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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> By fall, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling (Sept. 30-Oct. 12). A clarification was added to the school enrollment question to make sure households were reporting true homeschooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school.

> 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.

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For a working professional, the amount of knowledge one needs to learn/retain for day-to-day work activities trumps 10x what 10-15 year old kids learn in school. So it's not too hard to go over basic chemistry/physics/biology textbook and explain it to your kids. In addition, if you have smart & interested kids, I think you could save your kids 4-6 hours of learning time every day, while only investing a minimal amount of time yourself (2-3 hours).

We saw our 4th grader last year crushing all of his schoolwork within 45 minutes. Every so often, he’d have one question but otherwise loved being done before 9AM and then having the rest of the day to read, play, or do extension work that we’d dream up for him.

He reports liking this year better because of his friends, but that the school part is way more boring.

Almost certainly it will fall back at least partway. Like the increase in work-from-home, though, it is possible that it will not fall all the way back to pre-pandemic levels. But I think there is no question some of this change will not "stick".

My family is doing this as we have 4th grader twins and a 6th grader that are not eligible for the vaccine yet. Homeschooling is a huge amount of work for the parents. As soon as we can vaccinate the kids they are going back to regular school. While I'm pretty sure the kids are learning more than they did last year, and maybe even more than they would have learned in regular school it's so much less efficient that it just doesn't feel worth it.

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.

> But the alternative is the kids get COVID. It's not a question of if but when.... 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.

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.

There is no significant risk for healthy children.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02423-8

The current variants (except maybe Mu, we don't have enough data yet) are not too bad for kids, but at the same time I don't want to create an environment with heavy selection pressure on the virus to mutate into a form that is especially contagious in children.

Every grade school is an incubator today. We are just begging for a Nu variant with a transmissiblity factor of 3 in small children.

They’re not carding, so I suspect quite strongly that your 6th grader would “pass” and get the vaccine if you present their arm and say they’re 12. If our 10 year would pass, he’d be vax’d already (even though I think the risk to him is already extremely small).

We considered this, but the vaccine clinics wanted to check our insurance cards which would give away the game.

“We don’t have insurance (or we don’t have any information with us).” Might work.

I brought my card and CVS didn’t even want to look at it. (They’re getting paid either way and not via insurance.)

At this point I am skeptical of either prediction, just like remote work, homeschooling could gain many adepts.

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