A couple things to pull out… (1) sometimes alternative education is worse. There’s no question that, in some cases, alternative school is worse for a child’s

A couple things to pull out… (1) sometimes alternative education is worse. There’s no question that, in some cases, alternative school is worse for a child’s development than standard public school. I’ve personally seen children who were falling behind because their parents were not equipped to teach them in high school. (2) it can sometimes be better. Alternative school is higher variance than public school - the children who do poorly probably do worse while it can be spectacular for some children. We shouldn’t ignore that a relatively large percentage of homeschooled kids emerge at or near genius level. For kids for whom homeschooling works, it really works. (3) policy should encourage choice. On average, the US public school system is mediocre by world standards and in some parts of the country it’s an utter failure. Parents should be trusted with the care and education of their children because they’re in the best position to know what their child needs. Certainly some regulation around that freedom is in order, but we should expect more competition to produce more growth from a policy standpoint. Just like capitalism is the best-bad economic system we have, parent-choice is the best-bad educational system. Some parents will fail at their job and others will not. But centrally planned educational systems have massive problems, and parents must be allowed to opt out of those problems as their only real form of accountability. (4) we should avoid drawing conclusions from individual stories. When something bad happens at a public school - kid fails, someone gets shot, drugs are found, some one gets pregnant, there’s a fight - we accept those as being part of life, not a problem with public school. But when something bad happens to a homeschooler, we tend to wonder if the _system_ of homeschooling is broken. But the reality is that those stories are likely more surprising but probably not more common than the bad things which happen at a public high school. In the story, someone is quoted as saying “Eventually, something horrific is going to happen in one of these situations.” Which may be true and I hope we can find a way to avoid anything bad happening to anyone. But let’s not forget how many horrific things happen every week in high schools across America. It is a false promise to say that simply going to a public high school would fix all the problems found in homeschooling. Finally, if a parent wants to outsource the teaching of their child to a person who is operating out of a house, we should let them. The parent is the person most able to accurately assess their child’s needs, and it has to be their responsibility to make good choices for their children.