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I'm trying to do a deeper dive into education and its outcomes on children's life success. This is sort of a rehash on a post i made before. However this time the speaker is Matthew Stewart, who documents the same class differences that Charles Murray wrote about. Particular focus on the 9.9%. These people essentially live in gated neighborhoods with zoning that excludes people with less overall wealth. Much of schooling is funded by property taxes, and so as a result of the 9.9%'s houses being expensive, their schools get more and better funding, but when i took a small look, ive come across information stating that poor and rich schools receive the same funding in many instances, bringing the better schools advantage into question. To be fair, these schools may still hold an advantage in other ways, perhaps they have students that are less disruptive for example. Ive noticed here that there are many who debate this issue as one of the chicken and egg. Is it that the people in the lower class simply do bad behaviors, and thus they are in the lower-class with bad schools, and their children have worst outcomes because of it (or the children themselves are bad, which makes the school bad as well since you have many bad children that disrupt well behaved children's ability to learn), (and vice versa - the higher class simply made the right decisions, and thus their children benefit.) or does already being in poverty cause the bad behaviors/poor schooling? It seems very clear that college education effects outcomes such as higher earnings. But Id like more information on K-12. Mainly because id like to give my offspring the best advantage possible, and select the optimal school district and educational system for him/her. Does this simply not matter as much as we thought previously? Or perhaps there is more in the power of parents to help with schooling, with educational activities such as reading and writing at an early age?
Home and homeschool.
This is heavily colored by my own experiences but barring getting your kids into a really good K-12 system I don't think you can beat homeschooling for purely educational outcomes. With the caveat that at least one of the parents is going to need to be heavily involved in running the show, at least during the early years up until middle school. Once you get to that point if your kids are motivated you can basically go autopilot, and once they hit 11th grade early college programs are a popular option.
One more caveat, extracurriculars that get your kids involved with peers and mentors outside the home are going to be critical for obvious reasons.
I was homeschooled, and... it depends. In general, I liked it. My mom is disposed to be a decent teacher, and went on to teach lower elementary in the public schools. I ended up very well educated in literature, because a Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky book club is my parents' idea of a good time. Math didn't go so well. This is fine, since I don't necessarily want to be a Woman in STEM, but also very common among homeschoolers I know, even with engineer fathers. I think math just inherently requires more structure and pushing for a lot of teens than reading and writing do.
Khan Academy has pretty much solved this problem for pre-college math.
But here ... yeah, it really depends on the kid. Letting our kids work independently (along with a charter school that is very flexible), my son got 5 or 6 years ahead in math because he loves math, his older sister got a couple years ahead because she loves the idea of getting into a good college, and his younger sister just does what she's asked to because she loves her mommy, which is going to put our "don't be pushy parents" philosophy to the test in the coming years.
Assuming you have a natural aptitude for math, yes. Realistically homeschoolers with more structure(coops, etc) do much better than homeschoolers with less structure for math.
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