“Hmm…here’s the thing. All of you (other than you, I Was Homeschooled) are speaking as outsiders. I’m the product of 10 years of homeschooling, and (so far) 1 year of public school, and let me say, having experienced both sides of the debate, in 9/10 cases, homeschooling is complete bullshit. ”

Baxter’s experience is the only important and valid experience of homeschooling, his word is law on whether it is legitimate or not and he has spoken. Wow, Baxter, you’re so amazing. I didn’t realize your sole experience completely trumped all the other ones in this thread by sheer fact of being Yours. It even trumps actual /statistics/! Not only that, it even makes up ‘nine out of ten cases’, wow! Amazing.

“it might be different in other circles, or in places that regulate homeschooling more carefully, but what i’ve found in the 3 homeschooling groups i’ve experienced, is that homeschooling is usually done by religious extremists who are worried about their children being morally corrupted by the public schools, or just nutjobs trying to make a political point. ”

Sweeping generalizations and stereotypes that insult numerous people who have commented are awesome! Especially when Baxter uses them. Also, it’s funny how someone can say that situations can vary in different circumstances but right before that he says that they actually can’t and that homeschooling is ‘complete bullshit’. Now it may /seem/ like he’s just clumsily contradicting himself but that’s just his /brilliance/ that you can’t grasp!

“believe me, after a few years of almost constant isolation, it starts to fuck with your mind a little.”

Yeah, just /believe/ him! He’s an /insider/ people, his knowledge is vast and cannot be challenged! He /Knows/ Stuff. Like it was Weird how I thought isolation meant.. like.. never talking to people and in the above comments people have mentioned instances where their home-schooled children /do/ have plenty of interactions with other kids and adults and activities associated with socializing but…. nope! Guess I was wrong! Because Baxter has enlightened me. And hey, it ‘fucks with your mind a little’, people. Not like Public Schools, which never inflicted any amount of physical or mental pain on students ever.

“bottom line, the only case in which homeschooling is even vaguely practically and morally sound is if the kid in question has a serious disability and simply can’t go to school.”

Uh oh, the ‘bottom line’! Baxter has laid some /truth/ on you all. The One Truth! His Truth! Which you /must/ follow. Don’t you just feel so enlightened now?

“no matter how many statistics you find on the benefits of homeschooling, it doesn’t erase the psychological damage it does on real live kids as real live individuals. ”

Yeah, Baxter doesn’t even /need/ these so-called ‘statistics’ and ‘facts’! He just has Truth. Truthy Truthiness. And despite claims to the contrary in the actual post and comments following it, the Truth of the matter is that public schools never inflict psychological damage on anyone!!! Don’t you see? Erasing the damage home schooling does is /wrong/.. but erasing other people’s experiences of Public School and the damage it has done to them is A-okay! Or something! I hope Baxter starts handing out buttons, I want to vote in this guy for President!

My mom encountered opposition from the family, who were sure that she would ruin us – we turned out just fine, thank you. I graduated from high school early, my sisters and I detest texting and Twilight, and we’re not socially retarded.

Homeschooling is the nation’s choice for education, it seems, growing at a rate of 10 to 20% per year (Education Off the Grid, Kimberly Yuracko), and after starting with an estimated 1 million homeschooling in 2000, it has now grown to an estimated 3 million (Homeschooling: The Sleeping Giant of American Education, Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg).

All statistics that you can find on homeschooling are positive, including these two zingers:
-saves tax payers nearly 10 billion per year (Homeschooling: The Sleeping Giant of American Education, Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg)
-almost 75% of homeschoolers 18-24 attended college and/or completed a bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, or professional degree (New Followers of an Old Path, Susie Aasen)

If you are interested in learning more about homeschooling (and potential legal issues here and abroad), be sure to check out the HSLDA, and their case archives. Some of the things happening to homeschoolers in other countries – namely Germany and Sweden – are horrific, and should be an example for us if we let to government go to far in regulations.

And while I think that voting on school board members provides members of the public with some control over public education, most people who don’t have kids in school don’t see how the results of those elections play out in the classroom quite the same way.

I also think you underestimate how much teachers value engaged parents. I think there’s a lot of defensiveness on the part of teachers and the administration, because what parents want is often difficult to arrange, or impossible to arrange. Or because they, as teachers and administrators, have to negotiate the conflicting demands of different groups of parents, which is pretty thankless (I’m an advocate of open, information-based sexuality education in the classroom for students starting from a very early age. Another parent might feel that their child’s innocence was being damaged by my approach to talking about sex. Pity the teacher who gets between me and that parent.) But I know that without parents saying “hey, what about my kid?” (“Why are the class for my developmentally delayed kid and the after-school program not in the same school, and how am I supposed to get him from one to the other in the middle of the day?” “Why are there no stories with black protagonists in this English curriculum?” “Why are there no images of women doing science in this science book?” “Why are we serving packaged cookies as snacks to our kindergarten class, when we could be serving fruit?” etc.) those kids are more likely to fall between the cracks in the system.

And I don’t think the engaged parents do it for the kudos from teachers or administration. They do it so that their kids’ needs are met. Gratitude would be nice, but it’s hardly the point.

Again, I’m not saying that your kids deserve to be the ones over whom this societal negotiation is taking place. Or that you should do anything other than what you are planning to do. Far be it for me to constrain your family’s access to choice, or to tell anyone else what to do. If I manage to have a kid of my own, I’m not sure whether my own socialistic principles will stand up to reality, and I’m certainly not going to place my adherence to my principles over my kid’s needs. So I may be a big hypocrite (god knows, I loved supply teaching at the girl-focused private school here in town, and would love for any daughter of mine to be able to have that kind of education. Of course, said school costs more per year than I pay for housing, so even if I have a daughter, I won’t be able to afford it, and will have to make do with being a terror to my hypothetical kid’s hypothetical public school teachers). But I do worry about the kids who get left behind and about what happens to one of society’s best available tools for making sure that every kid has better tools, when the smart, committed people who have the time to spare and the tools to actually cause change withdraw from the system.

The thing with that view is a little bit two-fold. 1) That might work in the long term, but in the short term, it’s still a crappy school. 2) No one ever seems grateful, or even begrudingly acknowledges that things are better, because of the people who are always pushing the administration and teachers. Not the administration, not the teachers, not the students. So, honestly, I think it’s probably best that if I want something much higher for my children, I should not bug everyone else.

Of course, I’ll still be paying my taxes and voting on the school board members, so there’s that much. In fact, I’m probably doing the school a good thing, because I’d be paying taxes, but my kids wouldn’t be sucking up other students resources.

(I’m assuming that you don’t think I’m pulling my kids out because I want to dictate their information flow).

One of my biggest ideological problems with homeschooling or private education as a de facto response to the problems of the public education system is that it removes from the pool of those with the strongest interest in public education those parents and children whose needs and ideologies don’t conform to the norm. As a result, there are fewer deeply invested voices for greater diversity and accommodation for individual students’ needs.

If all the kids with exceptionalites are pulled out of public schooling, who will advocate within the school system for kids with exceptionalities?

Public education is the product of an ongoing society-wide negotiation regarding the values, standards, and cultural content we want the next generation to share. While it behooves everyone to take an active interest in this negotiation, the truth is that the most engaged participants are those who have a direct stake in the system (and that’s entirely understandable).

Longer Zingerella here.

All that (including the linked post) being said, I’m not sure what I would choose to do if it were my child being bullied or quashed or otherwise made miserable in public school. Do I want that negotiation to take place over my kid’s emotional landscape? I don’t know.

* I think, however, that some parents use homeschooling and private schooling as a way to exercise control over their kids’ access to information and choice, and I’m really quite opposed to that.

I don’t think it’s the conventional wisdom that all problems with K-12 education can be fixed by throwing money at them. If that was the case, someone would have, you know, actually tried that. What I hear as the conventional wisdom is “raising standards” a fuzzy term if any.

Generally for a couple of reasons. First, because they feel that only cranks want to homeschool their kids, and that their reasons primarily involve religious and/or political indoctrination, or even child abuse. See e.g. the Texas raid on the FLDS compound, which you’ll recall was quite the example of bipartisan “other”-bashing. Second, homeschooled kids have a nasty habit of embarrassing public school kids in academic metrics, while stubbornly failing to turn into socially stunted religious cultists as is constantly predicted.

Third, it occurs to me, they do all this while their families are still paying their share in taxes to support the public schools, with no deduction for home school expenses. Which does some violence to the conventional wisdom that all problems with K-12 education can be fixed by throwing money at them.