Census Bureau’s Survey Shows Significant Increase in Homeschooling Rates
census.gov
census.gov
I would much rather live a simpler life in a place with a low cost of living, than require a two income household and offload the education of my children to a system that doesn't particularly care about them being educated.
Certainly much of the blame goes not to the teachers themselves but the entire public education industry, but you can't quibble the total lack of results.
Remember: You can't ever fire an underperforming teacher.
Teachers tend to be paid less than an assistant manager at a Walmart. And require a master's degree.
Meanwhile, if you want different results, have teacher's judged differently. Right now, they're judged based on how well the worst performers in their class do. Of course they're going to focus on bringing up the rear.
Teachers on average make 62k nationally, get 2 months off a year, usually have great health care, pension, and have phenomenal job security.
And I know plenty of teachers without master degrees.
> I don't think this is true when you take into account benefits such as:
> healthcare,
Which WalMart Asst. Managers also get. Better health care in many cases.
> job security
How much is a secure but low paying job worth? Besides, once you're an assistant manager, you probably have decent job security if you don't fuck up.
> pension
WalMart Asst. Managers get access to a 401k. It's not a pension, but it's also not subject to fuckery by elected officials. And if you quit to do something better you can take it with you.
> 3 months off a year.
Teachers aren't paid for their 3 months off, and tend to work unpaid overtime during the year such that it evens out to being the equivalent of a fulltime, year round job anyway.
https://direct.mit.edu/edfp/article/9/3/231/10191/New-Measur...
Teachers get paid an additional ~$35,000 in benefits if they work for the state or federal government.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-8/teachers-job-requireme...
I seriously doubt Walmart assistant managers are getting anywhere near that level of benefits. I can't find any data on how much Walmart pays out in benefits, but you see to be pretty familiar with how much Walmart pays so please share.
> How much is a secure but low paying job worth? Besides, once you're an assistant manager, you probably have decent job security if you don't fuck up.
I know a bunch of teachers and a few principals and all of them across the board have said it's impossible to be fired as a teacher after the probationary period. I don't know any assistant managers at Walmart, but I've known a few front line managers at retail chains and they were always anxious about hitting their numbers.
Yes, they average 36 hrs/wk over the full year instead of 40 hrs/wk. 10% less time. And they're off 2 or 3 months a year. So, that lines up with my "they tend to work about the equivalent of a regular fulltime job while only getting paid for 9-10 months" statement.
> I seriously doubt Walmart assistant managers are getting anywhere near that level of benefits
And the majority of that is in pension benefits which assumes they work until they earn it out. It's one of those clever accounting things where since most teachers quit after < 10 years, they don't get any of those awesome benefits.
> I can't find any data on how much Walmart pays out in benefits, but you see to be pretty familiar with how much Walmart pays so please share.
I mean, I've just googled it. I saw that they have some 401k plans and some stock purchase plans. They seem to offer decent enough insurance (in that they cover dental and vision as well as health) but I have no idea what their copays are. In looking it up, it seems they also pay for you tuition costs, which is nice.
> I know a bunch of teachers and a few principals and all of them across the board have said it's impossible to be fired as a teacher after the probationary period.
Yes. It's stupidly hard to fire a teacher. But if the underlying job sucks, being secure in it is irrelevant. If teachers tend to quit, it doesn't matter how hard it is to fire them.
Also, the firing or not is very state dependent.
The people I know in retail always seem anxious about their numbers, but I've never heard of any of them getting fired for missing them.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/which-states-have-t...
In the lower grades, the biggest issue is the parent/child dynamics. When things are going badly, do they spin each other up or can the parent keep things calm. If you spin each other up, homeschool is not for you.
In the higher grades, parents need to know their limitations and bring in experts when needed.
Personally, I adored homeschooling my children.
Honestly the foundational work is just as vital to the parents as it is to the kids as we will be simply guiding them through a high school curriculum that is much more advanced that anything we ever experienced. This is the program we are using, but we have two more years before we begin.
However, having seen kids give up on the independent study route and beg to go to a standard school, I think you are underestimating how daunting it is to start learning high school subjects as independent studies. Fundamentally, arguing with your peers in history class or being able to ask questions in chemistry is really valuable. A video is interesting, but once you get to the point where there is a part you don't understand, it's really hard to make progress.
A lot of the "challenge" level courses seem to talk about class presentations? Is this a remote school more than homeschool?
You are completely correct about how hard independent study can be, in the group our younger kids go to, a few of the older siblings have opted to go back to a classroom settings, not all of them, but every kid is different and with a strong academic basis they can thrive in whatever setting you put them in. More importantly if the students choose to go to college that will almost definitely be a traditional college experience so at some point they will need to be acclimated to traditional school. I hope my children can thrive in the independent program, but if not they will have the skills needed to learn in any environment.
I found that a solid elementary school foundation from my parents, combined with weekly classes and individual tutoring during highschool, was excellent preparation for my university studies.
1. Garnet Valley in PA ( this one was the best of all we tried ) https://www.greatschools.org/pennsylvania/glen-mills/garnet-...
2. Fairfax Country in VA ( this one was the worst ) https://www.greatschools.org/virginia/falls-church/fairfax-c...
3. Los Gatos/Saratoga in CA https://www.greatschools.org/california/saratoga/schools/
In California we sent our kids to a private school before pulling them out for home schooling. Essentially I don't think its the school districts fault, I think its a suboptimal model and if you are really well funded with really engaged parents you can kinda make it work. Although the number of Kuman and Russian Math tutoring facilities near me makes me double guess myself on that.
> That change represents an increase of 5.6 percentage points and a doubling of U.S. households that were homeschooling at the start of the 2020-2021 school year compared to the prior year.
I’m skeptical that this represents a durable increase and deeply skeptical that it represents a durable doubling. Once C19 passes, homeschooling rates are more likely to revert to historical norms than to remain at a 2x level.
We could have homeschooled this past year (because of widespread WFH). I think many of these increased rates were similar opportunistic homeschooling.
He reports liking this year better because of his friends, but that the school part is way more boring.
But the alternative is the kids get COVID. It's not a question of if but when. The schools here are just not taking it seriously enough, and frankly they probably couldn't given the number of kids in the building. Sure they'll probably be OK when they get it, most kids are, but it seems completely reckless to just send them with the hope that they won't get a bad case. We are hoping to send the 6th grader back for the second half of the semester, he'll be getting the vaccine right after his birthday this month so we have a waiting period, a second shot, and another waiting period before he goes back.
From the statistics I've seen, the risk to children is comparable to the risk from RSV or influenza, and less than the risks of driving them to and from school. I'm curious if you've seen different data.
Every grade school is an incubator today. We are just begging for a Nu variant with a transmissiblity factor of 3 in small children.
I brought my card and CVS didn’t even want to look at it. (They’re getting paid either way and not via insurance.)
Also, if you think that the student might transition back from homeschool to public school, the school will want to do some kind of evaluation to determine what class the student belongs in. If the student had been remote learning via the public school all along, this never comes up.
I'm not against homeschooling, my kids are homeschooled. But it's not a decision to take lightly or without thoroughly investigating the rules and regulations about it for your local jurisdiction.
That's a potentially big difference.
Plus, homeschool coops give the kids more social interaction, which many families prefer.
I think the big difference about "remote schooling" is that once you're doing that, it raises the question of "is my public school the one that is best at this, or should I use someone else?" In some cases they may be, but often they are not.
I am German and thus have very different experiences. AFAIK home schooling in Germany is still illegal (as in "not being enrolled in a school at all") because it is (edit: in the opinion of the German state, not necessarily mine) basically essential to a child's development to be part of a social classroom experience.
Seeing how (a vast majority of) schools are also free and ~good, my very clichéd understanding is that the only parents that want to home school their children are those with extreme religious or political opinions they want to foist upon them.
In my anecdotal experience it is actually the opposite. Parents are concerned about political activist teachers forcing their beliefs onto children.
Recent examples are teachers in the US who have been captured on video in the classroom bullying children or telling them that any parents who disagree with the teacher’s beliefs are “stupid”, “anti-science”, etc.
Again, in my own experience there is some truth to this and some percentage of teachers purposely bring their politics (left or right) into the classroom with the intent to indoctrinate.
Interestingly, this behavior is completely out in the open in US higher education classrooms. Many teachers proudly and aggressively mix their personal political beliefs into their instruction. I suppose we just accept this as the students are technically no longer “children”?
Assuming you were educated in the US, can you honestly say that you never witnesses a teacher/professor infuse their political beliefs into their instruction (even if you agreed)? If so, awesome, but that isn’t the experience almost everyone else has.
Frankly, it is reprehensible behavior carried out by teachers who are at best, pitiful adults who are just seeking attention from children. Or, at worst, trying to groom children for their own political purposes.
i was required to take one class to become a resident assistant that you would probably consider as being mostly designed to shove political beliefs down my throat but in my opinion an understanding of those topics was relevant and necessary to being able to serve a diverse group of residents.
What I don't understand is this comment "essential to a child's development to be part of a social classroom experience" but it is a very common view. Ignoring online schools, the largest public high school in the US has over 8,000 students and high schools with 3,000-4,000 student are common. When in human history has it been the norm for children to gather daily in such large numbers everyday away from their families, with only high level supervision from adults who aren't their parents nor have much depth of insight into their lives? It's more akin to Lord of the Flies with the occasional adult commentary than a way to learn good social skills. What they learn is the law of jungle and many people are scared for life by the experience. Even at the elementary and middle school levels, enrollment of 1,000 students in a single school is common. There's absolutely nothing natural about this. It's an absurd artificial construct and it's amazing so many people think it is somehow a good thing.
Another common question is how will children make friends if not at school? For myself, most of my friends were those I met at school but about a quarter were from meeting in the neighborhood, through youth group at church, or through family or friend-of-a-friend connections. Just because someone lived in my neighborhood didn't mean they went to my public school. Some went to religious or private secular schools. Some kids at church also attended private secular schools (our church didn't have a school) or a different public school. If I had been homeschooled, I still would have met about a quarter of my friends outside of school, and probably would have met many of the same in-school friend through those friends due to common interests and geography. All of this was without me being into sports, which is another way children meet friends, even if it wasn't one of the ways I met them.
On the flip side, many homeschoolers have encountered public school teachers with extreme views. Extreme views may be fairly well distributed throughout society.
Anecdotally, this is incorrect. Source: we have homeschooled our child in the past (though we are not right now), and we do not have extreme opinions that we want to foist upon them.
I realize I am a sample size of one, but you did say only.
Homeschooling a child pretty much involves taking the state to court for your right to do so.
German Wikipedia estimates the number of such cases (I assume before Covid) to below 3000 (Germany has 83m inhabitants).
Apart from that, it is seemingly indeed left to each state if and how to enforce compulsory schooling - they just all do it. They only differ in the ages/durations required [1].
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausunterricht#Deutschland [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulpflicht_(Deutschland)#Dau...
Hey, we’ve all done it at some point in our lives so no worries, mate.
Thanks for answering though. I’m always curious how other Federal systems tend to function compared to the one I live in.
You have to keep in mind a critical difference between Germany and the US in this regard. The German Basic Law requires religious education to be available to children in public schools. If you’re a Muslim your kid can get instruction in Islamic morality. If you’re atheist you can choose a secular ethics course.
In America, any sort of religious education is illegal in public schools. So everyone effectively gets the secular ethnics course (because you can’t really teach kids without teaching some sort of moral framework). This material often contradicts even mainstream (not “extreme”) Christian or Muslim tenants.
I think the German system is far preferable to the American system, and many of the religious “extremists” you talk about would like such a system.
I think you're being optimistic.
One, muslim classes in state schools are extremely rare, and those students get dispensation so they can miss those class hours and go to the local mosque for instruction instead. Only that in several cases those mosques were actually teaching rather extremist and violent things. The state tries to build up more "own" muslim classes (in cooperation with muslim organisations).
Two, all those state school run classes are certainly too "mild" for extremists. I mean, the students of evangelical families (and I don't mean protestant, I mean the extreme strains of protestantism that are rampant in southern Germany) certainly send their kids to protestant classes, but at home they teach the opposite in many cases. You cannot reconcile a state school religion class with and "you need to read the bible literally, all those theological stuff at universities is baloney".
My point is that in the United States, even the “mild” Protestant or Muslim stuff is off limits in public schools. Everyone is taught secular humanist morality, often of a highly individualistic variety. So unlike in Germany, even religious people who aren’t “extremists” may want to home school their children.
I’m a liberal Protestant, but I’d still consider home schooling my kids. I just want them socialized in the basics of their religion. That’s an option in public schools in much of Europe but isn’t in the United States.
2nd generation homeschooler here. Of the hundreds of home school families I've known over the last 30-ish years I don't know any that don't have their children take classes together in some form or another.
The question is how much do children need to be in a "social classroom experience."
I suspect home schooling will be more of a thing amongst the well off. The institution of schooling, like many of our other institutions, isn’t a wild success. It’s okay, but certainly you can do better if you desire to.
Edit: Home schooling or tutoring is an existential threat in China.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2021/8/23/china-crackd...
These kids are in danger (smirk) of not being nationalists.
The flip side of this is that school system itself is highly political in the USA and the curriculum is often a battleground between the parties for what is mandatory to advocate. Couple that with children in public school being trash pretty often and you don't lose much by homeschooling. Especially if you're a parent who's willing to put in the work to select good resources and groups for your child.
The homeschooling ban has been challenged, but has most recently been upheld as valid by the European Court of Human Rights [0, unfortunately German only].
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausunterricht#Deutschland
This is assuming a good faith argument (steel-manning) on homeschooling as normally practiced.
I.e. I expect new education models to arise from parallel experiments like you see in America versus a monolith.
I was homeschooled K-12 from mid-80s to late 90s, part of the first generation of the modern homeschooling movement.
I'd say 80% of the families matched your description, but I'd guess it's lower today as it seems to be more mainstream. But I bet a least half still match.
Remote learning seems like a good tool in the mix. It does lend to being more hybrid than pure "home school".
Experience for school is that remote learning was nearly worthless for little ones. Improving for each grade level. School refuses to use remote leaning because of this.
Our own experience was same. Older the kids the better it worked. We hired private tutors to keep youngest on target. The school was a waste.
+ Would it have been better if remote sessions were smaller? Eg 1 on 1 or groups of 3?
+ How much did the remote software itself become a problem? Latency, tech issues, bad resolution?
+ Did you feel the content was suitable and tailored for remote learning?
The number of ways the kid can turn off wifi, disable the mouse or change computer language is amazing.
Mute button took class a month to figure out. Headphones have their own mic button.
Did I mention the kids can’t read, yet are expected to open the correct application or website.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/rura...
The old factory-method of schooling just doesn’t make any sense. Why do you have 45 minutes of math, 45 minutes of English, 45 minutes of etc.? It’s like the format of schooling was invented 150 years ago and never updated.
The teachers at our school are pretty level headed, but the NAIS-approved curriculum sources are pretty wacky. For example: https://pollyannaincrlc.org/
For example for Grade 4:
> The full collection of Racial Literacy Grade 4 lessons are designed to help students understand how geography influenced the emergence of civilization. Humans are the only animals to build vast civilizations,* and geography provided or denied the resources that allowed some groups of former hunter-gatherers to become farmers and herders and eventually develop some of the world’s first civilizations. Students will explore the various engineering, technological, scientific, and mathematical innovations of such civilizations, tracing cross-cultural patterns in order to develop a more informed and eclectic worldview––enhancing their own cultural competency. A goal is for students to realize that humans of a given time and place created similar structures and/or inherited ideas to establish a common pattern that was dictated by geography.* With such a lens, students will be able to analyze history and other social assertions that fabricate myths of racial superiority, including the ability to critique and dispel Eurocentric perspectives that favor a myopic view of race.
As a Bangladeshi who has spent a lot of time reading about development economics this is egregiously bad. It mixes up race with culture—a common error caused by projecting American racial politics onto other countries—and reduces the question of why some countries are rich and others are poor to “geography.”
Bangladesh is so bountiful in terms of resources that fish literally jump out of ponds into your net: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dziriaxG1Fk. It’s paradise compared to anywhere in Northern Europe. Resources aren’t why Europeans pulled ahead. That’s an absurd claim.
Which isn’t surprising, because nobody involved with this Pollyanna curriculum is actually a developmental economist or historian. It’s a curriculum that’s formulated by working backward from the premise of cultural equality.
Further, that paragraph only mentions race as a problematic myth. I don't see it mixing up race and culture so much as pointing out that Europe didn't expand because Europeans are somehow better. I fail to see a problem with teaching that.
Sure, but it excludes culture, which is the most important factor.
> Further, that paragraph only mentions race as a problematic myth. I don't see it mixing up race and culture so much as pointing out that Europe didn't expand because Europeans are somehow better. I fail to see a problem with teaching that.
You’re embracing the same ambiguity: when you say “European” are you talking about race or culture? “Eurocentric” narratives are mainly about culture, not race. There’s nothing wrong with saying Europeans were more successful because their cultures are better: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric...
Indeed, the “Eurocentric” narrative largely refers to the fusion of Christianity and Roman/Greek thought. The European “race” (Germanic people) assimilated into that culture. Nobody is talking about how great Germanic Paganism was.
Teaching that societal success is explained by “geography” rather than culture is bad for two reasons. One it’s false. Two, it encourages an external locus of control. It teaches people that success is the product of factors outside the control of an individual or group.
Yes, geography is not the only factor in cultural development. There's a certain element of random chance, there's human agency, and then there are feedback loops. It's a super complex system. You're probably right that reducing it to geography is mistake. But I'd no sooner see a curriculum reduce something as complex as the history of industrialization to culture than to geography.
Yes, over emphasizing geography would tend to teach an external locus of control. But overemphasizing culture gives students a misguided sense of cultural superiority, which, while better than racial superiority, is just as likely to lead to discrimination and misunderstanding. The discrimination would just be based on the language that someone speaks or the country that they come from rather than the color of their skin. Slightly more rational? Maybe. Just as devastating? Certainly.
For example rayiner, who is from Bangladesh, will forget to tell you that the Indian subcontinent is estimated to have produced 25% of world gdp as late as the 18th century. This was an Islamic empire with majority hindu subjects. What followed was the industrial revolution in Europe, production of advanced weaponry, colonization and the hollowing out of the wealth of a subcontinent.
You can continue to engage with brown sahib here, but he will merely dress up the worst of conservative tropes in alternative vocabulary and fish out some random tidbits and obscure statistics to give it a semblance of a scientific argument. He hasn't adopted a full blown Candace owens persona, he is angling for a brown Ben Shapiro habit.
It isn’t just that. Why is it that in the most crucial developmental years of your life you are tasked to learn everything with a bunch of people that are a distraction.
Yes, the socializing part is a distraction, a real one, it’s as if someone at your job says ‘meetings all day, every day, and then after the meetings, make sure you do the work’.
It’s insanity. Hopefully no one in those meetings (your school) goes beyond being a distraction (violent, bullying).
Groups of 20 families hiring an instructor as a grass roots method + online resources seems automatically scalable to me.
i.e. "ye olde one room schoolhouse"
The online resources just mean that a single instructor is more efficient/effective by leveraging the work of external specialists and can carry students into depths of subjects that were not attainable at that scale a century ago. Your great grandfather may have had to go to college to learn science and math beyond the basic stuff. Today a generalist teacher can leverage everything from a lesson plan to a virtual lecture prepared by teachers who specialize in teaching those subjects.
Khan academy's video tutorials can be a game changer when a child is having trouble understanding a particular concept in math, for example.
Basically keep the public funding but give allocation control to parents. Then everyone can have the same choice as rich people.
The OP pretty much is evidence of such.
No, online “school” doesn’t scale.
I favor a model of education that lets advanced kids move quicker than slower kids, and if slower kids pick up the pace, the system can adapt for them to move quicker also. A vast improvement over the current system of institutional mediocrity.
One thing that I would love to see in public schools is to allow a "free elective" that public schools administer (assuming the child picks it), which is just a MOOC with an examination schedule. A teacher can be tasked on following-up and ensuring that the child is actually making progress on their assessments, but that's it, maybe even offering a pass/fail option. This offers a low-cost way for children to explore their interests through high-level instruction without having to specifically source a teacher/expert on this material. A counselor would need to work with a child on an individual basis to evaluate whether the free elective was appropriate. Sadly in larger public schools counselors barely have enough time to keep track of their failing students, let alone their successful ones.
At some point. We are going to lose our jobs over her school.
So she played video games during the day and our evenings were spent playing catch-up. Tutors as much as we could.
> the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class
It's only about $50-100/week extra, but it helps.
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/cecily-myart-cruz-teache...
I've also known families who did go out of their way to get their kids in programs where they would make friends they could spend time with (both structured and unstructured), and in general give them comparable experiences to what you would get in a traditional school. One such group had a bunch of home-schooled kids put on theater productions every year, etc. Such families seemed to have many of the components of a standard school experience but it was organized a-la-carte by the parents and they were more involved. Those kids seemed to turn out pretty well-adjusted and extremely well educated. If you live in an area where home-schooling is common (that's probably pretty widespread at this point) it's quite easy to find support groups and resources on Facebook, etc. these days.
Hobbies with structured meetings, book clubs for continued learning, social sports are all things that are added into the mix to get good social activity. And, frankly, they’re a lot more fun than forced office/school interactions.
When I had to go back to public school, I missed homeschooling dearly, and I lost a lot of really good study habits that would have made college easier. Now that I’m working remotely, I have a lot better skill base to work from to manage the work because I was homeschooled.
We found local homeschooling groups and it turned out that the kids ended up with more socialization than when they were in traditional school. There were more field trips, PE activities, band (yes, there was a full bad of homeschooled kids) etc. -- partially because with an unparalleled student-to-teacher ratio, a day's worth of lessons can be completed in a much shorter time.
Everyone's mileage may vary, of course, but homeschooling doesn't mean condemning your kid to a shut-in, anti-social experience by any means.
https://www.indy100.com/news/pride-flag-allegiance-pledge-sc...
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427337084591874055?...