Homeschooling families are in the same boat in some ways. We have an income of $40,000 a year and three kids. We certainly could not afford to travel with a sports team, or do regular riding lessons. But what we’ve found is we can afford enough to make homeschool entirely worthwhile. Learning through volunteering is free, parent-led learning co-ops are free, library programs are free, city and county recreation and sports offerings are affordable as is participation in our local once-a-week paid teacher co-op, which offers some scholarship places. Our kids can also take advantage of selective enrollment options within our school system to take band, etc. that way. We don’t have cable. Our car is old. We don’t fly away for vacations.

Of great interest to me is the fact that there are many other families who might like to homeschool, but feel that they can’t afford for both parents to only work part-time for cash, or one parent to drop out of the workforce all together, in order to be available to homeschool. If you’re a single working parent, the challenges are more profound. In our locality, the school system pays about $15,000 a year per child. I would love to see parents who want to homeschool get just a portion of the money that they save taxpayers by taking on the responsibility for organizing the education of their own kids. Families take a big financial hit when they opt to engage in homeschooling. Lost potential wages are significant. Well worth them, in my estimation, but significant.

I’m not anti-public school. I support the idea of public schools being available as a resource. I have ideas for reforms that revolve around more local control, and more freedom for teachers, but I see a public school system as a potentially good thing. I don’t like when innovative ideas — such as helping to subsidize a parent who wants to take responsibility for directing her children’s education –are shot down preemptively, assumed to be destructive to the health of public education, rather than a complementary piece of what we call public education.

As a member of the public, I also have no say in the adoption of the state standards or the approval of textbooks as both are done by a committee of bureaucrats in Sacramento. NCLB took government micromanagement of schools to a whole new level.

The school board may be elected, but the members are beholden to special interests such as the teachers’ union rather than accountable to parents.

The parents in the town in which we lived up until January have been trying to get a high school built there for 30 years, but their efforts have been stymied by the administrators of the huge district of which it is a part.

I don’t see what’s so “public” about the “public schools”. The bureaucrats have all the power, so it’s much more accurate IMHO to call them “government-run schools”.

It seems many strangers to homeschooling conjure out of that term an image of a family whose goal it is to stay at home as much as possible, and replicate the school-based rhythms all by themselves in a creepy yawning chasm of familiar insularity.

I believe that the “home” in “homeschool” probably stands most for the desire a majority of homeschoolers share, to be free from one size fits all educational edicts/programs, and be free to direct the educational experience FROM the home, that is, from within the family. The “home” in homeschool does not imply some a belief in any of the hundred or so families that I’m personally in contact with, that all education must be offered only by parents, and only in a home environment. I’m surprised that I feel compelled to mention that, but there you are.

In her post, nhmom shared some of the activities in which her kids participate. If you put all the activities that the sum total of all homeschooling kids pursue on a list, you’d be rolling that out for a serious number of miles.

That said, home is a very enjoyable place to spend time with family and friends as we read and talk about history, work on tedious math problems, cook kick-ass desserts in the middle of the day, listen to a particularly compelling NPR story, draw a LOT for as long as we’d like, etc. We leave the house for many reasons at many times.

From “semester” to “semester”, the kids have different things going on, but let’s take my son right now: On Mondays we spend most of the day at home, then he has a babysitting gig at 3pm, and practice with his rock band at 6. Tuesdays, he’s gone for most of the day at his philosophy co-op with 9 other kids, and various parents, On Wednesday, we’re home in the morning, but he goes to a friends house all afternoon where they roam the woods, hang out etc. On Thursdays, we’re home in the morning, but he’s got a juggling class downtown at noon, then goes out for pizza for an hour with friends from the class, and other friends who are linking up with us, since next its back home for science and engineering. They’ve worked for the last 4 weeks on building a air-powered potato launcher. What every 13 year old boy needs in his life. On Fridays, the Charlottesville Homeschool Enrichment Center is open all day. This session, my son will take an animation film class, and one called Games and Strategy. My daughter will take a history/drama and a drawing class . And my kids aren’t even big joiners compared to a lot of other homeschooled kids we know! They like a lot of unstructured time to play and build and write and read. In the past, my son has taken part in the band program at our local middle school.

Oh, and a learning co-op can take many forms. Sometimes a group of parents get together and take turns preparing and offering a learning Unit to all the kids involved. Sometimes parents get together and hire someone to teach a class in a particular area. Sometimes parents organize something like CHEC where many classes are offered in a sort of Community College model, and kids can stay for the day signing up for as few or many classes as they’d like.

Is there ever a day when the kids are bored or cranky, or we parents are, or nothing particularly productive seems to happen? Of course. But I’m sure you can remember plenty of days when you didn’t particularly want to get up and go to school, and nothing of particular educational note happened there.

If you’re interested in learning more about the wide world of homeschooling, you may want to read Milton Gaither’s 2008 book, “Homeschool, An American History. You can also visit the blog he writes at “http://gaither.wordpress.com/ . In it, he even-handedly summarizes, contextualizes and critiques past and current articles and research that touches on or concerns itself wholly with homeschooling,.

The “problem” is that societal arrangements changed (e.g., more people have cars and can drive kids to school, parents care about test scores, etc.) but the arrangment of schooling did not (until recently, with charter schools, vouchers, school choice, etc.). Many of the same schools that existed 60 years ago still are in use today (both of the high schools where I worked in Chicago, for example, were over 100 years old), and it makes fiscal sense and helps planning (school districts have to make estimates for number of students–and thus number of teaching positions–for a given school’s next yeat before the end of the current year) to have attendance boundaries that restrict choice to some extent. It certainly would cost more money and be less efficient for every school to be open to everyone, and taxpayers probably wouldn’t like that.

Also, it’s worth noting that when many school districts attempt to close down a school for underuse or low performance, parents in the community fight to keep the school open because it’s convenient to have a school close to their home, or they are comfortable with that particular school.

This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be more choice, but there are valid reasons for why the system is set up as it is now. In order for it to change, a critical mass of citizens would need to demand change and be willing to shoulder the temporary costs of that change.