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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

the average homeschooling family spends $500 per child and year, the average public school spends $9953 per child and year

When you see this kind of statistics you immediately ask yourself who wants what from you and why. Of course the school district is more expensive, they have to maintain their buildings, transportation, and have to offer up remedial services by law. Most of all, they have to pay the teachers' wages, and the opportunity cost for the parent not taking work outside the home isn't counted.

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There is also the opportunity cost of homeschooling. By homeschooling, the parent is reducing their ability to work full-time or part-time so they are losing money. So the true cost for the parent would be something like $20/hour * 5 hours a day * 200 days a year ~= $20k. (Adjust the numbers as you see fit)

Are you saying that this opportunity cost somehow offsets the difference between the $500 and $9,963 It really does not make up much of a difference. An average homeschooling parent does is homeschooling two kids. Average class size it 24. Divide your $20k by 12 = 1,600. There is still a large deficit difference.

If you want more of a comparison of how wasteful (non efficient) and ineffective public schools are - just compare them to equivalent private schools. They turn out better test scores and spend around 25% that of public schools per student.

> [Private schools] turn out better test scores and spend around 25% that of public schools per student.

I don't believe you. Proof?

compare them to equivalent private schools

Which ones do you consider "equivalent"? Private schools that are the default choice of school for their area and aren't allowed to be selective about what students they admit/retain?

This statistic only works if the time spent by the parent is worth $0. Homeschooling is extremely time intensive.

This is the data point I questioned as well in the infographic. Without more info from the original survey as reference this stat as meaningless.

I certainly hope that any parent would have earned far more than $10k working the same hours they spent teaching.

To be valid you'd really need to do a total accounting of time and costs. The means lost income by the parent offset by time not lost due to driving to/from school and such.

Agreed! That misinformation-graphic is full of fallacious information. Just alone the bias of asking homeschooled children whether they think their homeschooling was beneficial; there are so many reasons why there would be a positive bias built in that totally pollutes the data. One top of that, you compare costs but don't provide an adequate cost structure for the fixed and variable costs of the home that the homeschooling is being conducted in??? It's all just trash, and, ironically, poorly reflects upon homeschooling if that is what comes of it.

Ignorance is bliss, just like unsettlingly blissful homeschoolers.

I suspect that the $500 figure does not account for the wage that the parent(s) would be making if they were working. Defining a number that would be good to compare is probably quite difficult because different people would spend different amounts of time, so maybe an average amount of time, average salary of parents, and standard deviation for both would be more accurate (but also much harder to find). Take it with a grain of salt.

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