11 ms·

Outschooling

145 points by ctulek 7y ago

jaden 7y ago
Homeschooling seems like an ideal solution for those with a parent at home to improve their children's academic learning. But it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system. As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it. Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-government paranoia? Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.
  - GuiA 7y ago
    I can read your comment in several, slightly conflicting, ways: - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest - homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my understanding of grandparent's point); in addition, they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it. Am I misunderstanding?
    - jf 7y ago
      As someone who was exclusively homeschooled (and glad of it) my read is mostly of the first interpretation: OP likely had authoritarian parents that used homeschooling as a method of control rather than a way to learn.
    - inetknght 7y ago
      > homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest I am not saying that homeschooling in practice is mostly undesirable. Instead, there can be undesirable elements to it. And those undesirable elements are neither common nor easy to spot. Nor am I saying that it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who aren't going to act in their child's best interest. I certainly think there's an element of truth to it but don't think it's overwhelmingly the case. My parents did have legitimate reasons to homeschool some of the family. But I think the legitimate issues were leveraged for, indeed, control. Then: I think they bit off more than they could chew (I have a big family); I don't think they realized just how much effort they volunteered of themselves. At the end of a year, they chose to dig their heels in and continue a broken implementation of homeschool and not addressing the problems that came up, instead of risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades and having to answer to the State. > they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it. Yes. Maybe not everywhere but it certainly seemed to be the case when I was in California until moved '03.
      - souprock 7y ago
        I certainly know what you mean about "big family" (have 11 so far) and "just how much effort they volunteered of themselves" and "risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades" due to uneven progress. The out is dual-enrollment, sometimes called running start or concurrent enrollment. In many locations it is free, leading to an AA degree. Because it is scheduled in the style of normal college, with classes chosen as you please, uneven progress is not a problem. Consider also that the students bear some responsibility and can easily have disasters in public school. If the students choose to dig their heels in, refusing to study, that simply shuts down any kind of education. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Be careful about assuming your parents did worse than a public school would have done, even if things went badly. Some kids just refuse to learn.
    - watwut 7y ago
      > - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest To large extend, homeschooling movement was to large extend motivated politically and does attract fringe groups who want to avoid mainstream society. Avoidance of exposure of certain parts of history or sex ed or gender relationships or culture is strong motivation for many of those families. It did not became popular in conservative christian male is head of household types randomly.
  - negzero7 7y ago
    I was also home schooled (4th and 5th grade) and it wasn't scary. I missed out on some social opportunities but I joined clubs and played sports to make up for those interactions. Homeschooling put me far ahead of my peers. I went back for middle school (6th grade) and skated through the next 3 years until I could take AP classes in high school. I am by no means exceptional nor were my parents great teachers. I think being able to go at my own pace allowed me to learn faster and more thoroughly than if I had been in a classroom. I'd say there are a lot of upsides to home schooling if parents can swing it, and the downsides can be mitigated by a little extra effort on socializing.
    - mathattack 7y ago
      There’s a ton of upside from 1 on 1 parental attention. Schools only get a few hours of real education time daily. A sharp parent can clear that in an hour or so. Give 3 hours 1 on 1 and the Gap grows even more.
  - rogerkirkness 7y ago
    I was homeschooled, and I learned way more way faster, your counter argument only applies to people too crazy for school as opposed to too smart. It's immediately clear when you meet people who are too crazy for school and who are too intense / smart.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    What social experiences do you feel like you missed out on? Having teachers ignore you and spend 90% of their time dealing with problem kids? The petty drama? How many people look back fondly on K-12 and think “man, that was great?” Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them, we let them loose on their own little child-dominated Lord of the Flies society.
    - paulgb 7y ago
      Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.
      - harryh 7y ago
        Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I am not at all convinced that this is true. See: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
      - camelNotation 7y ago
        > Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. There's really no evidence for this. The only reason anyone believes this is because modern school is a living hell and if the suffering and misery doesn't serve some practical purpose, we'd all be depressed. The truth is that there are plenty of people who are schooled privately that turn out just fine.
      - asark 7y ago
        > I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children. It certainly is, the book even beats you over the head with it when (spoiler warning I guess?) the warship shows up to rescue them at the end. I do think the K-12 school doesn't particularly resemble adult life, and is a lot worse in most ways. For one thing, leaving bad situations isn't really an option, while at the same time anti-social behavior is more tolerated. Meanwhile you're doing a bunch of work on things that are quickly round-filed when you're done with them, year after year, and operating under a system that's strangely strict and dehumanizing considering how much shittiness it allows to go on. And I had a pretty good school experience, so this isn't coming from some place of special bitterness.
  - camelNotation 7y ago
    I don't think this is a problem with homeschooling as much as with a subset of homeschoolers - particularly religious fundamentalists and anarchist types. My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived, she decided this was a natural fit. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week. Homeschooling can be used to keep kids out of the system and deny them a good education, but it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other. There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor. As my kids grow older, they'll get one-on-one training in the arts, foreign language, and various extra-curricular skills like swimming, dance, etc. from instructors that we hire to assist them. They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
    - rootusrootus 7y ago
      > They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Except for those whose parents also hire expert tutors. It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. When you consider how much homeschooling is by parents who are not themselves professional educators, I suspect a hybrid approach works better on average.
      - camelNotation 7y ago
        Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale. One on one teaching is not remotely the same as teaching in a classroom setting where you have to adapt to multiple learning styles and multiple achievement levels all while using standardized assessment techniques, detailed lesson planning, and classroom management skills. The vast majority of what composes an education degree is there because you are educating a large, diverse group. When it is just one teacher working one on one with a single student, a lot of that is irrelevant. The way you teach, the way you assess their progress, and the way you adapt to their needs is much more natural. And most of the principles that apply in both contexts can be learned on the fly. > It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. This is true and it's a lot of why we homeschool. There are peers that are getting similarly elite educations and just doing it slightly different ways. If I had a billion dollars, I would be paying for an elite, personal tutor to educate my children. I wouldn't be sending them to a public school. Homeschooling allows my wife and I to provide something analogous to that elite structure for our children, even though they are firmly middle class.
  - OrangeMango 7y ago
    > Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. My children are homeschooled in a major metro area not in Texas. We also have effectively zero oversight. But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I understand that in rural areas this can mean that such children have all but disappeared from view, but where we live the school districts allow homeschool children to participate in afterschool activities (including competitive sports) and a recent change in state law allows for homeschool children to attend a class or two at the local school and then leave for the day, if that is something a parent wants. The park district offers many sports classes in the middle of the day for homeschool kids, forest preserves and state parks offer nature classes, and museums have science and art courses. Private businesses love us, they offer discounts to fill up time slots that would otherwise go empty. The public library is very welcoming and typically allows use of community rooms for free. A public school classroom with 30+ children in it simply doesn't have the time to offer as much educational opportunity that our children get in half the time, allowing them so much time during the day for play, imagination, and reading or exploring topics of their own choice (we typically have 30-60 library books at home at any one point in time).
    - pryce 7y ago
      > But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I don't think the question of 'whether oversight is a good idea' is usefully explored by piecemeal examples where everything went fine and the motivation of parents is genuine "interest in the success of our children". This is not to say there is anything particularly wrong with homeschooling per se, I wouldn't accept that examining piecemeal cases where everything went fine would be a good way of inferring "whether oversight is a good idea" in the case of a church or business or academic institution either.
  - eadmund 7y ago
    > Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for. That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model. I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.
    - souprock 7y ago
      I could really use a voucher for homeschooling. I've spent a lot on books, calculators, and even paper. (11 kids) I think I spent about $1000 to do chemistry labs. With the voucher I probably would have added a condenser, nickel crucibles, a kiln, an extra digit on my balance, decent-sized platinum electrodes, and a spectrophotometer. Make it a big voucher and I'll get an electron microscope, an extreme-ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscope, and a DNA sequencer.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  Many of the most actively involved parents are already removing themselves (and their children) from the public school system, as the payoff to fighting for improvement won't come until after it can benefit their kids. I don't think it's exactly a tragedy of the commons situation, more of the inverse, but the costs (to the parent) are so high that it's hard to blame them. Personally, I think the best we can hope for is that models like Outschool can develop into supplements that work in concert with public school, reducing the relative ROI of going private.
- tathougies 7y ago
  The children of actively involved parents now have children themselves. They saw the futility of their actively involved parents actions, and how the school system wore them down and slowed down their growth, and want nothing to do with it.
- up_and_up 7y ago
  We have homeschool friends who felt the same and tried to get involved with the public school system. They are very civic minded etc. They found the red tape crushing for their kid, who is a bit of genius, plus he was getting beat up etc. Obviously this is anecdotal. They pulled him and now he is winning academic competitions (history, geography) like 3 grade levels above his age. He reads war history for hours and hours.
- 20years 7y ago
  Why is this concerning? The public school system has a lot of issues. My son went to public school until 6th grade and I about pulled my hair out with issue after issue. We put him in a hybrid charter school program (3 days homeschool, 2 days in class) for 7th and 8th and started my youngest in this same program from kindergarten. Both are well ahead academically of their peers and grade level. There are a ton of homeschool groups in our area too that organize activities where all of the kids get together. It is very active giving kids plenty of opportunity to socialize. We don't homeschool for religious reasons. We do it because we want our kids to get the best possible education without all of the indoctrination and other crap that is pushed through the public education system. This is pretty much the reason most of the other homeschoolers that I engage with do it too. I think homeschooling has a bad rap because of the media and a few bad apples but at least from my experience, that portrayal is not the norm.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
GuiA 7y ago
Interesting blog post and theory. A core counter argument to their base premise is that learning effectively is done in person, as part of a social group, in a physical space dedicated to learning, with hands on practice. It certainly seems to be the core takeaways of Waldorf/Montessori/constructionist/etc. approaches. > When our kids were in school and struggled with a class/teacher/subject, we would get them a tutor to come to our home in the evenings. In other words, there's a reason they paid the tutor to come in person, and not tutor over Skype or the phone. The author speaks of their intent being to open up access to education, and replace the "outdated tech" of physical schools and classrooms. I need to be convinced that successful execution of this plan (and its inevitable percolation into policy if it makes financial sense - which I have no doubt it does, for a VC to take interest in it) won't result in a two tiered system, with students from poorer families getting free, public education over video lessons, and students from wealthier family being able to attend private, more expensive, in person schooling.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  > In other words, there's a reason they paid the tutor to come in person, and not tutor over Skype or the phone. I'll refrain from posting the ages and names of his kids in the interest of privacy (you can figure it out with very light Googling), but his older children are in their late twenties, meaning they are nearly my age. When I was in high school "Skype tutoring" wasn't a thing, because reliable video chat didn't exist, and very little of my schoolwork used a computer for more than web processing. Isn't it a lot more likely that the sentence you are referencing is referring to that experience than evidence "in person" was the reason he paid for a tutor to come in person?
  - GuiA 7y ago
    I buy that it would be a combination of both factors. I don’t buy that it would be exclusively due to the lack of Skype (I assumed his kids had grown up in the last decade or so, but fair enough) because I myself have been paid tens of thousands of dollars tutoring students of fairly wealthy family when I was in grad school and not once was I asked to do it over Skype.
- 7y ago
the_watcher 7y ago
I'm slightly torn on models like this. On the one hand, the cost savings and potential to improve outcomes by scaling the impact of the best classes is obviously wildly important. At the same time, it does seem like there is hard to quantify value in the social aspects of a traditional school. As I write this, however, I realize that there are plenty of private and parochial schools where the class sizes are so small that you could probably replicate the social value pretty easily, since you wouldn't need too many students in the same place to do things like "class trips".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
hoytech 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air
up_and_up 7y ago
My wife are secular homeschoolers and have homeschooled our 3 kids: 10,8,5 for 5 years. We use outschool regularly, its a great platform to introduce random topics. I would invest in it honestly. AMA I guess
- charliesharding 7y ago
  What were the primary motivations for homeschooling? Cultural? Political? Quality? Access? Also how do you go about socializing them? I've been considering it myself
  - up_and_up 7y ago
    My wife was from a very competitive school district which forced overachievement and I got beat up by bullies in a small town school. Besides the personal anecdotes, 1. we felt like time was passing too quickly and wanted to have them around, we wanted to be together basically. 2. with 3 kids my wife hasnt been able to work (her line of work is not well paying), so it made sense to start homeschooling vs private schooling. 3. I have issues with what public schools are now, hyper focused on testing, lack of critical thinking, no outdoor time. The "socializing" concern is a farce imo. Granted we live in area with plenty of groups. Maybe a solo kid way out in the sticks will have problems. Our kids also regularly play with kids 2-5 years older or younger so things are different. Our kids have activities with other homeschool kids 4 days a week. The schedule looks like this: M: Outdoor Nature camp: think building fire with bow drills, axes, skinning animals, foraging for wild plants T: Academic day at home then occasional horseback riding W: Academic day at home, private music lessons, then playdate at friends house TH: Homeschool meetup group: think art, music, dance, karate, extracurricular classes with a group of 100 kids and 10 teachers FRI: another Homeschool meetup group: with various classes and open play SAT: Climbing, iceskating, skiing, biking, something outdoors Our life is a mellower version of "Captain Fantastic"
    - michaelchisari 7y ago
      This seems extraordinarily well-balanced. I'm often skeptical of homeschooling (especially for religious or political reasons), but you've got a great curriculum and motivation.
carlob 7y ago
I think this is going to be very controversial on the typical HN crowd: maybe too European, or too socialist. However here it goes. Some ten years ago I was convinced that private schools had a right to exist, but that they should never impact the funding of public schools, not even indirectly. Then I discovered that homeschooling was a thing in the US. Now I tend to believe that private schools should not be allowed to exist. School is far too important as a social mixer and a way to educate well-rounded citizens to leave it to the whims of parents. Parents already have a large enough impact on their kids, to let them take over 100% of their time. I also strongly believe that parents whose beliefs prevent their kids from getting the medical care they deserve (from refusing transfusions, to refusing vaccines) should get a hard look from social services. In general I don't believe that parenthood trumps some things that as a society we consider basic human rights. I think most people would agree with me when it comes down to issues like violence, exploitation and child labor, but I think this should extend to the access to healthcare and to a secular education.
- surge 7y ago
  You have a very narrow view of home schooling and only the worse cases. Take a look at the worse outcomes of public schooling and the averages in performance of home school kids versus public school kids. The social anxiety and other issues of kids going through a modern high school versus kids who socialize with mostly adults and socialize in sports programs, co-ops, or groups and learn to be self driven in learning. Public schools have a long way to go before they should be made mandatory. Until it is the very best solution for everyone, until it addresses every learning disability, the class sizes are smaller, teachers are paid better, classes track with a students ability and mental development and actually run in line with the latest in neuroscience and child development, have flexible hours so teenagers can sleep longer, put less on the kids when they go home so they have time for family activities and social interaction instead of 3-4 hrs of homework. Maybe when the solution isn't to medicate kids who don't learn by sitting still at a desk 6 hours a day with few breaks, elimination of recess and 20-30 minute lunch periods and few if any opportunities to "socialize" in the current schooling environment. When they teach problem solving and critical thinking, rather than rote memorizing for one standardized test at the end of year. If going to school was more like being an adult or put responsibilities on the student, like a college does, rather than treating the student population like they're in a low security prison. When it uses a system that wasn't developed for training factory workers and hasn't transitioned at all since then. When all the new money added to their budgets isn't siphoned up in administrative costs. When schools in many neighborhoods put kids in physical danger, involve gang activity and a good option simply isn't available to them because of their district. Then maybe we can talk about making it mandatory. Even then, the most rich and privileged still would have loop holes for tutoring their kids for something other than factory work. We would still need exceptions for kids who for a variety of reasons, medical or otherwise need to be at home, students who travel or work in acting/performance. Kids who are on specialized career tracks in schools geared towards where its best they learn very young (perforamance arts and music, CS) to compete in a global market. This idea that one education fits all is myopic and doesn't line up with the results that public schools produce thus far, and you want to take away any alternative. It would be like if the only healthcare option in the US was the VA, and no one was allowed to seek healthcare else where because some people make bad health decisions and go to homeopathic healthcare providers.
somethoughts 7y ago
The one I would be interested in would be "home-after-schooling". I would love to have more resources to help support K-8 students learn how to do original research for science fairs, MOOCs for non-math subjects and programming. Basically Khan Academy type courses that can enable teaching economics, literature, philosophy to a 12 year old. The interesting non-math stuff for Khan Academy doesn't start until 9-12th grade. I'd be curious as to why there is not an option to watch a recorded version with Outschool.
- amirnathoo 7y ago
  It's a matter of focus. We'd love there to be more self-study content available for kids also. But MOOCs have a famously low completion rate and it's hard to stay motivated without interaction. So we're focused on connecting learners and teachers and having them interact over video chat.
  - droithomme 7y ago
    > low completion rate Most people who sign up don't actually want a certificate and aren't trying to complete. They are interested in the subject, watching some videos, move on. When you have class sizes with 1000-30,000 students, it's OK if 90% don't complete the certificate since many more did than in a brick and mortar school, yet it cost much less per student to deliver the class. In online classes where you need to pay to get the certificate, it's been found that paid students have the same completion rate as brick and mortar university students. https://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/fee-payments-lift-mooc-completion-rates-20150409-1mhw76 https://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/fee-payments-lift-... > Students in massive open online courses (MOOC) who pay a modest amount for a "verified certificate" are just as likely finish their course as regular university students, according to a new large-scale study of online education.
    - geomark 7y ago
      This. Low completion rate of those who enrolled for free is, in a way, actually a positive indicator because it shows a lot more people getting a chance to "taste" a subject. Many decide it isn't for them or they learned what they wanted and are not interested in the certificate at the end. Something not possible with in-class courses.
momokoko 7y ago
I think EdTech forgets that student success has much less to do with schooling(home or otherwise). This is why education has bounced from trend to trend over the last 50 years. Because we constantly think we've found a silver bullet, but then after a decade or so, we realize it was once again correlation. If you really look at the data, student outcomes essentially boil down to parents and the students themselves. We've see this with how standardized testing has gone over so poorly. The truth is that, outside of gaming the test system with essentially test prep style cramming, schools really have not been able to make any real meaningful changes to student outcomes. Absolutely, schools can move the needle a bit in either direction, but outside of edge cases, I feel as though it may be a challenge to show the kind of outcome data that makes any EdTech product a must have in US education.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Improvements in teaching are very unlikely to change the rank ordering of who learns fastest/most/best. It can absolutely change how much I’d learned and when individual students learn something. Online teaching is far more conducive to mastery learning and ability grouping than offline education. Look at Lambda School for an example. If you have large cohorts starting on a regular basis you can have some people progressing slower than others but ensure they get there eventually in a way that’s not going to happen in a normal classroom environment. The scope for individualised instruction in an environment where you have classes of 15-30 students is limited. If you have 200 students starting every four weeks you can divide them into ten 20 person classes based on where they are in the curriculum and they’ll do much better than if they were doing things they’d already mastered or for which they just don’t have the prerequisites. On a more purely technological basis integrating spaced repetition into instructional design would be a massive win. Imagine if people actually remembered what they’d been taught in school instead of having a hazy idea the US Civil War was somewhere in the 1800s.
  - momokoko 7y ago
    Lamda school picks winners from the outset. Public education doesn't get that option.
iambateman 7y ago
In the late 90’s my parents homeschooled me. We had a subscription to a teaching service that broadcast lessons on Satellite at 2am. My parents set the VCR to record each night and then we played the tape back for “class”. Everything was awful. To this day, my understanding of elementary science is a little worse than one would expect because my mom didn’t enjoy teaching science. I’m so glad for advanced services making more forms of schooling possible for people. Just to throw some ice on some of the heat in the comments... - homeschooling isn’t for everyone, but it works wonderfully for some. My sister hated it and I loved it. People are different and need different approaches to learning. - some people who homeschool are religious, and some of them are “fundamentalist”. But most of the people I encountered were simply “religious.” There’s a difference. ;)
- austhrow743 7y ago
  Are/ were you religious at the time? Any chance that you and the rest of us actually share an idea of how religious homeschool people are but just have different cut offs for when we start throwing the term "fundamentalist" around? Anyone who genuinely believes the specifics beyond being a theist who pays lip service to Christianity is starting to head in to nut territory, personally.
jpm_sd 7y ago
Students can also access "real time group classes taught largely by very experienced K12 teachers" by... going to school.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  Opportunity cost can't justify public school. Seems to be a large waste of time, super authoritative, and mentally damaging to many.
- forgotmypw 7y ago
  I completed grades 1, 2, 3, and 5 in the USSR, right before its breaking apart. (I skipped grade 4 not because I was exceptionally smart, but because of the conversion from 10- to 11-year system.) I went to an average public school, not like a specialized math-heavy school, which also existed. Then I moved to the U.S. and started 6th grade, decent public school in a major city. I went to ESL class instead of regular English. Some of the history stuff was new to me. I struggled with integrating and being bullied, though not too badly. But as far as math and science goes, I was coasting up until 9th grade, when I started high school. In 8th grade, I was added to the "gifted" program, which basically meant I spent one period a week hanging out with the other gifted kids doing I don't even remember what. I've been told that while USSR designed its cirruculum to be passable by 80% of the students, in the U.S. it's designed to be passable by close to 100%. Which means that even if your child is smart, they'll be dragging along with the least capable 20% of the school population, doing busywork and being bored, wasting their time instead of learning all they could be at the most capable time of their life. (Russia's current education system has been stripped and crippled, so it's on par or worse than U.S. now.)
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  As a former high school teacher, as intuitive as this seems, it's dubious at best. To truly have "access," you need a lot of things in place (nutrition, sleep, prerequisite learning, a good school, an experienced teacher), and a lot of things not getting in the way (other kids, the institution, the teacher, circumstances). The bar is much lower for Outschool to hit the target.
jonny_eh 7y ago
Hiring a high school student to tutor a kid in math is not a "1%er" solution. Maybe 50%er?
dnprock 7y ago
I think public school system provides a good return for dollars spent. It has the scale that is difficult to match with other schooling methods. This is my experience from shuffling between private preschools. I think other schooling methods are appropriate if your circumstance forces you (e.g. bad public school system.) You can always opt out of the crazy things that happen at public schools. After school, you can homeschool your kids. This way you can get the positives of both systems. Education is complicated. We need to avoid comparing and optimization. It's idiotic to make a personal stance in education.
master-litty 7y ago
I interviewed with Outschool a few months ago, happy to see them here! They're a wonderful team. I've never seen a group of people with so much positive chemistry before; I've started asking more culture-centered questions in my interviews since then, now that I think about it. I think it's the best kind of team to front an educational endeavour and it's one big reason I believe in them. It's easier to have a healthy classroom environment if the providing workplace is healthy too.
- mdaniel 7y ago
  And perhaps related to this post, there was a YC "ad" a few links above this post saying: > Outschool (YC W16) Is Hiring a Senior Software Engineer in SF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20048401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20048401
killjoywashere 7y ago
Unless this results in better education outcomes spread across the entire population in the red states, this is effectively a bid to support the Republican agenda. This will follow the same pattern as standardized testing: those with the means will pursue the best investments. Those without will be left behind. And so the cycle of inequality worsens. This is "greed is good" politics. Think about it. If they were serious about education, why are they not investing, Koch-style, in local politics? Why are they not funding candidates who will advocate for stronger school systems, better transportation, school lunches, etc? This has nothing to do with kids. This has everything to do with extracting as much money as possible from the most anxious, which is incidentally the rapidly vanishing elbow of middle class in the ever-steepening power law curve of wealth distribution in the US.
- carlob 7y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. I, too have the impression that most of the commenters here are completely oblivious to the effects of their choices on society at large. The fact that I have been accused multiple times of not having children is evidence of an appeal to emotion: "You can only understand this if you think about your own family".
  - burfog 7y ago
    The accusation of not having children is the polite one, assuming no malice. The worse ones are that you would exempt your own children (the rest of us get to sacrifice ours), or that you wouldn't exempt your children (due to not caring about them).
falcor84 7y ago
>...students in the US who need to learn things like Algebra, European History, Biology, etc... HN, what's your take on the above? Do you believe that there is any particular curriculum of subjects that students "need" to have studied to be prepared for doing well in the world they will be living in?
- burfog 7y ago
  economics, law, financial planning, accounting, cooking, how to repair things, business writing, estimation That's all. No, we mostly don't teach this stuff anymore. For those going the college route, obviously the STEM prerequisites must be satisfied. This means AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Physics C (both halves), and AP Calculus BC.
  - falcor84 7y ago
    Thanks for responding. I wanted to contest the word "need" - given that the best majority of students aren't taught (in a schooling setting) even 1 of the subjects you mentioned, and we still live in an arguably quite civilized modern society, would you agree that they don't actually "need" to be taught?
HNLurker2 7y ago
This sounds to me like an American problem

145 points by ctulek 7y ago

Homeschooling seems like an ideal solution for those with a parent at home to improve their children's academic learning. But it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system.

inetknght 7y ago
> it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system. As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it. Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-government paranoia? Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.
- GuiA 7y ago
  I can read your comment in several, slightly conflicting, ways: - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest - homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my understanding of grandparent's point); in addition, they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it. Am I misunderstanding?
  - jf 7y ago
    As someone who was exclusively homeschooled (and glad of it) my read is mostly of the first interpretation: OP likely had authoritarian parents that used homeschooling as a method of control rather than a way to learn.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    > homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest I am not saying that homeschooling in practice is mostly undesirable. Instead, there can be undesirable elements to it. And those undesirable elements are neither common nor easy to spot. Nor am I saying that it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who aren't going to act in their child's best interest. I certainly think there's an element of truth to it but don't think it's overwhelmingly the case. My parents did have legitimate reasons to homeschool some of the family. But I think the legitimate issues were leveraged for, indeed, control. Then: I think they bit off more than they could chew (I have a big family); I don't think they realized just how much effort they volunteered of themselves. At the end of a year, they chose to dig their heels in and continue a broken implementation of homeschool and not addressing the problems that came up, instead of risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades and having to answer to the State. > they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it. Yes. Maybe not everywhere but it certainly seemed to be the case when I was in California until moved '03.
    - souprock 7y ago
      I certainly know what you mean about "big family" (have 11 so far) and "just how much effort they volunteered of themselves" and "risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades" due to uneven progress. The out is dual-enrollment, sometimes called running start or concurrent enrollment. In many locations it is free, leading to an AA degree. Because it is scheduled in the style of normal college, with classes chosen as you please, uneven progress is not a problem. Consider also that the students bear some responsibility and can easily have disasters in public school. If the students choose to dig their heels in, refusing to study, that simply shuts down any kind of education. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Be careful about assuming your parents did worse than a public school would have done, even if things went badly. Some kids just refuse to learn.
  - watwut 7y ago
    > - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest To large extend, homeschooling movement was to large extend motivated politically and does attract fringe groups who want to avoid mainstream society. Avoidance of exposure of certain parts of history or sex ed or gender relationships or culture is strong motivation for many of those families. It did not became popular in conservative christian male is head of household types randomly.
- negzero7 7y ago
  I was also home schooled (4th and 5th grade) and it wasn't scary. I missed out on some social opportunities but I joined clubs and played sports to make up for those interactions. Homeschooling put me far ahead of my peers. I went back for middle school (6th grade) and skated through the next 3 years until I could take AP classes in high school. I am by no means exceptional nor were my parents great teachers. I think being able to go at my own pace allowed me to learn faster and more thoroughly than if I had been in a classroom. I'd say there are a lot of upsides to home schooling if parents can swing it, and the downsides can be mitigated by a little extra effort on socializing.
  - mathattack 7y ago
    There’s a ton of upside from 1 on 1 parental attention. Schools only get a few hours of real education time daily. A sharp parent can clear that in an hour or so. Give 3 hours 1 on 1 and the Gap grows even more.
- rogerkirkness 7y ago
  I was homeschooled, and I learned way more way faster, your counter argument only applies to people too crazy for school as opposed to too smart. It's immediately clear when you meet people who are too crazy for school and who are too intense / smart.
- rayiner 7y ago
  What social experiences do you feel like you missed out on? Having teachers ignore you and spend 90% of their time dealing with problem kids? The petty drama? How many people look back fondly on K-12 and think “man, that was great?” Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them, we let them loose on their own little child-dominated Lord of the Flies society.
  - paulgb 7y ago
    Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.
    - harryh 7y ago
      Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I am not at all convinced that this is true. See: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
    - camelNotation 7y ago
      > Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. There's really no evidence for this. The only reason anyone believes this is because modern school is a living hell and if the suffering and misery doesn't serve some practical purpose, we'd all be depressed. The truth is that there are plenty of people who are schooled privately that turn out just fine.
    - asark 7y ago
      > I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children. It certainly is, the book even beats you over the head with it when (spoiler warning I guess?) the warship shows up to rescue them at the end. I do think the K-12 school doesn't particularly resemble adult life, and is a lot worse in most ways. For one thing, leaving bad situations isn't really an option, while at the same time anti-social behavior is more tolerated. Meanwhile you're doing a bunch of work on things that are quickly round-filed when you're done with them, year after year, and operating under a system that's strangely strict and dehumanizing considering how much shittiness it allows to go on. And I had a pretty good school experience, so this isn't coming from some place of special bitterness.
- camelNotation 7y ago
  I don't think this is a problem with homeschooling as much as with a subset of homeschoolers - particularly religious fundamentalists and anarchist types. My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived, she decided this was a natural fit. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week. Homeschooling can be used to keep kids out of the system and deny them a good education, but it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other. There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor. As my kids grow older, they'll get one-on-one training in the arts, foreign language, and various extra-curricular skills like swimming, dance, etc. from instructors that we hire to assist them. They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    > They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Except for those whose parents also hire expert tutors. It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. When you consider how much homeschooling is by parents who are not themselves professional educators, I suspect a hybrid approach works better on average.
    - camelNotation 7y ago
      Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale. One on one teaching is not remotely the same as teaching in a classroom setting where you have to adapt to multiple learning styles and multiple achievement levels all while using standardized assessment techniques, detailed lesson planning, and classroom management skills. The vast majority of what composes an education degree is there because you are educating a large, diverse group. When it is just one teacher working one on one with a single student, a lot of that is irrelevant. The way you teach, the way you assess their progress, and the way you adapt to their needs is much more natural. And most of the principles that apply in both contexts can be learned on the fly. > It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. This is true and it's a lot of why we homeschool. There are peers that are getting similarly elite educations and just doing it slightly different ways. If I had a billion dollars, I would be paying for an elite, personal tutor to educate my children. I wouldn't be sending them to a public school. Homeschooling allows my wife and I to provide something analogous to that elite structure for our children, even though they are firmly middle class.
- OrangeMango 7y ago
  > Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. My children are homeschooled in a major metro area not in Texas. We also have effectively zero oversight. But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I understand that in rural areas this can mean that such children have all but disappeared from view, but where we live the school districts allow homeschool children to participate in afterschool activities (including competitive sports) and a recent change in state law allows for homeschool children to attend a class or two at the local school and then leave for the day, if that is something a parent wants. The park district offers many sports classes in the middle of the day for homeschool kids, forest preserves and state parks offer nature classes, and museums have science and art courses. Private businesses love us, they offer discounts to fill up time slots that would otherwise go empty. The public library is very welcoming and typically allows use of community rooms for free. A public school classroom with 30+ children in it simply doesn't have the time to offer as much educational opportunity that our children get in half the time, allowing them so much time during the day for play, imagination, and reading or exploring topics of their own choice (we typically have 30-60 library books at home at any one point in time).
  - pryce 7y ago
    > But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I don't think the question of 'whether oversight is a good idea' is usefully explored by piecemeal examples where everything went fine and the motivation of parents is genuine "interest in the success of our children". This is not to say there is anything particularly wrong with homeschooling per se, I wouldn't accept that examining piecemeal cases where everything went fine would be a good way of inferring "whether oversight is a good idea" in the case of a church or business or academic institution either.
- eadmund 7y ago
  > Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for. That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model. I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.
  - souprock 7y ago
    I could really use a voucher for homeschooling. I've spent a lot on books, calculators, and even paper. (11 kids) I think I spent about $1000 to do chemistry labs. With the voucher I probably would have added a condenser, nickel crucibles, a kiln, an extra digit on my balance, decent-sized platinum electrodes, and a spectrophotometer. Make it a big voucher and I'll get an electron microscope, an extreme-ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscope, and a DNA sequencer.
the_watcher 7y ago
Many of the most actively involved parents are already removing themselves (and their children) from the public school system, as the payoff to fighting for improvement won't come until after it can benefit their kids. I don't think it's exactly a tragedy of the commons situation, more of the inverse, but the costs (to the parent) are so high that it's hard to blame them. Personally, I think the best we can hope for is that models like Outschool can develop into supplements that work in concert with public school, reducing the relative ROI of going private.
tathougies 7y ago
The children of actively involved parents now have children themselves. They saw the futility of their actively involved parents actions, and how the school system wore them down and slowed down their growth, and want nothing to do with it.
up_and_up 7y ago
We have homeschool friends who felt the same and tried to get involved with the public school system. They are very civic minded etc. They found the red tape crushing for their kid, who is a bit of genius, plus he was getting beat up etc. Obviously this is anecdotal. They pulled him and now he is winning academic competitions (history, geography) like 3 grade levels above his age. He reads war history for hours and hours.
20years 7y ago
Why is this concerning? The public school system has a lot of issues. My son went to public school until 6th grade and I about pulled my hair out with issue after issue. We put him in a hybrid charter school program (3 days homeschool, 2 days in class) for 7th and 8th and started my youngest in this same program from kindergarten. Both are well ahead academically of their peers and grade level. There are a ton of homeschool groups in our area too that organize activities where all of the kids get together. It is very active giving kids plenty of opportunity to socialize. We don't homeschool for religious reasons. We do it because we want our kids to get the best possible education without all of the indoctrination and other crap that is pushed through the public education system. This is pretty much the reason most of the other homeschoolers that I engage with do it too. I think homeschooling has a bad rap because of the media and a few bad apples but at least from my experience, that portrayal is not the norm.

deleted 7y ago

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GuiA 7y ago

Interesting blog post and theory. A core counter argument to their base premise is that learning effectively is done in person, as part of a social group, in a physical space dedicated to learning, with hands on practice. It certainly seems to be the core takeaways of Waldorf/Montessori/constructionist/etc. approaches. > When our kids were in school and struggled with a class/teacher/subject, we would get them a tutor to come to our home in the evenings. In other words, there's a reason they paid the tutor to come in person, and not tutor over Skype or the phone. The author speaks of their intent being to open up access to education, and replace the "outdated tech" of physical schools and classrooms. I need to be convinced that successful execution of this plan (and its inevitable percolation into policy if it makes financial sense - which I have no doubt it does, for a VC to take interest in it) won't result in a two tiered system, with students from poorer families getting free, public education over video lessons, and students from wealthier family being able to attend private, more expensive, in person schooling.

the_watcher 7y ago
> In other words, there's a reason they paid the tutor to come in person, and not tutor over Skype or the phone. I'll refrain from posting the ages and names of his kids in the interest of privacy (you can figure it out with very light Googling), but his older children are in their late twenties, meaning they are nearly my age. When I was in high school "Skype tutoring" wasn't a thing, because reliable video chat didn't exist, and very little of my schoolwork used a computer for more than web processing. Isn't it a lot more likely that the sentence you are referencing is referring to that experience than evidence "in person" was the reason he paid for a tutor to come in person?
- GuiA 7y ago
  I buy that it would be a combination of both factors. I don’t buy that it would be exclusively due to the lack of Skype (I assumed his kids had grown up in the last decade or so, but fair enough) because I myself have been paid tens of thousands of dollars tutoring students of fairly wealthy family when I was in grad school and not once was I asked to do it over Skype.
7y ago

the_watcher 7y ago

I'm slightly torn on models like this. On the one hand, the cost savings and potential to improve outcomes by scaling the impact of the best classes is obviously wildly important. At the same time, it does seem like there is hard to quantify value in the social aspects of a traditional school. As I write this, however, I realize that there are plenty of private and parochial schools where the class sizes are so small that you could probably replicate the social value pretty easily, since you wouldn't need too many students in the same place to do things like "class trips".

deleted 7y ago
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hoytech 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air

up_and_up 7y ago

My wife are secular homeschoolers and have homeschooled our 3 kids: 10,8,5 for 5 years. We use outschool regularly, its a great platform to introduce random topics. I would invest in it honestly. AMA I guess

charliesharding 7y ago
What were the primary motivations for homeschooling? Cultural? Political? Quality? Access? Also how do you go about socializing them? I've been considering it myself
- up_and_up 7y ago
  My wife was from a very competitive school district which forced overachievement and I got beat up by bullies in a small town school. Besides the personal anecdotes, 1. we felt like time was passing too quickly and wanted to have them around, we wanted to be together basically. 2. with 3 kids my wife hasnt been able to work (her line of work is not well paying), so it made sense to start homeschooling vs private schooling. 3. I have issues with what public schools are now, hyper focused on testing, lack of critical thinking, no outdoor time. The "socializing" concern is a farce imo. Granted we live in area with plenty of groups. Maybe a solo kid way out in the sticks will have problems. Our kids also regularly play with kids 2-5 years older or younger so things are different. Our kids have activities with other homeschool kids 4 days a week. The schedule looks like this: M: Outdoor Nature camp: think building fire with bow drills, axes, skinning animals, foraging for wild plants T: Academic day at home then occasional horseback riding W: Academic day at home, private music lessons, then playdate at friends house TH: Homeschool meetup group: think art, music, dance, karate, extracurricular classes with a group of 100 kids and 10 teachers FRI: another Homeschool meetup group: with various classes and open play SAT: Climbing, iceskating, skiing, biking, something outdoors Our life is a mellower version of "Captain Fantastic"
  - michaelchisari 7y ago
    This seems extraordinarily well-balanced. I'm often skeptical of homeschooling (especially for religious or political reasons), but you've got a great curriculum and motivation.

carlob 7y ago

I think this is going to be very controversial on the typical HN crowd: maybe too European, or too socialist. However here it goes. Some ten years ago I was convinced that private schools had a right to exist, but that they should never impact the funding of public schools, not even indirectly. Then I discovered that homeschooling was a thing in the US. Now I tend to believe that private schools should not be allowed to exist. School is far too important as a social mixer and a way to educate well-rounded citizens to leave it to the whims of parents. Parents already have a large enough impact on their kids, to let them take over 100% of their time. I also strongly believe that parents whose beliefs prevent their kids from getting the medical care they deserve (from refusing transfusions, to refusing vaccines) should get a hard look from social services. In general I don't believe that parenthood trumps some things that as a society we consider basic human rights. I think most people would agree with me when it comes down to issues like violence, exploitation and child labor, but I think this should extend to the access to healthcare and to a secular education.

surge 7y ago
You have a very narrow view of home schooling and only the worse cases. Take a look at the worse outcomes of public schooling and the averages in performance of home school kids versus public school kids. The social anxiety and other issues of kids going through a modern high school versus kids who socialize with mostly adults and socialize in sports programs, co-ops, or groups and learn to be self driven in learning. Public schools have a long way to go before they should be made mandatory. Until it is the very best solution for everyone, until it addresses every learning disability, the class sizes are smaller, teachers are paid better, classes track with a students ability and mental development and actually run in line with the latest in neuroscience and child development, have flexible hours so teenagers can sleep longer, put less on the kids when they go home so they have time for family activities and social interaction instead of 3-4 hrs of homework. Maybe when the solution isn't to medicate kids who don't learn by sitting still at a desk 6 hours a day with few breaks, elimination of recess and 20-30 minute lunch periods and few if any opportunities to "socialize" in the current schooling environment. When they teach problem solving and critical thinking, rather than rote memorizing for one standardized test at the end of year. If going to school was more like being an adult or put responsibilities on the student, like a college does, rather than treating the student population like they're in a low security prison. When it uses a system that wasn't developed for training factory workers and hasn't transitioned at all since then. When all the new money added to their budgets isn't siphoned up in administrative costs. When schools in many neighborhoods put kids in physical danger, involve gang activity and a good option simply isn't available to them because of their district. Then maybe we can talk about making it mandatory. Even then, the most rich and privileged still would have loop holes for tutoring their kids for something other than factory work. We would still need exceptions for kids who for a variety of reasons, medical or otherwise need to be at home, students who travel or work in acting/performance. Kids who are on specialized career tracks in schools geared towards where its best they learn very young (perforamance arts and music, CS) to compete in a global market. This idea that one education fits all is myopic and doesn't line up with the results that public schools produce thus far, and you want to take away any alternative. It would be like if the only healthcare option in the US was the VA, and no one was allowed to seek healthcare else where because some people make bad health decisions and go to homeopathic healthcare providers.

somethoughts 7y ago

The one I would be interested in would be "home-after-schooling". I would love to have more resources to help support K-8 students learn how to do original research for science fairs, MOOCs for non-math subjects and programming. Basically Khan Academy type courses that can enable teaching economics, literature, philosophy to a 12 year old. The interesting non-math stuff for Khan Academy doesn't start until 9-12th grade. I'd be curious as to why there is not an option to watch a recorded version with Outschool.

amirnathoo 7y ago
It's a matter of focus. We'd love there to be more self-study content available for kids also. But MOOCs have a famously low completion rate and it's hard to stay motivated without interaction. So we're focused on connecting learners and teachers and having them interact over video chat.
- droithomme 7y ago
  > low completion rate Most people who sign up don't actually want a certificate and aren't trying to complete. They are interested in the subject, watching some videos, move on. When you have class sizes with 1000-30,000 students, it's OK if 90% don't complete the certificate since many more did than in a brick and mortar school, yet it cost much less per student to deliver the class. In online classes where you need to pay to get the certificate, it's been found that paid students have the same completion rate as brick and mortar university students. https://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/fee-payments-lift-mooc-completion-rates-20150409-1mhw76 https://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/fee-payments-lift-... > Students in massive open online courses (MOOC) who pay a modest amount for a "verified certificate" are just as likely finish their course as regular university students, according to a new large-scale study of online education.
  - geomark 7y ago
    This. Low completion rate of those who enrolled for free is, in a way, actually a positive indicator because it shows a lot more people getting a chance to "taste" a subject. Many decide it isn't for them or they learned what they wanted and are not interested in the certificate at the end. Something not possible with in-class courses.

momokoko 7y ago

I think EdTech forgets that student success has much less to do with schooling(home or otherwise). This is why education has bounced from trend to trend over the last 50 years. Because we constantly think we've found a silver bullet, but then after a decade or so, we realize it was once again correlation. If you really look at the data, student outcomes essentially boil down to parents and the students themselves. We've see this with how standardized testing has gone over so poorly. The truth is that, outside of gaming the test system with essentially test prep style cramming, schools really have not been able to make any real meaningful changes to student outcomes. Absolutely, schools can move the needle a bit in either direction, but outside of edge cases, I feel as though it may be a challenge to show the kind of outcome data that makes any EdTech product a must have in US education.

barry-cotter 7y ago
Improvements in teaching are very unlikely to change the rank ordering of who learns fastest/most/best. It can absolutely change how much I’d learned and when individual students learn something. Online teaching is far more conducive to mastery learning and ability grouping than offline education. Look at Lambda School for an example. If you have large cohorts starting on a regular basis you can have some people progressing slower than others but ensure they get there eventually in a way that’s not going to happen in a normal classroom environment. The scope for individualised instruction in an environment where you have classes of 15-30 students is limited. If you have 200 students starting every four weeks you can divide them into ten 20 person classes based on where they are in the curriculum and they’ll do much better than if they were doing things they’d already mastered or for which they just don’t have the prerequisites. On a more purely technological basis integrating spaced repetition into instructional design would be a massive win. Imagine if people actually remembered what they’d been taught in school instead of having a hazy idea the US Civil War was somewhere in the 1800s.
- momokoko 7y ago
  Lamda school picks winners from the outset. Public education doesn't get that option.

iambateman 7y ago

In the late 90’s my parents homeschooled me. We had a subscription to a teaching service that broadcast lessons on Satellite at 2am. My parents set the VCR to record each night and then we played the tape back for “class”. Everything was awful. To this day, my understanding of elementary science is a little worse than one would expect because my mom didn’t enjoy teaching science. I’m so glad for advanced services making more forms of schooling possible for people. Just to throw some ice on some of the heat in the comments... - homeschooling isn’t for everyone, but it works wonderfully for some. My sister hated it and I loved it. People are different and need different approaches to learning. - some people who homeschool are religious, and some of them are “fundamentalist”. But most of the people I encountered were simply “religious.” There’s a difference. ;)

austhrow743 7y ago
Are/ were you religious at the time? Any chance that you and the rest of us actually share an idea of how religious homeschool people are but just have different cut offs for when we start throwing the term "fundamentalist" around? Anyone who genuinely believes the specifics beyond being a theist who pays lip service to Christianity is starting to head in to nut territory, personally.

jpm_sd 7y ago

Students can also access "real time group classes taught largely by very experienced K12 teachers" by... going to school.

linuxftw 7y ago
Opportunity cost can't justify public school. Seems to be a large waste of time, super authoritative, and mentally damaging to many.
forgotmypw 7y ago
I completed grades 1, 2, 3, and 5 in the USSR, right before its breaking apart. (I skipped grade 4 not because I was exceptionally smart, but because of the conversion from 10- to 11-year system.) I went to an average public school, not like a specialized math-heavy school, which also existed. Then I moved to the U.S. and started 6th grade, decent public school in a major city. I went to ESL class instead of regular English. Some of the history stuff was new to me. I struggled with integrating and being bullied, though not too badly. But as far as math and science goes, I was coasting up until 9th grade, when I started high school. In 8th grade, I was added to the "gifted" program, which basically meant I spent one period a week hanging out with the other gifted kids doing I don't even remember what. I've been told that while USSR designed its cirruculum to be passable by 80% of the students, in the U.S. it's designed to be passable by close to 100%. Which means that even if your child is smart, they'll be dragging along with the least capable 20% of the school population, doing busywork and being bored, wasting their time instead of learning all they could be at the most capable time of their life. (Russia's current education system has been stripped and crippled, so it's on par or worse than U.S. now.)
Matticus_Rex 7y ago
As a former high school teacher, as intuitive as this seems, it's dubious at best. To truly have "access," you need a lot of things in place (nutrition, sleep, prerequisite learning, a good school, an experienced teacher), and a lot of things not getting in the way (other kids, the institution, the teacher, circumstances). The bar is much lower for Outschool to hit the target.

jonny_eh 7y ago

Hiring a high school student to tutor a kid in math is not a "1%er" solution. Maybe 50%er?

dnprock 7y ago

I think public school system provides a good return for dollars spent. It has the scale that is difficult to match with other schooling methods. This is my experience from shuffling between private preschools. I think other schooling methods are appropriate if your circumstance forces you (e.g. bad public school system.) You can always opt out of the crazy things that happen at public schools. After school, you can homeschool your kids. This way you can get the positives of both systems. Education is complicated. We need to avoid comparing and optimization. It's idiotic to make a personal stance in education.

master-litty 7y ago

I interviewed with Outschool a few months ago, happy to see them here! They're a wonderful team. I've never seen a group of people with so much positive chemistry before; I've started asking more culture-centered questions in my interviews since then, now that I think about it. I think it's the best kind of team to front an educational endeavour and it's one big reason I believe in them. It's easier to have a healthy classroom environment if the providing workplace is healthy too.

mdaniel 7y ago
And perhaps related to this post, there was a YC "ad" a few links above this post saying: > Outschool (YC W16) Is Hiring a Senior Software Engineer in SF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20048401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20048401

killjoywashere 7y ago

Unless this results in better education outcomes spread across the entire population in the red states, this is effectively a bid to support the Republican agenda. This will follow the same pattern as standardized testing: those with the means will pursue the best investments. Those without will be left behind. And so the cycle of inequality worsens. This is "greed is good" politics. Think about it. If they were serious about education, why are they not investing, Koch-style, in local politics? Why are they not funding candidates who will advocate for stronger school systems, better transportation, school lunches, etc? This has nothing to do with kids. This has everything to do with extracting as much money as possible from the most anxious, which is incidentally the rapidly vanishing elbow of middle class in the ever-steepening power law curve of wealth distribution in the US.

carlob 7y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I, too have the impression that most of the commenters here are completely oblivious to the effects of their choices on society at large. The fact that I have been accused multiple times of not having children is evidence of an appeal to emotion: "You can only understand this if you think about your own family".
- burfog 7y ago
  The accusation of not having children is the polite one, assuming no malice. The worse ones are that you would exempt your own children (the rest of us get to sacrifice ours), or that you wouldn't exempt your children (due to not caring about them).

falcor84 7y ago

>...students in the US who need to learn things like Algebra, European History, Biology, etc... HN, what's your take on the above? Do you believe that there is any particular curriculum of subjects that students "need" to have studied to be prepared for doing well in the world they will be living in?

burfog 7y ago
economics, law, financial planning, accounting, cooking, how to repair things, business writing, estimation That's all. No, we mostly don't teach this stuff anymore. For those going the college route, obviously the STEM prerequisites must be satisfied. This means AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Physics C (both halves), and AP Calculus BC.
- falcor84 7y ago
  Thanks for responding. I wanted to contest the word "need" - given that the best majority of students aren't taught (in a schooling setting) even 1 of the subjects you mentioned, and we still live in an arguably quite civilized modern society, would you agree that they don't actually "need" to be taught?

HNLurker2 7y ago

This sounds to me like an American problem