Homeschooling hits record numbers

We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.

We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.

But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.

That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.

Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.

What's the reason?

I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.

Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.

I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.

More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?

6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.

Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment. I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.

Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.

I always thought of it as parent / tutor + kid = almost all interactions.

Thanks.

Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)

These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted

What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.

For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.

It also teaches you to deal with bullies. That said, we had homeschooled kids in my Boy Scouts troop. They learned how to deal with bullies just fine.

I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.

As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.

By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.

Citation needed.

Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.

I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.

I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.

All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.

Two graduated early (some with college credits).

My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).

None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.

Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>

I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic

We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.

30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.

[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.

For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids.

https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...

Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.

I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.

Your anecdote is not universal; neither is mine.

  Education is expensive and underfunded.

San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.

I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.

It really just results in them continuing to being bullied, or reacting badly and getting blamed themselves.

Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.

Citation needed.

If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.

My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.

Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)

That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?

For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.

Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.

This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.

Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.

It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".

Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.

Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?

Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.

Watch it, you almost said "rescuer" there.

  Teacher (all-in cost):                            $150k
  Teaching assistant:                               $100k
  Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft):    $60k
  Curriculum, books, supplies:                       $23k
  Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software):  $18k
  Field trips and enrichment:                        $10k
  Utilities, internet, insurance:                    $27k
  Furniture and equipment:                           $20k
  Admin/legal/accounting:                             $8k
  
  Total:                                            $416k

AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.

If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).

It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.

Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.

That largely depends on the parents. Many are _wildly_ unfit for this.

The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.

Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.

>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades

This reads as an inconsistency.

As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.

The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...

https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...

It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?

Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?

I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.

Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.

Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.

Wow that's a lot, how did you manage?

If you think that homeschooling is a panacea, I guess we're all about to f*ck around and find out...

If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.

Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.

(My wife and I have had 9.)

When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.

If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.

Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.

But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.

And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.

There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.

Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.

And that's just barely touching the surface.

Whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the situation. Being precocious is something adults might think positively about (though not in all situations) but it's not something other kids usually admire.

What kind of maintenance do you think is expensive compared to a budget of $560k per room, per year?

Because bullying is an extreme example of a common human power dynamic.

> If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society

Fair enough. I was thinking exclusively of non-violent bullying. (It may get physical. But in a roughhousing way. Not one intended to cause pain or injury.)

Did you grow up in Scarsdale or Palo Alto?

Of the others, there are either homeschool alternatives that are explicitly secular or at least not overtly religious, or there are competitive clubs. All the schools have track & field, but there is a large homeschool league. And the district has a few schools with pools and a few more with swim teams that practice at the city pools, but the local swim club is the one turning out the Olympians – but even then, it also seems to have plenty of offerings for kids who won't set a world butterfly record. Football, I imagine, is just so popular that the private/public schools take all the players.

What am I missing? My table has $200k left over so we could add another full time teacher at $150k?

  there’s something very suspicious going on

  there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones

The most recent $790,000,000 in 2024.

I think it also says something about the parents who think they can do as well or better.

Also, just FYI, to quote someone you prefix the text with ">".

Always makes me think of The West Wing scene:

> Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Video (sorry for the burned in subs, should be queued up): https://youtu.be/IzV09gESyh0?t=39

[1] http://hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Taubman/PEPG/conf...

I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008035

I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond.

My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).

You may want to look wider afield than homeschooling advocacy and lobbyist groups for your stats.

Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.

Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s

It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!

What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.

Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.

  "I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house."

  "I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot."

  "The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k."

          #    Median sticker price
  Pre-K   7    $16,610
   K     29    $11,530
   1     29    $11,530
   2     29    $11,175
   3     29    $11,175
   4     29    $11,175
   5     29    $11,175
   6     30    $11,519
   7     30    $11,519
   8     30    $11,519
   9      4    $31,725
  10      4    $31,725
  11      4    $31,725
  12      4    $31,725

  "Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond."

  "because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper"

Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.

  "because their goal is a good education"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711345

- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend

- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself

The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.

Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.

For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.

  "Tuition for most (non-religious) competitive private schools in San Francisco is easily twice that amount."

For each of the grades K-12, here is the % of non-religious private schools in San Francisco that charge $56k or more:

   K:  0%
   1:  0%
   2:  0%
   3:  0%
   4:  0%
   5:  0%
   6:  3%
   7:  3%
   8:  3%
   9: 71%
  10: 71%
  11: 71%
  12: 71%

But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.

  you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.

But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.

    I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.

    This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k.

    - Sacred Heart ($31k)
    - Archbishop Riordan ($32k)
    - Saint Ignatius ($34.6)
    - Sacred Heart ($60k) 
    - Jewish Community School ($65k)

You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate, and structure most of your argument around the cheapest schools (K-8). Mea culpa on my end, though: you are correct that when I was saying "cheapest I've seen," there was an unfair modifier of "cheapest schools on my personal spreadsheet" which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to. You're absolutely correct that there are cheaper parochial schools available as long as you only need K-8.

Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school (again, referencing SF Chronicle's data). I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.

    So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2025/sf-bay-area-privat...

For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])

1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s

  You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate

- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types

- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).

Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.

  Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private high schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school

  those schools specifically in your list are subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway

  I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.

  which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to

BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder

Protestant Christian and most of my Christian brothers and sisters look at how many kids I have and that we homeschool and think I'm a little crazy (just like most non-Christians). I'd say probably 1/3 of the families in our church homeschool though. It's a wonderful community to be a part of and if I sent my remaining kids to public school, I wouldn't be asked to leave.

God says children are a blessing and I know it to be true. I'm grateful for all the children he gave me (7).

Yes, kids who were home-schooled because their parents didn't want secular society interfering with them raising their kids in a niche religion are more likely to experience this. Even in those cases, however, I found that the kids adapted rather quickly.

In most other cases[1], the parents were explicitly worried about their kids' socialization, and found many opportunities for the kids to interact with other kids their age (e.g. typical after school activities like sports or such).

Many of the kids I know who were both home-schooled and socially awkward started in public school and were pulled due to bullying &c. To say that the home-schooling stunted their social growth is a counterfactual; it's just as easy to see them ending up worse off.

For the most part, I would say that socializing in public school vs. homeschooling is a bit like communication with in-person companies versus remote; in the former it just "happens" to some degree, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; in the latter it requires intentional work to happen, but can still happen.

1: A notable exception is one person I know who was homeschooled by parents, with a father that traveled a lot for work and took his family with him. She was often in situations where she had fewer than 5 kids around close to her age who also spoke English.

One is a commercial sheet metal worker and owns his own home.

Another is a Linux sysadmin and owns his own home and has a spouse and a child.

Another is a restaurant equipment repairman and rents.

Finally, my 19 year old just started his airplane mechanic apprenticeship and rents.

My other three are still in school and living in our family home.

The thought at you need college degree to find meaningful employment or to live a joyful life is simply false so I don't consider it a metric for homeschooling success.

I teach my kids how to learn and encourage them to get out there and be productive doing work they enjoy and raising their own families.

Success in my book means they can function as an adult, stand on their own financially, find a good spouse, and bring me some awesome grandkids to spoil.

I don't have a college degree but I make plenty to raise 7 kids while working from home. I got to be there for all their first steps and struggles through Algebra 2 and everything in between. I wouldn't trade working from home and homeschooling for anything. It's been very fulfilling.

Now where's my grandkids! <grin>

    My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?

    I'm saying it's a lot.

    then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!

    I made a tool to do that

I've been working from home for nearly 2 decades and have flexible hours.

My wife handles the majority of the grade school years (basic reading/writing/maths) and I teach most of the middle and high school.

They've always been involved in co-ops, church activities, and get plenty of socialization. They're emotionally mature, civically responsible, and others focused. We take them when we volunteer at local non-profits, whether that's sorting clothes at the local thrift store or picking up trash at a local park. An example of service becomes a lifestyle of generosity. It makes for great kids and even greater adults.

Put the time and work in to your kids. Nothing else will provide greater dividends.

  Your original point was not that it's "not underfunded," it was that it's overfunded

(But I do think it's overfunded.)

  My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.

  We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it.

  Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)

And what ensures they utilize those methods, exactly? Many states you, as a kid are 100% educationally off the grid the moments say "We're homeschooling".