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Damn. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire a live-in private tutor for every five children?
Live-in is expensive, and people worry about socialisation.
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This is to a very real extent what some families are discovering about voucher programs. The state of Arizona seems to have the most developed "direct payment" program, with "Empowerment Scholarship Accounts" that put $6,000+ per child straight into a parent's hands. If you've got four school-aged children to homeschool, the state will put $24,000 directly into your hands to purchase learning resources. If you've got a co-op with ten kids, that's $60,000 to pay a co-op teacher.
And that $6,000 is actually saving Arizona money, because Arizona normally spends about $12,000 per enrolled student on public education. Imagine New York following suit at the 50% mark--the state spends about $37,000 per enrolled student, so they could offer $18,000 per student to parents instead.
The amount of money in American public education is utterly staggering. Teachers complain about their pay (who doesn't?) but how much are teacher's union representatives, highly compensated superintendents, armies of DEI staffers, etc. actually contributing to improved childhood education? I'm pretty comfortable that the answer is "not contributing anything at all," but even if I charitably allow that half of what they do is worthwhile, the level of graft would still be measured as tens of billions of dollars each year. Public education is overwhelmingly a jobs program (and influence laundering machine).
Teachers complaining about pay makes me far angrier than it probably should because of how extremely overpaid many of them already are. I'm sure there are some rural Oklahoma districts paying new teachers $30,000, but this is not the norm. Every time I've looked into specific numbers, it's turned out that teachers make as much or more than similarly educated/skilled professionals in other fields, once you account for teachers' extraordinarily generous benefits and the fact you only have to work 9 months out of the year. When my mother retired from teaching kindergarten a few years ago, she was making well north of $100,000 a year for 4-5 hours of work a day, 200 days a year, in a job where she received essentially zero oversight and enjoyed the sort of job security where nothing short of a felony conviction would stop the checks from coming. I understand that this was in a California school district and does not represent the situation everywhere, but my experience is that teaching is one of the easiest and most remunerative professions available for the vast majority of people who currently work as teachers (there's a reason you always see laid off teachers working menial service jobs and entry level clerical work, and not pivoting to the sort of white collar work you'd expect their educations would qualify them for -- teaching was already by far the most attractive option available to them).
It's this bizarre martyr complex where teachers are constantly crowing about how unappreciated they are, completely blind to the fact that they're already basking in universal adulation far in excess of what their actual contribution to society should dictate. Every teacher I've ever met complains about how little credit they get for the time they spend after hours grading papers, etc. without any overtime, and they are universally shocked when I explain to them that's how it works for literally every non-hourly profession. Like they couldn't wrap their minds around the idea that other people also sometimes have to take work home, that they're not the only ones who don't get to always "clock out" at the end of the official work day.
It takes a lot of audacity to claim you have a thankless job when you have a literal pile of "thank you" gifts on your desk at the end of each school year.
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Actively harmful, in many cases. See e.g. the fad to ban algebra from middle schools for equity reasons, which wasn't coming from the teachers (who aren't innocents in the sorry state of the educational system, but their roles are at least grounded in something real).
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