11 ms·

Census Bureau’s Survey Shows Significant Increase in Homeschooling Rates

87 points by hindsightbias 5y ago

brighton36 5y ago
This is wonderful. I hope this trend continues
nixpulvis 5y ago
I'm not a parent, but I did know of some homeschooled kids growing up. Honest question; where do these kids get to socialize without their parents present for long lengths of time now?
- slackfan 5y ago
  Same place as any other kids do non-parentaly-supervized socializing. Their neighborhood, playgrounds, activity clubs, summer camps, band, etc, etc.
- 0x53 5y ago
  I was homeschooled. I played soccer throughout highschool for the homeschool soccer team, played in a youth orchestra, took classes at a homeschool co-op and then local community college. My family also did a lot with our local church. Once I graduated and went to a 4 year university I definitely liked the increased social interaction, but I had plenty in high school.
- MrZongle2 5y ago
  We homeschooled our two kids through their middle-school years, after it was clear that the supposedly superior charter middle school in the district was failing. We found local homeschooling groups and it turned out that the kids ended up with more socialization than when they were in traditional school. There were more field trips, PE activities, band (yes, there was a full bad of homeschooled kids) etc. -- partially because with an unparalleled student-to-teacher ratio, a day's worth of lessons can be completed in a much shorter time. Everyone's mileage may vary, of course, but homeschooling doesn't mean condemning your kid to a shut-in, anti-social experience by any means.
- octokatt 5y ago
  Homeschooled here, agree with other posters, and want to point out this is the same thing that happens with remote working. Hobbies with structured meetings, book clubs for continued learning, social sports are all things that are added into the mix to get good social activity. And, frankly, they’re a lot more fun than forced office/school interactions. When I had to go back to public school, I missed homeschooling dearly, and I lost a lot of really good study habits that would have made college easier. Now that I’m working remotely, I have a lot better skill base to work from to manage the work because I was homeschooled.
- macksd 5y ago
  I've known many homeschooling families very well, and it's a spectrum. There are families where the answer is "they don't", and those children seem to invariable end up with major life skills missing from their repertoire. I've also known families who did go out of their way to get their kids in programs where they would make friends they could spend time with (both structured and unstructured), and in general give them comparable experiences to what you would get in a traditional school. One such group had a bunch of home-schooled kids put on theater productions every year, etc. Such families seemed to have many of the components of a standard school experience but it was organized a-la-carte by the parents and they were more involved. Those kids seemed to turn out pretty well-adjusted and extremely well educated. If you live in an area where home-schooling is common (that's probably pretty widespread at this point) it's quite easy to find support groups and resources on Facebook, etc. these days.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
throwawaysea 5y ago
Glad to see this. I view homeschooling as increasingly important in an era where schools are being used for political indoctrination, for example with the injection of CRT and CRT-based ideology into classrooms. I see friends who are teachers often talking about “critical pedagogy”, which is explicitly political and activist. Parents shouldn’t have to monitor how their children are being mismanaged by those in a position of trust, but here we are. For parental rights to have any meaning, homeschooling and school choice more broadly, are critical.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Critical race theory isn't taught in primary or secondary schools.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    It absolutely is, and your comment is textbook gaslighting. I’ve seen this repeatedly from people who try to define CRT as an arcane framework taught only formally in law schools. Sorry but that’s not true either because it is directly taught, because its derivative concepts are taught, or because the accepted definition of CRT has changed - and it doesn’t matter which. But to claim CRT isn’t in schools in some form is plainly gaslighting. Ibram Kendi tried this sleight of hand as well, claiming anti-racism isn’t CRT, but he is already on the record admitting that CRT is foundational to his work on anti-racism, which is clearly being injected into schools (https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/24/ibram-x-kendi-falsely-claims-he-is-not-a-critical-race-theorist/ https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/24/ibram-x-kendi-falsely-c...).
    - jandrese 5y ago
      The conversation has been intentionally muddled here by shifting definitions. "Critical Race Theory" is a college course. However the version that is a rebranded "PC culture run amok" is far more prevalent and includes things like teaching kids that the US founders were slaveholders and that owning slaves is a bad thing. It's the same old story over the decades, but rebranded yet again to get the attention of the news media. "Traditional values are 'under attack' by crazy left wing people who only care about not-you".
sokoloff 5y ago
> By fall, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling (Sept. 30-Oct. 12). A clarification was added to the school enrollment question to make sure households were reporting true homeschooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school. > That change represents an increase of 5.6 percentage points and a doubling of U.S. households that were homeschooling at the start of the 2020-2021 school year compared to the prior year. I’m skeptical that this represents a durable increase and deeply skeptical that it represents a durable doubling. Once C19 passes, homeschooling rates are more likely to revert to historical norms than to remain at a 2x level. We could have homeschooled this past year (because of widespread WFH). I think many of these increased rates were similar opportunistic homeschooling.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Almost certainly it will fall back at least partway. Like the increase in work-from-home, though, it is possible that it will not fall all the way back to pre-pandemic levels. But I think there is no question some of this change will not "stick".
  - jandrese 5y ago
    My family is doing this as we have 4th grader twins and a 6th grader that are not eligible for the vaccine yet. Homeschooling is a huge amount of work for the parents. As soon as we can vaccinate the kids they are going back to regular school. While I'm pretty sure the kids are learning more than they did last year, and maybe even more than they would have learned in regular school it's so much less efficient that it just doesn't feel worth it. But the alternative is the kids get COVID. It's not a question of if but when. The schools here are just not taking it seriously enough, and frankly they probably couldn't given the number of kids in the building. Sure they'll probably be OK when they get it, most kids are, but it seems completely reckless to just send them with the hope that they won't get a bad case. We are hoping to send the 6th grader back for the second half of the semester, he'll be getting the vaccine right after his birthday this month so we have a waiting period, a second shot, and another waiting period before he goes back.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
They wouldn't let kids go to school. They made them stay home. Is anyone surprised that at least some parents and kids decided they liked that?
cblconfederate 5y ago
i know this is political for americans, but going forward i can only see homeschooling via remote schooling becoming more and more prevalent as families move away from dense cities, and others choose travel as a long-term living situation. it even makes ecological and epidemiological sense and i think more and more countries will warm into it. As for the socializing aspects of school, they 'll be replaced with neighborhood socializing, like it used to be
- coding123 5y ago
  Someone in one of my college classes said 20 years ago that he saw society at some point topple and the people would go back "in" and him saying that has stuck with me this entire time.
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  I don't know much about the terminology here, but doesn't "homeschooling" generally imply "the parents determine what the kid gets taught, they just have to make it through finals" and "remote schooling" imply "while still following the school's syllabus"? That's a potentially big difference.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    u re right -- i had the latter in mind. But if people do choose to become more mobile, they 'll still want their kids to follow a stable curriculum, which means essentially homeschooling (even if it means they follow the state-school classes of their home country)
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    We're in kind of an interesting time. It isn't weird for homeschooled kids to have a teacher brought in for specialized subjects. Many homeschool groups actually pool and will have parents teach different subjects. Remote learning seems like a good tool in the mix. It does lend to being more hybrid than pure "home school".
    - 5y ago
seibelj 5y ago
I could send my kids to very good private schools but we are seriously considering learning pods. Online groups make it easy to meet up with other pods. And I like the ability to craft the syllabus my kids learn from. The old factory-method of schooling just doesn’t make any sense. Why do you have 45 minutes of math, 45 minutes of English, 45 minutes of etc.? It’s like the format of schooling was invented 150 years ago and never updated.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Because school isn’t just about learning. Learning pods and online learning just isn’t scalable.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Scalable? Groups of 20 families hiring an instructor as a grass roots method + online resources seems automatically scalable to me.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >Groups of 20 families hiring an instructor i.e. "ye olde one room schoolhouse" The online resources just mean that a single instructor is more efficient/effective by leveraging the work of external specialists and can carry students into depths of subjects that were not attainable at that scale a century ago. Your great grandfather may have had to go to college to learn science and math beyond the basic stuff. Today a generalist teacher can leverage everything from a lesson plan to a virtual lecture prepared by teachers who specialize in teaching those subjects.
      - TimTheTinker 5y ago
        The resources available today make homeschooling and co-op/pod schooling incredibly scalable. Khan academy's video tutorials can be a game changer when a child is having trouble understanding a particular concept in math, for example.
    - 5y ago
dougmwne 5y ago
Seems like the difference between homeschooling and remote learning is probably not that large practically speaking. Every parent I know had to put significant attention towards remote learning when they had elementary aged kids. Seems to me it's mostly a matter of where you get your content and lesson plans from. Do you take whatever the school gives you or do you roll your own lesson plans with the copious resources out there.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  In the pre-pandemic times there were families who took their curricula from public schools. Often these were students who either had learning disabilities or were talented in a non-academic area (say the piano) and the parents just wanted extra flexibility in terms of education.
- drdec 5y ago
  Depending on which jurisdiction you live in, there can be a significant difference in terms of paperwork. Also, if you think that the student might transition back from homeschool to public school, the school will want to do some kind of evaluation to determine what class the student belongs in. If the student had been remote learning via the public school all along, this never comes up.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    What type of evaluation? I feel like the larger states all have standardized testing, so as long as your kid passes the tests each year, you did your job.
    - colpabar 5y ago
      I was never home schooled but I went to private school through 6th grade, and then went to public through high school. When I switched, I took placement tests that put me into the higher level math and english classes for 7th graders. I imagine it would be something like that.
    - drdec 5y ago
cltby 5y ago
The biggest problem with public schooling is less political indoctrination and more the lack of actual schooling. When educators themselves claim “there is no such thing as learning loss," we should take them at their word. School has very little intellectual content, and many parents are simply starting to recognize that. https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/cecily-myart-cruz-teachers-union https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/cecily-myart-cruz-teache...
- rayiner 5y ago
  The politics is just the latest example of the fact that teachers have a massive conflict of interest when it comes to educating kids. Parents want to maximize the success of their individual kid. Teachers want to advance the various goals of the school system at large. Even though I believe they’re mostly well intentioned, that can take the form of ignoring most kids to try and do damage control for the most troubled students, or sacrificing individual kids at the alter of some larger social ideology.
  - watwut 5y ago
    The big reason for homeschooling is that you can push your own politics or religion on school more. Not everyone does it for that reason, but there are quite a few radicals in the movement who do exactly that. Notably Christian radicals.
    - cltby 5y ago
      > The big reason for homeschooling is that you can push your own politics or religion on school more As a descriptive claim, this might be true (wouldn't shock me if the bulk of parents choose to homeschool for religious reasons). But if it's prescriptive, it's horribly wrong. A moderately intelligent child with moderately thoughtful parents will learn far more outside the school system than within.
    - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
      This is right, since no Christian private schools exist to provide this function.
useful 5y ago
A few teachers I know are selling their course material and lesson plans online. A majority of their sales come from home school parents in their local district whos kids attended their classes. It's only about $50-100/week extra, but it helps.
literallyaduck 5y ago
Bespoke X will almost always beat out one size fits all X.
- david_allison 5y ago
  The effect of bespoke education is massive, and nobody's listening. > the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
  - asdff 5y ago
    Everyone knows this I think. It's not that no one cares to afford a tutor, its that no a lot of people can afford a tutor or has the time to become a tutor for their own child on top of their other responsibilities. Who gets an A on every exam in college? The kids beating down the professors door the minute before office hours formally start and taking up all the time in the Q and A session with the TA, wringing every spare drop of hands on time with an educator that they can out of the 24 hour day, then they go to the library with their study groups and continue teaching eachother concepts on whiteboards. It's like competing with a runner who does 30 miles a day.
listless 5y ago
I’m a stat here and so is my sister. Both of us pulled kids out last year due to the unworkable situation of having a small child sit in zoom calls all day.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Nothing like 20 interruptions a day. At some point. We are going to lose our jobs over her school. So she played video games during the day and our evenings were spent playing catch-up. Tutors as much as we could.
  - listless 5y ago
    Don’t feel bad. Same situation here to be honest.
dkhenry 5y ago
I am part of this increase, and after a full year homeschooling we will not be sending our kids back to traditional school. What we noticed is that our kids weren't actually learning, they were being pushed through a program so they could pass a test with very little concern about where that would leave them in the future. This was most apparent in math, where foundational concepts were being rushed just to cover the full syllabus and in future years the foundations of computation were not really well covered and when we started to put them though our math program of choice ( Saxon math ) it was really clear they didn't understand the concepts ( for instance, given a word problem there was no real ability to write down the equation, even though they had been taught that material in the past ). It wasn't just math, it was every topic, and it was really apparent as we started to actually evaluate what they knew. As time goes by I am really struggling to see any benefit of the traditional model except for keeping kids busy so their parents can work. Giving kids the individual attention and tailoring the schoolwork for them its just so much better and able to actually instruct the children. I would much rather live a simpler life in a place with a low cost of living, than require a two income household and offload the education of my children to a system that doesn't particularly care about them being educated.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  How was the perceived quality of your school district (e.g. as evaluated on a real estate site)?
  - dkhenry 5y ago
    I have lived in some of the best school districts in the country and sent my kids to the public school in them. 1. Garnet Valley in PA ( this one was the best of all we tried ) https://www.greatschools.org/pennsylvania/glen-mills/garnet-valley-school-district/ https://www.greatschools.org/pennsylvania/glen-mills/garnet-... 2. Fairfax Country in VA ( this one was the worst ) https://www.greatschools.org/virginia/falls-church/fairfax-co-public-schools/ https://www.greatschools.org/virginia/falls-church/fairfax-c... 3. Los Gatos/Saratoga in CA https://www.greatschools.org/california/saratoga/schools/ https://www.greatschools.org/california/saratoga/schools/ In California we sent our kids to a private school before pulling them out for home schooling. Essentially I don't think its the school districts fault, I think its a suboptimal model and if you are really well funded with really engaged parents you can kinda make it work. Although the number of Kuman and Russian Math tutoring facilities near me makes me double guess myself on that.
hellisothers 5y ago
Anecdotally, last year when we got to see the daily schoolwork our 1st grader was asked to do we were shocked with how much below his skill level the assignments were (at our 10/10 school). We can’t do homeschooling for various reasons but it really made us reconsider if there is a way we could make it happen. Perhaps some of this increase is parents getting a close look at what their kids are learning.
legerdemain 5y ago
No one seems to bring it up here (why?), but the #1 benefit of homeschooling for my family is faith-based education. In the US, approximately 2/3 of homeschooled children and the three most popular homeschooling curriculum providers are explicitly Christian. I love it that my children, and increasingly the children of others, have the opportunity to be brought up in God's instruction. It is not up to the government what my children believe or how they're educated. I hope this trend keeps growing!
- HWR_14 5y ago
  I wasn't aware Christians had their own math, history or literature. I've been made sadly aware that some Christians have their own read on science (evolution, geology, apparently virology and epidemiology). So I guess my question would be, what is "faith based education"? I suppose as long as it's not causing you to abuse your children and you aren't getting public funding, I don't really care. But I will say, any "God's instruction" that can be undone by secular exposure for 7 hours a day, 180 days/year seems to be extreme enough that I worry it veers into the "bad for the child" zone.
ffggvv 5y ago
people also got to see the insane things their kids were being taught for the first time. https://www.indy100.com/news/pride-flag-allegiance-pledge-school-b1911595 https://www.indy100.com/news/pride-flag-allegiance-pledge-sc... https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427337084591874055?lang=en https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427337084591874055?... https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427842328878886914 https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427842328878886914

87 points by hindsightbias 5y ago

This is wonderful. I hope this trend continues

I'm not a parent, but I did know of some homeschooled kids growing up. Honest question; where do these kids get to socialize without their parents present for long lengths of time now?

slackfan 5y ago
Same place as any other kids do non-parentaly-supervized socializing. Their neighborhood, playgrounds, activity clubs, summer camps, band, etc, etc.
0x53 5y ago
I was homeschooled. I played soccer throughout highschool for the homeschool soccer team, played in a youth orchestra, took classes at a homeschool co-op and then local community college. My family also did a lot with our local church. Once I graduated and went to a 4 year university I definitely liked the increased social interaction, but I had plenty in high school.
MrZongle2 5y ago
We homeschooled our two kids through their middle-school years, after it was clear that the supposedly superior charter middle school in the district was failing. We found local homeschooling groups and it turned out that the kids ended up with more socialization than when they were in traditional school. There were more field trips, PE activities, band (yes, there was a full bad of homeschooled kids) etc. -- partially because with an unparalleled student-to-teacher ratio, a day's worth of lessons can be completed in a much shorter time. Everyone's mileage may vary, of course, but homeschooling doesn't mean condemning your kid to a shut-in, anti-social experience by any means.
octokatt 5y ago
Homeschooled here, agree with other posters, and want to point out this is the same thing that happens with remote working. Hobbies with structured meetings, book clubs for continued learning, social sports are all things that are added into the mix to get good social activity. And, frankly, they’re a lot more fun than forced office/school interactions. When I had to go back to public school, I missed homeschooling dearly, and I lost a lot of really good study habits that would have made college easier. Now that I’m working remotely, I have a lot better skill base to work from to manage the work because I was homeschooled.
macksd 5y ago
I've known many homeschooling families very well, and it's a spectrum. There are families where the answer is "they don't", and those children seem to invariable end up with major life skills missing from their repertoire. I've also known families who did go out of their way to get their kids in programs where they would make friends they could spend time with (both structured and unstructured), and in general give them comparable experiences to what you would get in a traditional school. One such group had a bunch of home-schooled kids put on theater productions every year, etc. Such families seemed to have many of the components of a standard school experience but it was organized a-la-carte by the parents and they were more involved. Those kids seemed to turn out pretty well-adjusted and extremely well educated. If you live in an area where home-schooling is common (that's probably pretty widespread at this point) it's quite easy to find support groups and resources on Facebook, etc. these days.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

throwawaysea 5y ago

Glad to see this. I view homeschooling as increasingly important in an era where schools are being used for political indoctrination, for example with the injection of CRT and CRT-based ideology into classrooms. I see friends who are teachers often talking about “critical pedagogy”, which is explicitly political and activist. Parents shouldn’t have to monitor how their children are being mismanaged by those in a position of trust, but here we are. For parental rights to have any meaning, homeschooling and school choice more broadly, are critical.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
crooked-v 5y ago
Critical race theory isn't taught in primary or secondary schools.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  It absolutely is, and your comment is textbook gaslighting. I’ve seen this repeatedly from people who try to define CRT as an arcane framework taught only formally in law schools. Sorry but that’s not true either because it is directly taught, because its derivative concepts are taught, or because the accepted definition of CRT has changed - and it doesn’t matter which. But to claim CRT isn’t in schools in some form is plainly gaslighting. Ibram Kendi tried this sleight of hand as well, claiming anti-racism isn’t CRT, but he is already on the record admitting that CRT is foundational to his work on anti-racism, which is clearly being injected into schools (https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/24/ibram-x-kendi-falsely-claims-he-is-not-a-critical-race-theorist/ https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/24/ibram-x-kendi-falsely-c...).
  - jandrese 5y ago
    The conversation has been intentionally muddled here by shifting definitions. "Critical Race Theory" is a college course. However the version that is a rebranded "PC culture run amok" is far more prevalent and includes things like teaching kids that the US founders were slaveholders and that owning slaves is a bad thing. It's the same old story over the decades, but rebranded yet again to get the attention of the news media. "Traditional values are 'under attack' by crazy left wing people who only care about not-you".

sokoloff 5y ago

> By fall, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling (Sept. 30-Oct. 12). A clarification was added to the school enrollment question to make sure households were reporting true homeschooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school. > That change represents an increase of 5.6 percentage points and a doubling of U.S. households that were homeschooling at the start of the 2020-2021 school year compared to the prior year. I’m skeptical that this represents a durable increase and deeply skeptical that it represents a durable doubling. Once C19 passes, homeschooling rates are more likely to revert to historical norms than to remain at a 2x level. We could have homeschooled this past year (because of widespread WFH). I think many of these increased rates were similar opportunistic homeschooling.

rossdavidh 5y ago
Almost certainly it will fall back at least partway. Like the increase in work-from-home, though, it is possible that it will not fall all the way back to pre-pandemic levels. But I think there is no question some of this change will not "stick".
- jandrese 5y ago
  My family is doing this as we have 4th grader twins and a 6th grader that are not eligible for the vaccine yet. Homeschooling is a huge amount of work for the parents. As soon as we can vaccinate the kids they are going back to regular school. While I'm pretty sure the kids are learning more than they did last year, and maybe even more than they would have learned in regular school it's so much less efficient that it just doesn't feel worth it. But the alternative is the kids get COVID. It's not a question of if but when. The schools here are just not taking it seriously enough, and frankly they probably couldn't given the number of kids in the building. Sure they'll probably be OK when they get it, most kids are, but it seems completely reckless to just send them with the hope that they won't get a bad case. We are hoping to send the 6th grader back for the second half of the semester, he'll be getting the vaccine right after his birthday this month so we have a waiting period, a second shot, and another waiting period before he goes back.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

They wouldn't let kids go to school. They made them stay home. Is anyone surprised that at least some parents and kids decided they liked that?

cblconfederate 5y ago

i know this is political for americans, but going forward i can only see homeschooling via remote schooling becoming more and more prevalent as families move away from dense cities, and others choose travel as a long-term living situation. it even makes ecological and epidemiological sense and i think more and more countries will warm into it. As for the socializing aspects of school, they 'll be replaced with neighborhood socializing, like it used to be

coding123 5y ago
Someone in one of my college classes said 20 years ago that he saw society at some point topple and the people would go back "in" and him saying that has stuck with me this entire time.
ThePadawan 5y ago
I don't know much about the terminology here, but doesn't "homeschooling" generally imply "the parents determine what the kid gets taught, they just have to make it through finals" and "remote schooling" imply "while still following the school's syllabus"? That's a potentially big difference.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  u re right -- i had the latter in mind. But if people do choose to become more mobile, they 'll still want their kids to follow a stable curriculum, which means essentially homeschooling (even if it means they follow the state-school classes of their home country)
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  We're in kind of an interesting time. It isn't weird for homeschooled kids to have a teacher brought in for specialized subjects. Many homeschool groups actually pool and will have parents teach different subjects. Remote learning seems like a good tool in the mix. It does lend to being more hybrid than pure "home school".
  - 5y ago

seibelj 5y ago

I could send my kids to very good private schools but we are seriously considering learning pods. Online groups make it easy to meet up with other pods. And I like the ability to craft the syllabus my kids learn from. The old factory-method of schooling just doesn’t make any sense. Why do you have 45 minutes of math, 45 minutes of English, 45 minutes of etc.? It’s like the format of schooling was invented 150 years ago and never updated.

endisneigh 5y ago
Because school isn’t just about learning. Learning pods and online learning just isn’t scalable.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Scalable? Groups of 20 families hiring an instructor as a grass roots method + online resources seems automatically scalable to me.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >Groups of 20 families hiring an instructor i.e. "ye olde one room schoolhouse" The online resources just mean that a single instructor is more efficient/effective by leveraging the work of external specialists and can carry students into depths of subjects that were not attainable at that scale a century ago. Your great grandfather may have had to go to college to learn science and math beyond the basic stuff. Today a generalist teacher can leverage everything from a lesson plan to a virtual lecture prepared by teachers who specialize in teaching those subjects.
    - TimTheTinker 5y ago
      The resources available today make homeschooling and co-op/pod schooling incredibly scalable. Khan academy's video tutorials can be a game changer when a child is having trouble understanding a particular concept in math, for example.
  - 5y ago

dougmwne 5y ago

Seems like the difference between homeschooling and remote learning is probably not that large practically speaking. Every parent I know had to put significant attention towards remote learning when they had elementary aged kids. Seems to me it's mostly a matter of where you get your content and lesson plans from. Do you take whatever the school gives you or do you roll your own lesson plans with the copious resources out there.

jdavis703 5y ago
In the pre-pandemic times there were families who took their curricula from public schools. Often these were students who either had learning disabilities or were talented in a non-academic area (say the piano) and the parents just wanted extra flexibility in terms of education.
drdec 5y ago
Depending on which jurisdiction you live in, there can be a significant difference in terms of paperwork. Also, if you think that the student might transition back from homeschool to public school, the school will want to do some kind of evaluation to determine what class the student belongs in. If the student had been remote learning via the public school all along, this never comes up.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  What type of evaluation? I feel like the larger states all have standardized testing, so as long as your kid passes the tests each year, you did your job.
  - colpabar 5y ago
    I was never home schooled but I went to private school through 6th grade, and then went to public through high school. When I switched, I took placement tests that put me into the higher level math and english classes for 7th graders. I imagine it would be something like that.
  - drdec 5y ago

cltby 5y ago

The biggest problem with public schooling is less political indoctrination and more the lack of actual schooling. When educators themselves claim “there is no such thing as learning loss," we should take them at their word. School has very little intellectual content, and many parents are simply starting to recognize that. https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/cecily-myart-cruz-teachers-union https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/cecily-myart-cruz-teache...

rayiner 5y ago
The politics is just the latest example of the fact that teachers have a massive conflict of interest when it comes to educating kids. Parents want to maximize the success of their individual kid. Teachers want to advance the various goals of the school system at large. Even though I believe they’re mostly well intentioned, that can take the form of ignoring most kids to try and do damage control for the most troubled students, or sacrificing individual kids at the alter of some larger social ideology.
- watwut 5y ago
  The big reason for homeschooling is that you can push your own politics or religion on school more. Not everyone does it for that reason, but there are quite a few radicals in the movement who do exactly that. Notably Christian radicals.
  - cltby 5y ago
    > The big reason for homeschooling is that you can push your own politics or religion on school more As a descriptive claim, this might be true (wouldn't shock me if the bulk of parents choose to homeschool for religious reasons). But if it's prescriptive, it's horribly wrong. A moderately intelligent child with moderately thoughtful parents will learn far more outside the school system than within.
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    This is right, since no Christian private schools exist to provide this function.

useful 5y ago

A few teachers I know are selling their course material and lesson plans online. A majority of their sales come from home school parents in their local district whos kids attended their classes. It's only about $50-100/week extra, but it helps.

literallyaduck 5y ago

Bespoke X will almost always beat out one size fits all X.

david_allison 5y ago
The effect of bespoke education is massive, and nobody's listening. > the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
- asdff 5y ago
  Everyone knows this I think. It's not that no one cares to afford a tutor, its that no a lot of people can afford a tutor or has the time to become a tutor for their own child on top of their other responsibilities. Who gets an A on every exam in college? The kids beating down the professors door the minute before office hours formally start and taking up all the time in the Q and A session with the TA, wringing every spare drop of hands on time with an educator that they can out of the 24 hour day, then they go to the library with their study groups and continue teaching eachother concepts on whiteboards. It's like competing with a runner who does 30 miles a day.

listless 5y ago

I’m a stat here and so is my sister. Both of us pulled kids out last year due to the unworkable situation of having a small child sit in zoom calls all day.

treeman79 5y ago
Nothing like 20 interruptions a day. At some point. We are going to lose our jobs over her school. So she played video games during the day and our evenings were spent playing catch-up. Tutors as much as we could.
- listless 5y ago
  Don’t feel bad. Same situation here to be honest.

dkhenry 5y ago

I am part of this increase, and after a full year homeschooling we will not be sending our kids back to traditional school. What we noticed is that our kids weren't actually learning, they were being pushed through a program so they could pass a test with very little concern about where that would leave them in the future. This was most apparent in math, where foundational concepts were being rushed just to cover the full syllabus and in future years the foundations of computation were not really well covered and when we started to put them though our math program of choice ( Saxon math ) it was really clear they didn't understand the concepts ( for instance, given a word problem there was no real ability to write down the equation, even though they had been taught that material in the past ). It wasn't just math, it was every topic, and it was really apparent as we started to actually evaluate what they knew. As time goes by I am really struggling to see any benefit of the traditional model except for keeping kids busy so their parents can work. Giving kids the individual attention and tailoring the schoolwork for them its just so much better and able to actually instruct the children. I would much rather live a simpler life in a place with a low cost of living, than require a two income household and offload the education of my children to a system that doesn't particularly care about them being educated.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
How was the perceived quality of your school district (e.g. as evaluated on a real estate site)?
- dkhenry 5y ago
  I have lived in some of the best school districts in the country and sent my kids to the public school in them. 1. Garnet Valley in PA ( this one was the best of all we tried ) https://www.greatschools.org/pennsylvania/glen-mills/garnet-valley-school-district/ https://www.greatschools.org/pennsylvania/glen-mills/garnet-... 2. Fairfax Country in VA ( this one was the worst ) https://www.greatschools.org/virginia/falls-church/fairfax-co-public-schools/ https://www.greatschools.org/virginia/falls-church/fairfax-c... 3. Los Gatos/Saratoga in CA https://www.greatschools.org/california/saratoga/schools/ https://www.greatschools.org/california/saratoga/schools/ In California we sent our kids to a private school before pulling them out for home schooling. Essentially I don't think its the school districts fault, I think its a suboptimal model and if you are really well funded with really engaged parents you can kinda make it work. Although the number of Kuman and Russian Math tutoring facilities near me makes me double guess myself on that.

hellisothers 5y ago

Anecdotally, last year when we got to see the daily schoolwork our 1st grader was asked to do we were shocked with how much below his skill level the assignments were (at our 10/10 school). We can’t do homeschooling for various reasons but it really made us reconsider if there is a way we could make it happen. Perhaps some of this increase is parents getting a close look at what their kids are learning.

legerdemain 5y ago

No one seems to bring it up here (why?), but the #1 benefit of homeschooling for my family is faith-based education. In the US, approximately 2/3 of homeschooled children and the three most popular homeschooling curriculum providers are explicitly Christian. I love it that my children, and increasingly the children of others, have the opportunity to be brought up in God's instruction. It is not up to the government what my children believe or how they're educated. I hope this trend keeps growing!

HWR_14 5y ago
I wasn't aware Christians had their own math, history or literature. I've been made sadly aware that some Christians have their own read on science (evolution, geology, apparently virology and epidemiology). So I guess my question would be, what is "faith based education"? I suppose as long as it's not causing you to abuse your children and you aren't getting public funding, I don't really care. But I will say, any "God's instruction" that can be undone by secular exposure for 7 hours a day, 180 days/year seems to be extreme enough that I worry it veers into the "bad for the child" zone.

ffggvv 5y ago

people also got to see the insane things their kids were being taught for the first time. https://www.indy100.com/news/pride-flag-allegiance-pledge-school-b1911595 https://www.indy100.com/news/pride-flag-allegiance-pledge-sc... https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427337084591874055?lang=en https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427337084591874055?... https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427842328878886914 https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427842328878886914