America is Seeing a 'Dramatic Rise' in Home Schooling (wvnews.com) 378
"Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America's fastest-growing form of education," according to a new analysis by the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here):
The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions...
In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51% over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7% growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4% in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling...
In 390 districts included in The Post's analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That's roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic... The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling's dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate. Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data...
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
Other interesting facts from their analysis:
In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51% over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7% growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4% in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling...
In 390 districts included in The Post's analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That's roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic... The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling's dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate. Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data...
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
Other interesting facts from their analysis:
- "Home schooling's surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics."
- "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. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance."
- "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."
Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
The quality of the student does not correlate with the quality of the school district.
Our school district is considered to be fairly high quality, but lately they have been changing the curriculum for the worse. They aren't teaching the scientific method in science any more because, apparently, it isn't used anywhere (direct quote from a science teacher.) They are scaling back on teaching phonics, and getting rid of advanced English and math programs.
The end result is a lot of parents, us included, send their kids to out of school tutoring. Our middle school aged daughter still couldn't spell very well, as she was never taught phonics. Our high school aged son had problems with algebra because he wasn't taught multiplication and division properly. It wasn't just us, it was a *lot* of students in the district. Parents are angry. School board elections are getting contentious. It's a mess.
Re:Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
The US education system has always been a mess at least as far back as when I started school 50 years ago and it has continued to degrade.
I mean they really could take some hints from other countries. Especially those that teach HOW to learn instead of just memorizing bullshit. The problem is, the teachers don't know any better and they're just as stupid as the kids. The school administrators are even worse. I've never met such a large group of absolute morons.
Nowadays teachers are quitting because the system is so screwed up. The kids have more power than the teachers. Schools are forced to hire people that have never taught before. The whole education system is collapsing. I guess everyone is suppose to be fat, dumb, and happy on their phone for the rest of their lives. Phones and software built by smarter oppressive evil foreign governments by the way.
Re:Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, the teachers don't know any better and they're just as stupid as the kids
Clearly you have not been in a public educational setting. The issue is very diverse, from running off qualified teachers, lower income creating children that are problematic everywhere, and pay for a teacher that is tied to abstract testing forcing teachers to teach how to pass a test rather than actually learn.
The kids have more power than the teachers
No, the parents have more power, the kids are just the tool to effect that power. Every single issue that is facing teachers is very much parent driven. When school districts have to honor 2000 different kids' parents request per school, so basically nobody gets anything but the least common denominator. Empowering parents even more has had the effect of making schools worse. That's not to say parents should have no power, but we're moving very, very, very far from democratic order to handling parental concern. If Mary's mom here has an issue with dissecting a frog, well then Mary should be the one sitting out in the hallway while the class is dissecting frogs. But instead, now educators just can't dissect the frog period because of Mary's mom. Administrators think this shit is great, because the more they take away, the more money they can save for other bullshit like football teams and all the shit that goes with that. So administrators play into this shit and then when the 80+ year old community votes in the Bible thumpers to be the administrators, well then Mary's mom is just the match they were waiting for to enact their dumb shit.
I guess everyone is suppose to be fat, dumb, and happy on their phone for the rest of their lives
Well that's what Mary's mom wants. Like we're quick to blame:
Phones and software built by smarter oppressive evil foreign governments by the way
But parents want this shit. They don't want to parent their fucking kids. They've both got jobs that are shit with two commutes round-trip they have to deal with. With healthcare that costs out the ass and food prices that keep going up everyday. Parents DO NOT HAVE TIME to deal with their kids' shit. And fuck, everyone is so fucking dead set on making sex illegal and preventing people from getting contraceptives, we're just going to fucking have more fucking kids that nobody wants. That they then just shove off onto the public education sector and wonder why their kids are fucking punching teachers.
Y'all want to blame the phones but who gave them a phone? Who isn't talking to them, pulling their head out of the fucking phone? Parents.
Parents are probably the worst option for who should be making the calls on public education because society is running them through a grind stone and destroying every aspect that makes them human beings. Because there's some asshat person with a billion dollars who just couldn't fathom giving up one single dollar to make anyone's life somewhat better. If Mary's mom is given so much grunt work that her 15-minute breaks are actually crying in the bathroom stress relief sessions, well if that makes billion dollar asshat another three bucks, well awesome! The system is working as intended.
This ain't just a US education system issue, this is our fucking society being unable to deal with the bullshit that's being handed out. Our entire way of life is being destroyed so that some asshat can make more money. Those phones, that's making some asshat money.
Re:Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
It was fine in the 60s and 70s. The US was worried about falling behind the Soviets and there was a push to upgrade science classes and the like. However most didn't really have need so a lot of equipment and chemicals ended up being in storage, only to be a hassle a couple decades later when trying to get rid of them.
Also, most of the push these days is to home proselytize kids - make sure they read the Bible, block all references to sex, don't teach them to get along with others and that people not like them are their enemies (good solid Christian values there), that any money you get from the government is socialism, etc. And OMG, definitely NOT teaching proper science with it's anti-god liberal bias. Yes, some families do great with home schooling, but I think the current rise is extremely political in nature. Simultaneously, there's a big push by many to undermine public schools, allowing even a single parent to request that a book be banned and the schools have to at least hold a hearing, proper history can't be taught lest some white kids feel bad that an ancestor beat slaves. It's constant non-stop criticizing public school teachers as the root of all evil, that they're liberal indoctrinators, teaching perversions, etc; weird that they're portrayed as both utterly incompetent yet diabolically clever in their indoctrination methods.
I'm from a family of teachers, and I still have some people come up to me decades after my father died and tell me how he was such a great teacher who changed their lives.
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This is the most idiotic post I've read in a while. You ironically seem to be the intolerant one with your bigoted views and stereotypes. I bet you get along with others just fine... as long as they share the same viewpoint as you (ba-dum pah).
I especially liked your take on books. If you wanted your child to read a banned book, then I don't know, try buying the book for them? Or see if the public library has it as opposed to the school's library? You seem to be awfully concerned about what other people's c
Re:Quality (Score:4, Informative)
> The real blame lies in the fact that schools don't get enough budget
"The US spends more on education than other countries. Why is it falling behind?"
https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars).
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/c... [ed.gov]
Allocation issue maybe, but certainly not a raw dollars per student issue.
Re:Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Compare Catholic schools in the US to public schools. Less than half the dollars per student, and their college acceptance rates are a lot higher.
It's not about dollars schools get, it's about how they're allowed (and required) to spend those dollars.
Re:Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
>Compare Catholic schools in the US to public schools. Less than half the dollars per student, and their college acceptance rates are a lot higher.
Yep. It's just a myth that we underfund education in this country. It's not a dollars issue, but a question of where those dollars end up.
That's why school vouchers are such a good idea. You can give a fraction of what you spend per pupil on a public school and fully fund a private school or charter school instead that you think will educate your kid better. While you might say that just fixing the allocation issue would be easier, it's not. The problems in our education system are entrenched at all levels of public schools, from the federal level to the state level to the county level to the district level to the school level, with teachers' unions also playing a big role. Making change in a meaningful way is not impossible, but very difficult. Even if you did something like a budget cut, the people making the budgets aren't going to cut their own budget.
It's actually far easier to issue a voucher instead and go with a system that doesn't have those entrenched legacy problems.
The college system also has the same problem. Instead of the mess of financial aid, loans, etc., we have right now, we could just issue students a $5k check a year for four years and let them decide where to spend it. Tuition prices would collapse.
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I am about as anti-religious as it gets. Have been, ever since I was a small child in Sunday School. Even then, I could tell that their shit made no sense and was a bunch of dumb bullshit.
I spend some $20K/year to send my first grader to a catholic school because it is a better option than the local public schools.
Re:Quality (Score:4, Insightful)
Compare Catholic schools in the US to public schools. Less than half the dollars per student, and their college acceptance rates are a lot higher.
It's not about dollars schools get, it's about how they're allowed (and required) to spend those dollars.
I think it's much more about the student population at both types of schools. As the misleading Mississippi reading miracle showed, dramatic results can be achieved by shifting the student population. Private schools (and charter schools) produce better student results because they only accept students that opt in. In contrast, public schools are required to accept all (remaining) students in their boundaries. There may be some slight truths to the higher quality of teachers and educational system at the private schools, but if it were possible to swap the students between the two types of schools, the results would immediately follow the students.
Re:Quality (Score:4, Interesting)
Allocation issue maybe, but certainly not a raw dollars per student issue.
That's just one of the many failings of the public school system. My kids could read and write basic sentences and identify all 50 states by the time they were four. That was on a budget of about $70/year/child with a full-time stay at home mom making their learning fun.
It's mind-blowing what they could accomplish if I could fund them to the tune of $15K/child/year. If I ever had reservations about terminating the public school system, they have all been completely and utterly stripped away. I would like to say that I can't even fathom how so much money could produce so many idiots, but I've seen the state of the public school system; and it all makes absolute, perfect sense.
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> It's not a shock to think that the US spends more per student than impoverished African nations.
>> 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries"
Is it a shock that none of the countries being compared in the article were from Africa, never mind the impoverished African countries? I believe the technique you employed is the classic "straw man argument".
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More interesting than the price in dollars would be how much of GDP is used for education for elementary and high school
No it wouldn't. Dollars per capita relating to educational outcome is the only interesting thing here when discussing the efficiency of education.
Only if you assume a similar cost of living and similar government benefits. Among other things, all of the other OECD countries have government-provided healthcare, whereas the United States has employer-provided healthcare. So the cost of education in the U.S. includes probably O($13k) per teacher in health insurance costs alone. Assuming a class size of 25, that's O($500) of the per-student difference right there.
And wealthier countries tend to have a higher cost of living in general, so if the U.S. p
Re:Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
PS - My grade-school-teacher relatives tole me that they had to promote every student, regardless of his grades, during the pandemic. That can't end well.
Re:Quality (Score:4, Insightful)
The real blame lies in the fact that schools don't get enough budget
Totally false! Per student spending has with only very local exceptions only gone up with respect to inflation over the past 50 years or so. Achievement continues to go down.
Its not a money problem at all. Its a special interest problem. The simple reality is education has a huge orthodoxy built up around it and any one who questions it gets slapped down hard (as tends to be the case with Union captive industries). Their is no science behind much of what they do, objectively it does not work but if you want your teaching degree you'll regurgitate what the text books on class room management and early learning say, and when you get into a job you'll do what the common core bs says you must; because the publishers paid off the unions, who pay off the pols.
A many-sided coin (Score:5, Insightful)
Public school administration are under pressure to show results, and the measure of success is high grades, so there is a clear-and-obvious trend of watering-down the curriculum and inflating grades. The end result is kids graduating without a clue. Parents who are interested in actually educating their children are noticing, and taking action.
ON THE OTHER HAND, there are benefits being lost. The social environment in a public school is unlike one that most people will ever see again in their lives. The opportunities to meet a wide variety of people (including potential future mates), to acquire and master social skills, to make lifelong friends, etc., is greater in public school than it ever will be again. So it is a trade-off, for sure.
Some other interesting trade-offs include things like exposure to disease (kids bringing home disease makes the whole household sick, which is bad, but it also better prepares the kid's immune system for a lot of what it will encounter during adulthood, which is good), exposure to politics (culture war stuff that I won't list explicitly because even stating the issue without picking sides will earn troll mods, but you all know what I am talking about, and it is also a curse/blessing situation), exposure to philosophy (this includes religious people encountering secular arguments AND secular people encountering religious arguments AND more general stuff like books that really challenge and stimulate critical thinking and subsequently get banned because of it) and exposure to unwanted pregnancy (we have such a strong desire for an impossible have-it-both-ways situation: we want our kids to meet members of the opposite gender and develop social skills and fall in love to someday marry and have kids, but we DON'T want them having kids while still in high school obviously, but that's precisely when their hormones rage the hardest and when we are thrusting them into each other's orbit with less adult supervision than ever before).
So, I find it to be an extremely complicated issue that brings significant risks and rewards on both sides, with just as many good reasons to fear it as to embrace it.
Re:Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
>scaling back on teaching phonics
Phonics was one of those things where politics and corruption took over from education.
"Let's require schools to teach reading one and only one way and lie about why it's better so we get our way".
Meanwhile, English teachers had no problem using a combination of methods to teach and did so until the school boards driven by textbook publisher driven corruption decide to tell them how to teach.
The same thing happened in mathematics. Observe how things are mostly set up so schools have to re-buy the textbooks every year.
Elected school boards are at the root of the problem. It provides a seeding point for corruption by all the companies that want access to the school money.
Phonics (Score:3)
Phonics was one of those things where politics and corruption took over from education.
There are a dozen ways to teach phonics. By phonics I mean sounding out words using letter and letter combination sounds. Phonetics might be a better label, but there are so many methods neither is fully accurate. This is how kids learned to read and spell for most of the 20th century.
By not teaching phonics, I mean they never taught my daughter what sounds letters made. The new concept is that you just absorb this stuff through reading. You do not. It has to be taught. We eneded up teacher her ourselves, a
Re:Phonics (Score:4, Informative)
You are using a different definition of phonics from the parent post. Phonics as used in educational circles means _only_ teachning what sounds the letters (or clusters of letters) make and not reading whole words by sight. Method currently popular in England according to my sources there. New Zealand and Australia teach a mixed method with whole-word recognition and phenetic recognition used where they work best and somewhat according to what works for the child.
I don't have any direct experience of the US educational systems so I can't comment on how they teach reading.
I was taught to read before I could talk! (yes, really!) It was a popular idea at the time - works like this: Cards with words on them. Mother says "Fetch me the card that says 'Mummy'" (or 'dog' or 'cat', etc.) Child crawls off to get the card. Plus other similar exercises with the cards. Also note that I was late talking...
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Yep, I'm in England and my kids were taught using phonics as you describe.
The other interesting thing about phonics is that they have the concept of "alien words". These are words that are nonsense, but the idea is for the
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They are scaling back on teaching phonics, and getting rid of advanced English and math programs.
I find it a little unsettling that more and more, real-world events are starting to remind me of things straight out of (or heading in the direction of) an Orwell book.
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I find it as expected. Orwell just described a medium high-tech authoritarian state. With the current idiotic tendency towards right wing ideas (happens always in uncertain times), authoritarianism is coming closer as the right wing does not think people deserve rights or freedoms, but must be tightly controlled for society to function.
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The quality of the student does not correlate with the quality of the school district.
Our school district is considered to be fairly high quality, but lately they have been changing the curriculum for the worse. They aren't teaching the scientific method in science any more because, apparently, it isn't used anywhere (direct quote from a science teacher.) They are scaling back on teaching phonics, and getting rid of advanced English and math programs.
The end result is a lot of parents, us included, send their kids to out of school tutoring. Our middle school aged daughter still couldn't spell very well, as she was never taught phonics. Our high school aged son had problems with algebra because he wasn't taught multiplication and division properly. It wasn't just us, it was a *lot* of students in the district. Parents are angry. School board elections are getting contentious. It's a mess.
I don't understand how you can teach how to read a ridiculous language like English using phonics. The spelling of English is an utter mess and has very little to do with how words sound.
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Sorry, I call BS. Phonics was only used for a few decades, people learned to read/write just fine both before and after. The most important way to increase both reading and writing ability is to......read. So if your child has continued issues with spelling, it may be because they do not read enough (no, TikTok comments don't count), and that would be your fault not the schools.
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Our middle school aged daughter still couldn't spell very well, as she was never taught phonics
Not sure where "learning phonics" is going to help you outside of first grade. English is largely NOT a phonetic language, and a large part of English class outside of grade school is learning such
Re:Quality (Score:5, Informative)
Full disclosure: I Worked in IT for higher ED for 11 years and K12 for 1 year.
Over the course of 11 years, the quality of the students in the higher ED college became worse and worse. but my 1 year stint in K12 however gave me the insight as to why the higher ED students were coming in so badly prepared for college that most of them basically talked like the kid from Porkchop Sandwiches [youtube.com]
K12 Does not teach kids to think. It teaches kids to react
Problem solving and critical thinking skills is absolutely discouraged and replaced with instant gratification and fast fact finding. Take Math for example. Instead of teaching a kid how to add 2+2, we show them a table that already has it figured out, or hand them a calculator. Word problems that attempt to make math more usable in the real world are basically nonexistent and replaced with papers with just simple math problems for easy calculator entry and cartoon characters saying "GOOD JOB!" written no less than three times on the paper. Most kids have a iPad shoved in their face most of the day to solve a math problem with a cartoon penguin that jumps an iceberg in a cutesy attempt to recreate Brain Age, except that all the kid does is see the simple math problems that they've seen hundreds of times and reacts to the problem like people react to Bejeweled.
Science is even worse. Everything that's in the book or the internet is fact. The scientific method is either not taught or barely taught. For example, when I was in school our Science teachers taught us the process on how we got to the current theory of the origin of life, from Theology, to spontaneous generation all the way to the current theory. Today, they just teach the Origin of life theory with either barely or no explanation on how we got there.
Also STEM was a big component of K12 education, which is fine, but again, is taught with reaction rather than thinking. Back in school we had LOGO and the Turtle, they gave you basic commands and you had to figure out how to get the turtle to walk. Today, they give kids Python and a book with all the programs written for them in it, so basically you're teaching a kid to transcribe rather than code and then teaching the kids that if you change this number this happens. The kids have no idea why it happens or what they typed. They just know the words in the book make things work so GOOD JOB!
The best way I can describe the difference between two decades ago and today is this video. [youtube.com] This was a short on Sesame Street for years that illustrates how to use critical thinking to solve a simple problem but was pulled due to the chance that a kid could trip and fall doing it. Instead of replacing the video with something similar but safer to teach critical thinking skills what did they replace the video with? More Elmo's World.
You do realize that's on purpose right? (Score:3, Funny)
Long-term though this is going to screw over your grandkids massively. With the public school system gone the private schools will be free to slash quality and there isn't going to be anything your kids can do about it. If there are public schools left by the time that happens they're going to b
Re:Quality (Score:5, Informative)
Is the scientific method as "we are taught on the first day of Bio 101" significantly different than how it is described here [wikipedia.org]?
Right at the beginning of the article it is made clear that it is a set of principles, not steps.
Do you have much in the way of credible citations/articles that expound upon your opinion of the wrongness of the scientific method? Because, until now, I have never encountered this attitude from anyone who is serious about science, and would like to know if there is serious academic discussion about this or just a trend in intellectual sloth.
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Just this last Sunday I heard someone expounding over the pulpit about how much better religion and faith were than science. Because for religion and faith we had the evidence of our feelings, instead of having to take the word of a scientist. Of course, totally missing the boat on the fact that feelings aren't a valid measure of anything other than an individual's emotional state, and that good science is repeatable by anyone willing to put in the effort and resources.
Will be sorted over time (Score:2)
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could be, but the problem right now is the lack of accountibility.
no one has any idea if it's effective because they are effectively out of the public school system, which is really the whole point.
waiting over a "student's lifetime" in not a great plan.
The schools have to teach to the test, why don't homeschooled kids have to take those same tests ?
then we'll find out a lot sooner how ineffective it is.
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Yep. I have a home-schooled friend I would guestimate has a 115-120 IQ, but can't do arithmetic in 30s. Picked up all these weird skills in interpersonal online, has a huge network, but can't multiply two numbers. There's nothing wrong with home schooling in principle, but you need some sanity checks Around basic levels of achievement, checks for abuse, etc.
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The whole "teaching to the test" bull is one of the reasons the US school system is the complete failure it is. Kids shovel the crap into their brains without even remotely understanding just WHAT they do there, barf it onto the test, then clean out that brain to shovel some other crap in.
Garbage in, garbage out.
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Teaching to the test was a horrible idea, I presume it still is, but my wife is no longer closely connected to the school system.
It could have been a decent (not good) idea, if it had been designed to ensure a minimum level of attainment. Instead it was implemented to punish those schools/teachers that didn't get an above average score. It's the carrot and stick approach without the carrot.
Re:Will be sorted over time (Score:4, Informative)
...then we'll find out a lot sooner how ineffective it is.
Home schooling is not new, and there have been TONS of studies on outcomes. Most of those studies conclude that homeschooled children do as well or better than public schooled kids.
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And every generation can pretend that no one ever thought of determining this before, just as you have done.
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The only way this will be sorted out will be to wait and see how these students perform during their lifetime.
We called this "the pre-modern era" and we know how educated people were back then (not much). Not quite sure why you'd try the same thing again but expect a different result this time.
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Don't blame em! (Score:3, Insightful)
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tomeeeto, tomaaato...
Death of America (Score:3, Insightful)
Over time, this will lead to the balkanization of the u.s., an increase in racism, and an increase in total indoctrination until the age of 18.
Public Schools combined with engaged parents is a much healthier blend for maintaining a homogenized population of one common people, to having shared values, hell- to sharing the same beliefs about the fundamentals of reality.
Good, high quality home schooling is fine, but I've gone to the home schooling websites and some of those books ignore established science and push mythology as facts.
And even my own daughter acknowledged despite working at home during covid, they could not provide as high a quality an education for my two gifted grandchildren. And she's *highly* accomplished in life and has excellent organizational skills and has risen to the executive level from the bottom (almost impossible) *and* she had six years formal training experience training and setting up curriculums for onboarding employees at that time.
So people without training or experience or a high level of drive are not going to successfully educate their children.
Likewise, simply going to share space with people of all races and beliefs in a public school humanizes those other people and causes friendships that cross groups.
I'm sure this will happen... but it's going to end badly.
Not Surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
I joined a group of four dozen authors from all over the world to make our works available to an entire school district. The board listened politely. The district officials listened politely. Months passed. We never heard from them again.
We spend north of $11000 a year per student here in the Golden State. Even if a teacher makes $100k, that leaves roughly a quarter million a year per classroom unaccounted for. We know it isn't being spent on:
1. Science equipment
2. Music
3. Computers
4. Clubs
5. Libraries
6. Field Trips
7. Sports (Aside from football and basketball and only at the high school level)
8. Art, Theater, Dance or Debate
9. Journalism or Creative Writing
10. Guest Lectures
11. Edible food
The public schools are government funded fortresses ruled over by bureaucrats far more interested in defending their access to taxpayer money and turf than anything else. Go ahead. Go volunteer at your local school and see how that works out for you.
It's no mystery at all why parents are walking away.
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Still, it sounds a lot. Over here in Europe we spend like 5000-7000 a student and get generally better results.
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Not surprising ... (Score:3)
... given the current state of public schools in the US.
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thinly veiled lies (Score:5, Interesting)
The article tries really hard to suggest diversity without actually claiming it, always saying things like "more diverse" rather than just "diverse". Then it gives up the game while claim the opposite, stating:
"...home-schooling parents as a whole still lean more conservative and religious than the general population, with about 1 in 3 saying the Bible is the literal word of God and 46 percent saying liberal influence on public schools is a reason they home-school."
Also, the article doesn't acknowledge another critical piece of the story, that a large set of the population (that includes home-schoolers) have become inclined to lie to pollers to hide the opinions and behaviors. It's well known to political pollers today and it no doubt has an impact here.
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I think the issue is to focus on the newly-homeschooled. We all know certain religious communities have always been much more likely to homeschool and likely always will be.
So if the percentage of homeschooled was historically 75% religious (made up number), and the "newly homeschooled" is closer to "50-50" the spirit of this article will be correct, but the overall percentage of homeschooled would likely not budge much from that 75% number.
Public education is vital (Score:5, Informative)
If there is one thing the founding fathers, for all their differences, agreed upon it was the importance of education as means for democracy to thrive. Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, Washington, all agree in some form that for the whole America/democracy thing to work the public had to have a robust education, regardless of your standing or wealth or upbringing.
I don't think anyone would argue that our public schools don't have issues but the idea of privatization or homeschooling from many is just a backdoor to further weaken what is really the absolute most important institution in the country and much like health care we stubbornly refuse to consider what other countries do to improve their systems and maybe learn something from them.
Nobody get's to choose their parents, or the circumstances they are brought up in so it's in everyone's duty, a vital part of the our social fabric that quality of education is separated from those circumstances or we don't get to say we live in anything remotely resembling a meritocracy.
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If there is one thing the founding fathers, for all their differences, agreed upon it was the importance of education as means for democracy to thrive. Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, Washington, all agree in some form that for the whole America/democracy thing to work the public had to have a robust education, regardless of your standing or wealth or upbringing.
I don't think anyone would argue that our public schools don't have issues but the idea of privatization or homeschooling from many is just a backdoor to further weaken what is really the absolute most important institution in the country and much like health care we stubbornly refuse to consider what other countries do to improve their systems and maybe learn something from them.
You unknowingly answered your own observation. Like the founding fathers, one of the things that links most of the political parties in other highly civilized countries is that Education is a priority to them. I remember one article I read, it talked about the educational system of some Northern European country (I think it was Sweden, but can't be sure). The two most extreme divergent political parties in the country both worked together to make certain that the education system was well funded and working
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using the public school system in an ideology fight (and yes, both parties are doing this)
This is true to a point but it is absolutely not fair imo to "both sides" this issue when if you take away the details of *how* we do public education you end up with one side of the spectrum supporting the institution and the other has been spending what feels like my entire life trying to weaken and undercut it and that alone is a massive, massive difference.
We can't make any progress on the fight over ideologies when we one side doesn't even really agree on the concept of public education to begin with a
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The founding fathers may have agreed upon it, but they didn't include it in the list of federal responsibilities. That is a junk argument. It's also "argument from authority".
Just because you are defending the correct side of an argument doesn't make junk arguments any better. Your other two paragraphs are much better.
Safety concerns perhaps? (Score:2)
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Leaving Politics out of School (Score:5, Interesting)
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WRT "who actually understands grammar at that point?", nobody understands English grammar. It's probably not understandable on the basis of simple rules (though I don't think that's been proven). If you want to look at something that "sort of" understands English grammar, look at an LLM.
A lot of what schools teach (taught?) about English grammar is actually based around Latin more than around English. And how many people can distinguish between Subjunctive 1 and Subjunctive 2? But I don't really even kn
Just great. (Score:2)
"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."
And *not* being taught. A generation without perspective.
Schools and parents have different goals (Score:5, Insightful)
> "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. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance."
Test scores are how the school system assesses itself; not how parents are assessing the quality of their child's education. Frankly, the obsession with test scores is a big part of the problem. For instance, my daughter made it pretty clear to me that the schools only really cared about ensuring that kids were happy and comfortable at times when the standardized tests were conducted. Every conversation I had with her teachers had to be grounded in the specific learning objectives outlined in the Common Core curriculum as adopted in our state, and there was no possibility of her exploring any curiosity on her own, unless that curiosity exactly matched with the objectives of the curriculum at the exact time that the curriculum sought to teach it.
As someone who homeschooled myself growing up, I'm pretty used to hearing that schools are an essential place where people learn to socialize which I had missed out on, and that I'm lucky to not be socially crippled in some way as an adult, because it is dangerous to withhold that experience from kids. My expectation going into the public K-12 process, then, was that the local public school district would be fostering a social atmosphere that in some way taught and reflected actual social dynamics that I recognize from everyday life. Instead, as my daughter moved through the process, I found the school district instituted policies to try to avoid conflict, poorly, in a manner that seemed to interfere with normal friendships a lot more than unhealthy bully-victim relationships. For instance, kids were forbidden from inviting classmates to birthday parties, unless they were willing to invite ALL classmates, so no one would feel left out. When conflicts inevitably arose anyway, my kid was couched in heavily bureaucratized therapyspeak to have conversations that no humans I have ever met would actually have or expect to resolve their problem. When that didn't work there was really no follow-up. To me, it seemed that the entire point all along was to limit the school's liability for anything that goes wrong and to have policy in place that appeared to "do something," rather than providing an environment for kids to grow up and figure things out in.
The grading was also meaningless. The school was highly reluctant to offer feedback that is particularly negative or positive. I suspect that there are multiple motives here, from student:teacher ratios of 30:1 or worse, to an intense need to make the achievement gap go away -- if not in reality, then at least in published statistics. When my daughter heard that there was a "Talented and Gifted Program," she was keenly interested in working to be identified for it. I noticed that my daughter would work really hard on projects, and come home with a feedback that said stuff like "Great work! 3/4," with no additional context as to what was deficient or strong, or how the additional point could have been earned. The final straw for me came when she told me that she'd experimented and found that her grades had nothing to do with the level of effort she put forward. She also said that the best way to protect her own quiet time to think about what she wanted was to keep up with the material just well enough that no one thought she was falling behind. This ensured that teachers mostly left her alone as long as she was handing her work in.
Later, we learned that the TAG program is considered a political liability by administration and only exists at all because of a vaguely-worded state statute creating an unfunded mandate for one -- TAG has an annual funding of less than $70/student/year with 0.8 FTEs allocated to it acr
no metal dectors (Score:3)
At least your kids won't have to go through a metal detector or practice active shooter drills. oof things are really bad compared to when I was in school.
Gee. What could have made that happen? (Score:4, Insightful)
Take your pick:
1. Pointless school closures with no notice. Sometimes lasting years in places.
2. Dumbing down the curriculum on the theory that the way to increase opportunity for some is to deny algebra 1 in the 8th grade to all
3. A small number of very public instances of egregious intrusion of activist politics into schools, in the form of
a. Trying to convince small children they're transgender
b. Using gender-neutral bathroom policies to cover up sexual assaults by biological males in girls' bathrooms
4. All of the above?
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Username checks out.
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Re:Gee. What could have made that happen? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone disgusted by the mental illness of transvestites is religious, it's more of a fundamental "Ewww, yuk" reaction to nasty pedo activities in schools.
It's not always the outright pedo activities. It's about the supporters planting ideas in kids heads. Some kid feels a bit 'funny' about their sexuality and the pro trans groups step in and ask if they've been feeling suicidal. Maybe not before, but now the idea has been placed in their head [cdc.gov]. Thanks a lot, assholes. These unqualified hacks need to be kept very far away from children. I'm surprised that state licensing boards haven't been pulling their credentials. This is basic Psyche 101 stuff. It's trivially easy to plant ideas in young children's heads. And we've been through that before [wikipedia.org].
Re: Gee. What could have made that happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Things like "critical theory" of the Kendi/DeAngelo variety turning kids to anti-Western Maoist radicals are at least not at all funny.
And last month's spectacular eruption of "from the river to the sea" chants should be evidence enough that while not the rule, it's also not some right-wing fever dream either.
probably saving their children (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:probably saving their children (Score:4, Interesting)
We have friends with high school and middle school aged children. Both curriculums lace their semesters with trainings in gender theories, racist theories (anti-white and anti-asian - they're asian), pro-trans and even pro-surgery. All laced with hate and anti-humanism. So I can see how compelling it is for parents to take their children out of this madness lol.
LOL indeed. Now, where was this at? Which school district? Do you have examples of these racist/trans/gender theories being taught? Which teacher or administrator was involved? Is it part of regular class or is it some sort of after-school thing?
It is crazy that you are modded up to +5 Insightful with such claims without the slightest shred of proof. It is shameful that people are eating it up so casually.
If I were you, I would be embarassed (yes, 1 fucking 'r') for uttering such drivel without offering ANY proof whatsoever.
All you have to do is say you are in Texas or Florida and we begin believing you, but that is not enough proof. Something like school district and year would help a LOT for investigative purposes. But no, fuck us, we don't need that type of information for such incredible claims. We are just supposed to happily believe it all. Meh.
Elite PrivatePublicRegular PrivateHome School (Score:2, Interesting)
I tutor kids from all different types of schools. My kids go to a mediocre public school.
Elite private schools are great, the equivalent of the best public schools.
Public schools in general, at least in California, are solid choices. Even the worst schools have good teachers but crap students from poor families.
Regular private schools are pretty awful. Untrained teachers. Weak curriculum. The equivalent of the worst public schools.
Home schooled are the fucking worst. No structure worth thinking of. N
I think that's fine. (Score:2)
It's going to work for some, maybe not for others... but that's true for the public and private systems as well. I say, let them be.
However... I think institutions providing post-secondary education should adopt a "fail them fast" mentality. If students arrive without basic lucite each of the ability to form a logical, cogent thought, throw them the fuck out. Don't waste the institutions's resources building future debt for the student.
We need some decently defended permission to fail.
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Frack... "lucite" should be "literacy"... autocorrect plus typing in bed on a phone. with one eye open through aging eyes...
Gee, why? (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... [dailymail.co.uk]
Aside from the naked racism in such a supposition, would anyone be surprised that parents would see this, and seek LITERALLY ANY ALTERNATIVE THEY COULD AFFORD to, y'know, actually educate their kids properly (even if they're minorities!)?
And this is absolutely not the only place nor context this is occurring. ...simply changed the rule FOR THEM about what punishments would be applied. Eg a certain level of inschool violence that would result in suspension or expulsion for an Asian, Hispanic, or White student simply wouldn't be punished as severely for a Black or Native student.
St Paul MN schools, in order to 'correct racial disparities' in discipline for Black and Native students
Not kidding:
https://www.city-journal.org/m... [city-journal.org]
Schools worried about wrong stuff... (Score:4, Interesting)
And we will see more (Score:3)
Politics aside, the quality of education is declining in the USA. In California, they have recently taken steps to reduce the math load of students, as many of them are failed by the state. (Yes, it is not the students failing, but the state education system failing them. I don't think our collective IQ is decreasing each generation... yet).
One of my friends recently did this. Their son loves math, but even in a very prestigious school district, they can't find what they are looking for. So the best option is doing it yourself. Better? You are no longer part of the drama and anti-social behavior exposed in our schools. And it might be a "win" (!) for the school as well, since the kid would be "trouble" for them (both ends of the spectrum outside their norms are going to cause issues).
Anyway, in the past, they had chanced scoring systems to hide deficiencies. First wrt. declining math and language understanding, they introduced new metrics like "graduation rates", which can easily be fulfilled if you never fail anyone for any reason at any time. When some moved to AP classes, they decided to shut them down. And finally they have realized algebra was exposing their inability to teach (the system, not individual hard working teachers), so they have removed that too (to a point).
(For those who are interested these are the "score cards" of the nation, where California is significantly behind most everyone else: https://www.nationsreportcard.... [nationsreportcard.gov])
Re:More like indoctrination (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you actually dug into the issue or did you just want the cheap-shot at religious conservatives?
I was put into home schooling for the exact opposite reason. We're a bunch of left-wing Yankees (native New Yorkers) who moved to the South and our parents were very unhappy with the quality (in 6th Grade we were reviewing subjects we'd mastered in 3rd and 4th Grade in NYS), religious bent (sent home with writing assignments on the bible), and toxic masculinity (my gym teacher chose to single me out as a 'sissy') of public schools in the South. Sad story: My second day of public school in the South was the first time I ever heard the 'N Word' used in anger. It was used by one of the teachers and the district's response was, "She's retiring next year." *facepalm*
I remained in home schooling when we moved back to the North, because it was easier for everyone than trying to transfer back into public high school.
As a side note, I'm not generally in favor of it, Southern ignorance notwithstanding. Academically I thrived, but socially, it very definitely stunted me, with friendships, dating, etc. I don't think I overcame that until my late 20s/early 30s. :-(
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Also: There's less risk of being shot or being treated like "bitches" when you're at home.
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Well, your anecdote does seem to go against the grain. My anecdote is that all the families I personally am aware of that home-schooled their kids are strongly religious. They talked about how they wanted their kids to learn the right things, but what they really wanted was for the kids NOT to learn "the wrong things", like evolution, how long ago dinosaurs roamed the planet etc.
Re: More like indoctrination (Score:2)
Re: More like indoctrination (Score:2)
While those certainly exist, I've also seen "no school is good enough for my kids" or "other kids are too mean and my kid shouldn't have to learn how to interact with anyone they don't want to".
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That's why I used the qualifier "most".
Re:More like indoctrination (Score:4, Interesting)
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Most of the homeschooling types are ultra-religious or ultra-anti government. Both tend to be very authoritarian and not very friendly to children.
You're a country that has kids swear a pledge of allegiance, which includes the phrase "One country, under God"
WTF do you expect?
If you add up all the patriotic hubris that goes on in the USA, the flags everywhere, the national anthems before every tiny little sporting event, the pledge of allegiance, the 'American Dream'... the list goes on and on... compare this with fascist Europe in the 1930s.
The USA must have been an *inspiration* to them. The eugenics and segregation were CERTAINLY and OPENLY an inspi
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. . . ultra-religious or ultra-anti government. Both tend to be very authoritarian and not very friendly to children.
How exactly do you figure that anti-government means being authoritarian? For that matter, how does being anti-government make a person bad for children?
I just can't reimagine hippies with a love children into your fantasy of rule-following threats to children.
Re:More like indoctrination (Score:5, Informative)
In my experience, the tests that kids have to pass at age 16 for a high school equivalency, the home-schooled kids I know pass those with flying colors. To boot, because they passed the test and have a certificate, they can hit the job market or college two years earlier than their peers.
Home schooling is more complex than people think. It takes a lot of instruction to keep on parity, and all the homeschooling parents I know are doing their best to provide a good, if not better education than what public schools can deliver.
Socialization is definitely something that schools offer, but this element works if one can afford the kiddie Veblen goods that Joe Popular has. Without the latest styles, the latest iPhone, and so on, a child is doomed to being unpopular. So, having some other venue for socialization is something that is starting to replace schools, with their rigid social strata system where a child's experience all depends on how much one makes as a parent. So, other venues for socialization like churches, cons, even renaissance faires are popping up instead (and it is surprising to see how well socialized the faire kids are.)
And no, many of the parents homeschooling are not religious nuts, nor are they sovereign citizens. I know some, with more degrees than a thermometer, who have seen what public schools can do to kids who may not be 100% compliant on everything (perhaps a bit of ADHD, dysgraphia, on the spectrum, etc), taken the time to educate the kids themselves, and when the kids hit 18, they are doing better than their peers because they have skills, trades, and street knowledge, while the peer from the public school has nothing to offer an employer, college means a lifetime of debt... and still nothing to offer an employer, or going into the military and hoping they chose right on the MOS (in bad times, getting a good MOS that gives a TS/SCI clearance which can be used in the civilian sector can be harder, and a MOS like 11X is all but worthless in the civilian sector.) Homeschooling can give a two year advantage versus peers, and the kids often are coming out with real life skills.
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What's wrong with not being friendly to children?
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> What's wrong with that?
Authoritarian parenting:
"If authoritarian disciplinary tactics were effective, we would expect them to lead to fewer such behavior problems as children get older. But that isn’t what we observe when we track children’s development. In a meta-analysis of more than 1400 published studies, Martin Pinquart found that harsh discipline and psychological control were actually the biggest predictors of a child’d behavior worsening over time (Pinquart 2017). Kids subject
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> What's wrong with that?
Authoritarian parenting:
"If authoritarian disciplinary tactics were effective, we would expect them to lead to fewer such behavior problems as children get older. But that isn’t what we observe when we track children’s development. In a meta-analysis of more than 1400 published studies, Martin Pinquart found that harsh discipline and psychological control were actually the biggest predictors of a child’d behavior worsening over time (Pinquart 2017). Kids subjected to authoritarian tactics at one time point tended to develop more externalizing behavior problems at later time points." https://parentingscience.com/a... [parentingscience.com]
Not very friendly to children:
If that means being antagonistic then it's a serious parenting problem.
I suspect that this applies to entire, authoritarian, societies. Not just parenting.
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What's wrong with that?
They're ignoramuses. Not in any position to teach children anything.
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Being ultra-religious tends to steer kids away from reality-based thinking, practical solutions, teamwork, rational thinking, constructive criticism, logic, that sort of stuff. The stuff the kids will actually need to know.
Extreme anti-authority teaches kids to mistrust expertise in favour of "common sense" (which is neither common nor sensical) and leads kids towards the mindset that violence, brutality, and power by the individual are necessarily "better" solutions than cooperation, collaboration, and pow
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What's wrong with teaching kids that obedience is more important than curiosity and questioning?
You are seriously asking this or are you just trolling?
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What's wrong with teaching kids that obedience is more important than curiosity and questioning?
You are seriously asking this or are you just trolling?
How are you going to get good replacement little soldiers to replenish your ranks when you engage in a nasty prolonged war of attrition? Certainly not by teaching curiosity and questioning...
Mind you, you're going to also have to change their diets too...
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You end up with this. https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
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If there is a dramatic increase in at-home learning, does this signal that these concerns were not significant?
This could actually be considered a very serious topic, in many ways. At the simplest answer: They can still be significant, but not as significant as other factors people are identifying as reasons to homeschool. Varying from "The school isn't challenging enough" or "The school isn't enforcing good behavior (or even encouraging bad behavior) such that the other kids are being abusive towards mine" all the way to "The school is teaching my kid things I consider EVIL and I'd prefer to keep them ignorant a
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If public schools cover evolution, that's new since I was there. We got Mendelian genetics and that was about it. And even that only one week in "General science".
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Maybe they noticed that their kids are happier without the bullying.
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Standardized tests could, in principle, be useful. But not frequent ones, and definitely not ones where the teachers know in advance what the questions are, and that they will be evaluated on how their students answer. "Teaching to the test" needs to be impossible.