> "Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance."
Test scores are how the school system assesses itself; not how parents are assessing the quality of their child's education. Frankly, the obsession with test scores is a big part of the problem. For instance, my daughter made it pretty clear to me that the schools only really cared about ensuring that kids were happy and comfortable at times when the standardized tests were conducted. Every conversation I had with her teachers had to be grounded in the specific learning objectives outlined in the Common Core curriculum as adopted in our state, and there was no possibility of her exploring any curiosity on her own, unless that curiosity exactly matched with the objectives of the curriculum at the exact time that the curriculum sought to teach it.
As someone who homeschooled myself growing up, I'm pretty used to hearing that schools are an essential place where people learn to socialize which I had missed out on, and that I'm lucky to not be socially crippled in some way as an adult, because it is dangerous to withhold that experience from kids. My expectation going into the public K-12 process, then, was that the local public school district would be fostering a social atmosphere that in some way taught and reflected actual social dynamics that I recognize from everyday life. Instead, as my daughter moved through the process, I found the school district instituted policies to try to avoid conflict, poorly, in a manner that seemed to interfere with normal friendships a lot more than unhealthy bully-victim relationships. For instance, kids were forbidden from inviting classmates to birthday parties, unless they were willing to invite ALL classmates, so no one would feel left out. When conflicts inevitably arose anyway, my kid was couched in heavily bureaucratized therapyspeak to have conversations that no humans I have ever met would actually have or expect to resolve their problem. When that didn't work there was really no follow-up. To me, it seemed that the entire point all along was to limit the school's liability for anything that goes wrong and to have policy in place that appeared to "do something," rather than providing an environment for kids to grow up and figure things out in.
The grading was also meaningless. The school was highly reluctant to offer feedback that is particularly negative or positive. I suspect that there are multiple motives here, from student:teacher ratios of 30:1 or worse, to an intense need to make the achievement gap go away -- if not in reality, then at least in published statistics. When my daughter heard that there was a "Talented and Gifted Program," she was keenly interested in working to be identified for it. I noticed that my daughter would work really hard on projects, and come home with a feedback that said stuff like "Great work! 3/4," with no additional context as to what was deficient or strong, or how the additional point could have been earned. The final straw for me came when she told me that she'd experimented and found that her grades had nothing to do with the level of effort she put forward. She also said that the best way to protect her own quiet time to think about what she wanted was to keep up with the material just well enough that no one thought she was falling behind. This ensured that teachers mostly left her alone as long as she was handing her work in.
Later, we learned that the TAG program is considered a political liability by administration and only exists at all because of a vaguely-worded state statute creating an unfunded mandate for one -- TAG has an annual funding of less than $70/student/year with 0.8 FTEs allocated to it across the entire K-12 district of ~50 schools and ~40k students, and results in no meaningful change to their educational experience. I have the strong impression now that admission is something used to appease certain parents, with an effort made to keep demographic balance in check so that the district doesn't seem like it is overserving or underserving any particular groups.
I offered to homeschool my daughter. But, she tried that during the pandemic and did not care for being at home all day. She really does want to be in a school setting, so now we do private school. She's a lot happier. She gets direct feedback on her actual work, is able to have friendships AND conflicts and navigate those in her own language with staff remaining hands-off, and teachers are a lot more free to actually define the content taught in their classroom each semester and encourage kids to branch out into different nooks and crannies that they get curious about. Oh, and I'm told the lunch is better too. I'm pretty sure the school does have a higher standardized test score too, but I honestly don't care.
Now obviously, a private school costs money, and that could account for some of this. I reviewed the budget of the public school district here, and found that the district spends significantly more per student than the private school does, even if we consider only the non-special-ed students from the district. I think the real issue is that public schools have a massive mission whose scope extends far beyond "just" education, and no one is even entirely sure what all that is. For instance: public schools provide meal programs for the poor; a detection system for certain kinds of abuse; early-intervention programs for at-risk youth; various law enforcement programs; special-needs therapy programs for kids with severe mental or physical issues; cultural engineering programming to try to inculcate specific civic values and correct certain issues; a political arena for the various factions of society to duke out what those values and issues are; and perhaps most importantly and above all else, a place for people to store their kids while both parents are engaged in full-time work outside the home. It is not especially good at any of these things, but with such a huge mission, how could it be?
Like I said, I homeschooled myself, so I can't say what public school was like when I was a kid and compare that to what my daughter experienced. My parents pulled me out because they themselves had become fed up with the school district with my older siblings, rather than any religious or fringe ideological motive. But when I talk to my friends that I grew up with, most of whom WERE in public school, or older people who are watching their grandkids go through the current generation of public school, the vibe I get is that the situation has deteriorated quite a bit since then.
