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We have some insight into the answer to this, because public schooling is (more or less) a replacement for home schooling. Home schooling has an incredible amou

We have some insight into the answer to this, because public schooling is (more or less) a replacement for home schooling. Home schooling has an incredible amount of inequality built in to it. Affluent parents can hire instructors. Poor parents may not even be able to meet their children’s basic schooling needs, if it weren’t for public schools. Obviously there’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, and the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century, which is roughly when modern public schools started appearing in the US (based on the “Prussian model”). There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve. It can be too easy to focus on narrow sets of metrics like test scores, or collect a bunch of anecdotes about bad experiences in public schools (or bad experiences in homeschooling). IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.

scarmig 3y ago
> IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead. Imagine your school district has banned teaching algebra to 8th graders, for reasons of equity. You're upset at this, since you have a child about to attend 8th grade. You go to a school board meeting, express yourself, and are at best ignored or more likely called names. What, from the perspective of a parent with a child who needs an education, do you then do? Fixing the system would be nice and all, but how do you do that before your kid becomes an adult, let alone make up for all the damage public schooling has been doing in the meantime?
- otoburb 3y ago
  If a family is willing and resourced to (deeply) consider homeschooling because of one subject (you mentioned Algebra for 8th graders[1]), then another less expensive/effortful path could be hiring an afterschool math tutor, or sitting down with your child to work through Khan Academy together. Both suggestions require extra time, while still keeping your child "within the system" through attending school and (presumably?) receiving a decent-enough education in other non-math subjects. If the malaise extends to (many) other subjects, then I could see how home schooling becomes a more attractive option. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741653
  - petertodd 3y ago
    > then another less expensive/effortful path could be hiring an afterschool math tutor, or sitting down with your child to work through Khan Academy together. ...so now after your child spends hours every day at school, they have to spend yet more hours learning what they should have learned in school. You can see why so many parents decide that for more effort, they can save their child a lot of wasted time, effort, resentment, and bad influences. Particularly families where at least one parent can stay at home (and these days, working from home makes that so much easier once kids are old enough to learn by themselves).
    - p1esk 3y ago
      You seem to imply that most parents who decided to homeschool actually do a good job at it. Is there any data to back that up?
      - Draiken 3y ago
        From what I've read, there's almost no data in it since it's all done in private with little to no oversight. This makes the comparison very hard, since one side is has all of its successes and failures critiqued in public, and the other side is only ever talked about with anecdotal data. Personally I believe there should be some sort of periodic standardized test for homeschooled kids too. Even if it's not for "passing" a grade, so we know in which level of learning they are compared to everyone else. If we can't compare them, how can we evaluate its merits and flaws?
        scarmig 3y ago
        I'd be a fan of some nationwide objective test, given once per year, that tracks level of achievement of all students, homeschooled, public, or private. Sadly it seems we're moving away from that as a country, because no one likes to be objectively measured. For the SATs, homeschooled students score ~75 points higher than public school students. We can draw only limited conclusions from that, though. People self select into taking the SATs. And there's the the bigger issue of demographics: given the demographics of homeschoolers who take the SAT, you'd expect them to outperform anyway. Regardless, more data is better.
- boredtofears 3y ago
  Move to a different school district? Parents do this all the time, it's drastic but way less so than taking on homeschooling.
- yterdy 3y ago
  This reeks of a purposeful misinterpretation of a hot-button incident, and a dogwhistle.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Are you claiming that SFUSD did not, in fact, ban teaching algebra in 8th grade, and are you ignoring that the state of California proceeded to then make it part of its state recommendations? Your isolated "hot button incident" is the real lived experience of hundreds of thousands of parents. Your "dogwhistle" is itself a dogwhistle (your obvious implication being "only a racist Trumptard could support allowing students to take algebra in 8th grade"). Ironic, in that the people defending the decision implicitly believe that non-white people are less capable of learning algebra than white people. Which itself is stupid, from a historical point of view. Who, after all, first formulated algebra?
    - yterdy 3y ago
      I'm saying that the issue gets characterized (wrongly) by detractors as pulling down the smart kids so that the other kids won't feel bad, when it's actually a matter of pulling resources for a smaller (parent-driven) "gifted" cohort in order to free those resources for use in improving everyone else's performance. This makes sense because the latter are less likely to be able to place their kids in private tutoring. Here's my lived experience: algebra in 7th grade, black boy. I'd have been better off taking it later, and making it up with summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses /certs in between algebra, algebra ii, calc, and diff eq/calc ii in high school. If that meant my classmates could have a better chance of keeping up, all the better; being in the historically lily-white gifted track at my magnet high school didn't do much in the way of convincing my teachers not to give up on me at the first sign of weakness. Yet another nuance you either miss or refuse to acknowledge.
      - scarmig 3y ago
        That's a massive misrepresentation of what's going on. This isn't dedicating resources to students in need; it's removing opportunities for poor students to take algebra in 8th grade, which is necessary if you want to take calculus in high school. And you might have been rich enough to take supplementary "summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses," but ripping that opportunity from people who don't have those resources is obscene.
sfink 3y ago
> the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century That's a bit of an understatement. I'm not great at history, but my understanding is that the mid-19th century was a little lacking in videoconferencing software, educated people with the resources to be on the other end of that video link, population density to have enough other like-minded kids within driving... uh, horse-riding range, up to date books, parents who weren't gone to the factories or fields during the day, etc. > There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve. Agreed. There is a smaller set of objectives that they actually do achieve. > IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead. I would assert that it's impossible to fix this broken system, and I can cite a lot of past history. I would also assert that replacing it entirely with homeschooling (which is not a single thing, but whatever) is also a guaranteed path to failure. The only hope I see is for exploration to be possible, and for people in the different situations to learn from each other. The public school institutions do try to experiment, but are incredibly restricted in all sorts of ways. Homeschoolers have the training wheels off and are much more free to crash straight into the bushes or off a cliff, but in practice plenty don't and plenty come up with a lot of different ways of doing things, some of them that seem to be working quite well in practice — academically, socially, etc. I agree that sucking resources out of public schools to benefit the privileged few is very troubling and worrisome. But so is the current state and trajectory of public schooling, and holding everyone back may be short term fair but long term disastrous. We're homeschooling one of our kids (both until recently, when one went to a public charter high school). We've seen the institutional effects firsthand. Simple example: we found excellent math resources, but they weren't "A-G" accredited for University of California entrance requirements. Which gave us pause, since we wanted to leave that option open. We ended up going through a A-G accredited program, the best of what we could identify, for a semester. It was crap: rote memorization of algorithms exactly matching to the state standards, lots of repetitive exercises, minimally useful feedback from teachers and their assistants. My son passed all of their tests and got an A+ grade, and is now a semester behind in math because none of that stuck in a way that is useful for building on. It was a waste of time. We gave up on it and the whole accredited path, and went back to an online program that is far more conceptual, rigorous, and just plain effective. (His earlier public school experience was somewhere in the middle, Again he did quite well there according to the state tests.) My guess is that it's yet another form of enshittification: A-G accreditation is very valuable, but once you get it there's no profit in increasing quality, only in growing your student base. There aren't enough accredited places to provide any competition on quality, especially when there's so much disagreement about what "quality" is in the first place, and as usual any useful definition ends up being expensive. Non-accredited places have to compete on quality. (For anyone who finds value in my personal opinions: Silicon Valley High School math bad, Art of Problem Solving math good.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Consultant32452 3y ago
I think the mistake you are making is in believing the public schools are failing in any way. You cannot fix something that is not broken. In my opinion the schools are working exactly as intended which is why anyone who can should get their children out of them. "Mistakes of this size are never made innocently." ~Ayn Rand
K0balt 3y ago
There is a huge amount of inequality in the quality of education that home schooling can achieve, that is definitely true. So maybe we work on the inequality. Inequality of education is a symptom of a self reinforcing broken economic system. Meanwhile, if I can provide a superior education and social experience for my children, Im glad to have the opportunity to do so. I’ve seen bad outcomes and good ones from homeschooling, and in my particular case I am absolutely delighted with the results (now that my children are adults) But to achieve that my wife and I invested our entire lives, uprooting ourselves and living experiences with our children as part of their education, sailing around on a boat we rebuilt and going to local schools in other languages as their cultural preparation. It was a bit hellish for my wife and I but the 6 years we invested in that paid unbelievable dividends for our children. Most people can’t or won’t do that. We weren’t (financially) rich, but I have always prioritized my freedom over material wealth, and you can do amazing things on a modest (60k/year was our passive income from contracting at that time) budget if you have complete control of your time.

scarmig 3y ago

> IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead. Imagine your school district has banned teaching algebra to 8th graders, for reasons of equity. You're upset at this, since you have a child about to attend 8th grade. You go to a school board meeting, express yourself, and are at best ignored or more likely called names. What, from the perspective of a parent with a child who needs an education, do you then do? Fixing the system would be nice and all, but how do you do that before your kid becomes an adult, let alone make up for all the damage public schooling has been doing in the meantime?

otoburb 3y ago
If a family is willing and resourced to (deeply) consider homeschooling because of one subject (you mentioned Algebra for 8th graders[1]), then another less expensive/effortful path could be hiring an afterschool math tutor, or sitting down with your child to work through Khan Academy together. Both suggestions require extra time, while still keeping your child "within the system" through attending school and (presumably?) receiving a decent-enough education in other non-math subjects. If the malaise extends to (many) other subjects, then I could see how home schooling becomes a more attractive option. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741653
- petertodd 3y ago
  > then another less expensive/effortful path could be hiring an afterschool math tutor, or sitting down with your child to work through Khan Academy together. ...so now after your child spends hours every day at school, they have to spend yet more hours learning what they should have learned in school. You can see why so many parents decide that for more effort, they can save their child a lot of wasted time, effort, resentment, and bad influences. Particularly families where at least one parent can stay at home (and these days, working from home makes that so much easier once kids are old enough to learn by themselves).
  - p1esk 3y ago
    You seem to imply that most parents who decided to homeschool actually do a good job at it. Is there any data to back that up?
    - Draiken 3y ago
      From what I've read, there's almost no data in it since it's all done in private with little to no oversight. This makes the comparison very hard, since one side is has all of its successes and failures critiqued in public, and the other side is only ever talked about with anecdotal data. Personally I believe there should be some sort of periodic standardized test for homeschooled kids too. Even if it's not for "passing" a grade, so we know in which level of learning they are compared to everyone else. If we can't compare them, how can we evaluate its merits and flaws?
      - scarmig 3y ago
        I'd be a fan of some nationwide objective test, given once per year, that tracks level of achievement of all students, homeschooled, public, or private. Sadly it seems we're moving away from that as a country, because no one likes to be objectively measured. For the SATs, homeschooled students score ~75 points higher than public school students. We can draw only limited conclusions from that, though. People self select into taking the SATs. And there's the the bigger issue of demographics: given the demographics of homeschoolers who take the SAT, you'd expect them to outperform anyway. Regardless, more data is better.
boredtofears 3y ago
Move to a different school district? Parents do this all the time, it's drastic but way less so than taking on homeschooling.
yterdy 3y ago
This reeks of a purposeful misinterpretation of a hot-button incident, and a dogwhistle.
- scarmig 3y ago
  Are you claiming that SFUSD did not, in fact, ban teaching algebra in 8th grade, and are you ignoring that the state of California proceeded to then make it part of its state recommendations? Your isolated "hot button incident" is the real lived experience of hundreds of thousands of parents. Your "dogwhistle" is itself a dogwhistle (your obvious implication being "only a racist Trumptard could support allowing students to take algebra in 8th grade"). Ironic, in that the people defending the decision implicitly believe that non-white people are less capable of learning algebra than white people. Which itself is stupid, from a historical point of view. Who, after all, first formulated algebra?
  - yterdy 3y ago
    I'm saying that the issue gets characterized (wrongly) by detractors as pulling down the smart kids so that the other kids won't feel bad, when it's actually a matter of pulling resources for a smaller (parent-driven) "gifted" cohort in order to free those resources for use in improving everyone else's performance. This makes sense because the latter are less likely to be able to place their kids in private tutoring. Here's my lived experience: algebra in 7th grade, black boy. I'd have been better off taking it later, and making it up with summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses /certs in between algebra, algebra ii, calc, and diff eq/calc ii in high school. If that meant my classmates could have a better chance of keeping up, all the better; being in the historically lily-white gifted track at my magnet high school didn't do much in the way of convincing my teachers not to give up on me at the first sign of weakness. Yet another nuance you either miss or refuse to acknowledge.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      That's a massive misrepresentation of what's going on. This isn't dedicating resources to students in need; it's removing opportunities for poor students to take algebra in 8th grade, which is necessary if you want to take calculus in high school. And you might have been rich enough to take supplementary "summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses," but ripping that opportunity from people who don't have those resources is obscene.

sfink 3y ago

> the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century That's a bit of an understatement. I'm not great at history, but my understanding is that the mid-19th century was a little lacking in videoconferencing software, educated people with the resources to be on the other end of that video link, population density to have enough other like-minded kids within driving... uh, horse-riding range, up to date books, parents who weren't gone to the factories or fields during the day, etc. > There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve. Agreed. There is a smaller set of objectives that they actually do achieve. > IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead. I would assert that it's impossible to fix this broken system, and I can cite a lot of past history. I would also assert that replacing it entirely with homeschooling (which is not a single thing, but whatever) is also a guaranteed path to failure. The only hope I see is for exploration to be possible, and for people in the different situations to learn from each other. The public school institutions do try to experiment, but are incredibly restricted in all sorts of ways. Homeschoolers have the training wheels off and are much more free to crash straight into the bushes or off a cliff, but in practice plenty don't and plenty come up with a lot of different ways of doing things, some of them that seem to be working quite well in practice — academically, socially, etc. I agree that sucking resources out of public schools to benefit the privileged few is very troubling and worrisome. But so is the current state and trajectory of public schooling, and holding everyone back may be short term fair but long term disastrous. We're homeschooling one of our kids (both until recently, when one went to a public charter high school). We've seen the institutional effects firsthand. Simple example: we found excellent math resources, but they weren't "A-G" accredited for University of California entrance requirements. Which gave us pause, since we wanted to leave that option open. We ended up going through a A-G accredited program, the best of what we could identify, for a semester. It was crap: rote memorization of algorithms exactly matching to the state standards, lots of repetitive exercises, minimally useful feedback from teachers and their assistants. My son passed all of their tests and got an A+ grade, and is now a semester behind in math because none of that stuck in a way that is useful for building on. It was a waste of time. We gave up on it and the whole accredited path, and went back to an online program that is far more conceptual, rigorous, and just plain effective. (His earlier public school experience was somewhere in the middle, Again he did quite well there according to the state tests.) My guess is that it's yet another form of enshittification: A-G accreditation is very valuable, but once you get it there's no profit in increasing quality, only in growing your student base. There aren't enough accredited places to provide any competition on quality, especially when there's so much disagreement about what "quality" is in the first place, and as usual any useful definition ends up being expensive. Non-accredited places have to compete on quality. (For anyone who finds value in my personal opinions: Silicon Valley High School math bad, Art of Problem Solving math good.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Consultant32452 3y ago

I think the mistake you are making is in believing the public schools are failing in any way. You cannot fix something that is not broken. In my opinion the schools are working exactly as intended which is why anyone who can should get their children out of them. "Mistakes of this size are never made innocently." ~Ayn Rand

K0balt 3y ago

There is a huge amount of inequality in the quality of education that home schooling can achieve, that is definitely true. So maybe we work on the inequality. Inequality of education is a symptom of a self reinforcing broken economic system. Meanwhile, if I can provide a superior education and social experience for my children, Im glad to have the opportunity to do so. I’ve seen bad outcomes and good ones from homeschooling, and in my particular case I am absolutely delighted with the results (now that my children are adults) But to achieve that my wife and I invested our entire lives, uprooting ourselves and living experiences with our children as part of their education, sailing around on a boat we rebuilt and going to local schools in other languages as their cultural preparation. It was a bit hellish for my wife and I but the 6 years we invested in that paid unbelievable dividends for our children. Most people can’t or won’t do that. We weren’t (financially) rich, but I have always prioritized my freedom over material wealth, and you can do amazing things on a modest (60k/year was our passive income from contracting at that time) budget if you have complete control of your time.