homeschooled kids are literally competing against kids from other countries that are being schooled on calculus, geometry, statistics, algebra with practical chemistry, physics and biology lessons. This is not going to end well 15 yrs down the line

Lots of colleges offer laboratory science classes for homeschooled children. AOPS wipes the floor with any math education you’d get at a public school. Most US national laboratories have on-site programs for school-aged kids and homeschoolers have equal standing for attending.

Anyone who takes it seriously gives up nothing.

You think avoiding these things are why people are thinking about homeschooling?!

In San Francisco where I live the public school system made the decision to not offer algebra until later for egalitarian reasons. Basically since they couldn't bring up the students that faired poorly in math, they delayed the subject for everybody. Along the same lines, they took the one high school dedicated to the highest achieving students and turned it into a lottery system rather than something earned.

Yes, of course you're right, kids will be competing on all those subjects. But the idea that public institutions are somehow the safeguards of fundamental academic achievement is just out of touch.

Of course, San Francisco public school's embrace of socialist/egalitarian drive identity politics is just one example of public education failure. Elsewhere in the US in these times, other school districts are being turned effectively into seminaries because the other political side has other doctrinal objectives. In neither case is learning how to think or how the world really works is important.