True Cost of Public Schools, Part I

A recent study on how public schools underreport their costs was especially interesting to me because of an online discussion I got into ages ago with some public school teachers who insisted that there were 'hidden costs' to homeschooling that we homeschoolers weren't taking into account which made homeschooling cost at least as much as public school.

Now, I do not think it is at all fair to compare public schools to home schools. We aren't doing the same thing at all, and I could never do what public school teachers do. I understand that, and I didn't think it was a fair comparison, but I wasn't the one making it.

And... while I don't think it's fair to compare the two, I also don't think it's fair to let stand a claim that is nonsense on the face of it. I thought the idea that homeschooling cost *more* than public education because there 'hidden' costs that I just was too dumb to understand was nonsense because the amount our local schools would have spent to educate our then six children was three thousand dollars more than our family income when we had six children, yet we were debt-free- ergo, we clearly were  educating our kids for less than the public schools were.

One of these public school teachers (who cleverly called me an idiot) even insisted I should take into account the cost of our dining room table since we did school at the table. We also do a considerable amount of schooling in the winter snuggled up under the blankets on my bed, but I am not going to count the cost of my bed and the blankets as a legitimate cost of homeschooling, either. I'd have the bed, covers, and table even if we were childless.  Even if he'd had a legitimate point, which he did not, our dining room tables have all been either free, or purchased used for less than a hundred dollars (closer to 20.00 in most cases), and amortized over time, the cost of those tables remains negligible.

It is true that for some people it is reasonable to count the lost wages of a stay at home parent who is home educating. We aren't one of those families, however, and I explained this at the time,  but for now I'll just leave this as a flat statement for now.  Trust me, we aren't missing any lost wages because I am staying home to homeschool our children.

They continued to insist that they just knew that there were hidden costs I wasn't counting- which made one grieve for the lack of logical ability demonstrated, given the fact, that, again, public schools would have spent more to educate our children than our debt-free family's annual income.  It was an obvious impossibility, therefore, that our family was under-estimating the cost of homeschooling our children.  The obvious clearly escapes some people.

I pointed out a number of hidden costs to the parents of children in public school, real costs in real money, that people do not often consider (school clothes, fees, consumable supplies, transportation costs, presents for the teacher, supplies for the classroom, etc).   Well... it turns out there are quite a few other 'hidden' costs of public schools, too- only these are hidden deliberately:



So... they spend thousands and thousands of dollars per pupil already, fudge the figures about just how much they are spending, and then.... continue to process through children who cannot read, and the solution for this problem is always give them more money to continue to fail in the same spectacular way.


What is that spectacular way?  Come back tomorrow and I'll have more to share.=)

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