Going back to my own family’s experience, my brother-in-law was a public high school biology teacher for over 30 years, (He recently retired.). I’m sure that helped in homeschooling their daughter.
I know someone that posts things along those lines almost every day.
I definitely have seen quite a few people with this opinion, people that think that schools are hotbeds of “liberalthink”, people that want to defund public schools and give them the money instead.
You get what you pay for. If your state has crappy pay for teacher you get crappy teachers. If your state starts treating teachers like professionals, you’ll get professional teachers.
Teachers in Colorado start of at under $18 per hour. Yes that is skewed because of working 185 days instead of 255 so let’s normalize it to $24.80 / hour for a highly paid first year teacher with a bachelor’s degree. Someone who doesn’t even have a high-school diploma can start at $22/hr at a fast-food place.
Are you and your fellow taxpayers willing to open up you wallet and pay for better teachers? In Colorado the answer is a resounding NO!
It is equivalent to complaining about a car’s performance while openly pouring sugar in the gas tank.
Thankfully most teachers are not in it for the money. They are in it to help kids and families in their communities. The constant disrespect they face doesn’t help though. There is a reason we have teacher shortages in so many areas of this country.
I don’t need you to address this specifically with your kids, but in general public schools are one of the very few places in our society where people from diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups socialize. How often is this true among homeschoolers? In your average homeschooling group, do the racial demographics reflect the community as a whole? Do the socioeconomic demographics? Do the religious demographics?
My impression is that they emphatically do not. Most homeschool groups are, I believe, racially and socioeconomically homogeneous (at least in comparison to public schools). Many are religiously and culturally homogeneous. Homeschooling, under such circumstances, deprives students of exposure to children of backgrounds very different from their own, and it’s the primary reason I wouldn’t homeschool my own children.
This is also a concern to me. It’s pretty common for me (a public school teacher) to work with students who have been homeschooled and who just don’t know how to take turns. They’re so accustomed to being the primary focus of their adult that it baffles them when I give attention to other children.
That’s a really strange thing to say. Paying someone doesn’t make them better at a job; but training someone does. Public school teachers undergo years of training before taking on the job, learning everything from the subject matter to developmental psychology to history of pedagogy to legal aspects of the field.
This is like arguing in favor of representing yourself in court because “paying someone to be a lawyer doesn’t make them magically better at the job.”
There’s a good case that teacher education departments need to improve, and I’ve made that case here before. But the thing you said is silly.
For context I want you all to know Colorado is a blue state. Our top 5 elected officials are Democrats and our legislature is one Senate seat away from a 2/3 majority in both Houses.
They took away the National Board stipend from us during covid. Now that covid is over, the legislature cannot shove money out fast enough. They still have not resumed our stipends. Us NBCTs lobbied for a return of part of out stipend. I didn’t talk to legislators directly but I was in the discussions that developed our strategies. They still have not resumed our stipends. I know that sounds selfish because I am an NBCT but it’s not that. It’s that you have demonstrably master teachers and our blue state government tells us to fuck off. Add to that the numerous times bills and propositions and Amendment 73 that raise teachers and you wonder why I am tired of being a teacher in this state. Everywhere I go it’s, “You’re a teacher. Fuck You!”
I live in Chicago. I understand what you mean. The right wing here says that CTU runs the city, but that could not be farther from the truth.
Let me just interject that for families that have some resources (these may not be financial; for example, in our area there is a homeschool-charter that mediates many of these resources to make them available to all families who want), it isn’t necessarily “homeschool means that the parent does everything.” There are lots of excellent programs (before COVID, but of course the pandemic accelerated everyone learning about these) that operate online either through video or some other means that allow teaching of children without the parents necessarily themselves having excellent subject matter expertise
I know of the following off the top of my head from our own experiences (*) and those of local homeschoolers I know:
- Art of Problem Solving has both text-based group classrooms and zoom-like classrooms for math and zoom-like classrooms for language arts [they are also qualified to teach in many of these charter homeschool networks, which would make the classes free or cost greatly reduced for a family that is part of such a network and has added AoPS as a potential curriculum]
- Russian School of Math has zoom-like classrooms for math (I don’t like them as much as AoPS and they are super expensive, but anyway they exist)
- Stanford Online High School (this is an entire high school that operates remotely and online and has a very good reputation)
- Our local homeschool-charter has group zoom sessions for math and language arts; I don’t know more details than that (but I could find out)
- Our local math circle at least used to do group homeschool activities, and I know the teacher still does a homeschoolers’ math team
So homeschooling doesn’t necessarily mean disrespect and crapping on teachers – actually most people I know who homeschool do understand they can’t teach their kids everything (or don’t want to) and are cobbling together a solution that takes advantage of using teachers. Though because we have this awesome homeschool charter in our area, the people I know may be not representative of homeschoolers in the US as a whole…
(*) I know a ton of homeschoolers, though we don’t actually homeschool. But there was this pandemic thing during which we had to cobble together some solutions, and there’s Older Child outpacing the math offered at her school, and we did think about homeschooling except that I didn’t want to quit my job and I knew I’d never be able to put together socialization in a way I would have been happy with.
There is also this group. The lack of any oversight allows this to happen -
" A couple calling themselves “Mr and Mrs Saxon” established the “Dissident Homeschool” channel on Telegram in 2021, according to reporting by Anonymous Comrades Collective, an anti-fascist research group, verified by Huffpost and Vice.
The channel, which has almost 2,500 subscribers, distributes “ready-made lesson plans”, Huffpost reported, including history lessons which praise the Confederate general Robert E Lee as a “grand role model for young, white men” and denigrate Martin Luther King Jr as “the antithesis of our civilization and our people”."
ETA: I’m not trying to impugn the concept of homeschooling with this cite, but we have to keep in mind that there are bad people that have bad motivations running groups like this, and this is incredibly harmful to those kids and to our society as a whole. This is why we need oversight in education. No kid deserves to have this group “educating” them.
One thing that seems rarely mentioned in these debates is the value of having education from different individuals, with their different styles and techniques. I have no doubt that most parents are better educators for their specific kids than a significant number of public school educators, but I don’t think any parents can effectively duplicate the experience of learned from dozens of different trained teacher over the course of a dozen years.
Probably what would work best is a combination: mostly public school, with the occasional term off for a tune-up at home. But most parents have economic pressures that prevent them from being able to devote the time and resources to the project.
I do agree with what was said and implied upthread, that homeschooling (as a phenomenon) is an ad hoc solution to a societal problem with education: it’s become part of the culture wars, it’s often underfunded, and in general we don’t have a good sense of what education is for in our society. Basic literacy and numeracy? Scientific literacy and critical thinking? Job training? General well-roundedness? Basic lifeskills applicable to the everyday world? Sports and physical health? Nutrition and wellness? Emotional intelligence? Appreciating diversity and cultural education?
I’d say all of the above, of course, but in practical terms that curriculum is pretty hard to cram into a six-hour teaching day. Homeschooling is inehrently going to do better at integrating the everyday life skills, and inherently worse at exposing students to a diversity of thinking styles and ideas in real time.
I think you misunderstood the context of my comment. Of course there are skills that can be learned that improve ability to teach. But a homeschooling parent is taking a hands-on full-time crash course in teaching, and there are vast, vast quantities of resources (as @raspberry_hunter and others have pointed out) out there to help (it’s certainly not a matter of “just Google it”) and the claim that “most parents cannot” is unsupported.
To elaborate and answer the OP: as I mentioned, I don’t homeschool myself but I know a lot of people who are affiliated with the local homeschool charter, which is sort of a hybrid solution where they do get together in person Tuesdays and Thursdays (science and social studies) and homeschool M/W/F (math, reading, writing) - where “homeschool” may well mean “use the charter’s zoom resources” or “use another group learning resource.” I believe the charter does do some form of regulation, but I’d have to ask my friends more about that.
The reasons vary. The biggest reasons among the people I personally know seem to be “because we don’t like what they are getting exposed to at public school” (drugs, sex, etc.), “public school isn’t a good fit for this kid” (mostly in terms of twice-exceptionality – a bright child who also has ADHD or is on the spectrum or both, and who as a result was not thriving socially), and “because they learn more by homeschooling than they would learn at public school.” (*) Usually a combination. I also know at least one kid who did a year of this homeschool charter because of bullying and then went back to public school. It definitely ramped up over COVID as people had to basically homeschool anyway and figured hey, this is not too bad, we will just keep on with it.
The kids I know from my church who charter-homeschool tend to have excellent social skills – they tend to be from large families and also tend to interact a lot with our church community on a near-daily basis, which gives them more socialization pound for pound than school alone would do. The kids I know who are twice-exceptional who homeschool don’t always have great social skills, but that’s more a cause of the homeschooling than an effect. (Those kids all started out in public school, with some forays into private, and then ended up homeschooling.)
In almost all the cases I know of, one parent is a stay-at-home parent (who may have a job where they can work from home, but not a full-time job). The one exception is the kids I know who start homeschooling late (7th/8th grade or later) when they’re old enough that they can be independent and not need a parent at home. I know a couple of families like that.
We thought seriously about homeschooling our kids, and still may end up with twice-exceptional Older Child in the homeschool charter if high school doesn’t work out. But I’m honestly too selfish to give up my job to teach my kids, and I don’t think I’d be able to address the social aspect sufficiently (since although I’m active in my church community, it’s not on the daily basis that many of these people are).
(*) I will admit one or two people I know who homeschool because “they’d learn more at home than at public school” really are ragging on teachers, but most of them are thinking (and I do think this is true, and was part of why we were thinking about homeschooling) that one-on-one attention and/or instruction is going to be a more efficient way to transfer knowledge than a many-to-one situation where there’s a wide range of abilities and motivation. Now, whether you’re losing something as well, as other posters have pointed out – an ability to work with others, to deal with a wide range of people and thinking styles, to give and take – well, that’s a separate question, and another reason why we didn’t go with it in the end.
I grew up homeschooled, from age 6-17. It really is an all-or-nothing thing.
In a homeschooling environment, all the usual structure and discipline of school is gone. What this means is that you can spend 6 hours a day pursuing a particular niche interest of yours, such as discrete mathematics or whatnot. You can also totally waste your life away.
So, many homeschooling kids ended up being total whizes and geniuses at some particular field, and going far beyond their peers - but then also severely lagging behind peers in other ways.
It works if your kid is an Einstein and has great potential to excel in one particular field of life.
Exposed to a diverse group of people with mixed ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds?
Exposed to teachers with diverse teaching styles?
I think some of you have an over-idealized view of public schools.
This describes my public school experience pretty well.
FYI- In Idaho there is no regulation and no registration requirements when it comes to homeschooling.
I grew up in a rural area with 95% white population so that was the background of the public school I went for all 12 years of my education.
And as for the second point the school district I attended was under-funded and really hampered teacher’s effort to do anything different so it was almost all the same style.
Which highlights one of the big problems with public education in the United States-- how wildly inconsistent public schools can be even in the same state. I know my state has good public schools but my parents could NOT afford move out of the town we lived in.
I started this topic anew after reading a Washington Post article (linked in the first post). The article basically describes how now, after Covid and given the particular sociopolitical environment, numbers of those homeschooling has recently dramatically increased (eg: by over 100% in the District of Columbia, but broken down by State).
It says in eighteen States there is basically no requirement to collect data. Working with what they could get, the Post estimated one homeschooled child for every ten public. Those numbers seem surprising. In Canada I think this is much less common, though of course I might be wrong.