Comment by Glyptodon
4 days ago
It's true that there has always been a sizeable chunk of religion motivated home schoolers, historically there was a long tail with motivations and efficacy that was all over the map.
One thing that's really common is for parents to try it when they feel that the local system is failing their kids in some way and the family economics supporting are acceptable.
There are also many permutations - it wasn't uncommon when I was younger for parents to do it through middle school, but have their kids attend high school because they felt that it was the point where socialization became important in a way that couldn't be handled effectively with home school.
Obviously there's a huge range of efficacy, too.
That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? And a lot of it is because society has gotten more and more zero sum and it's going to increasingly self cannibalize.
Which is not that far off from the writer's premise.
> That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
People demanding it is evidence that political public education should adapt to that demand. It may or may not pay off, but this is how politics works, and education is politicized.
There is NO WAY that voters are going to see commentary like yours and be dissuaded -- that's just not how politics works. Have you ever changed someone's mind really on politics?
It would be much better to look at what's been motivating voters to demand vouchers / whatever else you don't approve of and see if you can satisfy their demands in some other way, such as reducing the politicization of education in other ways.
>despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
You don't find the experience of New Orleans following their conversion to a complete charter system in 2005 (10 percentage point gain in college acceptance rates, improvements on standardized tests by about a third of a standard deviation) to be meaningful evidence?
https://news.tulane.edu/news/new-orleans-reforms-boost-stude...
Congratulations to Louisiana on improving from 50th-ranked state in education to...50th-ranked state in education?
The population of New Orleans is less than 10% of the population of Louisiana. Also, I'm not aware of a single metric by which Louisiana is considered to be last place in K-12 education in 2024. State PISA scores are basically on par with California, spending per student is higher than Nevada. It's certainly no Massachusetts, I've seen it ranked around 40th out of 50 on different metrics, but I think you're revealing some ignorance in assuming Louisiana's school system is ranked last in the nation.
What you see with that result is way more complicated than just "charter schools working."