Comment by koinedad
3 days ago
This blog takes a very narrow view on the subject… more people are realizing how the school systems are and that education can be done in different and even sometimes better ways.
3 days ago
This blog takes a very narrow view on the subject… more people are realizing how the school systems are and that education can be done in different and even sometimes better ways.
This is my take as well. A huge burst of new tooling appeared during covid because the traditional school system essentially disappeared.
That tooling isn't going to disappear just because schools are finally open again, and some of it is actually fairly compelling.
I'm in a large metro, and the schools near me are terrible. 1/10 and 2/10 scores are typical. All the traditional schools we're zoned for fall well into the bottom 10% of my state. We attended lots of public engagement meetings for these districts (everything from guided tours to district superintendent interviews to parent-teacher nights). My takeaway? These schools are struggling with kids who don't have housing, don't regularly eat, can't get transportation, and have parents who utterly disengaged or downright abusive.
They aren't trying to excel at education, they're trying to literally keep 20% of the kids alive and fed, and then scrape them over the failing line so they don't get their funding cut.
I have nothing but respect for the educators placed into those circumstances - seriously, it's an impossible job and they get paid peanuts for it.
But I also absolutely refuse to put my kids into that system. Full fucking stop. It's not a place to provide enrichment and growth.
But... that leaves us the spot where
1. We win a lotto and get placed into a charter school (which only rate marginally better than the default schools - 4/10 instead of 2/10).
2. We pay for private schools to the tune of $30k/kid/year, or nearly half a million US for our family over the course of my kids education.
3. We move.
4. We home school.
Prior to covid, I had basically already picked "move" as the answer when all my kids hit schooling age, but there's actually enough tooling now that we will likely consider group based (pod) home schooling first. Home schooling doesn't have the same reputation that it did prior to covid, and it's not just "religious fundies" or "anti-gov whackos" anymore. Those groups definitely still exist, but with online tooling - we have much better options to filter out the crazy folks and spread the load out so that kids get social interactions, have a real teacher (often with better credentials than the school teachers) and get 1 on 1 interactions from adults.