Homeschooling Hits Record Numbers (reason.com) 217
An anonymous reader shares a report: "In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%," Angela Watson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Homeschool Hub wrote earlier this month. "This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%." She added that more than a third of the states from which data is available report their highest homeschooling numbers ever, even exceeding the peaks reached when many public and private schools were closed during the pandemic.
After COVID-19 public health measures were suspended, there was a brief drop in homeschooling as parents and families returned to old habits. That didn't last long. Homeschooling began surging again in the 2023-2024 school year, with that growth continuing last year. Based on numbers from 22 states (not all states have released data, and many don't track homeschoolers), four report declines in the ranks of homeschooled children -- Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, and Tennessee -- while the others report growth from around 1 percent (Florida and Louisiana) to as high as 21.5 percent (South Carolina).
The latest figures likely underestimate growth in homeschooling since not all DIY families abide by registration requirements where they exist, and because families who use the portable funding available through increasingly popular Education Savings Accounts to pay for homeschooling costs are not counted as homeschoolers in several states, Florida included. As a result, adds Watson, "we consider these counts as the minimum number of homeschooled students in each state."
After COVID-19 public health measures were suspended, there was a brief drop in homeschooling as parents and families returned to old habits. That didn't last long. Homeschooling began surging again in the 2023-2024 school year, with that growth continuing last year. Based on numbers from 22 states (not all states have released data, and many don't track homeschoolers), four report declines in the ranks of homeschooled children -- Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, and Tennessee -- while the others report growth from around 1 percent (Florida and Louisiana) to as high as 21.5 percent (South Carolina).
The latest figures likely underestimate growth in homeschooling since not all DIY families abide by registration requirements where they exist, and because families who use the portable funding available through increasingly popular Education Savings Accounts to pay for homeschooling costs are not counted as homeschoolers in several states, Florida included. As a result, adds Watson, "we consider these counts as the minimum number of homeschooled students in each state."
We're in the group (Score:5, Informative)
Started on the homeschool path because of an athlete kid who spent the bulk of the day in the gym. Worked incredibly well for her, grades stayed at the top and honestly her retention and understanding of the material improved. Her little brother always complained about having to go to school, how boring it was, etc. Starting in 1st grade, it was consistent and getting more frequent. The more we looked into his complaints and asked for clarification it was clear he wasn't making up a story to get out of going. He would finish his work almost immediately, and then ask to do things like:
No, they expected my son to either re-do the same work multiple times or just sit there. When he couldn't sit still, the teacher made him stand in the hallway because his fidgeting 'interrupted her teaching.' So we moved him to homeschool as well, and now he's working on finishing middle school a couple years early and we're working on figuring out what his high school AP class schedule will look like.
He loves learning, and public schools simply aren't the place to do that.
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Re:We're in the group (Score:5, Informative)
There are a couple of things going on there. First of all, schools are really designed to teach kids en masse. If you had to teach ONE kid, you'd never set that kid up as we do, where a kid sits down and a teacher talks to them from the front of a room and, after that, gives the student a few minutes of individual attention. The classroom format is designed to maximize the amount of the teacher's time spent teaching while trying to maximize the aggregate learning of the class. But, that means that, for any particular kid, there's a fair bit of the class time when they're not learning at all or learning slower than they are capable of.
You can offset that, some, with differentiated instruction where you put the "smart" kids together -- there, the teacher can go at a faster pace, can provide more challenging work, and so on. But, it still has the same fundamental flaw -- you're optimizing for use of the teacher's time, not the student's.
The other thing is that schools, especially public schools, are bureaucracies that tend to be driven by centralized policy, not by individual decision making at that staff level. Part of that is necessity, but part of it is because administrators don't trust student-facing staff to make good decisions and are also hyper-concerned with liability when student X gets to do something when student Y doesn't. If X and Y are of different races, then there will be a claim that Y was denied BECAUSE of his/her race, even if the decision ultimately made sense for both X and Y.
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also hyper-concerned with liability when student X gets to do something when student Y doesn't. If X and Y are of different races, then there will be a claim that Y was denied BECAUSE of his/her race, even if the decision ultimately made sense for both X and Y.
While the race card is played, I think we should step back and remember that education in general elicits STRONG responses from parents across all ethnic, socio-economic categories. The problems are different, but even affluent school districts get regular and aggressive engagement from parents especially if there is any perception that their precious child is not getting their "fair" share of resources, right or wrong. I feel like race is just one tool in the toolbox that parents will use.
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For most people the solution will not be "more homeschooling," because that is a pipe dream for most who are struggling to get by. The solution is a m
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Re:We're in the group (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you, National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. But we've been hearing this song about underfunding for decades now and funding has gone up by massive amounts while education has not, in fact, gotten better.
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Looking around me, there are mountains of deferred infrastructure costs that can't be delayed anymore. New buildings, major refurbishing of buildings with asbestos, etc. That is the situation in a relatively suburban area. If you look at urban areas, you have a higher concentration of poorer people. If funding isn't redistributed from the top, the most expensive urban classrooms have the least funding. At the local level, some areas need to spend more than they can take in - but it's a net societal ben
Re: We're in the group (Score:2)
Generally speaking, the suburbs are FAR harder to maintain than urban areas. Urban areas suffer from malinvestment, but they are actually much better setup to deal with these sorts of issues if revenue is properly allocated.
Where infrastructure becomes expensive for cities, it's generally in ways the city is carrying the burdens of the surrounding area because suburbs are setup as ponzi schemes that crumble once the land is gone.
Re:We're in the group (Score:4, Insightful)
The US already pays more per student than just about any other country on the planet for education and we do not get the results.
No, the problem isn't money......
Re:We're in the group (Score:4, Insightful)
And when people propose investing in the schools that do work, they are demonized for trying to take money away from schools that don't work.
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At least in our areas, while there is no money for teachers (no raises, big classes etc), the schools spend enormous amounts of money on new stadiums. As long as the tax money goes to funding sports, I will do whatever I can to underfund them.
Example: https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
Always the oddball trying to blame different budgets and crap, but it comes from the same pocket in the end.
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Would love to know what mental gymnastics you use to justify the claim that underfunding explains why he wasn't even allowed to bring a book from home.
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It's the perception of the other students. If they see THAT kid reading a non schoolbook, why can't they do that as well?
I'm just speculating of course, but I know full well what it's like to have my classwork AND homework done before class is over. When I was younger, I got in trouble for talking a lot. By high school, I just put my head down on the desk or depending on the class, would read ahead in the book. Especially in history class, we didn't use half the book anyway but that didn't make it any less
Re:We're in the group (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be curious for an unbiased opinion of your child's social adjustment.
Every time I've encountered home schooled children they were either developmentally challenged, perhaps autistic, or they were mentally OK by stuck in a socially maladjusted bubble. I perceive both scenarios as rather sad and feel that the children suffer long term social/psycological issues because of it.
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If you met my kids without prior knowledge, you wouldn't pin them as homeschooled. They are in tune with the world around them, know all the pop culture, and have never suffered 'weird kid syndrome.' It's not like 30 years or whatever ago where a disconnect was clear and obvious.
My daughter is in the gym with a large number of girls who are a mix of homeschool and public school, roughly divided into schedule groups by their dedication to the sport. Socially these girls are close, have been friends for years
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Isn't that because the people who were homeschooling were mostly trying to shelter their kids from not just the education system but the whole world around them?
Re: We're in the group (Score:3)
That was definitely a big part of it. A archetypal home schooler used to be someone whose family was in a cult. While that remains an important contributor to homeschooling, many more parents are now doing it for political reasons or because they want to live somewhere that doesn't prioritize education to their standards.
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That's the inherent problem with classes, you have to teach 30+ students the same but they're not all capable of learning at the same pace or in the same way.
Kids who can't keep up fall behind, while those that are faster get bored and start to misbehave so they get labelled as troublemakers.
You also have the peer pressure from other kids, who will mock or even bully the top and bottom percentages of the class respectively, discouraging them from participating.
Catering to each child and teaching them at the
Re:We're in the group (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the part we need to talk about for sure. The one size fits all model just doesn't work, and was a driver in our choices.
The school's outright refusal to allow my son to learn independently was the nail in the coffin. One thing that pissed me off to no end, was when my son got in trouble for writing a report. Get this, they were doing a module on how the world is made up of different countries. There's the USA, there's Canada, there's Mexico, etc. That raised an itch my son just had to scratch, so while in class he used his Chromebook to start looking up other countries. So he gets on Wikipedia and starts going down the list, which didn't raise any suspicion until he was on one of the nations that speaks Arabic. The teacher obviously quickly determined he wasn't on the same country when she saw Arabic script on screen, so he was scolded. Itch didn't go away though, so he simply waited until he got home to continue his research. Over the next few days he had researched every single sovereign state and built a Google Doc listing their name, their flag, capital city, and some short snippets about them gleaned from Wikipedia. Over 50 pages, and he was super excited to present it to his teacher and share everything he learned about all these new places. You would think the teacher would have maybe been a little impressed, or at least given him a 'good job' or something. Nope, he got sent to the office and was in trouble because he 'used the school computer for something the teacher did not instruct him to do.'
It is not so bad to try and find middle ground when you have a large class. It is not acceptable to just pull everyone down to the minimum. It is abhorrent to "discipline" a kid for going above and beyond, on their own.
Re: We're in the group (Score:2)
It's not an issue of classes. It's an issue of pedagogy. Our teachers at their best are dedicated, underfunded, and operating based on tradition and gut feeling rather than science. It goes down hill from there.
Get parents out of the classroom. Or put all the problem parents' kids together. Then you can start educating the rest using effective techniques.
Some kids falling behind? The contemporary solution is to focus on those kids until they catch up.
Some kids getting ahead? The contemporary solution is to
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He would finish his work almost immediately, and then ask to do things like:
Get a book from the library from a grade level higher: DENIED
Bring a book from home: DENIED
Use the computer while the other kids finished: DENIED
How do you know he finished his work?
I have some personal experience with this. We took the Iowa Basic tests in grade school. When we finished the test our teacher let us read a book. I was in the middle of a really good book. I filled in all the dots on the math section randomly and spent the rest of the test time reading my book. My teacher was shocked by my low score and asked what had happened. She was quite annoyed by my honest explanation. But I would not be surprised if she changed the rules to avoi
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How do you know he finished his work?
Because the graded papers came home with A's? Because every single score and everything else they did was posted to his account? And because little kids are pretty excited to tell you about their day?
Pretty weird to think your not wanting to take a test seriously means my kids are the same.
Re: We're in the group (Score:5, Insightful)
so do you pay lower taxes by not having to support public education?
Do you want educated neighbors? Who you can hire for your business? Who will have enough income to purchase your product? Who will be employed and can adapt their skills to a rapidly changing environment? Who will know how to make healthy choices for themselves and for their neighbors (you)? Who will carefully consider and thinking critically about public issues and use that knowledge when they vote?
If you want these things, then you will pay for a good public education.
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...If you want these things, then you will pay for a good public education.
If you want those things, you will stay as far away from the public school system as you can manage. The public school system hampered my education and employment prospects, and nearly shut them down entirely. My mom taught me all the useful stuff at home, before the public school system started undoing it all.
I was semi-proficient in the three R's by the time I was 5. My learning pace slowed as I proceeded through the grades, and my desire to learn was all but dead by the time I graduated from High School
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If you want these things, then you will pay for a good public education.
THIS ^^^^^ times a million billion zillion.
Do you want educated doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, etc etc etc? It's well worth paying for that, and don't fool yourself into thinking it's not.
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Since school funding is from property taxes, EVERYONE is already paying those taxes regardless if they have kids or not. Homeschool or public, the parents will still be paying taxes same as a public school pupil's parent or the person that has no children.
Therefore, someone choosing to homeschool their child isn't reducing the amount of school funding in the pool. No one is getting a tax credit for homeschooling.
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Therefore, someone choosing to homeschool their child isn't reducing the amount of school funding in the pool. No one is getting a tax credit for homeschooling.
Yeah, and I never said they weren't. I've no idea where you came up with that.
My point is that it costs real money to provide a quality education (public or private) and a lot of people aren't okay with that fact.
"Education is expensive but the cost pales in comparison to ignorance."
Anyway, better luck reading more carefully next time and have a wonderful day.
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Do you want educated neighbors?
No, let's have bands of uneducated losers that have nothing better to do than breaking into our houses and steal our stuff. Then we can invest 10X more money in our police force than we would have in icky socialist public education.
On the plus side, these uneducated rabble will have the right to vote and to own to fire arms. So perhaps after a few generations of this nonsense they'll overthrow our great-grandchildren's regime.
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> Republicans have abandoned public education, which has driven teachers to the Democrats.
That’s a misleading framing. Teachers themselves have abandoned neutrality. Democrats monopolize education, and the democrat party is now arguably a wing of the teachers unions.
> Even Republican teachers do not trust Republican politicians to invest in public education.
Teachers now make FAR more than the median in every state, plus have benefits that FAR exceed the private sector, and overall investment has
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Teachers now make FAR more than the median in every state,
Source? And "the median", what group or groups are included to calculate this median?
Re: We're in the group (Score:2)
Yes, all those Democrat women who voted for Trump...
Re: We're in the group (Score:5, Interesting)
Encouragement of trans....grade school kids exposed to information on anal sex and how a boy can give a blow job were the most egregious examples....but just sets values that didn't set with what parents in general in the US want to impart to their kids.
In other words conservative parents are pulling their kids out of public school because of right wing trans panic (apparently it's just awful for kids to find out trans people really aren't at all scary in real life) and other right wing scare crap based on individual anecdotes and not broad trends.
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My kids are not in the public school system because here, a 6yo kid here gets an ipad or chromebook, and does a huge chunk of their school work through apps. I just dont believe that is a good way to learn. Has nothing to do with race, gender or left/right politics.
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Conservative parents have been homeschooling for a variety of reasons long before 'trans' got popular.
Home schoolers are not conservatives, they are just fringe. There are plenty of left-wing home schoolers. The only thing they share in common is wanting to control their kids 24/7. They are just extreme versions of helicopter parents. But most parents lack the interest, skills, time and financial support to be able to home school. If they have those, then a kid is going to benefit from the 100% attention from one teacher who has only their interests at heart. Assuming that teacher has the skills required.
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I'm aware. I was addressing the claims of the person I was responding to.
Re: We're in the group (Score:2)
Traditionally, homeschoolers choose to homeschool their children because they want to abuse their child in private.
If homeschoolers are generally conservative, that says something quite disgusting about conservatives.
Re: We're in the group (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of parents are home schooling to get their kids out of the classrooms filled with green/blue dyed hair teachers who are more concerned with indoctrination than education.
The pandemic opened A LOT of peoples' collective eyes as to what was really going on in classrooms that parents didn't have a clue about.
Encouragement of trans....grade school kids exposed to information on anal sex and how a boy can give a blow job were the most egregious examples....but just sets values that didn't set with what parents in general in the US want to impart to their kids.
the US population is generally middle of the road and you screeching green haired instructor is pushing stuff from the far left in many cases.
Parent's saw this and are putting a stop to it.
Frankly I can't blame them.
The only people who constantly talk about all of the above are republicans. I also very much doubt you will find any blue haired teachers.
Re: We're in the group (Score:5, Insightful)
I can manufacture outrageous events from my imagination and then extrapolate that fiction into a nation-wide systemic problem too!
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Just wait until you find out where Elon Musk's trans daughter went to school. Hint: It wasn't public schools.
Also, if there's been any societal shift towards LGBTQ+ acceptance among today's youth (it's been a long, long time since I was in school), here's another fact that's going to rattle your cage - it's not being pushed by the teachers, but by peers. You might not remember what it was like to be young, but those of us who haven't lost too many of those memories to senescence can tell you that teachers
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Pretty sure you know that answer. Taxes stay the same, so we foot the bill for public and homeschool expenses.
I agree, the No Child Left Behind program may have started with good intentions, but the implementation failed. Not to mention the recent political focus on school administration, and here in Texas the concept of teaching our kids to the standardized testing. This may be colloquial, but myself and others I've asked have agreed that despite the push to get more money in teachers' pockets their qua
Re: We're in the group (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning social skills by having to talk (how horrible!) to other people face-to-face. Interacting with people from different households (the travesty!). Hearing people with opposing points of view (madness!). Getting off their fat ass and walking from class to class (will this never end!). Not looking at their screens (this is the last straw!).
Re: We're in the group (Score:2)
"what were they doing the rest of the day?"
Being loosely supervised so you can go to work and make money. Just because you don't take advantage of this government service doesn't mean it's a bad service. People fight hard for daycare, and here the government is just giving it to you.
Re: We're in the group (Score:2)
If you think most of the country is like that, you've been lied to by your media sources. Get new ones.
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"Of those who responded to the survey, 40 percent of those in the U.S. House of Representatives who have school-aged children, and 49 percent of those in the Senate who have school-aged children, send or have sent at least one of their children to private school.", source: Heritage Foundation [heritage.org]
That organization has an agenda to represent the position of so-called "school choice", so I think if anything they would pump the numbers up higher for private school (kind of already have in the phrasing: "at least on
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I do not believe there is a school in America that is going to have a problem with you bringing a book from home.
Really? I went to school in a small town and at the elementary school I don't think people really had the freedom to just bring things into the classroom, regardless of what it is or where it came from. Zero independence to even make those choices.
Re: We're in the group (Score:3)
Just because you live in a Christian Nationalist shithole does not mean the rest of us have this problem.
Second-generation homeschooling (Score:5, Interesting)
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Time will tell, for sure. But I will say this, homeschool vs. public school today is a completely different animal than when I was a kid. If you would have asked 30 years ago me, I'd likely have agreed with you. Today me, with this being our lives now? Let's just say I have a much different perspective. I think the negative connotation we formed from the early homeschool or private school environments aren't as prevalent perhaps.
One of the biggest concerns was about socialization. For my daughter it wasn't
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I'm not in the homeschooling universe, but I have yet to meet a second-generation homeschooler. Like, anyone I know who was homeschooled sends -their- kids to school (public, private, parochial, boarding, single-sex, co-ed) - anything but homeschool. Thoughts?
I know a few. I don't know what it may or may not mean. It may be relevant that the ones I know used a community-based approach, where groups of homeschooling families worked together to create something akin to a school, with different parents teaching different subjects. This meant that while the kids socialization groups were small, they did hang out with and learn with other kids, not just their siblings.
Re:Second-generation homeschooling (Score:4)
I'll counter your anecdote with my own. I know quite a few homeschooled kids who are now adults who are homeschooling their own children.
Religious motivations aside, those children can all read, write, and perform basic mathematics far above equivalent public school levels. Their grasp of basic science is pretty good, too, at least when it doesn't conflict with religious beliefs. And every one of them plays some sort of musical instrument, and is active in sports.
I was once a homeschooling skeptic myself, but the results speak for themselves. Done right, homeschooling provides excellent outcomes. Done poorly, not so much. But in that respect, it's certainly no different than a whole lot of public schools.
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I was home schooled (more specifically, I switched from public school to home schooling in early 5th grade after public schools tried normal track, advanced placement, and then special ed in that order). Why? My public school experience can be summed up this way: I would excel in every new subject for the first week, get way ahead of the class, get bored, and drop to the bottom. Happened in every year, and every class. Special ed was the only place they had smaller classrooms, but they also had bigger chall
oh this will be fun (Score:2, Insightful)
a pack of 40-70 year old men complaining about public schools that they don't want to pay for but will also complain how dumb kids are. oh also they have money so you know, their kids could be homeschooled so fuck the rest of you kids, stay in those shitty public schools they have voted to make worse every election.
education for *everyone* is what undergirds our.entire modern society, it's a pillar, it allows all of to do all the things we are used to.
make no mistake this political nullshit by Republicans
Re:oh this will be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Look down the line a bit from this one and there is an article how students are hitting college with not even being able to halve a fraction. This is middle school level math at best. So now colleges are being forced to offer remedial level middle school math to make up the difference. Clearly this great system we have here in the US is an utter failure.
I remember in the 70s when I was a child. They came up with this great new math idea of a drawer full of exercises that you would take from and complete at your own pace (even that wouldn't be allowed today). A handful of us were done with the year's exercises in a couple of weeks. We were then given 'self study' which meant us grade schoolers being sent to the library to entertain ourselves. You can imagine how well that went. Fortunately, after grade school we still split into different tracks of math classes where many of us were moved on an AP track, so things got better. Today, they teach weird techniques and tricks instead of core math, teach just to the standardized tests as that is how the administration gets its money, and basically cater to the lowest performers. Adding money will only make this worse.
If I had children I absolutely would homeschool. Public school right now is fundamentally broken and does need a reimagining. That does not mean throw it out and dismantle everything, but someone does need to tip the apple cart and realize what we have now absolutely is not working. We can't deny the outcomes.
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Again, as https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org] argues, you have really two choices here:
1. FIX THE SYSTEM
2. work around the system (allow further degradation of the system and its benefits to the general populace driven by the NIMBY folks or pull-up-the-ladder-after folks).
I guess your decision is clear. And as a non-childbearer, irrelevant to the discussion.
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Re:oh this will be fun (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't mistake the recognition that the system is broken and needs to be fixed for a desire to "dismantle education". I want a strong and effective public education system. We do not have one. What we have is garbage. We should try other approaches while also undoing changes that have made things worse. "Social promotion", for example, is a failure. We need to return to holding kids back when they fail a grade. We need to return to phonics and discard the "whole word" approach. We need to return to rote memorization of basic math, which works, and discard the notion of trying to teach children about "deeper relationships" that their brains aren't ready for.
I'm a Republican. I absolutely do not want a "permanent labor class". I want a public education system that produces educated citizens, and in too many places, we don't have one.
I would put it to you that it is the other party that wants a "permanent labor class". Which has been a stated reason to allow illegal immigration. Illegal immigration also places even more burdens on an already failing public education system.
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We need both learning styles for most of this. You keep phonics but you don't discard whole word reading - that's what adults do. They see a word and recognize it without thinking through it. Teaching the method and then adding rote memorization on top is also better for math - you need to know what multiplication actually means to build on it in higher math, but if you can't do 9x2 or 13+14 in your head, then you will take too long at everything that comes later.
I absolutely do not want a "permanent labor class". I want a public education system that produces educated citizens
Still, our society is built around requir
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From 2010-2019, the number of administrators in public schools nearly doubled, while the number of students and teachers only went up by ~8%. Those admini
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and there's little incentive to review what has been done,
Also, doing so requires yet another layer of bureaucracy, which is exactly what you are against in the rest of your post. We probably do need extra administrators to reduce waste, but they aren't being used or they are utterly useless at their jobs.
Re: oh this will be fun (Score:4, Informative)
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Demanding that people who are different from you to explain themselves to your satisfaction before you're willing to leave them the hell alone is peak conservative asshole.
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Calling them names and leveling false accusations at them is kind of the exact opposite of ignoring them in peace. Unless that's what brings you peace, in which case you're the mentally ill fuckup in that equation.
Re:oh this will be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you cite any sources of lesson plans pushing this gay and trans agenda? The closest thing I can find is a teaching displaying a sign saying Everyone is welcome here https://www.today.com/parents/... [today.com]
Too bad she didn't ask the school board for corrections to specify who isn't welcome.
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Can you cite any sources of lesson plans pushing this gay and trans agenda?
That's really not how it's done. Seriously, you're distracting by trying to push the obvious.
I can't speak for other states, but here in Texas it's done under the auspices of counseling & mental health. When you enroll your kid in the local ISD, they have all kinds of parental consent forms. Two of these forms permit the school to offer your kid counseling, and the other is a medical consent form for the school nurse. That one is loaded, because it covers everything from simple knee scrapes to full b
Need much more oversight (Score:4, Insightful)
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If the child isn't being educated then yes, that would be exploitation.
School is so much more than acquiring knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)
I might be biased, because I moved back to Europe after 15 years in US with particular goal of having my kids being educated in their first language (and because I loved going to school so much), but I think homecshooling is insane. Schools are about education, but they are mostly abot developing a sence of civic engagement, social skills, new friendships, independence, meeting peopel from all social strata. Polarization in the US is because most peopel live in their own social echo chambers -- when little democrats and little republicans spend time in calssroom together, maybe it helps a little in understnading other people's point of view.
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Certainly, a public school *can* be such an environment. However, over the past few decades, I've watched public schools (at least in the US) devolve into an environment where independence is quashed, left-leaning (or outright far-left) values are taught as doctrine, and students are g
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Part of the problem in the US is the very idea you presented - that school is for something other than education. It is not. It must not be, because then there is only one remaining avenue for providing education. The home. Those mistaken beliefs about the purpose of a school are the reason homeschooling is on the
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Don't you be teaching my kids! (Score:4, Funny)
Homeschooling is used to control (Score:5, Insightful)
how kids think and act so they follow "family values". Parents who do this want to make sure that their political and religious beliefs are instilled in their children's habits for the rest of their lives.
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this may be true for some but its not for us. we did home schooling between 2020 and 2024 because of the pandemic and it had nothing to do with ideology. Our ideology is centered around community, but we found that the kids definitely learned more and better at home. That said, my wife is stay at home and so she became educator and mom, so kudos to her.
Anyway, the point is, home schooling isn't just for ideologies. It's also for parents who decide to do single income and invest their time in their children
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And BTW I also strongly think that private schools should not exist. Finland closed them all and they are now... #1 in education wor
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I'm a leftist, but holy fuck! In your world, should private schools also be outlawed? Also, I hope you realize that the threat of forced participation only feeds into the fears parents have that public schools intend to indoctrinate their children.
Do you have any proof of causation between Naziism and homeschooling?
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Wow, you trust the Trump administrations values so much you want to pass those along to kids?
That's certainly a choice.
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Ah yes, the horror of parents instilling values into their children! You don't have to look very far to find the horrific consequences of parents not doing that.
Prisons (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, a few idealists complain that future workplaces demand creativity [ed.gov], autonomy, and adaptability [psychologytoday.com]. The Center for American Progress prattles on about students needing a "broad range of skills and abilities," as though the modern manager prefers innovation to punctual obedience. If schools were not structured like prisons, how would they possibly [skill-up.org] ready students for a labour market where surveillance software tracks keystrokes, badge systems record movement, and annual reviews determine whether one's metaphorical sentence is extended? Fortunately, most K-12 schools heroically resist such destabilising tendencies. As the Discovery Institute points out [discovery.org], schools have admirably retained their industrial-era structure. Proof of their commitment to preparing children for the only thing that truly matters: sitting down and doing as they're told! [frontiersin.org]
Homeschooling can equal no education (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a small number of homeschool students in my caseload, and I was supposed to drop in on them unannounced. I did have one student who was doing homeschooling effectively. The district had a homeschooling centre, and students could drop in to access resources and tutoring. Frankly, it worked great for that kid. I would check in on her at the centre and verify her attendance and academic performance.
The other two demonstrated an unintended, but predictable, flaw in the welfare laws. One of the girls (and yes, all three were girls) would predictably be babysitting an infant sibling, smoking on the couch, playing video games with friends who were cutting school. The third, instead of babysitting and video games, she just watched TV and smoked pot all day.
The flaw was that welfare reform linked the welfare benefit to the child's school attendance. This created a situation where the child was "earning" the family income. These children understood that and leveraged it into power at home. They didn't want to go to school, so they were enrolled in "homeschool." For the parent, it was that or lose welfare benefits that were relied on. The highly motivated child used homeschooling to her benifit. The other two were very ill served by it.
All these folks claiming their kids are better off (Score:2)
Yet they won't have their kids engage in any metrics or testing for comparison. Even as recently as three years ago most home schooled students did not take the SAT or ACT (at that time approximately 3 percent of all students were home schooled versus less than 1 percent of ACT / SAT takers who claimed home schooled status). And the comparisons that we do have are flawed as the home school test takers are self selected versus the public school takers where ACT / SAT is more widespread and in many places c
home school (Score:2)
Let's be honest (Score:2)
Let's be honest- the vast, VAST majority of parents aren't remotely qualified to be a 'teacher'.
Teaching is a complex skill, which is why people go to COLLEGE and get a DEGREE to be able to do it professionally.
I know a LOT of parents, including some pretty smart ones, and most of them wouldn't be able to do a credible job of homeschooling a child. Again, teaching is a learned skill, not something you dabble in. It's not something anyone can just pick up and start doing.
Homeschooling has produced a lot of s
It's not the schools (Score:2)
It isn’t all a bed of roses (Score:2)
Home schooling is simply a natural reaction to declining public schools. Let’s pick California as a case study.
First, this isn’t about funding - California spends about twice as much per K-12 student than many other states, and its teachers, like teachers in virtually every state, make significantly more the state’s median salary and have significantly better benefits than the private sector.
Second, note that California’s colleges are surging remedial classes.
Third, California’
Re:Horrible education system (Score:5, Informative)
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Yep. As if denial would make their predicament any less bad.
Re:to be clear (Score:4, Insightful)
My kids are homeschooled, but have one foot in the public school world for electives. As a result, we get to observe both sides, and what we see is a dramatic difference in social skills. For example, two weeks ago, at a birthday party, about half the attendees were homeschooled, and the other half were public schooled. The homeschooled kids were generally engaged, respectful, and having a great time. The public school kids? They could hardly utter a full sentence without someone blurting out "6-7!" and were actively trying to disrupt and ruin the party for everyone else, including the birthday kid. Individually, kids from either side can be great. In a group setting, however? I'll take the homeschoolers every time. They've escaped the herd mentality that a public school system engenders.
Because of the time efficiency of homeschooling, my kids have plenty of time for extracurriculars, free time, and part-time work. When it comes to "socialization," (however you define it), that part-time job, working around adults, provides tremendously greater value than being surrounded by 2,500 other hormonal, brains-not-yet-fully-developed teenagers who are trying to define themselves and understand how they fit in the world.
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Let's be honest, the homeschoolers are probably spending a bit more time around adults and are treated as equals.
In public schools, you can't be friends with your teachers. Other students will tease you for it and the teachers themselves aren't exactly encouraged to be your friends either. It's a lot like a prison system.
So of course homeschoolers know how to socialize better because public schoolers are socialized in a jungle environment. Turns out, once you get out of silly K-12, you are no longer dealing