What specifically do you think is really high variance as opposed to the main downside being that it is expensive? If it is the ‘not going to school thing’ at least when I was growing up as a religiously homeschooled kid in the 90s, the strong impression that I got was that homeschooled kids systematically did better than other kids in terms of college success and other legible metrics—of course this has a gargantuan selection bias going on. But that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids.
The other stuff I recall from the article (ie being from a high resource background, having an intellectual mentor, being surrounded by intellectual conversations, getting one on one tutoring, good intrinsic capability) all seem to be things that either you can’t pick whether a child has or not, or where it would be weird if they left the child worse off.
One on one tutoring, for example, just doesn’t seem like a high variance thing, it seems like a positive expected value thing that might not actually be that causally important or have that big of impact, but where it will only make things worse in exceptional cases.
Isolating kids from peers is damaging to social skills in many cases. That would not show up in academic success, but it matters for happiness
Giving kids control over what they learn, and having them self-guide, is very prone to failing to pick up key skills—and some of the time, the skills are critical enough to handicap them later.
Also, “that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids”—It really doesn’t. If 25% of homeschooled kids do much better than average, and 75% do significantly worse, looking at those who went to college means you’ve completely eliminated the part of the sample that was harmed.
So this is based on my memory of homeschooling propaganda articles that I saw as a kid. But I’m pretty sure the data they had there showed most kids went to college. In my family three of us got University of California degrees, and the one who only got a nursing degree in his thirties authentically enjoyed manual labor jobs until he decided he also wanted more money.
Perhaps these numbers do stop at college, and so we don’t see in them children who get a good college education, but then fail in some important way later on in life, but I’ve never gotten an impression from anywhere that homeschooled children have generally worse life outcomes—anyways, this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.
I did have substantial social problems, even as an adult, and they have led me to be less successful in career terms than I probably would have been with stronger social skills. But this might be driven by a selection effect: The reason my parents actually started homeschooling me was because I was being bullied and having severe social problems in third grade.
“this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.”
Never mind. There aren’t particularly good studies. But what exists seems to say that homeschooled students do much better than average for all students, but maybe somewhat worse than the average for students with their parent’s SES backgrounds.
But the data mostly comes from non-random samples, so it is hard to generate firm conclusions.
It’s also mostly “conditional on acceptance, homeschooled students do better”—and given the selection bias in the conditional sample, that would reflect a bias against them in admissions, rather than being a fact about homeschooling.
What specifically do you think is really high variance as opposed to the main downside being that it is expensive? If it is the ‘not going to school thing’ at least when I was growing up as a religiously homeschooled kid in the 90s, the strong impression that I got was that homeschooled kids systematically did better than other kids in terms of college success and other legible metrics—of course this has a gargantuan selection bias going on. But that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids.
The other stuff I recall from the article (ie being from a high resource background, having an intellectual mentor, being surrounded by intellectual conversations, getting one on one tutoring, good intrinsic capability) all seem to be things that either you can’t pick whether a child has or not, or where it would be weird if they left the child worse off.
One on one tutoring, for example, just doesn’t seem like a high variance thing, it seems like a positive expected value thing that might not actually be that causally important or have that big of impact, but where it will only make things worse in exceptional cases.
Isolating kids from peers is damaging to social skills in many cases. That would not show up in academic success, but it matters for happiness
Giving kids control over what they learn, and having them self-guide, is very prone to failing to pick up key skills—and some of the time, the skills are critical enough to handicap them later.
Also, “that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids”—It really doesn’t. If 25% of homeschooled kids do much better than average, and 75% do significantly worse, looking at those who went to college means you’ve completely eliminated the part of the sample that was harmed.
So this is based on my memory of homeschooling propaganda articles that I saw as a kid. But I’m pretty sure the data they had there showed most kids went to college. In my family three of us got University of California degrees, and the one who only got a nursing degree in his thirties authentically enjoyed manual labor jobs until he decided he also wanted more money.
Perhaps these numbers do stop at college, and so we don’t see in them children who get a good college education, but then fail in some important way later on in life, but I’ve never gotten an impression from anywhere that homeschooled children have generally worse life outcomes—anyways, this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.
I did have substantial social problems, even as an adult, and they have led me to be less successful in career terms than I probably would have been with stronger social skills. But this might be driven by a selection effect: The reason my parents actually started homeschooling me was because I was being bullied and having severe social problems in third grade.
“this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.”
Never mind. There aren’t particularly good studies. But what exists seems to say that homeschooled students do much better than average for all students, but maybe somewhat worse than the average for students with their parent’s SES backgrounds.
But the data mostly comes from non-random samples, so it is hard to generate firm conclusions.
It’s also mostly “conditional on acceptance, homeschooled students do better”—and given the selection bias in the conditional sample, that would reflect a bias against them in admissions, rather than being a fact about homeschooling.