype. I sincerely doubt that me having communicated it to you is your first encounter with the idea.
As to your mind, I don't wish to change it. I am content with you remaining naive. My own children receive advantage from this. Please continue to screw up the public education system for decades, my entire lineage can only prosper the longer this continues.
So we're clear, when a teacher complains about being daycare, what they mean is they're:
The first of those is a reasonable expectation of the job. The second two, less-so.And so you complain about the unreasonable things, but don't mention the reasonable one... because it's literally the job.
Taking kvetching about ancillary mandates to mean that education isn't happening or isn't still the primary job is weird.
When someone disputes this, what they really mean is that they are uncomfortable with the realization that it is daycare, that it hurts them to consider that something so profoundly part of their status quo is rotten to the core, and it makes their own lives seem dishonest. They would rather than misperception that education still occurs to persist unchallenged.
> because it's literally the job.
Hasn't been, for years. It's not improving/reverting. You're willfully blind to it.
> or isn't still the primary job is weird.
Please don't mistake me. I'm not claiming that education has been secondary to other concerns. I'm saying that it doesn't happen at any significant rate at all, isn't in anyone's list of priorities, and that when it does happen it is accidental and unrepeatable.
Or, they disagree, and they have their own thoughts.
> Please don't mistake me. I'm not claiming that education has been secondary to other concerns. I'm saying that it doesn't happen at any significant rate at all, isn't in anyone's list of priorities, and that when it does happen it is accidental and unrepeatable.
As someone with two parents, multiple family members, and past partners in the profession of education, early childhood and other... we will have to agree to disagree.
I'm sure your opinions are formed from your own experiences.
Mine disagree.
Hehe, this is simply not true. Where did this conspiracy theory come from, and why do you think this poorly of people who are spending their time trying to help kids despite low pay and a constant barrage of harsh critical opinions from parents, law-makers, and hordes of armchair critics on the internet?
You’re making wild assumptions and using the worst possible motivation to build a straw man criticism. If you can do better, maybe you should get involved or consider being a school administrator?
I don’t like it when there is less support for the motivated students, and it happened to me in high school. But you are aware the situation we’re discussing is due to needing to educate 100% of the student body up to a minimum standard, right? Public schools are almost always underfunded and short-staffed. Nobody’s trying to actively prevent the smart kids from learning, they’re trying to avoid using all their resources teaching the kids that don’t need it as badly from leaving the larger group of kids who’s families have less money completely behind. Your comment is completely ignoring what happens to the students who are behind in math already, and how to get them enough help.
What is always true is that what’s best for the group isn’t necessarily best for the individual. In this case, you’re suggesting the opposite of prioritizing education for all, and thus you’re not talking about prioritizing education, you’re talking about prioritizing resources toward students that already meet the minimum standards. Schools, teachers, and administrators are trying to prioritize education for all, and they have an explicit duty to get every last kid up to basic minimum standards. If they don’t meet those goals of getting the bottom half of their classes passing, they could lose their jobs and they would be failing to prioritize education for all.
This is false. Why else ban teaching algebra district-wide to 8th graders? The explicit justification is that it helps some students get too far ahead of other students and causes inequitable access to take calculus classes later on, which is considered a bad thing.
Teachers even complain if you help your child accelerate through the textbook for the year.
If a state did the same thing with LGBT topics or evolution, I suspect you'd take no issue with calling it a ban.
Why are so many that hate public schools so focused on these two things? I don't think there's an evolution class, but it would be covered in biology.
They do want those things banned in schools and since they can't get them banned have rage quit the system.
Hahaha you mean the topics that are actually getting banned in states like Florida and Kentucky?
> giving directives that schools are not to devote any resources to teaching 8th grade algebra is in every sense equivalent to “banning teaching algebra”
Again, please provide some specific examples of this happening. Are you getting all worked up over something that is mostly made up or taken completely out of context? No way to know unless you cite the actual problem and demonstrate the magnitude of the problem.
Of course there absolutely is a huge difference between not having the resources for a class and banning it by law, and you know it. You can argue the outcomes might be equivalent, if you want, but it undermines your own argument to exaggerate.
I can't speak to local school board politics outside of SFUSD, but here's a particular example:
https://www.sfexaminer.com/forum/put-algebra-1-back-in-eight...
Opinion piece, but substantive.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sfusd-algebra-ma...
A more recent piece.
Googling it I can see that SFUSD is reconsidering https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...
> The question is not if we can increase acceleration options, but how we can meet that need equitably and while upholding our SFUSD values
Says it all. They have the resources, but still don't want to do it because outcomes will (obviously) diverge.
The California proposal for mathematics education got a lot of play on HN over the last several months, e.g.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237018
Here you go: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/14/metro/cambridge-schoo...
I'm sure you'll move the goalposts and say it doesn't count.
Banning advanced math is just another instance of this. A slower paced class for lower performing students would actually help them. Bringing down advanced students only serves to make the school look more equitable.
> A slower paced class for lower performing students would actually help them.
Agreed, bingo! If you don’t have the resources to cater to people who are ahead, the only choice to help those who need help is to lower the bar.
The thing about tracking is that it doesn't require more resources. If you have 6 classes in a year, you can put e.g. the top 17% together, and they can move at a faster pace than the bottom 17%. Or you can let kids take classes with mixed ages. Gifted kids don't need more resources. Literally you could have them go sit in the library and do what they want and they'd probably learn more than sitting in a class where they're forced to pay attention to something they've already mastered. When I was in calculus I was bored enough that I would also read my uncle's discrete math book that he let me borrow, but most teachers don't like when you ignore them, and when you're in a class with the lower end of the aptitude curve, there's negative peer pressure around being a nerd.
Hehe of course it does. You’re talking about more curriculums, more book and material acquisition, more teachers with more training, etc. And maybe lots of schools don’t have 6 different math classes.
> Gifted kids don’t need more resources.
Agreed! That’s maybe why some schools are focusing on the kids who do need more resources?
In fairness to your argument, I think “gifted” kids do need support though, it’s just that they are statistically better at either having it given to them outside of school, or of finding it on their own. What’s left is just a rather weak argument about not letting them get bored. Solving boredom should take a back seat to solving education for the less fortunate, IMO.
> What’s left is just a rather weak argument about not letting them get bored. Solving boredom should take a back seat to solving education for the less fortunate, IMO.
Okay, then let the advanced kids go sit in the library, go outside and play, or go home. Making them sit in class is, if anything, going to make them anti-social and create resentment toward the "dumb" kids. I don't think torturing a kid making them sit bored out of their mind among people they don't like for 15% of their life for no reason is a "weak" thing to argue against.
But the objection is "inequity". Surely this extra effort creates more inequity?
I always laugh at the people insist it's best to let their kids be guinea pigs while public school systems which aren't even utilized but it's most vocal advocates for their own children are on a multi decade track of "figuring it out".
The most likely place someone is to experience violence in their lifetime is in a school, sexual abuse and assault rates are higher than in the Catholic Church or BSA by population. You can't be mad at people for opting out while the rest of the advocates figure it out for the 5th decade of objective decline and empty promises when problems they've experienced when they were in school haven't even been addressed or have gotten worse. They may be voting for the right people and are active advocates for better education but their kids are in immediate need of a better education.
Your "dogwhistle" is itself a dogwhistle (your obvious implication being "only a racist Trumptard could support allowing students to take algebra in 8th grade"). Ironic, in that the people defending the decision implicitly believe that non-white people are less capable of learning algebra than white people. Which itself is stupid, from a historical point of view. Who, after all, first formulated algebra?
Here's my lived experience: algebra in 7th grade, black boy. I'd have been better off taking it later, and making it up with summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses /certs in between algebra, algebra ii, calc, and diff eq/calc ii in high school. If that meant my classmates could have a better chance of keeping up, all the better; being in the historically lily-white gifted track at my magnet high school didn't do much in the way of convincing my teachers not to give up on me at the first sign of weakness. Yet another nuance you either miss or refuse to acknowledge.
The supplementary courses were provided by the school system, by the way. I would have taken them, but I was working or otherwise predisposed. If you really cared, you'd be advocating for the same (especially since a large portion of the general failure to attain math competency in America is due to our excessively long summer breaks).
That's a bit of an understatement. I'm not great at history, but my understanding is that the mid-19th century was a little lacking in videoconferencing software, educated people with the resources to be on the other end of that video link, population density to have enough other like-minded kids within driving... uh, horse-riding range, up to date books, parents who weren't gone to the factories or fields during the day, etc.
> There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve.
Agreed. There is a smaller set of objectives that they actually do achieve.
> IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.
I would assert that it's impossible to fix this broken system, and I can cite a lot of past history. I would also assert that replacing it entirely with homeschooling (which is not a single thing, but whatever) is also a guaranteed path to failure. The only hope I see is for exploration to be possible, and for people in the different situations to learn from each other. The public school institutions do try to experiment, but are incredibly restricted in all sorts of ways. Homeschoolers have the training wheels off and are much more free to crash straight into the bushes or off a cliff, but in practice plenty don't and plenty come up with a lot of different ways of doing things, some of them that seem to be working quite well in practice — academically, socially, etc.
I agree that sucking resources out of public schools to benefit the privileged few is very troubling and worrisome. But so is the current state and trajectory of public schooling, and holding everyone back may be short term fair but long term disastrous.
We're homeschooling one of our kids (both until recently, when one went to a public charter high school). We've seen the institutional effects firsthand. Simple example: we found excellent math resources, but they weren't "A-G" accredited for University of California entrance requirements. Which gave us pause, since we wanted to leave that option open. We ended up going through a A-G accredited program, the best of what we could identify, for a semester. It was crap: rote memorization of algorithms exactly matching to the state standards, lots of repetitive exercises, minimally useful feedback from teachers and their assistants. My son passed all of their tests and got an A+ grade, and is now a semester behind in math because none of that stuck in a way that is useful for building on. It was a waste of time. We gave up on it and the whole accredited path, and went back to an online program that is far more conceptual, rigorous, and just plain effective. (His earlier public school experience was somewhere in the middle, Again he did quite well there according to the state tests.)
My guess is that it's yet another form of enshittification: A-G accreditation is very valuable, but once you get it there's no profit in increasing quality, only in growing your student base. There aren't enough accredited places to provide any competition on quality, especially when there's so much disagreement about what "quality" is in the first place, and as usual any useful definition ends up being expensive. Non-accredited places have to compete on quality.
(For anyone who finds value in my personal opinions: Silicon Valley High School math bad, Art of Problem Solving math good.)
"Mistakes of this size are never made innocently." ~Ayn Rand
Inequality of education is a symptom of a self reinforcing broken economic system.
Meanwhile, if I can provide a superior education and social experience for my children, Im glad to have the opportunity to do so. I’ve seen bad outcomes and good ones from homeschooling, and in my particular case I am absolutely delighted with the results (now that my children are adults)
But to achieve that my wife and I invested our entire lives, uprooting ourselves and living experiences with our children as part of their education, sailing around on a boat we rebuilt and going to local schools in other languages as their cultural preparation. It was a bit hellish for my wife and I but the 6 years we invested in that paid unbelievable dividends for our children. Most people can’t or won’t do that.
We weren’t (financially) rich, but I have always prioritized my freedom over material wealth, and you can do amazing things on a modest (60k/year was our passive income from contracting at that time) budget if you have complete control of your time.
I suspect that the education kids get at the worst 20% of public schools in the country is still way better than the worst 20% of homeschoolers.
I also would totally believe that the education kids get at the top 20% of homeschools is better than the average public school.
Public schools are far from perfect, but there are minimum standards and there are resources at the state and federal level to try to improve schools that aren't meeting those standards.
My problem with homeschools is that in most states, there aren't any standards being enforced. If homeschools had surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd be fine with it.
It's kind of the democracy versus authoritarianism debate. Authoritarians typically look really good on paper because they can conceal their mistakes, while the democracy bears all to the populace. And yea, there are some benevolent dictatorships with great outcomes, but I don't think that a single one of the homeschoolers would think that would be a valid point because it's also the exception.
> homeschooling has horrific and hidden outcomes
Please tell me more, as a homeschooled and successful software engineer and family guy I'm interested. Several people in my family are or have been homeschooled. I could tell you where they're at right now but I've bragged enough with myself already.
Yes, there can be horrific and hidden outcomes with homeschooling. Also with public education. Also with woodworking. Or having kids. Or cooking.
It's about how you do something, and why you do it.
Sorry for being so condescending, but your statements are offensive in their absurdity.
> Please tell me more
https://www.hsinvisiblechildren.org/fatalities/
The root issue is that the homeschooling community, in their general distrust and suspicion of government authority has pushed hard for zero oversight and regulation (mostly through the HSLDA).
In most states, they've been able to achieve that.
And as potentially valid of a goal as avoiding oversight by someone you don't trust might be, it has willingly created a void.
A void that the homeschooling community itself doesn't police.
Consequently, when you do have the worst of the worst home outcomes... there's no one to turn to. And HSLDA even has specific playbooks to help parents avoid CPS intervention.
These cases are then buried to the extent possible (lobbying, media removal requests) because their very existence threatens the overall goal.
What are a few broken eggs to make an omelette, though?
This is horrific.
> What are a few broken eggs to make an omelette, though?
I hope my comments don't suggest that this is the perspective of my thinking.
However I think we should make an effort of separating extreme cases from the norm. It is unjust to judge homeschooling as a concept by these very unfortunate fringe cases, when there's heaps of proven success cases on the other side, furthermore taking into account that abuse also happens despite kids going to public or even private schools.
And also taking into account that the protection laws that are so mentioned here have also been often abused by the government against innocent and honest people and their families.
Most of this stuff is driven by religion and politics.
As so is the backlash. I get the impression that the emotional foundation to many of the objections to homeschooling is the idea that some kids will get a (home-schooled) education that doesn't conform to the commenter's politics or values. School has long been a mechanism for a dominant group to impose its politics and values on other people's kids. Public schools are just a milder form of that than Indian residential boarding schools or Chinese boarding preschools (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/china-tibet-board...), but they still perform the same function.
Homeschooling provides an escape from those functions (and other problems), and that's one I'd certainly want available to myself. I can imagine how nightmarish it'd be to be forced to send my kids to one of those Chinese boarding schools.
Deficits of empathy like those that would deny that escape (and the attendant hypocrisy) are getting really grating to me, even in people I more or less agree with.
IMO, private religious schools with appropriate regulation (ie not some indoctrination academy) are a great thing, and I think supporting families in some way to avail themselves of them is a good compromise.
As I stated elsewhere here, my kids went to catholic schools and did great. I’m not approaching this as a “thou shalt public school” perspective. I also coached baseball to age 15, and I can tell you that kids benefit from someone who isn’t mom or dad instructing them.
Is that "typical"?
It's a leap to assume that it's "typical" that homeschooling parents incompetent and incapable of educating their children. If anything, I'd assume the extra attention and emotional investment that's possible could make up for a lack of a educational credentials.
It's also a leap that the public schools would do better. It's also a common theme here that a motivation for homeschooling lack of academic rigor or outright failure of the public schools. I could see homeschooling as the only realistic option for a parent who lives in a failing school district (which are depressingly common) but is not wealthy enough to afford private school tuition (and has no access to vouchers).
And I'm not really biased here: I send my kids to public school.
These don't need to be exceptional, but they do probably need to be above-average to do a decent job, and obviously time and wealth are entangled (no time if have to work two jobs).
You literally do not know what you're talking about. Go read the article I linked, which you clearly did not bother to do.
Yesterday, there was a teach complaining that they weren't allowed to flunk students who did not show up for class. For middle school. They weren't allowed to flunk students who scored 0% on tests, because they would sit at the back of class and play on smartphones the entire time, or disruptively talk to other students.
When they would demand from administration some kind of answer, they'd be told they weren't doing enough to engage the students.
You claim there are minimum standards, and technically that's true... any of us could look those standards up on the internet in only a moment, those standards are ignored for some incredibly large fraction of public schools.
> If homeschools had surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd be fine with it.
The great thing is, I don't have to put up with you being fine with how my wife and I teach our children. We don't have to answer to you.
I'm not just a contrarian here. You are fine with what the public schools are doing, right now. Your oversight, such as it is, doesn't seem to be effective at doing any of the things that I could want. It does lead me to be suspicious about what it is that you want.
If an argument is based on a single specific case, then an extreme argument can be constructed about anything.
E.g. public school teachers duct taping students to desks
E.g. home schooling parents sexually abusing their children
These things happen at non-zero rates, but neither are representative of the general population.
Letting parents opt out of public schools means that the most committed abusers get to sidestep this safety valve.
Any distraction from a school's primary mission to educate disparately impacts the people who need it most.
School's primary mission is to serve the needs of a societies children.
Inactive children don't learn as well as active children (especially boys). Hungry children don't learn as well as feed children. Abused children don't thrive.
I'm deeply curious why you don't want public school children feed or protected from abuse.
My children are more important to me than, well... just about anything. Including your children or anyone else's.
If other people are so subhuman as to harm their own children, then that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make so that my children aren't abused by the public school system, aren't turned into idiots by the public school system, and aren't indoctrinated by the public school system.
Do you think that when there's a string of tweenage suicides, that the contagion didn't spread via public schools? Am I supposed to put my kids at risk of that, just so you can pretend you'll catch the 1-in-10,000 of horrific abuse, which CPS will just ignore anyway?
You offer a bad bargain. I pay everything and get nothing. Fortunately (and I mean this in a way that the words just can't do it justice... "fortune" of the sort like out of Greek mythology where the gods have smiled upon me and bestowed every blessing and boon) I don't have to take that deal.
Primary schooling's mission is to educate children about capabilities to provide for themselves and those in there care as well as operate as how to perform and behave as productive members of society. Ancillary benefits are nice, but not required, to achieve that mission, thus should only be included in the strategy to the point that they support the overall mission.
So kids learn better when both active and not hungry? Yep, we know this, and thus justifies having lunch, cafeterias, gyms, and PE class. (We should have more funding for these things).
So kids learn better when not abused? Yep, we know this, and thus schools are typically required reporters. (And thank goodness they are -- we should fund more training on these things).
What you missed in my prior comment was that the argument wasn't against any of these outcomes. It was bemoaning that society requires these ancillary benefits in schools in order for society to continue operating at all, not that it's nice that schools are available as resources to provide what should be a child's primary caregiver's responsibilities.
Thus my comment. Schools shouldn't have to be police, meal kitchens, exercise facility, or child care in order for society to function. But they too often are. It's a failure of policy to which no one holds others to account. And insisting or expecting that schools provide these as primary responsibilities does harm to the students to whom need these in their lives, but for the school would not have them.
Help the marginal student? Yes, absolutely, we should fund.
Provide long term assistance (disguised welfare) through the schools? Not appropriate, a full change in situation is warranted for basic needs to be met for children by their caregivers.
Consider this. During the pandemic, we could have conscripted all school teachers in the first few weeks to deliver food to everyone within their school operating areas. A ready, idle workforce to solve one of the fundamental problems, allowing virtually everyone but teachers to remain locked down while focusing use of protective gear during its limited availability. Why didn't we rely on the schooling workforce to deliver food during lockdown? Most of the answers I can see apply to long term welfare and social safety net assistance being provided through schools as well -- training, safety, and other elements that simply aren't appropriate to expect of educators.
You said:
> Completely disagree. [...] Any distraction from a school's primary mission to educate disparately impacts the people who need it most.
This response makes it sound like you don't "Completely disagree." after all.
I've explained my disagreement sufficiently. Have a good day.
but even if that's what the author meant, what's wrong with education being a necessary support for other goals?
it's always quite hard to identify tangible skills that traditional education actually teaches, and explain why those are important to the real lives of graduates. the average person needs, day-to-day, pretty minimal R,W&A skills.
Absolutely insane take.
This is a street that goes both ways. I had parents who were caring, nurturing, and not even remotely abusive. The other children at my public school were physically and emotionally merciless, and the school didn't give a shit. When I started standing up to my bullies and fighting back, I was the one who got in trouble, not them.
In my n=1 data set and lived experience, public schools are the evil, twisted abuse enablers, not the parents.
And you don't need n=1, this is extremely common.
Not sure which is worse.
I have an education thanks to my family and despite public education. I was partially homeschooled. It was my family who helped me go through high-school, not the other way around. For the high-school I went to, I could have (and almost did at one point) ended up being dead, for all they cared.
I won't deny there's abuse and cases in which public institutions have helped and saved people, but by assuming that this is the norm you completely overshot it here with your absolutism.
I disagree with your risk assessment, though. Most kids who are abused are most likely to be abused by a parent, not a stranger. (source: https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/nationa...)
Homeschool requirements vary wildly by state, and even in states with more requirements like testing, kids slip through the cracks. I was never required to take a standardize test by either of the states I lived in (Washington and Oregon). I knew a homeschool girl my age (12) who could not read. Her 16 year old brother could read, but could barely do math. They had no learning disabilities, their mom just wanted the welfare paycheck for them and otherwise ignored them. She already had a 5 year old and a newborn as well to keep the gravy train coming.
I had very little access to mandated reporters, and again nothing enforced by law. Those I did have access to, like my annual visit to my doctor, my mother insisted in sitting in the exam room with me. The doctors made no effort to remove her (they asked me in front of her if I was comfortable with her staying. Of course I said yes, I would have been severely punished at home if I admitted I wanted her to leave.)
Safety rules are not made with the 99% of good people in mind, but to catch the 1% of bad actors. Homeschooling is attractive to good parents because they can improve the outcomes for their children. It is also attractive to bad, abusive parents because it removes children from any external oversight and support structures outside their abuser's control.
I am not trying to downplay any risks here, and even less disregard very unfortunate situations and cases that for sure happen more often than they should.
However I can't see how this becomes as absolute as the parent comment is suggesting, in which by default it is assumed that parents are nefarious agents and public school is the saviour.
Which brings me to:
> Safety rules are not made with the 99% of good people in mind, but to catch the 1% of bad actors.
The risk in accepting this, as it happens so often in society, is ending up having to downgrade everyone to the worst case scenario, and working from that.
> The risk in accepting this, as it happens so often in society, is ending up having to downgrade everyone to the worst case scenario, and working from that.
I think most folks would be fine with homeschooling if there were reasonable regulation for it, including sharing your curriculum and schedule with the state, and allowing surprise inspections during your schedule, so that abuses can be found.
The biggest problem with homeschooling right now is that the lobbying group for homeschooling is vehemently opposed to any form of regulation, which makes it the wild west, which allows abusers to flourish.
If homeschooling wants to prevent the worst excesses, it has to standardize oversight and enforcement mechanisms.
"Zero regulation is the only acceptable amount of regulation," the talking point, enables abuse.
Not by the 99% who are doing it well!! But by the few bad apples out there.
By my thinking:
Those don't seem overly onerous to prevent abuse from taking advantage of homeschooling options.And the homeschooling community should want these things too, because they would provide a firm rebuttal to anyone attacking the practice from a perspective of abuse.
But now... when some abuse happens... but there are continued calls for zero oversight...
That's not a great look.
I'm glad you had a good school experience. I was lucky to avoid the worst of it, but I knew kids who grew up with lifelong PTSD from the bullying / abuse, and complete apathy of the school system.
Likewise, I knew kids at school who had terrible home lives. This was almost a result of drug or alcohol abuse, or just plain neglect on the part of the parents. The children were treated as an annoyance or inconvenience. These parents were glad that school got them out of their sight; I'm sure if boarding schools were free they would happily sent their kids off to one.
I'm convinced that the percentage of parents that would actively make it a full time job to torment their children by homeschooling them is a vanishingly small number. Bad parents simply don't care about their children.
You just described public schools, Universities, and their relationship to the student loan racket. Deficient education followed by indentured servitude through loan repayment. False advertising by public school teachers of a ticket to the easy life through any university degree. If I had a nickel for every person I've met who had their life messed up by that lie, I'd be rich
You're also not going to hear about the homeschooling horrors from the typical HN demographic. Broadly, and obviously with exceptions, there are two groups of parents who choose to homeschool: 1. Parents who have an abundance of educational resources and time and do it to provide a higher quality of education, and 2. Parents who do it for religious separatism reasons because public school gets in the way of their indoctrination. Selection bias means you're going to see a lot of the outcomes from #1 posting here, and not a lot of #2.
For every example who was homeschooled with a high-quality curriculum, had great parent-run extracurriculars, socialized well, and so on, how many examples are invisibly stuck as someone's housewife who can't even be employed because their only textbook was the Bible, and they didn't learn anything past 3rd grade math? They're not posting their horror story here on HN.
I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would not agree with her on, for example, evolution. But she is loving and devoted and her two daughters have received tons of time and investment from her in their education, far more than they would receive in a public school.
I obviously haven't, like, tested her kids, but they do seem smart and well adjusted. I'm not really worried about the limitations on their scientific learning — it's not ideal if they are skipping some evolutionary biology (I actually have no idea but I assume they are) but they are going to leave home, go to college in a very secular country and get to learn that stuff. I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?).
By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.
They’re pretty common, in fact. Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/
“The Bible is the only education you need” is a very common meme among evangelical Christians.
> and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.
Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted curricula, no matter how specious they are. One influential homeschool association has a 24/7 legal hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts at accountability.
> Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/
Contrary to your claim, the linked page implies nothing about the Bible being the "only textbook". It simply offers a set of Bible lessons for homeschoolers ("This exciting curriculum contains homeschool lessons that cover the entire Bible chronologically in four years…").
As for your last statement: in most states there's no oversight. Sure, parents have to file a curriculum that gets reviewed and approved. Parents jump through that hoop by downloading a curriculum and mailing it in. There's nobody checking that they actually follow any of that curriculum. There's no state-run testing as a check and balance.
My kids went to a Catholic elementary school, where I was the school board president. A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum.
The biggest growth in private schooling is in this and similar curriculum. It’s attractive to more reactionary people as they can assert “local control” while using texts that are too old to be considered controversial.
Parents aren’t to blame necessarily, people want what’s good for their kids. But awful elements of society are abusing religion to achieve their social ends. In my case, I was accused of being a “Marxist” for not condemning a fundraiser that provided winter clothing for poor children, including migrants swooped up and shipped across the country. We’ve allowed people to be brainwashed by charlatans.
To be clear, a 'classical education' refers to a traditional form of education where you break up a child's education into grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages and then mainly use primary sources. There's nothing wrong with this system and it was likely the way many people, including Marx, were educated. The idea that this is 'right wing' is bonkers to me.
If you don’t like it, though, there are less successful countries in this world that still persecute people based on religious belief. You are free to try one out. See how it goes.
I don’t agree with parent, but the reasons are vastly more nuanced than “your ancestors were religious so you’re wrong.” And that’s ignoring the even weirder swipe suggesting parent move to a different country.
Instead I simply suggested a reflection: would you still feel this was a good thing to do if it was your great great grandparents having their children seized? Wouldn’t a great many of us have had our families broken?
I’m an atheist and evolutionary biology is my favorite field outside of CS, but unless you are personally working on figuring out how things actually work, I’m not sure how one belief over another benefits the average person.
Evidence, when not absolute, is as useful as the lack of it.
People accept evolution without having a clue about it.
1) The amount of evidence for a claim. 2) The grandiosity of the claim.
If you tell me you have a pet dog named "Spike" I probably would be willing to accept that with as little evidence as a picture of you holding a dog, found in your wallet [i might even take your word for it, if i knew you to be an otherwise mostly honest person]. Because, dogs exist and are plentiful, billions of people own dogs, and "Spike" is a common name. you may be fooling me (it may be the neighbors dog) but i'm still justified in the believe because the evidence rises to the claim.
If on the other hand you claim that you have a pink polka dotted flying dragon as as a pet named "Chester". I would be a fool to believe you. I have no evidence such a thing exists, or that people have them as pets. I would have to see it in person, and even then, i would need to get a report from teams of biologists/zoologists to be willing to accept the claim. It would require tons more evidence.
And yet, the claim STILL isn't _that_ preposterous. The dragon would be an animal, and i know animals exist. I know there are animals with scales, i know some animals fly. I even now there are some with wild coat patterns.
Now if you tell me you believe in an all powerful all knowing god who is responsible for why there is life? I have zero evidence, i have no experience like what you are describing. I've never been given evidence of a being outside of time and space. I don't know that that is even a thing. I don't know what all powerful is, or if that could exist? or all knowing? is that possible? I have no correlary to compare to. It's not like we know King Neptune exists, and while not infinitely powerful, is still pretty boss. Why would i believe that was the explanation for why there are creatures on this planet?
Evolution, on the other hand, has mounds of evidence. We have a powerful fossil record, We went thru a pandemic that shows the power of mutation. Even our own ability to drink milk. And yet even evolution isn't making all that fanciful of predictions. It doesn't claim to know your thoughts, or how you will die. So the evidence rises to claim. Do we know everything there is to know about evolution? Could we be wrong in some areas? Sure. But we are justified in accepting it.
However, I think you either have too high an opinion of how people go about their ideas and beliefs, or you trust too much in the power and protagonism of reasoning.
I'd bet a lot, if not most of the people, don't go as far as you described. They believe in evolution because that's what's believed right now, and they got taught that in school. Try having a critical conversation about evolution with the average Joe, see what you find out.
Truth is everyone has faith in something. I have faith in God, so I believe certain things that might not seem rational to someone. Other people have faith in science and scientists and teachers, so they believe certain things which definitely don't seem rational to me. They don't have proof, they don't understand the reasonings, they haven't seen evidence. They just have faith in "the experts". And so they believe.
Anyway, why is the idea of God being real _that_ preposterous?
as for trusting in experts, there's no question that that is problematic in the extreme. However, it comes back to how the evidence rises to the claim. Can a group of people be experts in a subject? How can we validate that? Can we verify that their are experts in how electrical wiring works? To a large degree we can. We have lots of evidence. Do they know everything, probably not, but i can have confidence that they are mostly correct. Can we verify there are experts in evolution? Again, i think we can. They have produced mountains of evidence. Do they know everything? No. But they are likely largely correct. Can we verify there are experts in God? What are the tests? How do we verify these experts?
You mention faith, and i have to ask, what good is faith? Is there anything you could _not_ believe, based on faith? If faith has no mechanism to filter out anything, does it tell you anything about what is true or likely true?
There's usually low risk in trusting that a contractor is an expert in electrical wiring if they say so, and I usually trust plumbers or tradesmen to know their stuff and do their work. And how many times I've been wrong.
But my point is that most people don't go through this verification process, examining the credentials of scientists, taking a look at the evidencie, studies, papers, reasoning, etc. that backs up evolution. So it's not a rational belief. It's faith in other people, or a system.
If people did that, they would get to the conclusion that a lot of evidence points at the possibility of evolution being true. But by no means it's proven beyond doubt.
I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.
Regarding your questions about faith, I would not say that's how faith works. I have reasons behind what I have faith in. Right now I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.
Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
That something is not visible does not mean it doesn't make sense.
Could I be wrong? I guess I could, by definition, and I would be rejecting a scientific theory. Could you be wrong? What's the consequence of that?
Unlike the natural world, the supernatural cannot be observed nor reproduced so it necessarily requires faith in order to function.
In more concrete terms: I don't know how my microwave oven works. I've never built one and don't have a degree in microwave oven technology. But I still don't need to have faith that it works--I can observe it working and if I wanted to, I could take it apart and observe its subcomponents working. I don't do this, but just the fact that I could means that I don't have to blindly believe in it or conjure up explanations about how it works.
you can still be justified in a belief if the prevailing evidence rises to the claim. We can be wrong about anything, and certainly in the mid 1800's people probably thought they knew how physics worked pretty well. They were wrong, of course, However, until evidence was produced that discounted their existing evidence, they were justified in that belief, and, it mostly worked for all intents and purposes for the tests they proposed/attempted, even tho quantum physics says something quite surprisingly different.
>> I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.
i don't doubt you. However, 9 billion people can use the process of faith to believe things, including things you think are horrendous. How do you discount their beliefs, while being confident in yours, if all you have is faith to discern the difference? If you are discerning a difference, that difference is coming from somewhere else, likely evidence and rationality. So the process of faith, itself, is not trustworthy, as i'm guessing you feel that at least half the planet is using faith and coming to the wrong conclusions.
After her eldest child was bordering on middle school age and still completely illiterate, she wound up sending the lot back to public schools. Thank god, but I still feel awful for those kids.
(Mandatory “not all homeschoolers” of course.)
As you say, learning the basics of evolution is something that can be done on your own in a weekend reading wikipedia. Similarly, you can learn the mainstream scientific explanations of how the universe was created from watching a few youtube videos. That's basically how I learned that stuff as an (atheist) homeschooled kid.
School seems to fail to teach the philosophy of science well anyway - skepticism, evidence, double-blind testing, etc. So I don't think evangelical homeschoolers are missing that much.
The current internet makes it very easy to self-select (intentionally or not) a bubble, and then never see anything outside of it (or only see one-sided takes you agree with about the “debate”). Given the algorithms major platforms use, I suspect it would be relatively easy to create a bubble in which evolution is never treated as real, and where dinosaur bones were planted to fool people.
Public schools themselves indoctrinate children--just with a different set of values than many parents have. The people who built the US system of widespread compulsory public schooling in the US were quite explicit about that being one of the primary purposes of the system. (So were the people who built the Prussian system that was referenced elsewhere in the thread.)
Yale flew me out to interview for a biology graduate program. I had the credentials and test scores to be considered, but was turned down, quite possibly because of those stereotypes (based on the questions I got in the interview process).
You get things like a Christian family whose "curriculum" for their daughters was: listen to classical music, bible listening 20 minutes/day, handwriting, bible memorization, exercise 15/day (not great so far, but wait for it): clean room 6/week, fold laundry 5/week, clean living room 5/week, clear off bar 6/week, tidy shelves in dining room 3/week, tidy stereo cabinet 2/week, clean brown cupboard in pantry 5/week, clean storeroom 1/week, tidy blue chest, dust piano, clean and vacuum, clean hallway, make bed...
Part of good media literacy is being able to discern the facts from the opinion on the part of the reporter. In this case: Yes, it's clear that the LWT team skews pretty liberal, and because of that, they and I are going to disagree on a lot. But you really don't need to spin the fact that numerous groups of extremely christian parents are providing home schooling that borders on (and sometimes crosses into) child abuse. The way children are treated as parents property in this country is fucking disgusting. This is not simply "someone's child" this is what will eventually become a person, a person who will have to work to earn a living the same as the rest of us, a person who will have to reckon with global politics and issues, a person who will have to file taxes and send out their water bill, I could go on for the rest of the day listing off things they will almost certainly have to do, and NONE of them, not a single, sodding, fucking, solitary one of those things, is going to be helped by Jesus.
My wife grew up in an extremely religious household (not fundamentalist thankfully, but very evangelical all the same) and they completely and utterly failed her in terms of preparing her for the real world, in ways too numerous to name here. She learned a whole lot about Jesus though! Not that it did her much because she's an atheist now, and I basically have to run the logistics of the household because she can't do math.
This is among many reasons for my continued slide further from Atheist to Anti-Theist.
The point is they're not trying to not.
> This is not simply "someone's child" this is what will eventually become a person
No; they're already a person. They're also someone's child.
> and NONE of them, not a single, sodding, fucking, solitary one of those things, is going to be helped by Jesus.
This hyper-emotional take seems unrelated to the discussion. I hope things get better, though.
And my point is I think the act of trying to not is overrated.
> This hyper-emotional take seems unrelated to the discussion. I hope things get better, though.
I'm not afraid of my feelings. The notion of children being raised with nothing but their sky friend's manual is terrifying. We are already in the midst of the fallout of a society largely run by people who think the Rapture is coming soon and that the world was created by god six thousand years ago. The effects on long term planning, problem solving, addressing social ills cannot be overstated when the leadership of so many nations is convinced that God is gonna show up sometime in the next 30 years and pack up humanity like a train set, and therefore there's no point in mitigating the effects of climate change, or taking care of people who refuse to take their magical bullshit seriously and/or respect their bigotries as anything other than what they are.
If that doesn't make you emotional to think about, I think that's a you problem.
That would be very odd indeed. Quite an odd thing to claim, though.
> The notion of children being raised with nothing but their sky friend's manual is terrifying. We are already in the midst of the fallout of a society largely run by people who think the Rapture is coming soon and that the world was created by god six thousand years ago. The effects on long term planning, problem solving, addressing social ills cannot be overstated when the leadership of so many nations is convinced that God is gonna show up sometime in the next 30 years and pack up humanity like a train set, and therefore there's no point in mitigating the effects of climate change, or taking care of people who refuse to take their magical bullshit seriously and/or respect their bigotries as anything other than what they are.
This is just raw prejudice and negativity. More people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 100 years that in the previous 10000, and to a standard higher than that of kings and queens of a couple of hundred years ago. We cooperate and interoperate more; we stand our ground together against evils in the world; we fight poverty and hunger more than anyone ever could've dreamed of in history.
> If that doesn't make you emotional to think about, I think that's a you problem.
This is a non sequitur. One can feel emotions without going on hyper-emotional rants.
Absolutely correct, and none of that is achieved by people raised on a strict diet of Jesus. How many borderline illiterate people from the Appalachians are revolutionizing our world? I am not saying people not born of means are incapable of changing the world (beyond the ways in which the world has ensured it anyway) in fact I am mourning, I am mourning the loss of so much human potential, sacrificed on the altar of this anti-social libertarian experiment within which a child is completely unable to advocate for themselves, their desires, and their being until they turn the magic age of 18, at which point they are thrust into the adult world, whether they have been prepared for it or not in the care of people who are not held accountable to performing that task, and if they fail to perform, they will be cast out, they will starve, they will die.
You're damn right I'm prejudiced against these people. I have seen firsthand the hell they inflict upon their children in the course of following their bullshit ideology. I've listened to hours of their intellectually bankrupt and dishonest defenses of ancient texts they insist are the best foundation for a child's learning, texts full of rape, murder, slavery, torture, all performed in the name of a narcissistic unbeing who demands complete obedience to his arbitrary commands, while demonstrating no measurable effect on the world and insisting he is the only truly righteous force. And his followers in turn wield this book as a weapon against the marginalized worldwide, waging an endless war on everyone different from them, based on nothing but their own bigotry.
My only disappointment in being Atheist is I'm fairly certain there is no hell for these people who so desperately deserve it.
The "public schools as a warrantless, ongoing search by the government into parenting" model of schooling.
Why wouldn't everyone want to sign up for that? I mean, it's not even expensive. Just subject your kids to bullying, bureaucracy, and bumblefuckery (call 'em the Three Bs!) and you too can be under suspicion for 13+ years.
That is a pretty serious factor to weight.
https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educa...
Selection effects create a "blind men and the elephant" problem when considering anecdotes about homeschoolers. Homeschool children who return to public school may do so because their parents lack the resources to homeschool them effectively, so they might perform worse (academically & socially) than the average homeschool child. But homeschool children who get jobs in the technology industry and post on Hacker News are probably more successful than the average. It remains for the reader to determine whether the lack of "success" of homeschool children who join the military, in contrast to homeschooler mean success elsewhere, is due to a selection effect or a psychological effect of homeschooling.
It's not that surprising given that the Prussian schooling system upon which ours is based was meant exactly for that.
They were able to franchise a school for, I believe $10-15,000 (certainly under $20K), a background check, and a 2 hour open book test for them both.
I struggle to see how this is acceptable for not just "homeschooling" your own kids, but other people's kids.
Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success.
US schooling has been taken over (at the level of the state legislatures; blame goes to state Congress not to the schools) by companies selling "achievement" test. And also by charter schools whose success is based on only selecting high-achieving problem-free children?
Why do teachers say they are nothing but babysitters? Maybe because they aren't allowed to teach, to inspire love of learning in the children? And their classroom budgets are so tight they buy school supplies out of their own pockets, while living on an income that is close to poverty level? While facing felony charges for having the wrong book in the shelf behind their desk???
When things like "Creme de la Creme Early Learning Center of Excellence" are real institutions instead of something from a comic dystopia, you know you have a problem.
"think of the children" is just the vehicle bigotry. Notice he isn't complaining about straight hook-up apps.
You don't need a need a book to use to these apps and I have strong doubts children are queuing at libraries to read them.
Homosexuality is just really disgusting to a lot of people who don't want their children exposed to it. If you also have to remove books about Tinder so gays don't feel singled out, you can do that too.
The rest are a diverse un-hirable band of racists, anti vaxxers and people that fake injuries for money.
I'm not at all conservative but i can see not all conservatives are like this. This is a recent phenomenon.
Just the gay ones?
I don't want kids using either hookup or dating apps. But the UI's are are very simple so I don't see why removing a book from a library would prevent this?
You can google app tutorials if "swipe left, swipe right" is too complicated for you.
By definition progress is movement in a direction. Who set the direction? Toward which destination? To achieve which aim and goals? Who benefits? To assume it is the students, the teachers, or "the people" broadly, is a naive and destructive assumption.
Social progress by one definition might include the production of obedient soldiers and factory workers. It might include the limiting of cultural diversity, creating a common core of cultural conformity and homogenization among the youth a country populated by recent immigrants. It might include training the youth to accept authority without question.
If one is interested enough to learn about the actual thinking of the founders and maintainers of public school institutions in the United States and around the world, you can read what they published of their thinking for yourself. John Taylo Gatto unearthed much of this thinking and shared it with the world in his books and lectures.
Here is one transcript you may find enlightening:
https://smarthomeschooler.com/blog/2021/5/28/gatto-six-purpo...
"Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success."
How do you measure such success? There's standardized testing but you don't seem to like that.
Public schools were created in the US to indoctrinate catholic kids - the “unwashed masses of Irish papists.” It was an oppressive institution from the start. They were designed with the same architecture as incarceration systems from France and to this day are mainly serviced by the same companies that service our prisons.
There have been so, so many attempts to recast public schools in the image of our aspirations - most notably Teach for America. I count many of their graduates among my edtech founder friends.
For those of us that have given a portion of our lives to improve these systems, the reality is heartbreaking. Public education is a callous political football whose primary purpose is to make sure children are being babysat so their parents can work. Genuine progress can be made but will be snuffed out by the well oiled grinder for government funding and political promotions.
Administrators determine our children’s future, not teachers, parents, or children. Any of those three would be better.
Yes, there are bright spots. But the vast majority of school systems destroy the aspirations of well-intentioned, newly educated teachers within a couple years. Most teachers leave the profession after less than a decade in it.
The best researchers I’ve found have all reached a stunningly simple conclusion on why better funding does not improve outcomes - students are living in intense poverty. Many students are homeless. Many have no safe place to sleep.
The reason homeschooling is rising is because intelligent, caring parents can give their child a better education simply by not subjecting them to the bizarre social experience that has become most public schools.
The exception to that rule is the proof of what matters - a community of parents/guardians who come together and support a mutual learning center with caring educators.
Co-op, private, public, they all work when you have that.
The real public school horror story is that today, in America, a "good school" is defined as one where your child won't get shot.
I leave the rest of the rant as an exercise to the reader.
One of my friends went to a school where she was beaten every day and the teachers had totally given up and most of them did not teach.
Unfortunately, we need much more data than we have. The article mentions school quality is often not the driving reason for homeschooling, but you can definitely imagine public schools where almost any level of homeschooling is a better alternative.
[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-r....
My children are in public school, but I am not sure if they will stay there. Even in "good" schools, there's many problems (especially in middle schools) and a lot of time is wasted if your kids have any academic ability at all.
Peer groups matter. In “good” schools you’re optimizing the peer group. A good/bad school rating has little to do with teacher capability.
The problem is what you do with the parents who do not care at all. People making these statements that “it’s about the parents” - well, it has some truth to it. But when 10% of the students are running the halls, screaming and fighting, beating random kids, having sex and doing drugs in the bathrooms, and assaulting teachers who don’t care anymore, then it doesn’t matter what the other 90% of the parents are doing.
And for older children, peers tend to influence them more than parents anyway. Turning around a failing student will often require separating them from their current friends. Tough to do when you can't afford to move to a better school district.
All the push just hurt me in the end, I would be a lot better off without traditional school, rarely I learned anything useful there.
It’s not a “do this or else”. It’s basically let’s do it together.
If you search niche.com, you can see proficiency scores correlate exactly with household income. Same school systems, same new facilities, same teacher compensation, same class sizes.
And are you saying they have per-student household income data? Or they just have the household income data for the school district as a whole? Or maybe the household income data for the student body as a whole? Those are very different things.
I think we might be saying the same thing though, since “right” school generally means a school where a large proportion of the other kids have parents who are throwing a lot of resources at the kids (including the parents’ time and attitudes towards academic learning). It just so happens that this group of parents is higher income, so the easily visible statistic will be neighborhoods with higher income households will have higher academic proficiency percentages in the schools.
There is also this old map:
https://opportunityatlas.org/
Schools are a tool to teach people at scale. Tools can be used well or poorly and for various end goals.
This doesn't seem to be so self-evident. Why do I care about the education of those around me?
...generates more economic activity
...understands basic civics and government
The public school system isn't doing that for our fellow citizens already. I fail to see why it would be worse if the failure happens at home rather than in a government building.
And that's a fair criticism of some public schools. And some home-schoolers. And probably some private schools.
That's also why you care about the state of the public school system, even if you have no kids (or they don't attend public school).
It’s just odd that so many people here seem to be so in favor of the “sit down and shut up” style of schooling. Isn’t it pretty widely agreed upon that US public schools suck? Don’t you think there are some parents who are homeschooling their children explicitly because they feel their public school would not prepare them to be good members of society?
Regular interaction with non-custodial adults provides more opportunities for child abuse to be uncovered and stopped. You can go on youtube and hear myriad testimonials from former homeschooled kids that were abused for years on end. And nobody knew. Nobody even had a chance to know.
Varies a lot by states. Some states have no assessment requirement for honeschooled students at all, some have a requirement to keep a portfolio which may or may not be reviewed, some have an standardized testing requirement with more flexibility and lower frequency than public schools, and some have homeschool students take the same standardized tests as everyone else.
https://education.uslegal.com/homeschooling/homeschooling-la...
No that’s literally the main benefit. People actually get to teach their own kids without state indoctrination (either left or right.)
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/scientists-flag-ncerts-mi...
I definitely wouldn't want this kind of "regulated" education for children.
I'd bet a lot on parents caring more about their kids welfare than regulators.
My school was actually rated decently for the area. Not the best, but pretty good.
[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-high-adults-unable-basic-mathe...
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
[2] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_...
I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them?
> Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's extraordinarily weird.
If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to address that challenge.
Do you actually feel there's abuse happening? Or, is it that you just find them unusual?
The homeschoolers get a free pass to do literally whatever... don't you see a dichotomy with what you're preaching?
Why can't you just do anything you want, regardless of the effect it has on your dependents?
Second, I do all those things because it's my responsibility, not because the state will come after me if I don't.
One legal theory that may be relevant was brought up long ago for a case on banned books in school: you have the right to raise your kid according to your beliefs, but many states guarantee children the right to education. So the state could regulate homeschooling to ensure all children have access to an actual education.
>If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to address that challenge.
A lot of those resources rely on processes that come after reports from teachers and caregivers. If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation. Children who go to daycare or public school are seen by professionals trained to spot abuse.
We allow anyone to have children, because otherwise we're on a very slippery and short slope towards eugenics. But those children are entitled to the same rights and protections as their parents. It's hard to strike a good balance between a family's freedom and a child's freedom.
Edited out some unnecessary detours in my ramblings
They guarantee the right to /access/ education. This is not at all the same as guaranteeing that all children "must be educated at a state approved school."
> If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation.
I read an incredible number of police reports. There's a lot of abuse that gets detected outside of daycare and schools. Unless the children are literally locked into a basement, I doubt that the parents can continually exercise enough total control to keep whatever other abuse their committing hidden.
To the extent that if it is happening, it's an exceptionally rare case, and I doubt that simply forcing all parents to send their children to a third party for education is going to have any impact on these particularly pernicious cases.
I understand the instinct, but I think the solution is wrong, and it's an inappropriate case to use to defend schooling in general.
That's oversimplifying. You're right about the "at a state approved school", but the right is to access education to a set standard that will equip them for life.
You can't just say "well, they have access to -my- education, so we're good". There should be caveats around quality and deliverability of education.
Because if you (the generic 'you', not singling you out individually) have low/zero value educational material, and no desire to provide it for your children, then that is /not/ them accessing education in any meaninful sense of the concept.
> I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them?
Because your children are not your property, they are your responsibility and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.
As a side note I find it fascinating how people who feel strongly about individual freedom, believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership) over their children. Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to children?
I am their _guardian_.
> and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.
And what is that standard? Passing standardized tests? How do you account for the poor performance of American schools in general? How do you account for the differential performance across the country, let alone, wild performance differences across a single city? If a child goes to school but fails to become educated, can the sue the school district? Does the school owe them continued education until they meet the standard?
> believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership) over their children.
If something happens to my children and I'm even just negligent then I will pay the ultimate price. You cannot ensconce in me this responsibility and then deny my authority to exercise control over them to maintain it.
> Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to children?
Why do you think children can't sign contracts or buy alcohol? They have _limited_ freedom, under my _guardianship_. This is more important than the States imputed idealism with respect to "education."
Actually, American schools do not do badly in international comparisons. They are the number one, sure, but they are still pretty good.
There's also some very unsurprising outcomes based on state policy there.
New test scores, known as MCAP (Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program), obtained by Project Baltimore, revealed that 23 schools, including elementary, middle, and high schools, had not one student that could do math at grade level.
Calverton school (https://www.niche.com/k12/calverton-elementary-middle-school...)
Adding insult to injury, the same teacher said that he even passed kids who had been on his roster all year but didn’t bother to show up for a single day of class. But this teacher says grade changing at Calverton goes much further than just taking a failing grade and making it a 60. Some students who pass, according to this educator, don’t even have grades because they’ve never showed up to class.That's demonstrably false.
You can do plenty of neglectful or negligent things to your children and face zero consequences.
The state dictating and setting the rules is no more free than the parents setting the rules.
This basically comes down to an argument not of freedom, but if the children are property of the state or parents.
When you look at it this way, it makes perfect sense that libertairian minded folks would support homeschooling.
After all, the state isnt offering the freedom of choice and action to children, it is making legal requirements and demands.
Is the purpose of their lives to serve the interests of the state, or society at large? Or should they be live their lives based on their own interests and priorities.
the libertarian perspective is that if you grant the state and society the authority to control the child, it will use that authority to advance the interests of the state or society.
As if public schools provide kids any sort of freedom or autonomy? What is your point here?
Someone has to be in charge of a kid. Either the parent acts as the authority over their child, or the state does.
I couldn’t possibly agree more! They are MY responsibility. Not yours. Not the state’s. Not society’s. I will educate them the way that I see fit. It’s not my responsibility to educate your kids, and it’s not your responsibility to educate mine, no matter how righteous and justified it may feel.
If you are teaching your children to murder all Jews and that red traffic lights mean go, then you are clearly not capable of being responsible for another human being.
I agree, within reason is always necessary, and if those things were being taught then it's time for a visit from CPS, for sure. But it still feels like a potential slippery slope of "You're abusing this child by teaching them things that aren't approved by the state" in the extreme case. I know that may sound silly, but with as polarized as the country has been recently, and with authoritarianism on the rise worldwide (I saw a man get arrested in the UK yesterday because he criticized some protests on Facebook!), I don't see it being an entirely foreign idea.
I bet there's a correlation between this viewpoint and not having any children.
Your kid has a right to education, you don't get to deny them that right. It's funny how these arguments are all "don't tread on my right to tread on my kid."
Because quite frankly, they didn‘t have a say in the matter and rely upon you entirely to provide an adequate education
The issue is that when a kid's at school, there are many people who may notice something's wrong. From teachers, school nurses, school administrators, and even other kids. This is by no means perfect, and many, many cases of abuse slip through the cracks. But it is something, which is more then many home schooled kids have.
While I'd wager most home schooled kids aren't abused, the fact of the matter is it's much easier for an abusive parent to cover up their abuse if their child is home schooled. You may still feel home schooling is a net positive, but this aspect is very hard to deny.
Like the Satanism panics of the 1990s demonstrate, elaborate imaginings of complex sadistic rituals that are necessarily rare[0] bordering on nonexistent, tend to capture the public mind and suck oxygen away from treating the totally unattractive (not even in the capacity of making for a true crime special) real problems.
If you want to see this on TV, the last season of The Wire was about it.
[0] There were actually a spate of ritual killings in Liberia through the 1970s, proving humanity capable at least and making the issue to be one of reasonableness.
One friend’s mom wouldn’t teach him the curriculum for months, and then when she knew a test was coming up she would make him study with her for 14 hours a day to try to cram it in. Then when he naturally performed poorly on state exams he was punished (often physically) for not trying hard enough. She regularly woke him up for classes when she wanted to be awake at 2 or 3 am, then later after her afternoon nap at 6 or 8pm. He grew up constantly tired, without a regular schedule of meals, and never made it to the group outings because he felt sick all the time.
Another friend’s mom just couldn’t be bothered to teach and just took her out on “learning” hikes with other homeschooling moms, never taught her anything, and wound up sending her back to public school with severely (I mean severely) underdeveloped skills after being held back for several years.
Neither of these parents I’m sure “planned” to abuse their children in this way. They just weren’t up for the task of teaching in the way that a child requires, and their own personal issues turned that into a larger problem. But my friends suffered for it.
My honest sympathies to your friends.
> negatively associated with college degree attainment (RR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.88) and possibly with greater risk of posttraumatic stress disorder.
I’m sure I’m just unlucky and that the 3/4 abuse ratio doesn’t hold for the broader population. Higher rate of PTSD is suspect though.
As an anecdote I have close family member that teaches younger elementary school grades. They have told me about signs of possible abuse they've seen but no available recourse.
I'm also aware that school is a also an environment where abuse occurs. How can we say that we are not exposing public school children to more abuse per capita than homeschooled? There is a school in my neighbourhood that often has the police called in. Lockdowns over students bringing in knives and attacking each other.
It would be good to know these things if making an argument that pivots on abuse.
One last anecdote. All the experiences I can remember having that I'd consider abuse occurred in either: school, work or public transit. Some were bad interactions with strangers in passing, other were more chronic (generally at school).
While it is true terrible things can happen to kids at home, you need stats to compare this with the alternative before a stance should be taken.
It's natural to want to stay out of things, especially if one doesn't know the procedure and worries about messing up a family's lives. But it's better for the people in charge of investigating cops abuse to decide the appropriate course.
As for how reporting happens, it depends on the state. In mine (Pennsylvania), all school employees are made well aware they're considered "Mandated Reporters." They are legally required to report any suspicions of child abuse, either through the state's website, phone line, local police, or the county agency responsible for child abuse cases. The suspected abuse victim doesn't need to say they're being abused or anything at all, the reporter doesn't even have to guess who the abuser is. If the reporter thinks there may have been abuse because they saw or learned about physical (e.g. bruises) or behavioral (e.g. afraid to go home) signs, they have to report it. Not reporting can led to misdemeanor or felony charges for the Mandated Reporter. Somebody who reported their suspicion is immune from civil or criminal liability, and protected from retaliation from the institution they work at, for the report (unless it can be shown they're using reports maliciously). They're also tested as confidential informants in any investigation.
The law also encourages "Permissive Reporters" to report suspected child abuse, but without threatening charges for not reporting. These reporters can do so anonymously.
All this info comes from my wife, who was a daycare teacher, and DuckDuckGo-ing "Pennsylvania mandated reporters."
The number of substantiated (court ruling, protective order, etc) child abuse cases in 2022: around 5,000.
No other group, including doctors, police officers, and Child Protective Services themselves, made more reports. Only around 6% of the school employees' reports were substantiated, making their reports least likely to be substantiated. This leads me to believe school employees have a lower threshold for reporting a suspicion compared to other groups.
And they overlook 100x more students beating the shit out of each other. No, I won't cite it. I lived it, and I have relatives working in that system who say nothing has changed.
BTW there are more than 100k school teachers in Pennsylvania. 10k reports a year represents about 1 in 10 teachers making a single report a year. I retract my 100x remark, it's far worse than that.
If you adjust for scale, I would be utterly flabbergasted if home schooling had a higher per capita rate of abuse than actual public schools unless public schools have changed to the point of being utterly unrecognisable from the 80-90's when it was inflicted on me.
The 4th amendment of the Constitution protects all of us from warrantless searches. If you turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches to ferret out criminal activity, then public schools become unconstitutional.
The strange thing is that you can probably turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches without actually codifying that in statute, without making any major changes to school policy. All you have to do is assert that this is one of the major benefits of public education, and get some large fraction of other Americans to believe the same thing.
> You may still feel home schooling is a net positive,
It's a net positive to undermine fundamental human rights?
A lot of people seem to be implying that religious indoctrination is abuse, when it isn't legally, even if you think it should be. I'm personally in between a rock and a hard place here, since I don't want my kids exposed to either religion or LGBT stuff.
From what I can tell, homeschooled kids are given a curriculum with books/workbooks for both the student and the teacher. They are also tested by the state and must meet certain criteria.
so there seems to be guidance and verification.
Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.
This article makes a case that the statistics of small sample sizes has bamboozled many different well-intentioned groups, including the small school movement.
The argument is that the fact that many of the best schools are small is an artifact of statistics (de Moivre's equation) rather than evidence small schools are superior.
Not the way government tends to work in US.
Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US is controlled at a local level; every town, district, and city etc has its own rules, has to hire its own staff and pay for it all out of local taxes. And because the generally tiny constituency of each district, a very small number of nutcases can change the rules and impose their point of view for the school district.
And because of the local funding, there can be huge resource and quality differences between schools for adjacent locations, just due to crossing some arbitrary jurisdiction line.
It is madness, but it is a madness that is deeply loved/entrenched here.
This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents. The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc. You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources.
And you're only partially right about local control of education. There are many federal and state regulations that dictate school policies in every facet. These would rule out many of the local "nut cases". Much of the funding is provided by the state and federal government too, depending on the state.
It’s only “efficient” because it doesn’t have to scale. Add non-wealthy kids into the mix. Add children with learning disabilities. All of a sudden, homeschooling fails a massive chunk of the population.
Public education has served the US well for most of the post-WWII era. Let’s fix it, not abandon it.
I'm not saying to abandon it. I'm saying if the question is efficiency, that particular homeschooling model is very efficient, even if other arrangements need to be made for certain segments of the population (I would revise your "non-wealthy" statement to be "poor" as much of the middle class could make that system work).
Of course there have been multiple attempts to fix the system already. So far we haven't seemed to find the solution. Back to your "non-wealthy" comment, even the current system tends to fail the poor, since parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success (this is largely tied to two parent households, but income plays a role as well).
But many people, both in this forum and in meat-space are doing just that. Perhaps not directly, but the end result of "school choice" (of which there are several flavors) will be the end of generally good-enough public education for most of the population. Toss in the latest conservative boogeymen (CRT, book bans, etc) and the outlook looks pretty gloomy.
parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success
I often wonder if our schools are fine, but everything else is broken.
Stagnant wages, longer working hours, fewer 2 parent households, other things.
My big question is if the money per student is the same, but the outcomes are better, then what can we emulate from the charter or private schools? Or is it selection bias since the parents are involved enough to get them in?
Selection bias a real problem with charters and privates. We've already selected for "parents who give a shit". And frequently for "no IEP or other learning disability". So, kids who are, at worst, average intellect with parents who care enough to fill out some paperwork and drive them to school - those kids are going to succeed almost anywhere.
And I totally understand the desire to get your own children a high quality education. That's a large part of why I moved back to Fairfax County. But, I also feel strongly that strong public schools are a requirement for a healthy society.
Charter schools are frequently oversubscribed, and admit students via lottery. This makes it pretty easy to run randomized tests that aren't affected by selection bias.
No, it does not, because the following sources of selection bias exist.
(1) Charters select for actively involved parents, because they are not the default-assigned by-residence public schools, and an active choice is necessary to get into the pool,
(2) Charters, because they are not scaled to only take the actively-choosing parents from the catchment area of a typical district school, select for parents with greater means who are able to make a longer travel to the school for drop off, pickup, and other necessary interactions.
(3) There are often biases in the lottery system; even something as simple as giving favorable consideration for having a sibling already in the school reinforces the impact of other biases.
I agree, that we should have good public schools. I feel they do get written off by many of the school choice proposals. I think there could be more support if pairing public school improvements with school choice. If we can improve the public schools to the point of being attractive, then it wouldn't matter if school choice was a thing. It's definitely an unusual paradigm where there is a public option with many people being forced to it for financial reasons, yet the institution is largely unwilling to compete with private offerings.
The system today is optimizing for standardization federally in order to try and fight the natural entropy toward a highly unequal system where rich kids get dramatically better education and there is a downward spiral for poor kids. It's not achieving this goal today, but decentralizing the system would most definitely reinforce unequal outcomes, not avoid it.
That's the goal[1], but what is it constrained by? Primarily that constraint is cost. If you can improve efficiency (improved outcomes per dollar), everyone stands to benefit, especially at the lower end if you can reallocate that money towards them.
The main problem is that school is trying to be utilized to fix multiple issues at home that it simply can't correct for under the current system (yes that other person's example would make it worse). Federal standards and more money won't fix it. Other policy changes might help, but would be difficult to implement.
[1] I'd argue the goal is for each individual to reach their best potential as opposed to equity. Otherwise we end up with perverse systems that limit some upper end students, as we're starting to see innsome areas. That is not good for society/humanity. Equitable resourcing could be good.
The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded. Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason. Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes. Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it.
This feels like youre getting outside the HN guidelines. What framework? Which parts?
"The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded."
Would that money fix anything? Do you have any stats/criteria for how a particular area of the budget is overfunded? Otherwise when taken with your other verbiage, it sounds like just an inflammatory opinion. The US already spends 6.1% of its GDP on education, which is more than most other countries.
"Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason."
This is a bit dramatic given the definition. There are a few states with low teacher pay. However, you have to also look at median income and cost of living. Yeah, the average teacher makes about $50k in MS, but median income for MS is $48k per year with a low cost of living in most of the state. I have friends who have turned down public teaching that would pay more than their private teaching job due to the way the schools are run. Clearly pay is not the main issue in my area.
"Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes."
In general, you are right. In the context of this thread, those would be test scores, graduation rate, job/college placement rates.
"Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it."
No, not everyone knows it. Care to explain? It seems the test measure what the kids are supposed to know at a specific level. Are there some problems with things like teaching to the test instead of teaching for durable knowledge or love of learning, sure. But if you know how to read/write/etc at your grade level, then your scores will be fine. Seem like one of the best comparisons we have. Are there better alternatives?
It is not. Curriculum is decided far above the heads of the districts, as is standardized testing. Funding is a problem, though, how much of a problem is wildly variable depending on where you are.
And my best classes in uni weren't the massive lectures at the University of Texas but rather small summer school classes I took in a cheap Houston community college during summer break where I could actually interact with the teacher and fellow students.
Finally, HNers overuse "reinventing" as a pejorative. If you use a similar approach found in another option, and the HNer doesn't prefer your option over the other option, you're always "reinventing" it. As if some trivial thing in common between two options are the only would-be differences between them. It's not very thoughtful commentary.
Home-schooling could be 100% identical to public schooling except that it's not the local school system and it would still deliver on its goal of not being the local school system. That's the whole point.
We all know the worse the ratio the worse the education tends to be. Tutoring is a long established means of compensating for this, by supplementing sessions with a 1:1 ratio, clearly illustrating the problem.
FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing from the community and not-so-great public school system, but I don't because then I'm just another contributor to the inequality problem. We Live In A Society.
It is interesting to think of parents that see their own children as props, like pawns in some larger game rather than as individuals. I think there are subtle ways that this can happen.
I think a lot of people grew up in overly conservative homes. A common story you hear nowadays is a kid who grew up forced to tow the line in some religion and only once they reached maturity did they even realize there was another world out there. They may even promise themselves that they won't allow the same thing to happen to their own kids.
I don't know anything about you or your family or kids, but your attitude made me wonder if there is a backlash coming. If kids raised in forced diverse circumstances may rebel against their parents since they are being coerced into their parents view of "ideal world", much like the parents of stereotypical tiger asian parents or nutty sports dads.
No matter what way you cut it the will of the parent is subjected on the child. In my opinion that’s how it should be.
The decisive factor is what the focus of the parents will is. Is it personal glory? Is it trying to “make the world a better place”?. I would argue that choosing what is best for the child from the perspective of the parent is the best.
Giving them a robust worldview, a good set of morals and the capabilities to effect change when their older are the right way forward.
Our children are not missionaries that go into the world to make it a better place. Our children are to be nurtured so that when they grow up they can make a positive change in the world.
My only chance for a normal life and education was public school.
A huge amount of americans are poor in time and money. The only option their children have is public school. Their future is entirely dependent on a public that is willing to invest in them so that they even have a future, one that isn't just "wage slave at walmart". Sure, it often doesn't work out, it's a struggling system that has been abused and ignored for decades, and it fails millions every year.
You know what doesn't help any of those millions of kids? All the wealthy families sending their kids to private schools or homeschooling and removing their property taxes from the public school system. Society will not be a better place for your kids if they are individually 10% better but 10% of the children born in the US basically have no access to education.
The advocation of "School choice" as conservatives are currently selling it is about taking away the chance I had at a middle class life. It's about saving a few thousand dollars for already privileged individuals at the expense of swathes of people like me who were at least average intelligence who had the audacity to be born to a poor mother.
If you think public schooling in america is deficient, then let us fix it.
But that's not how they think. They believe the bottom 10% deserve their hard lives.
Capitalism needs an oppressed class to function.
The people on top write laws to ensure the oppressed class will exist. Then they sell it to the middle class using scary stories of crime, religion, etc.
You’ll know this by the people who campaign for voucher programs that we’re all told are evil somehow. Yet the goal of vouchers is to make all options available to everyone.
Without vouchers, all options are only available to those with financial options.
You can go to public school, private school or a home school program. If you want a better public school, you have to move to a better rated school district. In order to do that, you have to be able to afford it.
Without vouchers, poor families only option is public school where they currently live. People opposed to vouchers have 1 goal: preserve the status quo. They’ll tell you absolutely anything to convince you otherwise too.
How exactly does that work?
We homeschool and I pay property taxes that fund our local school just like everyone else in town. I pay for services that I don't use and can be used for other children if the powers that be decide to allocate it that way.
School choice/vouchers defund public schools proportional to loss of public school responsibility for students.
Besides, it is pretty said that the best counter argument against charter schools is that parents will take their fair share of funding and use it to buy a much better education for their children.
To your point about charter schools, there is a strong argument to be made that when parents have a choice where there kids go, public schools will have to make sure they are providing more academic opportunities if they don't want to risk losing the academically minded families (and their money). That seems like it would be a good thing for everyone.
I voted to raise property tax where I live specifically to improve the funding situation for our struggling public schools - I attended a great public school district growing up (because, surprise: my parents could afford to move into the district).
The funding situation needs to be fixed across the board, because indeed everyone attending public school deserves as good an education as I received, but the way the system functions currently is that poor areas get poor schools (at least in the midwest where I've lived).
So, while I whole-heartedly support education reform and improving funding as public policies: I still wouldn't send my own kids to the public school district where I live; they're terrible. I wish they weren't.
My freshman year of highschool, I was at a very large school, around 3400 in attendance. The school had been expanded several times, and was more or less at capacity. Some facilities were scaled out well, others weren't. There were fights on a weekly basis, tons of security trying to prevent that, but, they could only do so much. Lunch lines were very long, sometimes I'd be lucky to get 10 minutes to eat, mostly brought my own lunch because of that. The school was locked down a few times that year because of weapon scares. It was hell.
Then my sophomore year, they cut the school in half, sending most of the students, save for the seniors, to a new school across town. That landed the school I attended at around 1400 kids, my junior year, all of the extra seniors had graduated, so, it shrank further to around 1300. From sophomore year on, there was not a single fight, everyone knew eachother and got along, they cut the security team down to just two people and they both were well liked. Test scores were way up, class sizes went from 40+ to consistently under 30, and things overall were fairly good as far as highschool goes. The new school across town was a similar situation from what I gathered from friends who went there.
Now you might write that off as it was simply too crowded, but, they closed about a third of the school, which was held in portable classrooms when the split happened. Some of those were re-purposed for offices and whatnot, most got hauled away. So the actual density of people didn't really change much. We got some extra space to have PE classes in, but that was about it, space wise.
You might also write that off as demographic changes, which was also not true. In fact, the roughest part of town all went to the school I attended, while the nicer, more affluent side of town, mostly got sent to the new school.
The way I see it, the school was simply too large, and managing that many students day to day, and all of their needs and affairs, did not scale well, and bred inefficiency, inefficiency that existed long before I got there and everyone got to keep their job and maintain that as the status-quo. Sure the buildings/campus could physically contain them well enough, yes they were all reasonably well fed and watered, but they'd become unmanageable in such a way that was not likely to be fixed.
In terms of reinvention in public education, smaller schools are a decent model, as are smaller class sizes. The real deciding factor in how well a student does however, is parent buy-in, which homeschool models have in spades, and in addition the class sizes are about as small as you can reasonably go as well. Understand of course that, parents opting to homeschool are paying taxes to public schools, while receiving no benefit, and that in addition to paying for the costs associated with homeschooling. Not all families can afford to effectively pay for schooling twice, hell, most can barely afford to exist while paying once. You could very likely fix your concerns about privilege by simply redirecting money back to homeschool parents that would normally be spent on public school. There are very well defined $/student numbers out there, so, the amounts would be fairly trivial to come up with. You could also really work around the whole right/left politically polarized bullshit factory by perhaps giving a little more to the lower income families and a little less to high income families. I think that'd sufficiently frame the nominally 'right wing' framed homeschool ideals as neutral, or at least dissonant enough that you might get most of everyone on-board provided you could get the right palms greased in state government.
Understand of course that, the public education system is an enormous apparatus, and they're managing unfathomable numbers of students. They're also not setup in fairly clean competency hierarchies either. At the local level, seniority tends to be king...
People are diverse and have diverse needs. That includes kids. AFAIK the most efficient method of education is still one-to-one tutoring, the very opposite of "schools at scale". Unfortunately it is also very expensive.
Efficient in what way? Children in public schools are now doing worse than previous generations. Efficiency does not beget quality education.
> Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.
If we, as a society values families more and enables single income households this wouldn’t be privilege, it could be the norm.
it is like the difference between a commercial child care service, and having your friend's kids or you kid's friends over for the day.
I think it depends largely on who controls the process - the parents of a paid professional.
That said, it is not a typical approach either, nor is schooling by a parent. I have used (and this is typical in the UK, although i do not know about the US) paid face to face tutors, taught my self, provided the kids with textbooks etc. to teach themselves, paid for online courses, helped them find other resources and so on.
The paid tutors are qualified (both of them are qualified in the subjects they teach, one is a former school teacher).
In California the student enrolls in a home school program through a local public school. You are assigned a homeschool liaison and can enroll in public school classes. The kids and parents get a weekly checkin and support. You have to pass public school tests. You get a budget from the public school to use for materials.
My grandsons are getting homeschooled through 6th grade. My daughter decided it was just too hard to duplicate a high school education at home so she is phasing them into public school in middle school.
She gave each child the choice of home school or public school. The Covid lockdown made that choice easy for the kids. They know that if they don't keep up, she will send them back to public school. That is quite the motivator.
Just like your neighbors she works with other parents to keep the kids socialized, take them on field trips, and to form a support system. She also signs the kids up for sports.
The downside (from her observation) is since some of the early homeschoolers were bible based, she had to really review the school material. A surprising number of text books use the bible as history or have questionable science. She also noticed that many parents homeschool their kids because they can't participate in regular school (for various reasons). Her kids homeschool as a choice.
The biggest upside is that time is more flexible and the liaison is flexible. The family took a trip to NYC and the liaison was asking the boys quite a few questions about what they saw and learned.
It is pretty misleading for this article to talk about homeschooling being a “fundamental change” without mentioning that homeschooling was the default practice for most of human history. If anything, this is just a return to a long-established practice, not a fringe movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
Homeschooling was also the default thing a ±century ago, while you'd need to go back pretty far to find true animal/human sacrifice in European/European-American culture.
I better example might be freedom from surveillance. It's a totally fringe lifestyle to not be tracked everywhere you go, at least in a developed country.
But your rhetoric might be useful for shooting down privacy advocates during the next dust-up. Privacy may have been common in the past but now its fringe, just like animal sacrifice. Key escrow is the future!
Make those two untrue and it's like you never existed.
You're proving GP's point, that was the norm in developed countries 100 years ago and to a relative degree 50 years ago. The organs of the state and of capital which effected surveillance or tracking were tiny and isolated compared to what they are now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
This is part of the reason why business monopolies are social poison.
I'm sure homeschooling can work out fine, but that is hardly assured by simply being inline with historical tradition. If you go to war with broadswords and spears, you're going to lose. If you insist on living without indoor plumbing or refrigerated food storage, you're likely going to have your kids taken away, and rightfully so, in spite of the fact humans lived that way by default longer than not.
Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?
It's astounding. I don't know if that's just because that particular state doesn't have very strict rules around homeschooling, or if that's standard; I just haven't done the research.
Presumably the students are also applying with ACT/SAT scores in hand, which do have an established meaning.
Are you saying things written on a fancy letterhead with a stamp can't be unquestionably trusted?
And ACT/SAT has become optional since covid for most institutions.
There are "accredited" homeschool programs, and the "accreditation" means probably about as much as it does for "accredited" private schools, many of whom don't even bother.
Elsewhere in the comments I mentioned the Baltimore public school system, where clearly whatever "accreditation" it has is completely and utterly worthless.
Heck, even my ABET accredited university, although overall of high quality, had a few teachers that taught me nothing at all and who had no checks on their failure to teach.
So they should go back to requiring it. Seems pretty easy.
Except...
>More Than 80% Of Four-Year Colleges Won’t Require Standardized Tests For Fall 2023 Admissions
>An additional 85 schools will be test-blind or score-free, meaning that applicants’ standardized exam results are not considered even if they are submitted. Included in that number is the entire California public university system....
>[And] at least 1,450 colleges and universities have made their test-optional and test-blind policies permanent.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/11/15/more...
One of the other reasons for this is because students completely unprepared for college from public schools are an increasing problem. This is also why they now all offer remedial classes under varying names and programs, and why first-year university programs are much easier than they were in say, 1940.
For instance - to use your example - which student is more likely to be given your advice: the one from an affluent family attending a well-funded school, or the (let's posit much smarter) one from a family of non-college attendees living in an under-funded district? When the SAT was a formal requirement they'd be more likely to be judged on an actually level playing field.
Many of the school districts in my area have consolidated, and it's not even possible to verify attendance of students from the small schools that no longer exist.
To my knowledge, there is no "accreditation" that matters for public high schools - there are only thresholds for which state funding is available.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-suspends-graduation...
Oh please. No one's going to jail for this.
Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd conveniently ignores the reasons those regulations were created in the first place.
And society should also care whether government-run public schools are doing this--not to mention whether they are indoctrinating children with values that many parents disagree with.
School boards are elected, but I don't think "broad democractic oversight" is a fair description.
In any case, none of the things you mention prevented the US public school system from being explicitly set up to indoctrinate children, as explicitly described by the people who set it up. So to the extent that society in the US cares about educating children, it cares about educating them according to a particular political agenda that many people do not agree with. That is a major reason why homeschooling continues to increase in popularity.
Not all homeschoolers are like this. There are plenty of other good reasons for parents not to want their kids to go to public schools.
> society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated
Yes, but for whose definition of "educated"? In the US, at least, the government was not supposed to decide that. Individual families and communities were. And, as I have posted elsewhere in this thread, the people who set up the US system of widespread, compulsory public education were quite explicit about what they meant by "educated", and that included plenty of things that any reasonable person would consider to be indoctrination, not education--and that was on purpose.
Saying that the cost of giving persecuted minorities an out is "then we might not be able to persecute the minorities that I've decided actually deserve it" just feels fundamentally unconvincing.
It sounds ideal.
But we might want at least some oversight and regulation to, for example, make sure kids aren't being homeschooled on how to build rockets and kill some group of people.
Bad apples will fall from any tree. A poisoned tree will mostly produce bad apples.
Nor are homeschooled kids.
Lmao, yes they are. You couldn't be more wrong, kids who attend public school make better military recruits. Public schools teach kids how to conform to institutional systems and follow orders. These are essential skills for effective killers.
Btw, since you're so scared of kids learning how to build rockets.. I learned how to build rockets in public school through a program called TARC. The same design principles I learned for model rockets could be applied to homemade weaponized rockets. Does that frighten you? Do you think that makes me Hamas or something? (Hamas is who you're thinking of right? America doesn't have a domestic rocket attack problem, I'm sure you know that.) You should know that most people in the MIC went through public school. If you're actually afraid of people learning these sort of skills, shouldn't you be advocating for kids receiving a bible-only education that renders them incapable of engineering, and therefore weapon design, and unfit for military recruitment?
Maybe modeling the child rocket program[1] on [whatever it is that public high schools are doing] would save us?
No, of course not. Is being helpless comforting to you? How often does anyone actually fix a serious problem with an institution? Sure it happens sometimes, but the best almost everyone can hope for it to muddle through being subjected to the problems.
The impulse to put homeschooling under the thumb of government officials is not comforting, because it would remove the agency of parents to respond to problems they experience or fear in the school system.
In this child = cardboard box analogy, I guess home-school would be equivalent to transporting the box in your own car. In this case, the box would also be subject to scrutiny, for example at border crossings.
And I can't argue with your position on how often things are fixed. It wouldn't matter what evidence I found, the goal post would just move a little bit farther. Sure, "it happens sometimes," but never enough to satisfy.
But I can counter with, how often can you fix broken homeschooling that has no auditing or oversight?
Never. Not even sometimes.
That said, I don't think home schooling is an option for all either. Covid showed how difficult it could be for many families.
I was on Facebook, idly scrolling, and I received an ad for a nearby Montessori school. The ad was a simple lavender square, with the name of the school on it (no photo), and simply the text "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Of all of the letters, the "three Rs" weren't in evidence. Nothing about how the school will teach the child how to learn, prepare them for high school, or provide a rounded education. Just "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Upon some mental reflection, I recalled some recent radio ads for local universities, and the first sentence was about how they were diverse, and then there was something about inclusion and equality. No mention was made of "we will prepare you to be an adult" or "we will get you a good job."
Unfortunately, I cannot have children, but if I were in a position to, I would like to think I would be interested in their education to the extent that I would make serious choices. And right now, that educational institutions consider their highest advertising priority is to display a relentless laser focus on DIE to the exclusion of, well, education does give a little pause to their selection.
As I recall just how ill-served I was by the many schools I attended (we moved quite a lot), both for education and socialization, I can only imagine that diverting the already-anemic school efforts away from the core mission it even-then was not doing a great job at would only make these institutions even less-suited to their supposed task.
I think the biggest argument for schooling is the socialization aspect of it. I don't know about the rest of you but I was bullied pretty relentlessly throughout grade school and it completely changed my personality. I became much more of a loner, reserved, quiet, and just defeated. I'm still working through some of that baggage 30 years later. That's not the socialization that I want for my kids.
I work remotely, my wife freelances. We have lots of friends and family with children our kids age, why not surround them by people who love them?
The question for me, personally, is private school vs. homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public education via choosing the right private school (and being able to afford it), I do wonder if that would be superior to most homeschooling setups.
Prior to moving, our only “good” option for realistic schooling was putting our children in a local Catholic school with high fees. Given our state is in the midst of legal battles with activist groups fighting to overturn a recent school-choice voucher program, seemed moving was the safe choice.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone but a public-sector teacher being finally held to account would fight against giving parents options to place their kids in a school they see fit.
Because they want to indoctrinate your kids. A lot of teachers get into the profession because of a compelling social justice urge, much like a missionary from the church. When they are outside the public school system they are harder to reach.
Additionally, the more kids in the system equates to more political power for the teachers unions since they get to expand.
Hard to disentangle good change from bad; some of the initiative is good, but negative feedback seems to have been translated to "ignore those haters, they have no valid points."
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/california-needs-real-math-edu...
When I was a kid teachers had a bit more freedom to decide what to teach but now you teach to the test or lose your funding.
Why is there an assumption that what is on the test is inherently worthless but every individual teacher is qualified to design an entire curriculum?
Because my mother went to school for six years for exactly that purpose? Some states have pretty high requirements for teachers, and they tend to do well.
Also, the "teach to test" BS is extremely locality dependent. There are zero things you can generalize across all public schools in the US.
Or, in other words, do we need hundreds of thousands of curricula? Doesn't that leave a lot of by definition below average curricula. Would selecting among even dozens of well-designed options make sense instead?
Teaching to the test is akin to teaching music only through sheet music; no instruments. The test is a mile wide and an inch deep and instead of helping students appreciate and understand topics and apply that knowledge creatively, we rush temporary memorization and regurgitation.
Like all measures, once they become a target, they become a poor measure.
We’ve been homeschooling for 7 years. Our child’s social experience has increased both quantitatively and qualitatively. From few/constantly bullied physically and sexually, to many/nice thoughtful friends who will jump in and defend her instead of filming her, should things go down. She’s also a leader, does service for her community, and (proud papa moment here) at her 4th debate competition (3 per year in this league) won 9th place speaker and 3rd place team. Her team swept the series of 4 rounds. The only way their team could do that…wait for it…lots of practice aka socialization.
The “socialization” boogeyman is one of the most overplayed red herrings about homeschooling IMO.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty feeling envious about my nieces' upbringing. They went to private school that ran from 1-8 grade, so they essentially skipped the middle school experience that was detrimental to so many. Honestly, I believe middle school as I experienced it (a whole bunch of elementary "feeder" schools that fed into one giant middle school for 7-8 grade) is the dumbest invention in the history of humanity. It sticks together kids, at wildly different stages of development, in an unfamiliar environment where everyone is trying to find their place in the social hierarchy - Lord of the Flies should have been set in middle school. Much better IMO to just have kids stay together 1-8th grade, and by then most folks are at least well into puberty by the time they get to high school. Not saying of course bullying doesn't happen in high school, but I think by then more kids are able to find their "tribe", so if they are bullied they have friends to fall back on (again, I'm of course painting with broad strokes).
On the other hand, I'd definitely want my children to be familiar with it. Bullying is not something isolated to schools. I've seen it in nearly every social and political situation that exists at nearly every age group. In my estimation people are getting worse at identifying it and collectively we're getting worse at punishing it.
I'm glad I learned how to shut it down quick or avoid it altogether earlier rather than later.
Being let out into the world thinking everybody loves you sounds like a terrifying idea too.
Are you also taking photos for blackmail purposes? That'd very possibly shut the whole thing down.
If it's a peer in a more professional setting, simply calling them out generally makes you less a target, especially if calling out their behaviour is done in a group setting. It comes down to the old "stand up for yourself" rule we've all heard. Also, calm confidence tends to work with adults too.
If the bullying is coming from above, time to move on. I have zero patience for it, and there's likely no stopping them.
Also, I'm not suggesting you take them outside, although I know a couple guys who've been through fights between coworkers in their workplaces. Grown men (in their 30s) sure can take a long time to grow.
Unless you live in prison or a war zone I highly doubt you've witnessed "adult" bullying that remotely approaches the ferocity and cruelty some kids have to endure on a daily basis.
"If another kid is throwing sand at you and won't stop when you ask, tell a grown up."
No, grown ups were also raised on this garbage and won't do anything. What's the teacher going to do if the other kid won't stop? Go tell the principal? And what will they do? Nothing.
The correct thing to do is to shove the other kid. Don't hurt them; just indicate they need to back off. If they still don't, throw sand at them, and then while they're recoiling, shove them down and kick them.
Society has a major problem where proper, proportionate, defensive violence is punished, and it traces back to this kind of crap.
Are you both working full-time? What's the arrangement? How do you fit the homeschooling in around your jobs?
My wife and I have talked about this a lot. We don't have kids yet, but we're very open to the idea of homeschooling when the time comes. I'm not sure how we'll do it though - we're in a better position than most (we make good money and both wfh) but there are only so many hours in the day. I'm interested to know how other people make it work.
The kids were great, and the parents were mostly great, too.
Anyway, maybe there's some similar local programs. If not, I bet you could run one yourself. I bet youtube would make it super easy, actually.
Even when I taught, sometimes the parents would organize something else for a week, like a local hike.
Since then it's become clear that there are basically two categories of homeschoolers: those that want to bring in extra education beyond what the public school system can deliver, and those that want to bring in less education than the public system. Usually in the name of "protecting" them from some information for religious reasons. That's where all the attention and concern is. Because children can't advocate for themselves, especially against their parents.
(The UK had a recent scandal with illegal schools: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/12/ofsted-unc... ; running a school for money - heck, even offering a childminding service for money - without registering with OFSTED is definitely illegal, while homeschooling is legal by default https://www.gov.uk/home-education )
I grew up in a place with a large number of religious organizations and outcome of this is what I would consider abuse in a huge number of cases. Would the children themselves think so at the time, kinda hard when you're taught "spare the rod, spoil the child" and "Of course the Earth is only 6000 years old" daily.
[0] 78% of peer-reviewed studies on academic achievement show homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in institutional schools (Ray, 2017). Source and lots of other good tidbits: https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:te....)
Your continual assumptions about me are both wrong and offensive.
Regardless of income, the key factor seems to be the rationale. If parents want to homeschool because they're involved with their kids' lives and want them to succeed, they'll do well relative to the available public school options.
Just like high earners like LeBron James are not allowed to WFH and have long commutes.
It just depends on the nature of the work.
If you gave parents even 1/3 of that money the state would save a fortune and parents would be so much better off. The monopoly system of education we have is just so awful. I’m fine with having bonus benefits for special needs kids, and public schools should always exist to educate the high-needs students. But the system we have now is so laughably bad and segregated that anyone who defends it must have a financial stake in keeping it running.
They also have bussing costs, which (e.g.) private schools don't, which further complicates comparisons. That's not a small amount of money.
The problem is the local public school where everyone in my neighborhood is forced to go (unless they are rich) is dangerous and ranked bottom 5%. That is extremely racist, inequitable, and unfair to people who are forced to attend.
For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons, that must seem profoundly unfair. To be driven out of the public schools means to be denied resources.
Public schools using public money should be especially sensitive and as neutral as possible on political or culture war issues. That's increasingly difficult, but without that, public school doesn't have a good future.
Normally schools are thought of as Democrat-controlled, but that's not true everywhere. So rather than just saying that everything is OK the way it is, think about how it will be when your political opponents are in control.
https://idealschool.education/full-day-program/utah-voucher-...
We homeschool to keep our kids out of government schools. Inviting that same government into our home for a bit of money would make no sense whatsoever.
I don't think it's really possible to be neutral about culture war issues, sort of by definition, especially when many of the wars are about schools themselves. A school is part of American culture, it can't somehow choose not to participate. To use a historical example, there was a culture war over teaching evolution in schools. A teacher at the time could describe the history and facts of the controversy without stating their opinion on it, but when the students leave that classroom, they are still in a school that either teaches evolution or doesn't. By existing and having a curriculum, the school takes a position in the culture war.
Imagine if your country held a referendum on a certain issue, and said "if more than 50% of citizens vote yes, the law passes, otherwise it fails". You could have a genuinely neutral opinion on the issue ("I don't care which side wins"), but you cannot take a neutral action, because not voting makes the law less likely to pass. This is unfair, and you can be mad about it, but the only way to be "neutral" would be to leave the country and renounce your citizenship so that you are no longer part of the equation. Similarly, in a culture war, the only way to be neutral would be to not participate in the culture in question, which is even more difficult than leaving a country.
Let me give one more example: whether or not to tip your server in a restaurant. Tipping 10% instead of 20% is not neutral. Tipping 50% of the time you go to a restaurant is not neutral. You could say "I don't wish to take a position, so I will no longer go to restaurants", but I'm confident the anti-tipping side would claim you as one of their own. Again it feels unfair, but it's just how culture works.
And if you live in an area where evolution is a controversial topic, then you should leave it up to the parents. You don't have a right to use their money to teach something that a lot of people don't want to be taught. Of course, there's some line where something is fringe enough and you don't have to accommodate every last person. Again, try to be neutral, don't aim for perfection.
And you know what? Evolution is a nuanced topic. The actual claims that can be backed up by first principals using the scientific method are fairly narrow. Much of the reasoning is very prone to confirmation bias and all kinds of after-the-fact fitting rather than forward-looking predictions. To stick to the science on the topic of evolution you have to be pretty careful and most teachers are not. Not saying it shouldn't be taught... I think it has a lot of explanatory power outside of pure science and represents a large body of important observations. But I don't think it's a good example of science-vs-idiots.
We aren't talking about fine points of evolution, we are talking about the earth being older than mankind at all.
Parents should always have the final say in what their children are being taught, even if it’s patently unscientific. Anything else feels like an incredibly slippery slope of, “Daddy Government knows what’s best for your kids better than you do, so we’re chipping away at your parental rights until we can save your child from your non-governmentally approved ideas!”
What happens when the government decides to teach nonsense?
There is nothing magical about the state that makes it a better arbiter of truth than other institutions. Historically states have a pretty poor record. They tend to push ideas that benefit the people who control them, whether that’s a nobility or a majority faction in the electorate (or both).
Essentially everyone in America agrees with you. This is written into our Constitution.
> It is not the responsibility of the state, in any way, shape, or form, to dictate information to a child that the parents take issue with
This is an impossible standard. We have to make public schooling available, and we can't provide individual tutors for every student, so they must be taught in groups. This guarantees that some students will be taught things that their parents take issue with. To compensate for this we make some escape hatches available like homeschooling, private schooling, or moving to a different school district, but these are all difficult or impossible for most parents. Some schools have offered to let parents take their kids out of class when certain topics are taught, but this approach can't scale to all subjects and topics. It also can't address parents upset about what their child is NOT being taught.
I'm not aware of any educational model that gives all parents complete control over their children's education.
No school curriculum will ever be 100% satisfactory to 100% of people, but I believe that the state has no obligation to enforce a certain educational model simply because it is “correct”. That probably sounds a bit silly, but I just believe that people have the right to believe and teach ideas that run counter to the state-approved message, even if the state is empirically correct.
School does not occupy all the time of a child. If a school teaches something parents disagree with, parents can debunk that when the kids are home. They can bring arguments and kids will eventually make up their own minds.
Homeschooling presents a single view, that of the parents. There is no debate.
I homeschooled my daughter for reasons other than culture wars or politics (she’s a violinist and public schools didn’t regard practice time as particularly important.)
But I never thought of public school funding as transactional. We did not take direct advantage of the benefit; but a reasonably well educated populace benefits me in a host of other ways. So I harboured no resentment when paying my public school levy.
But that's precisely the point: what does "well-educated" mean? If the money is going toward reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, then few will disagree. When the curriculum, environment, or manner of teaching drift into more controversial areas, then you might start to see things differently.
Imagine the school starts teaching things that don't align with your values, and they leave out things that do. How would you feel about the way your tax dollars are spent?
That's not money you have a right to as a parent. I don't take part in all the social programs my government offers, but I don't get all that money back.
Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police attempted to defund and/or defunded their department. That's not a great example because self-service policing doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.
Ultimately, if you want the voters' money, you need to convince them that you at least won't use it against them. And it's really easy for people to start thinking that it's being used against them when engaging in culture war or political issues.
This is a great example for what should happen - demands for systemic reform, not taking what you think is "your" money and going home.
It's one thing to opt out of a system, it's another to think you're justified to get money back for it. As someone without any children am I justified in getting 24k/year back because I'm not using the school system for my (average) 2 non-kids? Of course not, but I do pay taxes for that service.
Ideally, it would be a back-to-basics reform that would be more neutral. But probably what would happen is a slow draining of the best students along with money until it spirals.
You can say that shouldn't happen, or be mad at the people who opt out, or be mad at the people who underfund it. But it would be better to save it by at least making an effort to be neutral before it gets to that point. Too many teachers look at students as their children to mold according to their personal or party values rather than educating them according to collective or neutral values.
Money spent ≠ value provided. My kid's class has over half a million dollars spent on it per year. But many parents see it as merely childcare, and then spend more money on after school tutoring and activities.
I can see the appeal of skipping the schooling and doing the other activities during the school day. It's probably much easier/cheaper to get appointments before 2, when most kids are in school. And there's more flexibility in terms of scheduling. I just heard today that a family was threatened with being kicked out of our local school if they accrued 10 days of unexcused absences (which includes vacation days). While I don't think the school would actually kick the family out, the fact that this is even floated as an idea sounds crazy.
Overall, it's a very high variance method of education. For every Judit Polgar, you have a woman told her highest calling must be to reproduce and be subservient to her husband (I know these people personally).
If you have the resources and have intellectually precocious children, especially if they are a bit odd, they will likely enjoy it and benefit from it. If you have kids that really want to play sports at a high level or are socially very successful, they might later resent the opportunities they missed and the shared experiences they lack. Obviously, this is reductive, but I think something like this is true.
The pandemic is the most obvious cause, and the article notes that "Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth." Obviously test scores are not the only measure of quality, but at least in this article there is no evidence of any cause other than the pandemic. The other possible factor discussed in this comment section, politics, doesn't seem to be relevant either. There is no correlation between homeschooling rates and the politics of the parents or the state.
Also, "fastest-growing" is not very remarkable when the only other categories are public and private. Home-schooling is by far the smallest category, less than 5%, so basically any increase (which has to come from a decrease in at least one of the other categories) will make it the fastest-growing category.
Here are statistics going back further: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a.... Homeschooling gradually increased from 1999 to 2012, and then started to decline a bit until the pandemic.
I think you're forgetting the biggest reason: it turns out zoom school was a disaster and the worst of both worlds.
Regular schooling isn't ideal. But homeschooling is a pretty major reaction to that, and it shouldn't be done without serious consideration for the non-zero chance that your kids will resent you for that decision.
As a parent of two daughters who are homeschooled - unschooled, actually - I 100% agree.
As with everything, our approach is intentional and we're open with our kids about it. If they wanted to go to a school - public, private, or religious - we would make that happen.
Our eldest is currently taking three hours per day at the local public high school. She's 15, wants to own a equine stud farm, and is taking every agriculture class she can find. After this year she will have exhausted their offerings in that subject, so she'll likely start at the local community college in the fall.
Same goes to the homeschooling — some can be successful, some can be disastrous. The majority of homeschooled kids that would fail, definitely wouldn’t be on these forums. So we’ll hear mostly success stories that came out of it.
It’s hard to apply the comments to a generalized idea from HN.
HSLDA has successfully lobbied against even tracking if a child is homeschooled, so there is no way to truly statistically tell which experience is the representative one. All you get are anecdotes, mostly from the parent's point of view.
Probably one of the most biased formats you can find. Mixing comedy with pseudo-facts and personal opinions to push an agenda/narrative.
I wish we could only see what he produces as comedy but way too often people love to share his clips/narrative as a semi-reliable source of information.
https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1715586174658441404
I wonder how much of the whole debate is mostly about difference of opinions between people on both sides of this specific subject rather than the ones the media focuses on.
At what point do we call it culture and "difference of opinion" as opposed to just plain old indoctrination or brainwashing?
It's not a left vs right issue, this is freedom vs tyranny. Right now the left isn't able see it as Tyranny or indoctrination because their predominant opinions and values are being taught to children, so it's convenient. It's another form of "civilizing those barbarian <insert unfavorable group here>".
At the end of the day, I don't belong to society, and neither do my children. They belong to themselves and can choose for themselves how they see fit. Until then, I'll instill my values to them, and make sure they treat their fellow beings better than the way "society" treats them.
But, to bring the culture wars into this, how do you feel that you have joint guardianship of a child whose parent fundamentally disagrees with you? With our church group, I trust the parents to discipline, to entertain and to teach in a way consistent with my beliefs, even if they're very different people. On the other hand, my next door neighbor is convinced my daughter is a boy because she likes trucks and would like her to be trans, like she has already transed her son. When you perceive other adults attempting to abuse your child and this is a common enough movement you're not going to be able to feel any joint sense of guardianship. And it's not just culture issues. Unsurprisingly, neighbors children are also poorly behaved, disrespectful, and never get told no.
America has fully embraced multiculturalism without assimilation, so there are now dozens of cultures, so no sense of joint guardianship over children.