Public School, Homeschool, & the Road I Never Thought I’d Travel

The best part of being a public school teacher is the students. I have always loved my students and the joy of teaching and connecting with them. The worst part about being a public school teacher is how little power you have to change anything at all.

During my six years in public schools, I had a great experience overall and absolutely loved my students. But towards the end of my time in public schools, I was becoming disillusioned with the testing, the lack of accountability for students and parents, the inflexibility of scheduling and curriculums, and the bureaucratic red tape that impacted many aspects of the job. And while I was disillusioned, I am not a public school “basher.” The aggressive and often toxic narrative around public schools and their flaws is unhelpful for society and homeschoolers alike. There are plenty of false narratives pushed in media that make public school teachers’ lives harder and erodes trust between schools and their communities. I have known many teachers I would love my kids to be taught by that care about students and do an amazing job helping kids grow and learn. Teachers are not the reason I chose to homeschool and public schools, while they have serious flaws that do need to be fixed, have great benefits too. Public schools are not a bad or wrong choice. Homeschooling can be very overwhelming to some parents and does not fit the learning needs of some kids. Even more so, it can be financially unattainable. Public schools in many cases can be the right choice for many kids and families. I’m not here to bash them or the many people working hard day in and day out to not only educate kids, but support and show up for them in any way they can. That being said, I would be lying if I said my experience in public schools didn’t contribute to our decision to homeschool our kids.

After becoming a stay-at-home mom, I was initially shocked when everyone I met in our area was planning to homeschool. I didn’t know much about homeschooling, but I definitely had a negative bias and some stereotypical assumptions about it. As my oldest neared preschool age, I knew I would have to make a decision about what we wanted to do. I didn’t love the school choices in our area. Unfortunately, one of public schools’ most glaring issues is that your experience is often dictated by the income of your area, which for us meant our schools were not well-funded. I began researching homeschooling and it didn’t take long to realize many of my assumptions were wrong about the experience of many homeschoolers. Knowing I had the ability to confidently teach my kids and weighing my concerns about public school based on experience…Well, you know what we chose. Here were four big factors I considered in this decision:

1. Inflexible Curriculums and Testing

My last years in the classroom, I taught in one of the richest districts in the country. It had done away with “honors” classes which typically offers a stepping stone in academic difficulty for students not ready for college level classes, but ready for more than grade level classes offer. Getting rid of these classes is happening in many school districts, not just the one I was in. Instead, they offered “grade level” classes that were generally catered to students that struggled most and AP classes that were fast paced and very challenging. They had essentially done away with the middle of the latter. For students that weren’t ready for AP level classes, they had no way to challenge themselves without being completely overwhelmed and burned out in a class environment that was too big of a leap. Meanwhile, the “grade level” classes often lacked rigor because such a wide variety of abilities is very difficult to cater to as a teacher. There are so many rules and regulations in eduction that contribute to this, but I will say that although in a perfect world teachers could perfectly differentiate every lesson for every kid, in reality teachers are not given the time or resources to realistically do this. The decision of the school district to get rid of “honors” classes assumed more kids would go to AP level classes. Instead, it resulted in many students never having a healthy educational stepping stone to high level classes, so they stay in classes that aren’t challenging them at all. On the flip side, AP students were constantly stressed out by the pace and sheer amount of information the curriculums covered. I loved the content of AP classes I taught, but the reality of the school year schedule forced all AP classes to sacrifice depth for the sake of covering everything before a testing deadline. When testing was cancelled during the COVID pandemic, I got to experience what it would be like to be able to slow down and use the full school year to teach the curriculum. It was eye-opening. Ultimately, many schools have little middle ground. Either very easy classes that aren’t challenging many students or classes that were so fast paced and difficult students were way too stressed out than they should be at fifteen years old. Learning unfortunately does revolve around testing in many ways in the school system. I could see how it was negatively impacting student’s growth and learning. I wasn’t sure this was the type of environment I wanted for my kids.

I also came to find out that the state test my students had to take for World History assigned a “Proficient” score for passing when students got the equivalent of a little over 50% correct. Of course, it makes sense that the bar is so low when the state needs the vast majority of kids to pass a test regardless of individual differences. But what kind of standard is that? Is it even actually showing that students are doing well if the bar to measure every kid state wide is so miserably low? Parents also don’t realize that the bar is so low, they just receive a score of “Proficient” or higher. They aren’t told a barely passing proficient score really means their kid failed, but just not bad enough to actually fail the test. These tests were also incredibly easy. While I do think kids need to learn testing strategies and get comfortable taking tests, since college and many career paths do require some form of testing, the idea of so many years of my kid’s education revolving almost solely around these types of tests felt completely unnecessary. More meaningful ways of measuring learning exist and they can build more valuable skills in the process.

2. Technology in the Classroom

Technology in the classroom is a huge disruptor of learning. Children simply do not have the brain development and impulse control necessary to resist technology bells, whistles, and endless apps. The benefits of having a one-to-one device do not outweigh the device’s inevitable role as a constant distraction and dopamine disruptor. I taught high schoolers and the inundation of distraction from technology was unmanageable for them. Why would young kids be any different? My students would openly tell me that they knew technology and social media especially was bad for them, but they just didn’t have the power to resist it. One of my students had her smart phone taken away for a month as a punishment and it was replaced with a flip phone. She told me her month of having a flip phone resulted in the best grades she’d ever gotten. When she got it back? Grades went back down. Learning disrupted. (Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation encompasses all the issues I was seeing related to technology and kids. I would recommend it if you are interested in this topic.) For all these reasons, I absolutely did not want my kids handed any kind of technology as a young learner. I’m happy to see some states acknowledging the problems technology in classrooms presents, but I still think the many issues they cause in disrupting learning will take time to be fully acknowledged and well addressed. Technology has benefits, but in a homeschooling environment, if I use it, I can actually make sure it’s an overall benefit to learning and is used intentionally. In a classroom where one adult has to make sure 15+ kids aren’t getting distracted by anything else on their device? A fool’s errand.

3. Wasted Time

When I started preschool at home with my son, we only sat down to do his preschool curriculum books for 15-20 minutes two to three times a week. I would play learning games with him sometimes as well, but we really weren’t spending much time doing it. Why? Because we didn’t need to! He was learning everything he needed to know in that much time. My oldest was reading books by the time he was four. When I tell people that, I think they assume I’m obsessed with making my kids “do school” and push them academically, because I’m a teacher. But that is truly not it at all. We’ve had weeks at a time that we aren’t doing any work in our curriculum books at all, because life gets in the way and yet, he is far ahead of where he would be in traditional preschool.

When I talked to one of my closet friends that is a former Pre-K, Kindergarten, and First grade teacher, I asked her how elementary teachers handle kids that enter Kindergarten without ever having gone to Preschool, because I noticed the Kindergarten curriculum for our state started with reading CVC words and didn’t explicitly state teaching the foundational skills leading up to being able to do that. When she told me they have to do everything in small groups to cater to the vast differences in abilities, my jaw hit the floor. Again, in a perfect world tons of differentiation would be easily attainable, but I knew from experience what she was saying was she had to have different small group lessons to teach kids who had no foundation at all, and others that helped kids ready to move beyond CVC words and everyone in between. All this with only the minimal planning time teachers are given. I was overwhelmed just hearing her explain it to me. Her response to my shock? “Yeah! That’s why I hated it so much!” Needless to say, she’s now in a new career. But this very inefficient approach also means that it simply does not take young kids 7 hours-a-day, 5 days-a-week to learn what they need to learn at this age. It takes a single adult teaching a class full of students at completely different levels that much time! And of course, parents need their kids to be somewhere while they work. The need for childcare obviously shapes the way school works. But knowing my kids could learn what they need to know and also spend much more time experiencing the world rather than doing busywork is much more appealing to me.

I asked the daughter of the only family I knew that homeschooled when we were young what she thought of her homeschool experience. She said she did try public school for a year in high school because her mom wasn’t able to provide the structure and consistency she felt she needed, but the wasted time in public school was hard for her to swallow. Homeschooled kids know that there is a more time efficient way to learn that leaves a lot more time to explore interests and passions. For this reason, I felt that, especially in their younger years when they are developmentally wired to be running and exploring, my kids would be better served by having more time to be a kid than a student.

4. A Fuller Childhood Experience

I’m not necessarily committed to homeschooling through high school. I don’t think its helpful to dogmatically approach this choice as something I must commit to forever as if a traditional school could never be the right choice for us. We’ll continually revaluate as they get older and consider what makes the most sense for them and our family. But for now, I do think they will get a more meaningful childhood experience through homeschooling. One the main criticisms people seem to have of homeschooling is the assumption that public schools provide such a critical exposure to various extra curricula’s and social learning. I do think the extra curricular opportunities are a huge benefit of schools, but the idea that this setting is an essential learning experience in life is a bit presumptuous. Everything has trade-offs. While my kids may not spend seven hours-a-day, five days-a-week with other kids their age, they do play and learn with other kids multiple times a week. It doesn’t require a 40-hour work week of socialization to learn how interact with other people, and being surrounded primarily by kids their own age that are also still figuring out how to function doesn’t make a great case for being a superior social learning environment. My kids interact with people of all ages on a regular basis making them more comfortable talking to a librarian or park ranger than many kids their age. They may not be in music class three times a week, but they are learning in state and national parks on a regular basis, racing homemade nature boats down rivers to learn about currents and buoyancy, and doing relay races at the park with their friends to solve word puzzles. These experiences are at least equally as valuable and more varied than the sameness of what a public school can provide. We naturally learn when we are exposed to new places, ideas, and people. Public school students only get one out of three of those on a regular basis. The places and people don’t change. For now, the ability to prioritize learning that allows them to engage with all three is more valuable to me than what a traditional school has to offer.

There’s so much more I could share about the public vs homeschool trade-offs, but I’ll have to save those for another day. If you’re reading this while trying to decide how you want to approach school for your family just know that making a decision for now does not mean you have to commit to that decision forever. There will be pros and cons for your child’s learning experience regardless of what choice you make. I was very nervous when I realized I was leaning towards homeschooling, because I knew there would be an element of social pressure to “do what everyone else is doing” when we shared this choice with friends and family that all came from public school backgrounds. If that’s how you’re feeling, just remind yourself (and everyone else) what every adult tried so hard to drill into our heads as teens. Just because everyone else is doing something doesn’t mean you should too.