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Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

• generalizations 3y ago
  https://archive.ph/KftoD https://archive.ph/KftoD
• generalizations 3y ago
  > a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe Tell me your bias without telling me you're biased.
  • 303uru 3y ago
    What about that is untrue?
    • generalizations 3y ago
      Nothing whatsoever - they are technically correct (the best kind of correct). And yet it is also a descriptor that is likely to prime the reader with a negative connotation. There's a reason that witness oaths require not only "nothing but the truth", but first of all "the whole truth".
      • voxic11 3y ago
        I read it as acknowledging a preconception the reader is likely to have and therefor building rapport with the reader, not necessarily a sign of bias by the author.
        • generalizations 3y ago
          That just sounds like bias with extra steps. Which subset of readers is the author choosing to build rapport with? Which subset are they choosing not to build rapport with? Why one, and not the other? And anyway, why build rapport at all - this isn't an opinion piece.
    • HEmanZ 3y ago
      Is there some misunderstanding in English that “biased” means “factually false”? I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet confuse them as the same thing. Bias is supposed to mean something that is factual but presenting a one-sided opinion by e.g using a subset of facts and language meant to influence the readers opinion.
  • MilStdJunkie 3y ago
    It's biased in the same way an unchoked shotgun shoots pellets with wider dispersion. K-12 education done independently, atomized from regional or national institutions, means people come out more different, so the edges of the cluster are further away. Homeschoolers are biased about 43% to white and rural, so it's pretty fair that the fring is going to be on that side of things. I'm kind of stumped as to how that's biased.
    • zdragnar 3y ago
      You can't tell me with a straight face that public education is a uniform experience in the US. Just read through the comments other people have posted in subthreads here about their own experiences. My own school had a wide range of "don't bother learning, get pregnant and drop out" to "goes on to elite university" students, and everything in-between.
      • margalabargala 3y ago
        > You can't tell me with a straight face that public education is a uniform experience in the US. No one claimed that "public education is a uniform experience in the US". Did you reply to the wrong comment? Do you think the variability is wider among public schools, or among homeschools?
        • PuissantSheep 3y ago
          [dead]
  • hotnfresh 3y ago
    "Somalia—a country that once conjured images of famine and interminable civil unrest—" Is that snippet most likely an expression of bias, or is it most likely setting up to challenge bias?
• alex_young 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20231031143032/https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/homeschooling-growth-data-by-district/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231031143032/https://www.washi...
• boeingUH60 3y ago
  Good luck to these people, hope it turns out well. Personally, I can't imagine home-schooling kids. I neither have the time nor patience to do that, which is why I appreciate teachers. Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-schooled.
  • krastanov 3y ago
    Just FYI, while I share the overall sentiment, I think you are not up to date on the socialization aspect of homeschooling. Typical homeschooling today includes activities where most homeschooled kids from the town gather together for PE or art or other enrichment activities, maybe even specialized academic activities.
    • Loughla 3y ago
      There is no such thing as typical homeschooling, in my experience in education (decades and decades). It is extremely dependent on 1. access to wealth, 2. underlying reason for homeschooling (religion/safety/other item), and 3. where in the country you live (rural v suburban v urban). In that order specifically. Homeschooling is the ultimate class solidification technique. Those with wealth can almost certainly guarantee their children will do really well. Those without don't stand a chance in hell.
      • brodouevencode 3y ago
        > Homeschooling is the ultimate class solidification technique In what ways that are different from any public or private school?
      • AlwaysRock 3y ago
        Yup. There are a few big buckets in the US. 1. Religious Home Schoolers. They are primarily homeschooled because the parents are very religious and don't want them in public schools because of fears their kids will become too secular. 2. Wealthy Home Schoolers. These are very well off people who choose to home school their kids for any number of reasons (like their traditional schooling options being poor) but can afford to hire tutors or teachers or if they teach the kids themselves, there were previously teachers. 3. Group Home Schoolers. These are families that have grouped up to split the duties of homeschooling across multiple families. Sometimes for all classes or just a few. The kids are more likely to have more day-to-day connection with other kids/students other than their siblings. All of these groups have tons of cross over. Religious group home schoolers is a big thing right now. But your opinion on homeschooling is likely heavily built on the type of homeschooling you have witnessed/been involved in. At the end of the day, everyone has their own experience and biases built into schooling from their own lived experiences. For every, "I was homeschooled and grew up to be very social and successful” story, there is a, "I learned nothing and I don't know how to talk to people" story.
• brightball 3y ago
  When I moved into my current house about 10 years ago, the family next door home schooled. I'd never known any home schoolers before and definitely had some notions about how terrible it must be until I learned about it. This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, depending on the age. 2 subjects per day, so as a parent your teaching commitment was a half day a week on 1 subject. They would do field trips. They held a school play in a garage complete with costumes and video. And the kids were smart, well mannered, socially adjusted kids with very happy and normal lives. And there are plenty of sports opportunities as well. As far as I know, they all went to public high school too. Completely shifted my view of what I thought home schooling was, which was the kids stuck in 1 house with 1 parent all day in social isolation. The reality was closer to a model of a Montessori school which has a huge amount of success stories.
  • CharlesW 3y ago
    There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-professor-says-there-may-be-a-dark-side-of-homeschooling/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...
    • keiferski 3y ago
      It seems to me that the only relevant question here is how home schooling compares to public schools when it comes to “horror stories.” And there certainly aren’t a lack of public school horror stories…
      • pixl97 3y ago
        There are plenty of 'public school' horror stories because these things are public and can be audited in a great number of cases. You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private. Maybe you'll be a therapist and years later get to talk to one of these people how they are effectively crippled for the rest of their life. Or you'll be like me that grew up in a place that had a bunch of religious organizations that homeschooled most of their children with educations that I'd consider completely and totally deficient, and then pull those same people back into the organization as cheap/uneducated labor they could abuse.
• keiferski 3y ago
  This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent. It is pretty misleading for this article to talk about homeschooling being a “fundamental change” without mentioning that homeschooling was the default practice for most of human history. If anything, this is just a return to a long-established practice, not a fringe movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
  • jwestbury 3y ago
    There are many behaviours which were common throughout human history which would now be fringe movements. Human and/or animal sacrifices, for instance.
    • edgyquant 3y ago
      What a weird example. Sacrifices have not been common in the west for thousands of years and the majority in the Middle East for over half that time as well. Seems like a bad faith gotcha
    • keiferski 3y ago
      If animal sacrifice became common again, I would expect articles to mention the fact that it was a human practice for millennia – and not pretend it's just a fringe thing those pesky Other People invented. Homeschooling was also the default thing a ±century ago, while you'd need to go back pretty far to find true animal/human sacrifice in European/European-American culture.
      • Manuel_D 3y ago
        The default thing in preindustrial societies was no formal education for the vast majority of the population. The elite - a small slice of the population - was homeschooled by private tutors, and artisans (also small % of population) went into apprenticeships. This isn't really analogous to a vision of the world where the majority of the population is schooled at home.
      • 3y ago
• tivert 3y ago
  > Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught. Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?
  • add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    Sounds like a generational Dunning-Kruger situation.
  • Loughla 3y ago
    The college I most recently consulted with had to take a homeschool "transcript" that can literally be a signed paper from the parent handwritten with nothing to back it up. It's astounding. I don't know if that's just because that particular state doesn't have very strict rules around homeschooling, or if that's standard; I just haven't done the research.
    • Amezarak 3y ago
      How else do you think a transcript should work? What makes you think a random private school transcript has anything else backing it up? Presumably the students are also applying with ACT/SAT scores in hand, which do have an established meaning.
      • tivert 3y ago
        > How else do you think a transcript should work? What makes you think a random private school transcript has anything else backing it up? Are you saying things written on a fancy letterhead with a stamp can't be unquestionably trusted?
      • Loughla 3y ago
        Because they have some kind of accreditation body that monitors and approves the schools with established standards and approved/documented practices, whereas homeschool does not? And ACT/SAT has become optional since covid for most institutions.
• at_a_remove 3y ago
  The Post has a vague undercurrent of bafflement, a wide-eyed, "What could it possibly be?" and really only bothers to speculate toward the end. I was on Facebook, idly scrolling, and I received an ad for a nearby Montessori school. The ad was a simple lavender square, with the name of the school on it (no photo), and simply the text "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Of all of the letters, the "three Rs" weren't in evidence. Nothing about how the school will teach the child how to learn, prepare them for high school, or provide a rounded education. Just "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Upon some mental reflection, I recalled some recent radio ads for local universities, and the first sentence was about how they were diverse, and then there was something about inclusion and equality. No mention was made of "we will prepare you to be an adult" or "we will get you a good job." Unfortunately, I cannot have children, but if I were in a position to, I would like to think I would be interested in their education to the extent that I would make serious choices. And right now, that educational institutions consider their highest advertising priority is to display a relentless laser focus on DIE to the exclusion of, well, education does give a little pause to their selection. As I recall just how ill-served I was by the many schools I attended (we moved quite a lot), both for education and socialization, I can only imagine that diverting the already-anemic school efforts away from the core mission it even-then was not doing a great job at would only make these institutions even less-suited to their supposed task.
• burcs 3y ago
  We're homeschooling our kids. I was pretty against it at first, but seeing our education system degrade to the state it is today, and being honest about my schooling experience definitely opened me up to it. I think the biggest argument for schooling is the socialization aspect of it. I don't know about the rest of you but I was bullied pretty relentlessly throughout grade school and it completely changed my personality. I became much more of a loner, reserved, quiet, and just defeated. I'm still working through some of that baggage 30 years later. That's not the socialization that I want for my kids. I work remotely, my wife freelances. We have lots of friends and family with children our kids age, why not surround them by people who love them?
  • keiferski 3y ago
    I think I have basically the same opinion. It's not so much that I believe homeschooling is amazing in-itself, but rather that the public education system has so clearly deteriorated that it seems borderline criminal to subject your kids to it. The question for me, personally, is private school vs. homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public education via choosing the right private school (and being able to afford it), I do wonder if that would be superior to most homeschooling setups.
    • wizerdrobe 3y ago
      We didn’t go full home-school, but my wife and I intentionally left our city to go raise our kids out in a rural area so they could grow up in and around nature and with a nice, small school district that smokes anything we had back in the city. Better test scores, smaller classes, minimal major discipline issues. Prior to moving, our only “good” option for realistic schooling was putting our children in a local Catholic school with high fees. Given our state is in the midst of legal battles with activist groups fighting to overturn a recent school-choice voucher program, seemed moving was the safe choice. For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone but a public-sector teacher being finally held to account would fight against giving parents options to place their kids in a school they see fit.
      • 3y ago
• pjc50 3y ago
  So .. I was homeschooled for a couple of years, in the UK, and had a relatively normal if solitary experience. But that was because my mother was a qualified teacher who'd stopped working, and I was a smart kid. This left me naturally favourable to the idea. Since then it's become clear that there are basically two categories of homeschoolers: those that want to bring in extra education beyond what the public school system can deliver, and those that want to bring in less education than the public system. Usually in the name of "protecting" them from some information for religious reasons. That's where all the attention and concern is. Because children can't advocate for themselves, especially against their parents. (The UK had a recent scandal with illegal schools: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/12/ofsted-uncovers-500-suspected-illegal-schools-in-england https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/12/ofsted-unc... ; running a school for money - heck, even offering a childminding service for money - without registering with OFSTED is definitely illegal, while homeschooling is legal by default https://www.gov.uk/home-education https://www.gov.uk/home-education )
  • pixl97 3y ago
    This too is my experience. I grew up in a place with a large number of religious organizations and outcome of this is what I would consider abuse in a huge number of cases. Would the children themselves think so at the time, kinda hard when you're taught "spare the rod, spoil the child" and "Of course the Earth is only 6000 years old" daily.
    • WoodEye 3y ago
      I guarantee you (and the data backs this up) that the home schooled religious kids that are taught the earth is 6,000 years old and were spanked can run circles academically around the average public school kid.
      • LeonB 3y ago
        You didn’t provide “the data” - and I doubt it backs up your specific claim here.
• n3storm 3y ago
  Huge batch of negationists and easy-to-scam-with-health-products humans incoming.
• outside1234 3y ago
  The problem with home schooling is that it is a solution for the rich and leaves all of the poor kids behind.
  • throwaway1777 3y ago
    Yes it is. People forget this because they live in a bubble. It’s like remote work, nice for the laptop class, but not possible for the person growing your food and manufacturing your tesla.
    • pjc50 3y ago
      Oh, there's definitely poor people doing it as well. Not necessarily as well.
      • Ancapistani 3y ago
        We've looking into this, as deeply as we can as "outsiders". We homeschool, but are firmly "middle class" from a national perspective and easily in the top 1% income in our county. Regardless of income, the key factor seems to be the rationale. If parents want to homeschool because they're involved with their kids' lives and want them to succeed, they'll do well relative to the available public school options.
    • BurningFrog 3y ago
      There are plenty of people doing low paid jobs like phone support from home. Just like high earners like LeBron James are not allowed to WFH and have long commutes. It just depends on the nature of the work.
    • fundad 3y ago
      Always nice to see a silly Elon quote
  • ryan93 3y ago
    It is almost exclusively a middle class activity. Also not that expensive if one parent is home. I knew many homeschooled kids who were just given a math textbook and worked through it. You only go to math class in public school for about 182 hours a year, so a diligent kid can do a year of math in a few months no problem.
• throwaway1777 3y ago
  There’s a whole spectrum of “home schooling”. At one end you have parents teaching their own kids, maybe using some online resources, libraries etc. but for many it is more like group schooling which is almost like a charter or private school where you join with other “home” schoolers but don’t have a traditional teacher and administration, it’s basically the remote work approach of school vs the in-office approach. Then you have actual private schools with a more traditional building and teaching method. And finally you have public schools, the default choice which used to be seen as the gold standard in terms of equal opportunity, but let’s forget about that because schools are “indoctrinating” kids now.
• monero-xmr 3y ago
  I would much prefer “backpack funding” aka vouchers. The blue-state city I live in spends almost $25k per student per year and apart from a few magnet schools they are atrociously bad. Like the high school my kids would have to attend if I wasn’t wealthy had a student murdered outside of it a few years ago. If you gave parents even 1/3 of that money the state would save a fortune and parents would be so much better off. The monopoly system of education we have is just so awful. I’m fine with having bonus benefits for special needs kids, and public schools should always exist to educate the high-needs students. But the system we have now is so laughably bad and segregated that anyone who defends it must have a financial stake in keeping it running.
  • hotnfresh 3y ago
    Naïve per-student-spending calculations can misleading. Some students cost a lot more than others. My state spends hundreds of thousands per student in some cases—but that's schools in juvenile detention facilities. Nonetheless, that goes in the stats. Kids in self-contained classrooms ("special ed" kids who can't function in the normal classroom) can be several times as expensive to educate as the median kid. Kids in ordinary classrooms who get a dedicated assistant, they've got all the usual spending plus the fully-loaded cost of the assistant, so that's easily over $50k total. Kid in a gifted program? Add low-five figures to the cost. Fancy selective-admission public schools, which some states have? Typically higher spending per student than other schools, which drags up the average. They also have bussing costs, which (e.g.) private schools don't, which further complicates comparisons. That's not a small amount of money.
    • monero-xmr 3y ago
      I clearly stated I am fine for the special needs kids getting more funding. The central point is to give me - the parent - the money that would go to the atrociously bad school so I can put my kids (not special needs) into a good school. That is the situation for the majority of students.
      • throwaway626 3y ago
• underseacables 3y ago
  We started homeschooling our kids during the pandemic with a neighborhood group, and it went really well. Everything about them improved, not just their academic performance, but also their mood got way more positive about learning. Now we have them in private school and.. it seems to be going fairly well. They don't have the irritability that they did in public schools, and I think my children are much happier. From my perspective, there's just too much chaos in public education for healthy learning.
• sproketboy 3y ago
  [dead]
• chmod600 3y ago
  If you home school, you don't get the money back. Public school is something like $12k/yr. That's a lot of money that you're essentially opting out of. For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons, that must seem profoundly unfair. To be driven out of the public schools means to be denied resources. Public schools using public money should be especially sensitive and as neutral as possible on political or culture war issues. That's increasingly difficult, but without that, public school doesn't have a good future. Normally schools are thought of as Democrat-controlled, but that's not true everywhere. So rather than just saying that everything is OK the way it is, think about how it will be when your political opponents are in control.
  • keiferski 3y ago
    I believe that some states have programs that give you the money if you home-school. There seem to be some restrictions, though: https://idealschool.education/full-day-program/utah-voucher-program/ https://idealschool.education/full-day-program/utah-voucher-...
    • Ancapistani 3y ago
      Our state does - we did not take it, because the money comes with enough strings to make it distasteful. We homeschool to keep our kids out of government schools. Inviting that same government into our home for a bit of money would make no sense whatsoever.
      • keiferski 3y ago
        Makes sense, and looking at some of the requirements, understandable.
  • burkaman 3y ago
    > as neutral as possible on political or culture war issues I don't think it's really possible to be neutral about culture war issues, sort of by definition, especially when many of the wars are about schools themselves. A school is part of American culture, it can't somehow choose not to participate. To use a historical example, there was a culture war over teaching evolution in schools. A teacher at the time could describe the history and facts of the controversy without stating their opinion on it, but when the students leave that classroom, they are still in a school that either teaches evolution or doesn't. By existing and having a curriculum, the school takes a position in the culture war. Imagine if your country held a referendum on a certain issue, and said "if more than 50% of citizens vote yes, the law passes, otherwise it fails". You could have a genuinely neutral opinion on the issue ("I don't care which side wins"), but you cannot take a neutral action, because not voting makes the law less likely to pass. This is unfair, and you can be mad about it, but the only way to be "neutral" would be to leave the country and renounce your citizenship so that you are no longer part of the equation. Similarly, in a culture war, the only way to be neutral would be to not participate in the culture in question, which is even more difficult than leaving a country. Let me give one more example: whether or not to tip your server in a restaurant. Tipping 10% instead of 20% is not neutral. Tipping 50% of the time you go to a restaurant is not neutral. You could say "I don't wish to take a position, so I will no longer go to restaurants", but I'm confident the anti-tipping side would claim you as one of their own. Again it feels unfair, but it's just how culture works.
• weeznerps 3y ago
  I was homeschooled in the 90s/early 00s in the conservative Christian wing of the movement. Personally, I think it was a great experience (despite the conservative, religious aspect which I later rejected) and made me a more unique person. I would not have done well socially in school as a child anyway. My brother though, raised in the same environment, resents our upbringing. I also meet many homeschoolers raised in conservative Christian households who disliked the experience. Overall, it's a very high variance method of education. For every Judit Polgar, you have a woman told her highest calling must be to reproduce and be subservient to her husband (I know these people personally). If you have the resources and have intellectually precocious children, especially if they are a bit odd, they will likely enjoy it and benefit from it. If you have kids that really want to play sports at a high level or are socially very successful, they might later resent the opportunities they missed and the shared experiences they lack. Obviously, this is reductive, but I think something like this is true.
• burkaman 3y ago
  Is there a story here beyond the pandemic? The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. Now the rate is gradually declining as some kids return to school and some parents decide it's working well so they'll keep going until their kids are older. The pandemic is the most obvious cause, and the article notes that "Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth." Obviously test scores are not the only measure of quality, but at least in this article there is no evidence of any cause other than the pandemic. The other possible factor discussed in this comment section, politics, doesn't seem to be relevant either. There is no correlation between homeschooling rates and the politics of the parents or the state. Also, "fastest-growing" is not very remarkable when the only other categories are public and private. Home-schooling is by far the smallest category, less than 5%, so basically any increase (which has to come from a decrease in at least one of the other categories) will make it the fastest-growing category. Here are statistics going back further: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a.... Homeschooling gradually increased from 1999 to 2012, and then started to decline a bit until the pandemic.
  • tivert 3y ago
    > The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. I think you're forgetting the biggest reason: it turns out zoom school was a disaster and the worst of both worlds.
    • burkaman 3y ago
      Yes thank you, definitely should have mentioned that. My point is that there were a wide variety of pandemic-driven reasons that parents decided to homeschool. Even if all these reasons disappeared when the pandemic culturally ended, we wouldn't expect homeschooling rates to suddenly drop back down to the pre-pandemic level. Switching to homeschooling is a huge change, and so is switching back. I would expect the rates to gradually decline as fewer new students enter homeschool, existing students age out of it, and some students switch back to public or private school, and that's exactly what the data looks like.
• AlwaysRock 3y ago
  Feels like there is a big homeschooling article once every other week here and a whole slew of parents saying, "We homeschool and its great and our kids love it" and then a bunch of adults saying, "I was homeschooled and it was not great, and I did not love it" Regular schooling isn't ideal. But homeschooling is a pretty major reaction to that, and it shouldn't be done without serious consideration for the non-zero chance that your kids will resent you for that decision.
  • Ancapistani 3y ago
    > But homeschooling is a pretty major reaction to that, and it shouldn't be done without serious consideration for the non-zero chance that your kids will resent you for that decision. As a parent of two daughters who are homeschooled - unschooled, actually - I 100% agree. As with everything, our approach is intentional and we're open with our kids about it. If they wanted to go to a school - public, private, or religious - we would make that happen. Our eldest is currently taking three hours per day at the local public high school. She's 15, wants to own a equine stud farm, and is taking every agriculture class she can find. After this year she will have exhausted their offerings in that subject, so she'll likely start at the local community college in the fall.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • kredd 3y ago
    It’s HN, we have to keep in mind there is a huge self-selection bias that’s happening. In general, I consider good public schools can be good, bad ones can be bad. But even in the worst case you somewhat interact with other people at the least. Same goes to the homeschooling — some can be successful, some can be disastrous. The majority of homeschooled kids that would fail, definitely wouldn’t be on these forums. So we’ll hear mostly success stories that came out of it. It’s hard to apply the comments to a generalized idea from HN.
  • Pinsy352 3y ago
    Yeah, I have definitely run into other formerly homeschooled students who really enjoyed it. Usually they had some choice in being homeschooled (either requested it or were given a yearly option to opt out). I myself would say I had a mixed experience. I did well academically because my parents prioritized academics and had college as a strong goal for me, but the religious indoctrination and utter lack of social experiences was awful for me. It also seriously strained my relationship with my mom, who did not manage her chronic illness, extended family issues, and homeschooling me well. Another family I knew had a 16 year old who could barely do 5th grade level math, a girl my age who couldn't read, and two more kids who were also going to be 'unschooled' by their IMO neglectful mother. HSLDA has successfully lobbied against even tracking if a child is homeschooled, so there is no way to truly statistically tell which experience is the representative one. All you get are anecdotes, mostly from the parent's point of view.
• nickthegreek 3y ago
  John Oliver did a great segment on the issues with home schooling in the modern age a few weeks ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI
  • goalonetwo 3y ago
    Ah yes, John Oliver. Probably one of the most biased formats you can find. Mixing comedy with pseudo-facts and personal opinions to push an agenda/narrative. I wish we could only see what he produces as comedy but way too often people love to share his clips/narrative as a semi-reliable source of information.
    • nickthegreek 3y ago
      If you have any specific issues with this segment, I would be interesting in hearing them.
      • goalonetwo 3y ago
        Let's start with this thread: https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1715586174658441404 https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1715586174658441404
        • nickthegreek 3y ago
          I do appreciate the effort, but I can't see the thread as I do not have a twitter account.
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
          • slackfan 3y ago
            nitter.net?
• francisofascii 3y ago
  Anecdotally I have worked with many colleagues who were homeschooled. I suspect a correlation with home school children and programmers. Also, just met a ninth grader who enrolled at our local high school after being home schooled. He is programming Rust and taking Calculus with a bunch of seniors. Not sure if he is exceptional or simply was able to fast forward due to being homeschooled.
  • xxs 3y ago
    I find it rather unlikely homeschool process had anything to do with, esp. Rust. At that age I did mostly assembly but that was just personal search/no teaching. Overall the kid is just an anecdote.
• brentm 3y ago
  I wonder how this all turns out. I know some people will do a great job at educating their kids but I have a feeling that on the average most of these kids will have been better off not home schooled. I think it takes a pretty special type of kid to do the work when the only pressure comes from your mom and dad.
• knodi 3y ago
  Home schooling is also the worst form of education, only second to no education.
  • bluescrn 3y ago
    Home schooling can be anything from the very best to the very worst, depending on who's doing the teaching and how well they're doing it.
• vasco 3y ago
  I wasn't homeschooled and it's not legal to do it in my country even, so I have a bias. That being said it seems weird to me that parents in the US seem to consider that they "own" their kids to a much bigger degree than some places in Europe at least. I don't have kids but I think most parents around me growing up had a sense that their kid also belongs "to society" in a way, and going to school and learning about what society "wants you to" is expected, in the same way you also are just simply required to vaccinate and that's it, because you also "belong to society" in some way other than just belonging to your parents. I wonder how much of the whole debate is mostly about difference of opinions between people on both sides of this specific subject rather than the ones the media focuses on.
  • zo1 3y ago
    So grown ups in a country where children aren't allowed to be home schooled generally believe that their children "belong to society"? At what point do we call it culture and "difference of opinion" as opposed to just plain old indoctrination or brainwashing? It's not a left vs right issue, this is freedom vs tyranny. Right now the left isn't able see it as Tyranny or indoctrination because their predominant opinions and values are being taught to children, so it's convenient. It's another form of "civilizing those barbarian <insert unfavorable group here>". At the end of the day, I don't belong to society, and neither do my children. They belong to themselves and can choose for themselves how they see fit. Until then, I'll instill my values to them, and make sure they treat their fellow beings better than the way "society" treats them.
  • anon291 3y ago
    Well the issue is that the United States is very diverse. Most countries are basically monocultural ethnostates. My kids do not belong to American society but they definitely belong to a particular culture. And within that culture, and families who partake, we do 'share' our children. But, to bring the culture wars into this, how do you feel that you have joint guardianship of a child whose parent fundamentally disagrees with you? With our church group, I trust the parents to discipline, to entertain and to teach in a way consistent with my beliefs, even if they're very different people. On the other hand, my next door neighbor is convinced my daughter is a boy because she likes trucks and would like her to be trans, like she has already transed her son. When you perceive other adults attempting to abuse your child and this is a common enough movement you're not going to be able to feel any joint sense of guardianship. And it's not just culture issues. Unsurprisingly, neighbors children are also poorly behaved, disrespectful, and never get told no. America has fully embraced multiculturalism without assimilation, so there are now dozens of cultures, so no sense of joint guardianship over children.
• seltzered_ 3y ago
  "Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people." There was a vice documentary that sorta touched on the political & religious biases with some homeschooling communities & programs: https://youtu.be/9kuNycfklN4 https://youtu.be/9kuNycfklN4 (2022)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• lapetitejort 3y ago
  I was home-schooled until high school. Long story short, it was a disaster. I bordered on having no education at all, on top of no socialization. I'm so fortunate I got at least four years of public school. I still think I suffer to this day. For parents who are thinking of home schooling your kids: best of luck to you. If you succeed, maybe your kids will be smarter. If you fail, you could be setting your kids up for a lifetime of stunted socialization skills and poor work habits.
  • ejb999 3y ago
    so kind of like public school then?
  • arrowsmith 3y ago
    > a lifetime of stunted socialization skills and poor work habits. The joke's on you, I wasn't home-schooled and I still got both of those.
    • brightball 3y ago
      Is your username related to the actual program out of Toronto?
      • arrowsmith 3y ago
        No, I'm not Canadian and have no idea what program you're talking about.
        • brightball 3y ago
          https://www.arrowsmith.ca/ https://www.arrowsmith.ca/
    • le-mark 3y ago
      This is comment I was looking for. Any number of circumstances can lead to the same outcome, question is what does one do going forward?
  • 3y ago
• camhart 3y ago
  When the choice is be happy with your assigned school based on your location, or you have to uproot and move your entire household, homeschooling becomes one of the few options when public school is failing one of your kids.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    If you have the ability and desire to homeschool then it's always going to be the best choice. Only if you feel like you won't be a good teacher or you do not have the resources should you consider public/private school. My kids are in public school because neither my wife nor I have the time to homeschool. However, I feel like we still do about 25% homeschool because of the engagement required to actually educate our kids. They basically goto school to sit in a chair until the workday is almost over. /both our kids are in one of the "best" public middle schools in DFW supposedly. It's still filled with the most wildly incompetent staff imaginable.
    • turtlebits 3y ago
      Disagree. Most parents are not going to be good teachers of children, no matter how good they think they can teach. Being present/engaging doesn't cut it. School, especially for younger kids is all about social relationships, managing emotions/empathy and less about education/academics.
• ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  "Fringe" and "fastest-growing" are in no way contradictory, quite the reverse.
  • droopyEyelids 3y ago
    Great point. We need a "so-and-so's law" type name for this, even though it's obvious when you think about it.
• linuxftw 3y ago
  There's always this pretense that other people should have some say whatsoever in how another person chooses to educate their child. As if what people decided 100+ years ago should exist in perpetuity. What does a public high school diploma afford one these days? The opportunity to work manual labor or retail jobs for starvation wages, and the opportunity to attend more school that costs money for jobs that pay marginally more for most people. It's wasted time and resources for the vast majority of people. Could you imagine trying to train children to become elite athletes? As if everyone is going to play on a collegiate sports team, so we just spend 8+ hours per day doing athletic training? Even though most will never achieve success in collegiate or professional sports? Well, at least kids wouldn't be obese in that scenario, which is likely going to pay more dividends than teaching an average-iq person calculus.
• teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I have a set of cousins that were all home schooled. Most of them went to ivy league schools, a couple own very successful businesses. I went to public school and haven't done too poorly. The most important thing is that your parents give a shit and can prioritize their children's well being.
• jawns 3y ago
  People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept, but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things. There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all very different motivations. Likewise, there are people who "unschool," people who use very formal curricula, people who make use of co-ops and traditional classroom settings, people who use a lot of remote learning, people who value social interactions and have their kids involved in lots of activities with other kids, and people who are more focused on academic achievement. These are all very different methods of education. Beyond that, there are parents who are well equipped to homeschool and parents who are not. And there is a small but hard-to-ignore percentage who claim to homeschool but really neglect their kids. Treating all these scenarios as a single thing that you can hold a single, consistent opinion about suggests to me a lack of familiarity with its wide spectrums along multiple dimensions. It's like passing a judgment on a person based on their race, country of origin, gender, etc. Disclaimer: Our family homeschools. Both my wife (previously a public- and private-school teacher) and I were biased against it prior to having kids, but we came to find that a lot of our biases and concerns were unfounded.
  • torial 3y ago
    100% agree with this. Also, with the right community, it is possible to have plenty of "socialization" with other kids. My family participates in a parent-led co-op that allows kids to benefit from different strengths in different parents and to have lots of friends. As my kids are neurodivergent, I think this environment has been safer for them and allows them to focus on their passions. There is still some peer pressure re: neurodivergence, but I think it was less severe than when I was in public school with less obvious neurodivergence.
    • darigo 3y ago
      >it is possible to have plenty of "socialization" with other kids. I agree. Public school is not a great place for socialization, and it's not hard to create something better. Nothing socializes kids like sitting next to each other motionless in silence for several hours lol
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• turminal 3y ago
  Fringe and fastest-growing are not mutually exclusive: https://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/
• pengaru 3y ago
  I expected home schooling to take off in popularity once school shootings became normalized and schools responded by increasingly resembling prisons.
• brindlejim 3y ago
  This appears to be largely a COVID phenomenon. Lacking that forcing function, I doubt whether subsequent cohorts of parents will opt for that burden. The only thing that might push them to maintain the discipline of home schooling is the ideological capture of public schools, which leads to discrimination, unmonitored chaos and the long-term medicalization of students based on dumb ideas, the naming of which will would get this comment flagged.
• timerol 3y ago
  "Rise from fringe to fastest-growing" seems like a math misunderstanding. Something that's small has the largest possibility of growing rapidly, expressed as a percentage. https://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/ The article really doubles down on suspect use of numbers by talking about "[Hillsborough County, Fla] vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling." Spurious election correlations make for bad articles. Within that county since 2017 school enrollment has grown "3.4 percent, to 224,538 students." (about 7400 student increase), while homeschooling has grown 74%, up to 10,680 (growth of about 4500 students).
• defgeneric 3y ago
  I'm skeptical when these parents their kids cite poor public schools as the primary reason for home schooling. When you look closer, it's almost always lifestyle and ideology that are the main factors. The often-cited failure in socialization extends beyond socialization within peer-groups as well--kids also need exposure to a variety of adults and authority figures. It's not only about learning how to make friends. > Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance. > The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students. > “Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.” I mean reading this it just sounds like they are discovering the hard way the concept of... a school??
  • pdonis 3y ago
    A school-like environment that doesn't indoctrinate their children in values that the parents disagree with, which is what would happen if their children went to public schools.
    • defgeneric 3y ago
      Sorry, but the parents' "values" are almost always some crackpot nonsense. Public schools at least aim for a measure of neutrality, beyond which children can develop their own ideas. It's just strange to me that people are so intent on having their children mirror their own ideas. Have some humility, entertain the idea that you yourself may be wrong about everything, and let the kids figure out what they think for themselves. The public school gives them a reasonably neutral basis to do that, even as the different ideological fads come and go in the faculty and administration.
      • pdonis 3y ago
        > the parents' "values" are almost always some crackpot nonsense "Almost always" is way, way too broad. Yes, some parents' values are crackpot nonsense, but many are not. One does not have to be a crackpot to prefer homeschooling to US public schools. Also, the values that the people who set up the US public school system explicitly said that system would indoctrinate children into are nothing to write home about either. > Have some humility Take your own advice. If anyone is being way overconfident here, it's you. > let the kids figure out what they think for themselves It seems to me that homeschooling is far more likely to let kids do this than public schools are. > The public school gives them a reasonably neutral basis to do that In the US? You must be joking. Public schools in the US are anything but neutral.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  I kept waiting for the ideology, which is mostly absent from this, but here it is: >Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender. So, FL parents are homeschooling because they object to the rules recently put in place about teaching about racism and LGBT issues? Somehow, I doubt that.
  • FireBeyond 3y ago
    No, it's more: "if you homeschool, you, and we are free to not even have to worry about this as an issue, versus us trying with varying degrees of success to lock it out of your kids school". The two can be entirely compatible.
    • AlbertCory 3y ago
      I don't even understand this. FL officials are encouraging homeschooling? That's silly, given that the majority of kids will still go to public schools.
      • FireBeyond 3y ago
        It's ideology. If you're invested in taking those things out of education, and that's your motivator, then you have a couple of options: encourage homeschooling, where it can't be mandated, or work to remove it from public schools. Who is to say you can't do both? After all, either achieves your ideological aims.
        • AlbertCory 3y ago
          so you claim to have found a motivation for this behavior, which you haven't even provided evidence for? these horrible people are encouraging homeschooling, and that's why it's growing? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Especially when the whole article describes it as a nationwide phenomenon. I believe "projection" describes this paranoid belief of yours.
• ouiouibaguette 3y ago
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• deepsquirrelnet 3y ago
  Growing up, I had friends from 3 different families of kids that were homeschooled. The first was my neighbor. I’m not really sure why his parents homeschooled him. He was an only child, and strikingly similar to the character of Cartman from Southpark. Him mom was also strikingly similar to Cartman’s mom. He didn’t learn anything, as his mom was not very strict about making sure he did his lessons. He had terrible social skills and very few life skills, which all came from hobbies that he pursued. He was an intelligent kid, and is struggling today due to generally poor work ethic and few job skills. The second family was a typical anti-government family with cult-like religious beliefs. They believed God was in charge of their reproductive systems and had way more children than they could care for. It was a huge family. The first born was able to secure a job as an airline attendant, and led a reasonably normal life. Last I heard, many of the rest had succumb to methamphetamine and/or opioid addictions and have been in and out of jail. All of them were substantially undereducated, several with severe speech impediments and none with GEDs or high school diplomas. The last family were the kids of my family’s pastor. They were generally successful. Their parents were strict, but very involved in their kids’ education. In many ways, they were successful - ahead in reading and math. They were somewhat poorly adapted socially, but had enough relationships through the church to overcome it. In my experience, it can be a positive thing for children. The success of the children really depends on how involved parents are in making sure their kids needs are met. Sadly, it also seems like many parents who choose to homeschool do so because they don’t personally value education.
  • WoodEye 3y ago
    That’s a pretty wide range of outcomes but is it materially different than what happens to kids in average public schools? There are also factors like social class and resources that make judging outcomes pretty tough. Most people that homeschool kids due to religion aren’t going to be well off.
    • deepsquirrelnet 3y ago
      Yeah, I guess I think it’s not a matter of public school vs homeschool that’s really important. I think it just matters that someone is encouraging a kid’s education and development. It could be a parent or a teacher. What saddens me is that some kids I grew up with were deprived of that in their homeschools. They almost certainly would have done better in public schools than at home. Not that public schools are better than homeschooling, but they are better than neglect.
• jononomo 3y ago
  Hasn't homeschooling been the norm for our species for over a hundred thousand years and has only recently (in the last five thousand years) begun to seem abnormal?
• mberning 3y ago
  To see the mind boggling topics that come up during school board meetings and elections I can see why people want to home school.
• ken47 3y ago
  Titles like this irk me. It’s likely the fastest growing because it’s fringe.
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    The graphics don't help clear things up, either. Showing the growth rate over time is interesting, but only if you also show the percent of kids in each camp. It's not immediately obvious whether homeschooled kids are 2%, 8%, or .2%, from looking at the charts (and even doing a ctrl-F on "percent"). It's kind of embarrassing that this article doesn't once mention the rough percentage of students that are being homeschooled.
• jononomo 3y ago
  I'm noticing several comments to the effect that "teachers" have some particular qualification to teach that other people don't have. But, at least in the US, the qualifications required to become a teacher are intended to protect the teacher's union and they don't confer any special "teaching ability". People have been teaching things to each other for hundreds of thousands of years, even before there were degree programs in education. I will grant that some people are particularly good at explaining things well, but I don't associate that ability with "public school teacher" in any respect. In fact, it correlates with being bright, which is negatively correlated with being a public school teacher.
• typicalHNuser 3y ago
  [flagged]
• sweeter 3y ago
  I mean its obvious. There has been a concerted effort to de-fund public schools and center the conversation about "right to choose" education, alongside a handout of vouchers to attend private religious schools AND the implementation of new laws that allow tax payer dollars to go to funding those privately owned religious schools (seriously). The intent imo is to make schools seem "scary" and push parents to put their kids in private schools that these religious groups control, they are for-profit so they can rake in those sweet tax dollars and the parents money, while public schools flail and kids don't get a proper education. Its a concerted effort to privatize and dismantle the public school system. These schools don't have to abide by federal laws either, even while receiving federal tax money. Throw that in with the very real dangers of going to school these days, these are the only two options after a while. Go to a private religious school, or home school... and that is not an accident or a coincidence.
  • collaborative 3y ago
    I find it a bit far fetched to suggest that these private religious schools have enough influence to change laws and get tax dollars The much simpler explanation is that having influence over private schools is very tempting for the govt and the easiest tool is via giving or retaining funding which they don't personally have to pay. They just want to secure votes and influence
    • sweeter 3y ago
      You'd be partially correct in saying that private schools alone dont have the influence to do this, its more so politicians who endorse these schools and own stake in these schools that are at the root of the issue. With the goal of moving taxpayer money into private monied interests, instead of public services. Its a tail as old as time in the US.
      • collaborative 3y ago
        You are right, the problem isn't 100% on the schools or the politicians, it's probably both. And I agree that no public money should go to private schools, nor the press for that matter. At the end of the day power resides in the politicians, so they are the ones most at fault (+voters). A hard problem to fix when you have to vote for option A or option B
• Modified3019 3y ago
  I’m not surprised, american public schools can end up with a lot of pathologies that can’t be practically addressed by a parent outside of “flee and try literally anything else”. My public elementary school was outright hostile to my existence, with teachers ignoring/enabling my bullies and then trying to punish me when I started fighting back viciously at the prompting of my exasperated father. “Anarcho-tyranny” is a good way to sum up my experience. You’ll likely find it unsurprising that I am adhd(I) (fully evaluated) and almost certainly autistic to some degree (not fully evaluated as there’s not much for me to gain on a diagnosis), though these revelations wouldn’t come until decades later when I learned what these things actually meant instead of media tropes. Prior to that I was considered “shy/very introverted”. Homeschool was straight up not an option for me, since we were a single parent/provider household. I’m extremely lucky that a charter middle school opened up around 4th grade. It was amazing to see what sort of environment occurred when both teachers and children were held accountable and can and would be removed. There’s also the effects of the natural bias of having most of the children there having active and concerned parents involved, which I imagine also plays a big role in the ultimate quality of the education homeschoolers now get, as opposed to what seemed to be more prominently religious/paranoid motivations when I was a child. Also fortunately my public high school was, mostly, tame.
• haizhung 3y ago
  Am I the only one thinking that home schooling is the wrong solution to the underlying problem? The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding. Teachers are quitting left and right, and schools are in a terrible state. Instead of fixing THAT problem, now people homeschool. Ok; I guess. At least homeschooling is something that the individual can control, public funding not so much. But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone - something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents the right to squander the future of their children on a whim? I have two kids, would consider myself very well educated (have a PhD, etc), and I habe absolutely 0 confidence in myself schooling my kids. Finally, public schooling is obviously an attempt at leveling the playing field between children from different backgrounds. By removing your kid from that, I think it further contributes to the segregation of our society.
  • traject_ 3y ago
    > But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone - something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at). The key assumption here is that the expertise and years of studying translates to desirable outcomes. The large expansion of homeschooling suggesting by the article suggests a great rise in people who no longer believe that the expertise promoted by teaching schools is actually relevant to teach their children. After all, mass public schooling is only about a century old and default human experience in many ways has always been closer to what we call homeschooling.
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
      >The large expansion of homeschooling suggesting by the article suggests a great rise in people who no longer believe that the expertise promoted by teaching schools is actually relevant to teach their children. "Believe" is the important word there. Are these people removing children from school because they actually can do a better job, or because the TV told them a school somewhere had a litterbox for a furry student?
• dgunay 3y ago
  Ignoring the education/socialization arguments, I'm surprised to see that no one has mentioned the ostensibly reduced risk of your homeschooled child becoming the victim of a school shooting. Go on and tell me how statistically the risk is negligible. It makes me feel a bit anxious whenever someone I love is doing _anything_ with a tail risk of instant death that society has somehow normalized, even just driving. I'm not a parent but I imagine that kind of thing could really affect some parents' peace of mind.
  • paulryanrogers 3y ago
    That is one consideration. I'm surprised more gun owners don't consider how much more likely their choice is to lead to accident or suicidal death in their own home. If we outlawed private gun ownership in the country then both school and home could be much safer.
• xyzelement 3y ago
  It might help to begin with the end in mind. The goal of education and the reason you send your kids to school is so that they come out with skills that enable them to succeed in society[1] and you also want them to be bolstered as moral and ethical human beings. If you trust the public school to do that - or at least do a better job of it than you could yourself - then you send them. On the other extreme, you either opt for private school or home-school. I assume people don't make these decisions lightly. The path of least resistance is to send your kid to whatever random school they are zoned for. The next level of care is to move to an area with better schools or hope you can get into a charter school. Next level beyond that is paying a heavy price (in dollars or hours) to send them to private school or home-school. So I respect people who do that, a lot. It comes from care for their kids and ability to commit to it deeply. As a personal observation, I was very lucky with the public school education I got in Brooklyn in the 90s. Especially in high school, I had many teachers that taught me how to think more than what to think. But that was 30 years ago and that kind of teacher was kinda old-school then. Back then, I can count on one hand the number of teachers I had that today would be categorizes as "woke crazies" (one tell-tale sign, they grade you on whether you agree with them, not the quality of your argument) but I suspect that ratio is way worse now. My kid is a toddler and I have a bunch of years to evaluate the teaching in our area, but I wouldn't think I'd be doing my son a favor sending him to a school that constrains thinking and speech rather than encourages breadth. I am very far from considering home schooling but if my choice is to basically stay home and teach my kids or to send them to a brain-deadening environment (that's an extreme, don't think it's happening in my town) I know what I'd pick. [1] that is a combination of technical, thinking, and social skills.
  • rahimnathwani 3y ago
    Not sure how old your toddler is or whether you already know about this, but you might consider adding 'Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons' to your cart: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22teach%20your%20child%20to%20read%20in%20100%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    • xyzelement 3y ago
• Animats 3y ago
  Caution, dark pattern in the data search: "This page keeps track of the districts that you search for in the database. We use this information as described in our Privacy Policy, including to better understand our readers and personalize your experience."
• Justsignedup 3y ago
  Just to leave it here, here's John Oliver's take on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• simplyluke 3y ago
  The article's failure to mention the shuttering of many of these schools for well over a full academic year seems intentionally negligent. My local school district, Seattle, didn't have full in-person instruction until the Fall of 2021. We've now got decent data on how disastrous remote learning was for kids, so parents choosing to take matters into their own hands seems like an entirely rational response. I don't have kids but if I did would have absolutely looked into alternate options to zoom lectures for kindergarteners. > 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 Parents with resources are opting out of a system that was not providing for their kids. This isn't surprising.
• WalterBright 3y ago
  I had a good time in public schools. All my friends were there, and we had a lot of fun. Didn't learn much of anything, though, which became apparent during the disastrous first week of college.
• calebm 3y ago
  I heard Salmon Khan give a talk earlier this year where he mentioned the "Two Sigma Problem" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem), where kids with a private tutor perform 2 standard deviations better (on average) than public-schooled children. (Caveat: not all parents are going to be quite as good as a private tutor.)
• temptemptemp111 3y ago
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• Pound5260 3y ago
  I see all this comments about how the homeschooled kids fail academically, and I cannot help but wonder if the people parroting this have any idea of the current state of public schools in the US. Homeschooled kids are subject to the very strict scrutiny of the court of public opinion (and ironically some of the most academically sound kids I have seen were homeschooled...) while public school kids can finish high school without knowing how to read or do basic math, and that's ok...
  • WoodEye 3y ago
    Yes or many people here went to good or elite public schools and assume their school is what the average high school experience is like.
• lgleason 3y ago
  The lack of quality with public schools has degraded to the point of you facing the choice of either spending a boat load of money on private, and even some of those have gone downhill, or homeschooling. I also know a lot of people who were very successful with homeschooling.
• lefstathiou 3y ago
  To add my two cents to the HN community scratching their head about this: my wife and I are the products of public school, we have the means to send our kids to private school, and I am actively lining up the people and resources to home school our two toddlers. For us, it comes down to the belief that we can provide better moral education, values education, and intellectual rigor than the majority of public and private schools we've seen. I also don't see the social element being something that can't easily be solved for. Our kids are involved in so many activities and they are effectively home schooled, whereas countless friends and clients are bemoaning how toxic their children's high schools have become. The bar seems low to both of us and it's getting unapologetically lower. That's the plan anyway, we'll see how it plays out.
  • calf 3y ago
    You talk about a moral education, but performatively your plan is "an individual solution to a social problem". Irony aside, in other words, when homeschooling is the (rational) response of a parent doing their best by their children, then Margaret Thatcher has won: There is no society.
• SeanLuke 3y ago
  This is a terrible, just terrible headline and awful data spin. Let's start with the obvious: "fringe" is a measure of size. "fastest growing" is a measure of rate. You don't go from size to rate. Next: the data graphically presented has no axes or explanation, but what it appears to be showing is the percentage growth of each schooling type relative to its 2017 value. But then there's this bit: > 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 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. Let's be charitable and say 2.7 million. The Post data says that's 158% of the 2017 value, and 2020 was, oh, let's say, 164%, so in 2020 there were 2.8 million. According to the DoE, there were 48.1 million kids in public schools in 2020. This is at best 1 in 17. Surely the Doe and the WP can't differ by a factor of 2? https://research.com/universities-colleges/number-of-public-schools-in-the-us https://research.com/universities-colleges/number-of-public-... Last, the graph clearly shows that, post covid, home-schooling is the fastest declining form of education. It has dropped 15% since 2020 alone, whereas public school has dropped by, what, about 1%? Why isn't this the headline? Or that clearly homeschoolers are being moved to private institutions?
• avidphantasm 3y ago
  Home schooling should be banned. It is anti-social behavior. Also, no parent knows how to teach children of all ages. Likewise, no parent knows enough about everything children need to learn.
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  The idea of putting your child’s education and future in the hands of a stranger not rewarded on the results of their work is horrifying.
• RyanAdamas 3y ago
  How many more things that you get made fun of for doing are actually the best things you could be doing?
• imwillofficial 3y ago
  I was home schooled before it was cool. Set me up for success. Thanks mom.
• jpease 3y ago
  My personal observation, having homeschooled my junior and senior year, the level of wasted time (i.e. not adding value) at public school is incredible. While it wouldn’t work at all age levels, the program I used was incredibly flexible and really encouraged curiosity. This isn’t to say I didn’t benefit from attending public schools. There were programs and experiences there that would be difficult to impossible to replicate. However, overall, I’d guess that at least 50% of time in public schooling is baby sitting and crowd control.
• ReallyOldLurker 3y ago
  I'm not surprised at the rise in homeschooling. When you have anti-education groups like the Oregon Department of Education [1] running the public school system, any parent that cares and can make the effort should remove their child from public schooling. This semester they switched my son from high-school chemistry to "environmental science". I asked him, "is oxygen flammable?" He couldn't answer. I looked at the content of the so called environmental science. Its really just a repeat of some basic biology material that he covered last year and lots of politics on pollution and climate change. [1] https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-says-students-dont-need-to-prove-mastery-of-reading-writing-or-math-to-graduate-citing-harm-to-students-of-color.html https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-sa...
  • unsubstantiated 3y ago
    Running away from the problem will only make it worse.
    • bequanna 3y ago
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      • plussed_reader 3y ago
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      • ninkendo 3y ago
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    • RuleOfBirds 3y ago
      Implying "instead of path B, which is good for your child, do path A, which is bad for your child, to prevent A from becoming an even worse option?"
      • cooper_ganglia 3y ago
• jsnsirndmdn 3y ago
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• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  The more diversity of education the better.
• Racing0461 3y ago
  What happened to housing "white flight"/moving to the suburbs/etc and pubic transporation is happening to education because the government caters to the lowest instead of centering the middle class family. Where these people can take their ball and go home, they are doing so. In cases where they can't (ie a job in the city), it's just because they can't. not because they like "urban life".
• causality0 3y ago
  If you've been in a public high school lately you wouldn't be surprised at homeschooling's growing popularity. I'm sure we all remember having a class with a "peanut gallery" in the back who refused to shut up and learn. Instead of being one class one year that's now every class every year for everybody. My brother, sister in law, and aunt are all public school teachers and none of them allow their children to attend public school.
• metadat 3y ago
  https://archive.today/w1Q12 https://archive.today/w1Q12
• Willish42 3y ago
  I'm probably way too late for this comment to not get buried, but in my experience 99% of homeschooled or "unschooled" kids growing up in the US around me had parents who were obsessed with avoiding secular education on things in basic biology (evolution) or history (slavery), OR had parents in the 90th+ percentile for household income and/or focus on education and STEM stuff (e.g. one parent took a part-time job teaching them at home to give them way-above-average skills compared to their peers entering HS or College). In all cases, the "better" outcomes were situational and largely correlated with income and access to opportunity rather than a homeschooling model actually being proven to be better. AFAIK, most academic outcomes for home-schooled kids are actually worse when adjusted for income. This is at least true for private school vs. public school (https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/private-school-vs-public-school https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/private-school...) but I suspect home school data is much more sparse
• sevenstar 3y ago
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• pseingatl 3y ago
  Mom got in fights with son's teachers, pulled him out for home schooling. Mom not a teacher, couldn't teach anything. No high school diploma. No college. Failed GED. No job. Not socialized. Depressed. Envious of his peers. That's when the trouble started.
• ec109685 3y ago
  Reading the article: it dropped from the peak, still small percentage overall (a few million kids). With online schooling supplemental options, parents working from home, it does seem like this will get more popular. Part of why we end up with a cohesive society is that no matter where you come from, your kids will be educated mostly together. It will be interesting to see what happens long term if that stops being true.
• erie 3y ago
  $1,087 to Pentagon contractors $300 for education https://www.nationalpriorities.org/whats-new/2023/4/17/pay-taxes-you-gave-1087-pentagon-contractors/ https://www.nationalpriorities.org/whats-new/2023/4/17/pay-t...
• deleted 3y ago
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• alphanullmeric 3y ago
  Turns out that English teachers doing nothing but discussing their politics in class, addition of more and more breadth requirements and dumbing down stem courses to appease the lowest common denominator makes public high schools unappealing for many parents.
• powerapple 3y ago
  Is there any resources for home schooling? Even without home schooling, I would like "top up" my son's school education, not necessarily give him extra work, but if I find the teaching in school is lacking in some aspects, I would like to make up for it.
• fabifabulous 3y ago
  Thank you, Prussia, for Germany‘s “Schulpflicht“.
• Exoristos 3y ago
  My dad has a Master's in Education. My mother has a Montessori certificate. They homeschooled me and my siblings for several years with the goal of providing a private-school education they could afford. They used curricula from actual private schools. It ended up being a great success in some subjects and not in others. I had no problem with college. I think this idea that home schooling is for counter-cultural loonies is unfair and needs to die, and the trend this article discusses is more evidence of that.
• iancmceachern 3y ago
  It's because we've been systematically dismantling snd defunding our public education institutions for 50 years
• pelasaco 3y ago
  "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".. I'm not sure if the "Post" didn't understand that the problem isn't "quality" per se or they are full supportive to the principles that make the parents wanting the kids out of the school in the first place.
• snvzz 3y ago
  The alternative is to have your kid waste time in a classroom where classes are optimized to target either the stupidest or least interested in learning kid, whichever performs lowest. They call it "No child left behind", i.e. every child left behind. I doubt even John Taylor Gatto expected mass education to get this bad.
• qwerty456127 3y ago
  Hopefully the process will ultimately lead to education becoming a pure free market with no admission requitrements: just choose your provider, pay the competitive price they charge and get the knowledge remotely through whatever tech they chose to build on, wherever in the world you are.
• phreeza 3y ago
  The headline makes no sense, comparing the absolute size ("fringe") to a rate of change ("fastest-growing"). This is particularly egregious when you look at the actual article because it is talking about relative growth over time, so being small/at the fringes actually makes it easier to achieve fast growth.
• michaelhoney 3y ago
  The thing that worries me about this is that it will further polarise the US. A public education can bring kids from different parts of society together. If homeschooling continues, you’ll further stratify your society. You’ll have a bunch of kids actualising themselves, sure: but you’ll also get a bunch of kids being deliberately kept ignorant.
• MrMan 3y ago
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• tibbydudeza 3y ago
  We did it for our youngest - diagnosed on the spectrum and teen depression and a lack of suitable schools for her in our area. We took her out of the schooling system and placed her with a tutor (former educator) gave kids like her classes at her home every day from 8 till 2. Parents becoming teachers without an education background or simply shoving a kid in front of a laptop to do it "online" is simply not workable.
• hxegon 3y ago
  I think a good chunk of this feels like religious / conspiratorial indoctrination. But. A lot of kids in school genuinely wonder if they're going to die when they step on the bus everyday. I don't know how you couldn't see that as a parent. There were 51 school shootings in 2022, nearly a weekly occurrence. Is this the rise of home schooling, or just a natural response to the complete apathy and failure of our institutions?
  • cooper_ganglia 3y ago
    I think the public school system is failing in so many ways and homeschooling is a better solution, but even with that, school shootings are near the absolute bottom of my concerns. They're an issue, but we have so many more pressing issues that are hurting kids so much more. The shootings are so heavily promoted on the news because engagement is good, clicks make money. Keeping people scared is profitable. Most of those recorded "school shootings" are simply cases where a gun was fired on school grounds, not a "mass shooting". In literally almost every single case, it's one kid shooting another kid an is gang-related. You can actually go through and see the exact circumstances around each incident, along with a pertaining news article: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2023/01 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year... So hopefully that gives you a little bit of comfort! As long as your kids aren't violent teen gang members in the school parking lot after a football game, it's highly unlikely that they'll even know someone who has witnessed gun violence at any school.
• h2odragon 3y ago
  We homeschooled for a couple years after a 1st grade teacher told us our daughter didn't need to learn math, "she's so pretty she should be a cheerleader!"
• gardenhedge 3y ago
  If I meet someone who is homeschooling their child it immediately raises red flags about that person.
• ThinkBeat 3y ago
  This is sensationalist and ridicules. When something on the fringe gets a bit more popular it will easily have a phenomenal growth rate. Let's say I started making computers (somehow). I sell 10 the first year, 10 the next year, but I make to the front page of HN one day and I sell 1000 computers that year. My growth rate, would outpace every large computer maker in the US (probably) with a good margin (probably). Yet, nearly everyone in the world would still be using and buying computers from the big vendors (probably). and few people will never know my computer exists. Since nearly everyone attends public school growth can only come from an increased population, or a return from private school. (or a return from homeschooling) It would be nice if they included the absolute numbers of people in each category. Plus their own data seem to indicate that the trend may already have peaked since 2023 numbers are down. I think a lot of parents will soon find out how much work it takes to properly homeschool their children (child).
  • shkkmo 3y ago
    > Let's say I started making computers (somehow). I sell 10 the first year, 10 the next year, but I make to the front page of HN one day and I sell 1000 computers that year. Homeschooling has been around a long time. A sudden and radical departure from that growth rate is notable. However, it does appear to have been more of a covid spike that has only partially subsided.
• Eumenes 3y ago
  This topic seems to be very polarizing and brings out many mini autocrats who don't have children and think the solution always lies in government. Public schools have been a failure for many years and this is one way parents can engage and take education in their own hands.
• mansoor_ 3y ago
  There is a always a happy medium. Depriving your children of regular schooling is probably a bad idea, give them the tools to think for themselves and analyse the and process information before ingesting.
• nunez 3y ago
  My problem with homeschooling is that it's completely unregulated. This is a huge problem given that parental involvement is the single biggest determinant of children's success and growth. Public school is treated like a huge daycare by many, but at least kids from negligent parents _had_ to go. My concern is that parents can now say "we're homeschooling" when in reality they're doing fuck all and, worse, are using their kids as house labor.
  • uticus 3y ago
    > parental involvement is the single biggest determinant of children's success and growth yes! > my problem with homeschooling is that it's completely unregulated oh dear. so...if perhaps you meant "not regulated to x standards" i could agree more readily with that, at least in US / many European. but even conceding that, regulation historically has tended to effectively supplant parental involvement with state involvement (speaking about actual effects of regulation, not intentions). contra your first point about parental involvement. i suppose it's possible future regulation could be different. but i see no reason given the current cultural climate to think future regulations will in fact uphold parental responsibility over state responsibility. and besides it appears to me that government funded schooling is being held up as the "huge daycare." it has automatic funding in most places - even those who would not wish to pay, even those who never have children involved in it are contributing. it is in fact consistently used as a way to collect more taxes, but i digress. if i were a lax parent i would not have any inclination to move away from something that is already paid for and easy for me. or if i simply needed a place for my children to go for 8 hours out of the day government funded schooling is an obvious easy option. in short regulation is not the solution to bad parenting, nor is it a good way to prevent bad parenting.
• agumonkey 3y ago
  I often monitor centralized / decentralized waves in society, but this one caught me by surprise. ps: I'm now wondering if this will have the same benefits as remote work. School can be wonderful but also massively damaging. Having ways to learn without bullies, or toxic teachers .. could make a big difference for many.
• breakingrules 3y ago
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• NiagaraThistle 3y ago
  My biggest concern with Home Schooling is you literally have someone not qualified as a teacher, as in probably knows nothing of the subject and may not even have an education themselves, teaching the children. Obviously this isn't all cases, and some traditional school teachers are questionable at best, but at least traditional teachers had to at least TRY to be subject matter experts before teaching in a traditional school. Sadly I personally know several friends that homeschool their kids and I have to say they are certainly doing a disservice to their children as the kids will only ever be as smart as their teachers and these 'teachers' (ie parents) are not the brightest.
  • goodmunky 3y ago
    >> the kids will only ever be as smart as their teachers and these 'teachers' (ie parents) are not the brightest. I can feel your arrogance and contempt from here, suffice to say that’s not how “smart” works and it’s certainly not how education works. Sounds like you could benefit from some extra home schooling yourself.
  • merpnderp 3y ago
    For some reason there's not a lot of academic interest in homeschool outcomes, so there's not much data out there. But the data that is out there shows why parents who turn to homeschooling almost never turn back. And I've never met a homeschooled kid who didn't seem weird. And by weird, I mean able to easily discuss complex topics with adults, showing not only competent conversation skills, but broad knowledge of the world and how it works. https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/ https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/
    • mcpackieh 3y ago
      > And I've never met a homeschooled kid who didn't seem weird. And by weird, I mean able to easily discuss complex topics with adults, showing not only competent conversation skills, but broad knowledge of the world and how it works. It goes beyond knowledge. I went to public school but one of my better friends was homeschooled. We knew each other because we participated on the same sports team and consequently saw each other six days a week for most of the year. He was always odd and I knew it, but only some years later did I figure out what was odd about him: He was two years older than me but he always treated me like an equal. He lacked the biases against people of a different ages that were normal in public school attendees. Most older kids (the rest all public school attendees) wouldn't necessarily bully the younger kids, but at best treated them distantly with mild to substantial condescension. I was the same way, almost all of my friends were the same age as me but kids even one year younger were in some way "little kids" to me, even though some of them were physically larger, faster, and sometimes smarter too. What difference does one or two years make? Now that I'm an adult, I can clearly see that a few years of difference is no difference at all. My homeschooled friend had that figured out years before anybody else.
• Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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• KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 3y ago
  Seems apropos to mention the works of John Taylor Gatto on the origin of the American public school system and in particular its motivation: social control of the lower classes by the elite of the country. You can find interviews on the web. He was teacher of the year in New York (both city and state) before he retired in disgust at what was being done to young people's minds with the current "schooling" system -- training in regurgitating canned answers, not in critical or original thought -- and then only on approved topics. Why is ignorance of the dollar creation system so widespread if we truly have an educated country -- for example.
  • greenhearth 3y ago
    Controlling the mind? Are you completely mental? American public education system came out of the labor rights movement and the need to combat juvenile delinquency. It has its faults at the moment but only because it is continuously being dismantled for privatization.
    • KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 3y ago
      read Gatto
• partiallypro 3y ago
  I can't really blame parents for homeschooling their kids when, especially after COVID, students have had their grades and proficiency fall off a cliff. The trend was pre-COVID but ACT scores have fallen drastically. If you watch teachers on Tiktok, etc, or just talk to them in person, they will tell you that the current generation of children are so far behind where they are supposed to be academically, even in areas with relative wealth. It's wild, the state of the US education system is in shambles. Some of it is related to COVID, but a lot of it is just policy failures and really strange incentives. My dad was a teacher at one point and the principal told him he could only fail X number of students (despite a lot more not being proficient) because they'd miss out on certain funding, and it wasn't worth dealing with the parents. My dad eventually quit, in part because of this. That leads to sort of a education backlog where the next grade picks up students that don't meet the criteria, so they are teaching down, slowing the education of everyone else...which moves those kids to the next grade where once again they aren't proficient and it just dominoes. That was 20 years ago, I can't even imagine the state of things now.
• browningstreet 3y ago
  I homeschooled my kid. We moved from a strong Bay Area CA school district to a pretty bad one. But also, our experience of school districts, and classrooms, were pretty incompatible with the kid we were raising. The first few (!) years were quite difficult. We didn’t seek out any homeschool group support but we did study about home schooling. We ended up devising our own curriculum and our kid, eventually, and to some degree ..on his own, became a diligent student. Just learning how to do “school work” was a real hurdle. The biggest outcome that requires reconsideration is that he was pretty invisible when he applied to colleges. Our demographic qualifications didn’t help. So we’re paying cash for college. He did take some community college classes during the time that would’ve been his last two years of high school. He really liked community college. He thrived. The local (well regarded) university is an educational black box, offering little support or contact with administrators or educators. Office hours are never kept and often cancelled, for instance. Assignments aren’t managed properly in online systems and teachers can’t be reached by the deadline (it’s almost like a Google support situation — impervious and well guarded). Still, he found a research position and got offered a job and works with an interesting and accessible professor. Socially, his university isn’t a match. He’s not that interested in college life, and I can’t find a wedge in to encourage him. He’s in a STEM field, so everyone’s pretty anti-social. So, we’re that kind of homeschool tribe. He turned out fine. He’s very happy that he was homeschooled. Honestly, if I hadn’t been divorced (amicably) and if she hadn’t been anchored here, I would’ve seriously considered moving to another country for his education. It’s what he and I are discussing for his grad school interests. We’re both making lists of places overseas (where we’ve been expats at various times).
• debacle 3y ago
  IF I could do it again, I would homeschool. My kids are both relatively gifted. If you have a gifted child, this is what school looks like: K-5: Extreme boredom and anxiety because roughly 1/2 the year is review or test prep. If you are lucky, your child might have a GT teacher. 6-8: Your child will struggle to make friends, especially if they aren't connected to social media. Thankfully, my kids were athletes and musicians but for the smart kids who weren't, I saw a lot of bullying. 9-10: Your kids will learn, but not all that much. They'll start being offered advanced and AP courses, but because of most kids' busy schedules these days, this simply means that they are completely segregated from their friends that aren't "smart." 11-12: Curricula have been gutted, and so your children will leave high school less smart than you are, especially when it comes to history. Your kids will be pushed to take AP courses, not realizing that many of the AP credits they earn wont be honored by many schools depending on their career track. It's relatively safe to say that 30-50% of all of the learning in the K-12 space happens during this time for gifted students. In fact you could probably give kids time off from 6th through 9th grade, and they'd still wind up being 90-95% as knowledgeable as if they hadn't. In contrast, many of the homeschool families I know have kids who learn for 4-6 hours per week. When they aren't learning, they are at co-ops, on field trips, enjoying free play, or learning other skills (woodworking, music, etc). Something is fundamentally broken with our public education system. The system is more stressful, less educational, and far more expensive than it was 20 years ago, and it's putting out students who are in many ways hollow.
  • RecycledEle 3y ago
    I love home schoolers, but there are options. 4th through 7th: seek out a FIRST Lego League program for your kids. FLL teaches then to think and solve problems. High School: Dual credit does exist. Look for a high school in your area that offers a college degree through dual credit.
• lukas099 3y ago
  > 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. Seems they should compare home-schooling growth to change in school quality. The best schools could decline in quality and still be the best. And parents of those schools might be the ones best-equipped to start home-schooling.
• solarman5000 3y ago
  I homeschool my kids comp sci stuff, because public schools are not preparing children at all, they are just indoctrination centers for google, Microsoft or Apple. In my fight to let my kids bring their own laptops, the administration said they were switching over to tablets soon Great, so now they won't even be able to type when they get older. Thank god AI is coming
• LookatThat 3y ago
  America's education system is failing simple as that, the numbers show it and it's trending down instead of up in all academic categories. Anecdotally my spouse whom is a Teacher often has to deal with kids in middle and high school levels who can barely read or do basic math/logic (but have strong influenced opinions on social issues that lean heavily left - just the fact don't get mad. I only mention this to show where the effort lies in teaching our children). Homeschooling is simply a way to try and mitigate putting ones child in an environment that is not accomplishing it's main task which is teach mandatory subjects to an average and hopefully excellent level. If they would focus on academics instead of politics and ideologies (outside of elective courses that specifically teach these subjects) I think most people would still consider Public Schools in general but until they solve that, these issues will be solved by parents in many different avenues home schooling is just one of them and there will be more that will be tried.
• SpencerHaile254 3y ago
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