This is an empirical claim and there's statistics already available. Almost every study of student performance dramatically favors homeschool over American public school. I'm not saying this in support of homeschool, but as an indictment of public school. It's wild that schools spend many millions of dollars on hundreds of professionals, materials, and centuries of institutional knowledge, and yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.

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moduspol 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

To be fair: that mom gets to pick and choose which kids to teach. She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.

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sdsd 5 days ago | parent [-]

>She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.

I think you're thinking of it backwards. Inner city Detroit kids probably struggle in school precisely because there maybe isn't a mom at home who's passionate and available to educate them (among plenty of other reasons, to be sure).

Inner city Detroit kids (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism) aren't just inherently hard to teach for no reason

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moduspol 4 days ago | parent [-]

Obviously that's the case, which is why it's not fair to claim homeschooling parents "trivially outcompete" the public school system. That was my point.

> (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism)

Are we still doing not-so-subtle claims of "I think you're a racist?"

Pick any demographic group that gets overwhelmingly bad results and depends on the public school system. Look at the statistics. We aren't going to fix problems we can't acknowledge. Urban public school districts are among the most impacted by bad public schools.

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mystraline 4 days ago | parent [-]

> We aren't going to fix problems we can't acknowledge. Urban public school districts are among the most impacted by bad public schools.

That problem is because school district funding is directly related to tax revenue in said district.

Tax revenue has to go to capital maintenance and repair, and also scholastic budgets (teachers, aides, equipment, books).

Due to 'White Flight' ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) and historical segregation of black people, left primarily poverty in urban city cores. People who later move into empty residences do so with reduced rents, and general poverty problems like food insecurity, bad transportation, and higher crime. (Poverty is a disease and can be modelled as such.)

The poverty is directly related to low scholastic district funding, therefore poor schools.

And to further harm poor (monetary and educational outcome) schools, is Bush's plan in the 2000's to pull funding from underperforming schools. Better funded schools have better educational outcomes, so those schools were less affected, or not at all.

Even a local school in my area had federal funding reduced. I'm in a community with roughly 97% white people, so its not a legacy race thing. But it does turn out that it is a poverty thing.

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moduspol 4 days ago | parent [-]

If the problem could be solved by throwing more money at it, it would have been solved long ago. Some poorly performing inner-city school districts are among the highest of per-pupil spenders in the country.

Some problems can't be solved by money, or even by the public school system.

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mystraline 4 days ago | parent [-]

I made the point of calling the whole situation 'poverty'.

You make a valid claim that urban schools have highest per-capita expenditures, which I accept.

However, no amount of school funding can fix: violence/crime, food deserts, poverty wages, parent(s) working multiple jobs and not enough parent-child time, or all the other trappings of poverty not explicitly in schools.

Free breakfast/lunch would definitely help, at least in terms of nutrition and hunger.

But we're past just pumping a district with cash to fix it. We would need to pump the whole community to fix the disease of poverty to start turning the academic performance around.

The downside? Fixing poverty proper takes longer than politicians are elected in. Well, that and "those people shouldn't get freebies, cause that's socialism".

("Those people" is obviously barely coded language for ghetto black people. Howls of socialism and not deserving aid. Glad I never had children.)

	▲	moduspol 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed on all points.

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datadrivenangel 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a homeschooler raised ~20 years ago, the key insight is that outcomes are bimodally distributed based on an overlayed function of parental socioeconomic status and student talent.

	▲	sdsd 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The question is which causes which. Does homeschool follow or bolster student talent. Is high parental involvement a meaningless correlation of some other aspect of high SES which actually explains these results, or is it that high SES homes are more involved, and the money itself is the mere correlate?

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gnz11 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.

Oh come on. A quick read on Wikipedia will even tell you the research on outcomes is fraught with biases and lacking evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

	▲	sdsd 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thankfully, my reading of the research didn't begin or end with "a quick read on Wikipedia"