Outschooling in the Bay Area

I have homeschooled my kids for four years now, and I think this article does a great job at dispelling common myths. The &quot;socialization&quot; myth is the biggest, but if you look at homeschool teenagers, they are much more well socialized in interacting with adults in the real world. One point I would have liked to have seen: the number of homeschool parents who are former teachers. More than half of our homeschool friends are former teachers. This means these parents worked in the public school system, and when it came time to send there kids decided &quot;nope, I&#x27;m not sending my kids through that system&quot;.<p>As for startup ideas: I want MOOC aimed at younger kids. Right now the closest thing we have is Khan Academy, and it&#x27;s pretty good, but a MOOC on a specific subject, with a series of videos, and questions, and interactive activities would be a big help.

That&#x27;s a very interesting perspective that resonates with my own experience growing up. Although for a completely different reason (collapse of the Soviet system and with it the funding for good schools), parents in my neighborhood banded together to create a sort of private alternative to the state run monster that was imploding.<p>While we still had traditional classrooms and a centralized place of learning, the groups were much smaller (10-15 kids) and the programs studied were very different from the state run schools. We covered all the basics in ~25% of the time and the rest was advanced or very creative. My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid!<p>I&#x27;ve been pondering how to replicate some of these experiences for my future kids and this is definitely interesting.

I run an education startup that has unexpectedly attracted a lot of homeschooled students&#x2F;parents.<p>The author asserts, &quot;this is the community where experimentation ... to educational approaches is happening the fastest&quot;, and I am finding that to be true. The parents are more open-minded and the students are more self-driven.<p>In fact, it feels likely to me that any dramatic change to the education system as a whole will start with the homeschool community, if it ever comes at all. So, my advice to other education entrepreneurs is that this is a good market to start with.<p>The author&#x27;s big conclusion - an impending unbundling of education - is really interesting to me. It aligns with my own prediction (and the basis for my startup), which is that students&#x2F;parents will have a stronger say in who the right teacher is for them, for any given subject. And, with tools enabled by tech&#x2F;internet, the best teachers will be able to scale up what they do and reach many thousands of students.

<i>I first became interested in homeschooling several years ago after a friend with six kids began homeschooling in San Francisco out of necessity - the public school system wanted to send each of her kids to a different school. Instead of hiring six Ubers each morning she decided to start homeschooling her kids herself.</i><p>Can someone explain how something like this even happens? I&#x27;m used to a system which assigns you a school based on your address&#x2F;space. If space constraints change, the child is generally not kicked out. Exceptions are usually made to space constraints so that younger siblings may attend the same school as their older siblings. I can understand an elementary, a middle and a high school but that is only three different schools.

Having been homeschooled myself, I can attest to most of the advantages he describes. Personalized education is a very powerful thing, especially for what he calls &quot;asynchronous learners&quot;.

Kudos to Amir in explaining the outshooling movement so well. I always had a negative view of home-schooling, but his explanations of why more parents are doing it today made sense. In many cases, kids can learn a lot more and remain creative. The big drawback still is that one parent would need to stay home, but Amir did mention that this could be changing.

<p><pre><code> For various reasons, the mainstream regard homeschooling as a niche approach suitable only for the weird or the wealthy. That’s a prejudice that doesn’t reflect the reality of the growing movement I&#x27;ve observed in the Bay Area. </code></pre> I&#x27;d like to see the author back this claim up, rather than ask us to trust him. Homeschooling is a feasible choice for families where one parent does not have to work full time, which rules out many poorer families.<p>This is a roundabout way of saying that the idea that homeschooling (or &quot;outschooling&quot;) is the future is, frankly, a pipe dream. It is and always will be a niche option.

I&#x27;d say the thesis of the article is that homeschooling will become more popular and have a large impact on the development of instructional methods in public schools in the future. The first may be true, the second is not.<p>The main factors militating against homeschooling are conformity, money and logistics. As homeschooling becomes ever more mainstream the weirdness hit people take for it will lessen. Money and logistics are the big things. For homeschooling, even unschooling, you need at least one responsible adult nearby and available, usually a SAHM. That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you&#x27;re on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot.<p>Homeschooling will have no effect on school instruction, none. The things mentioned in the article could almost all have been written any time since the 60&#x27;s. The only exception is MOOCs, which are mostly equivalent to community college for high school students.<p>Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto have been beating the drum on how awful the overwhelming majority of schools are for decades to no effect. The Sudbury&#x2F;Summer hill&#x2F;democratic schools movement grew and then receded in the middle of last century.<p>And what&#x27;s the latest big thing in education? Ability tracking instead of age tracking, the smallest, least disruptive, obviously good change to the current system? No, it&#x27;s No Child Left Behind.<p>Just give up hope already. There will be no reform.

Like many important things in America, children are neglected. Everybody gets divorced even if they have kids. And everybody works even if they have a spouse that works, even if they have kids. And we send our kids to public schools where they learn nothing besides how to be thick skinned. And we are surprised when the next generation is filled with even more stupid ass holes.

This is a staggering and damning indictment:<p>&quot;It only takes 2-3 hours of study per day to keep up with the regular school curriculum&quot;<p>The sheer waste of life that implies about children in &#x27;regular school&#x27;, let alone the staff that provide services for them, is staggering.

Somebody do this: Uber&#x2F;TaskRabbit for homeschool teachers. I&#x27;d love to get together with ~10 sets of parents, have everyone kick in $15-20k&#x2F;year each year, and maybe a place to host classes, and hire a bright, motivated teacher. The company would provide the core logistics&#x2F;materials for passing the Common Core tests, and the teachers and parents would have the flexibility to design around that. It&#x27;d be cheaper than private school and less child abuse than subjecting your kids to the public school system.

I have no prejudices against home schooling but it takes quite a leap of faith to take a kid out of regular schools and start with it. Particularly if the school is &#x27;good enough&#x27; such that the kid is doing well, even though it&#x27;s plainly obvious how inefficient the schooling is.<p>The big issue for me is the vast difference between learning rates and attitude between kids, but the insistence on keeping them together on an arbitrary set of calendar dates of birth, rather than aptitude or interests.<p>Some (most?) parents plainly don&#x27;t care and are just happy to get the kids out of the house and in someone else&#x27;s care. These kids are generally disruptive and are destined to have a low level of education. I see the need to keep trying with them despite the low achievement rate, yet at the same time I see the need to let motivated learners race ahead at their own speed.<p>Throw in the murky issues of government funding, political interference in curriculum and entrenched power structures like teachers unions and school boards and it&#x27;s not clear to me how a better model emerges from it all.

This is not directly relevant to the article, but I see people look at public&#x2F;private school v. homeschool as if it&#x27;s a zero-sum game. Many families are unable to have a parent stay home the entire day(whether due to money or due to the parent liking their career-who wants an unhappy, bored teacher all day?), but ideally &quot;schooling&quot; should be going on in the home as well as in school. In public school I learned little of value past socialization (I did have interaction with peers, something my family would not have been able to give me on a regular basis if I was homeschooled) but I learned a lot on my own time and was encouraged by my parents to do this. Most children who are too ahead of the public school curve to benefit from it are smart enough to teach themselves (with some help from parents in the evenings if needed.)

Is flexi-schooling heard of in USA? It is using a mixture of school based and non-school learning. In essence it is using a local school as a service rather than adopting its regime wholesale.<p>Out-of-schooling or outschooling is called &quot;education otherwise&quot; (EO) in the UK following legislation referring to a parent&#x27;s responsibility to ensure their child either attends school or gets a sufficient education otherwise than in school.<p>I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;ve made the distinction with home-schooling, which EO people in the UK usually use to refer to mimicking school at home, having a &quot;classroom&quot; and a parent acting as a teacher. Most non-school based learning is referred to as &quot;home-schooling&quot; or &quot;home education&quot; by outsiders it seems and very little of it is actually home-schooling; this leads to a quite wrong view of kids who&#x27;re getting educated outside of school as being shut-ins locked away from other kids and feeds in to the &quot;not attending school means they lack socialisation&quot; fallacy.<p>We started flexi-schooling to some success but in the UK it&#x27;s up to the individual headteacher (how&#x27;s that for a centrally planned education system) to allow it or not and our&#x27;s deferred to the governors who basically thought, and expressed, that the only way to learn anything is in a school. My wife and I are both graduates with science degrees working in our own creative business, she has a teaching qualification and we&#x27;ve both been leaders with kids organisations for many years; we work in a semi-teaching role and I&#x27;ve done IT education with individual adults. Apparently either of us could educate a class of 30 kids, we do on occassion (sometimes out of school), but educating our own child(ren) like that or a small group of EO kids is apparently impossible.<p>Anyway, we did flexi-schooling for a year (1 day in 10 out of school, we wanted 1 in 5) without authorisation with the eldest child [ie in opposition to the school&#x27;s expressed desire] - tests showed he was excelling despite the schools anticipation of abject educational demise.<p>Then the government brought in fines for non-authorised absence from school. This has weighed heavy, if we had the funds we&#x27;d just continue - it&#x27;s worth it - but we don&#x27;t have funds and so we&#x27;ve been unable to continue with what we consider (and the evidence suggests) is the best paedagogical approach for this particular child. The legislation is intended to stop people from taking their children on holiday in school time and their is scope in the system to accommodate flexi-schooling - and legislative support in the Education Act (and to a lesser extent the ECHR).<p>Were our child physically disabled, or indeed mentally challenged rather than excelling (just bright, not &#x27;gifted&#x27; incidentally) it seems the school would have given greater concessions. Catering for those with exceptional needs is an area in which flexi-schooling is often accepted and used to great effect.

I have one point:<p>* The reason why we have schools is that parents can go to work. Sad but true.

&quot;Normal schools can’t personalize the curriculum and so deal poorly with asynchronous learners.&quot;<p>Couldn&#x27;t agree more! Universities tend to be much worse in this aspect.

The problem with homeschooling is that in much of the country &quot;homeschooling&quot; = &quot;Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, and so should you&quot; level of misinformation (I&#x27;m exaggerating, but only a little).<p>I guess it&#x27;s less of a factor in this neck of the woods.