Homeschooling for Equality in the City

It was a glorious day of about 50 degrees today, so I took T & C to the nearby playground.  While there, some mothers were talking about what they plan on doing for school for their children for next year.  There are several "options": a handful of public schools and a couple of charter schools.  They were hoping that their kids would "get in" to a good school.  If you live in Buffalo, you probably know the ones that came up in conversation.  "Choosing" a school in Buffalo is complicated.  There are many ways to get into the good schools, either a test, living in a certain area, sibling preference, or lottery.  Many people who do not live in an urban area assume that city schools automatically must be bad, but if you live there you know that the schools in the city districts are a variety.  Buffalo has some of the best public schools in the country, award winning at times, and some of the worst schools, perhaps like those in some sociology textbooks.

T & C are quite bright.  T finished kindergarten in homeschool before age 5.  C is more than halfway done kindergarten despite not being four and a half yet.  This causes many people to wonder why I homeschool.  They tell me that I should take my kids to the tests and get them into the good school since they would make it.  Most likely they are correct about my kids making it.

But what about the kids that don't get into the good school?  Shouldn't all children be entitled to go to a good education or at least one of equal quality?  I am reflecting on this lately because of the recent article where Dana Goldstein of Slate says "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids".  I had to spend some time contemplating this since I consider myself to be more of a liberal than a conservative.  Two things stand out in my mind.  From a practical standpoint, by homeschooling my kids, two more slots are open at a "good school" so two more city kids can get a better education than they would have.  Contrary to the article's implications, I am helping other city kids.  This is something I can single handedly do rather than when parents "work in the system" to change it which may or may not yield results.

The other aspect of this discussion that comes to mind is what it means to be a liberal.  Liberals get far too enamored with the government running programs.  I would not advocate to take government out of funding or prioritizing education, but I strongly suggest that government is not good at operating education.  Rather than think that the enemy of public education is no education or private education, public education could come to mean something totally different and more effective.  Perhaps liberals should be fighting for government funding of families with school age kids to homeschool since giving up an income to homeschool is costly.  It sounds crazy at first, but public schools generally are not great, and certainly parents have a better incentive to educate their own children than strangers do no matter how well trained or certified.  There could also be a wide array of resources in some sort of online curriculum bank for families to choose with some mild accountability standards.  Strict accountability is not as necessary since parents are more likely to care about quality for their own kids than strangers.

When it comes to education in Buffalo, or any urban area, making homeschooling a real option for people could be a great liberal cause.  If students can be so easily left out of the "good schools", what other avenues do they have for some educational equality?  Working in the system doesn't make sense if the system can't be fixed all that easily or it takes so much time that children are left to fail.  A couple of years at the school age can make or break a kid's future depending on the quality.  Is that really fair?  Fairness is what being liberal is supposed to be about.  Time for liberals to do some soul searching when it comes to education!