Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

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Synposis: Shitty Silly-Con valley company is selling "teaching homeschoolers" under the guise of "microschooling" and "guides" instead of proper teachers. Reading in any of these scam companies, and you'll find quickly that they are not schools, and these are not accredited teachers. But again, deregulation and demolishment of public sector structures and laws to further private interests IS the point, as we'll see.

And their payment model is bonkers.... https://www.prenda.com/empowering-learners

    The Prenda Fee - "The Prenda fee for the 2023-2024 school year is $2,199." (As in, each student's family pays this to Prenda)

    The Guide Fee - "The guide fee is set by you as the guide and will vary from microschool to microschool." (AKA The Uber/AirBNB model of education, where the intermediates have no knowledge and all the risk.)

And some states allow redirecting funds from state education money to pay for this new scam. And this goes back to a previous post I commented on, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37179921 . Now, we can add "Expensive Imaginary Scam Education".

In reality, send your children to public school, and use the money you'd waste on this scam to visit museums, universities, libraries, historical sites, and the like. BE the enriching force in your child's life.

This doesn't accurately reflect the reality of the situation. Atlanta Public Schools (my local district) spends $22k per student and average teacher pay is like $60k. Get 7 kids together and you can hire a teacher with 10s of thousand left over for other stuff. Or send your kid into a class room with 20-30 other kids.

Some of this is cheating by not dealing with the added expense of special needs kids. But a lot more of it is the explosion of administration and expenses not directly related to education.

It seems to be the trend in local government. Taxes get collected and the bureaucracy grabs the bulk of the dollars leading only a little of the value delivered back to the citizens. Schools are a prime example. 25 kids in a class room are consuming $1 million of tax dollars and less than 10% of that goes to the person educating them.

Like you call $2k bonkers but what do you think APS is consuming in administration to educate my kid?

> Atlanta Public Schools (my local district) spends $22k per student

If you homeschool, do you get that money back to spend on education?

No, this was more of a hypothetical to the "Silly-con robbing the government to get rich" bit of the GP.

Sorry, I don't understand. Can you put it more straightforwardly?

They said:

>And some states allow redirecting funds from state education money to pay for this new scam.

My point is that their admin fee is significantly less than what my local school district spends per pupil in admin. So redirecting money from public schools to them is not a "scam". It'd be a significant savings if it were theoretically possible.

Oh! Wow - I'd never have guessed that. Thanks, and I agree with that point.

I started the article with the same skeptical mindset as you, and to be frank, I was in support of these by the time I finished it.

I can definitely see this being a disaster. I can also see it as becoming quite successful. Time will tell, but having more choices in education is better. Let those who can afford to experiment pay those fees. When I look at what people overpay for their cars, I'm going to guess this will have better returns than the vehicle will.

> In reality, send your children to public school, and use the money you'd waste on this scam to visit museums, universities, libraries, historical sites, and the like. BE the enriching force in your child's life.

A false dichotomy, don't you think? Someone sending their kids to these microschools are probably as likely to send their kids to museums, etc than those who send kids to public schools. In my anecdotal experience, they are more likely. In the old days (i.e. 10-20 years ago), sending kids to museums, libraries and field trips for education was heavily promoted by those advocating for homeschooling.

Is it really a scam if it helps kids fit in and learn? I have a pretty strong baseline bias against homeschool, but a lot of the testimonials in the article are pretty positive. For every fear people have of homeschools being dangerous or inadequate, it’s hard to look at public education as anything but that.

Testimonials are as useful as Amazon five-star reviews, and the actual data on educational interventions/approaches takes decades to come back.

Testimonials are always positive.

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