I don't see anyone here who's closed to the idea home schooling as a general rule. A dozen or so posts in, all I've seen are very real concerns about the lack of socialization, the concern that parents would have difficulty being objective and adequately measuring progress, etc. Those are just two of many reasons why the decision to home school should be considered very carefully.

Now, my wife and I don't have kids, and won't for some time, so I don't have personal experience with any of these issues. But I do happen to have three coworkers whose wives home school their kids (which is quite a statistical aberration) and I've had a fair number of conversations with them about the pros, cons, etc.

Let's start with the easiest and least refutable knock against home schooling, which is that it's completely out of the goddamn question for single parent or dual parent, dual income families. If home schooling your child isn't taking up at least a full time job's worth of your time and effort, you are Doing. It. Wrong.

So, for those lucky few for whom a parent can put in the time and effort required to be a good home school teacher, you also need that parent to understand enough about all of the subjects to teach them. At early grade levels, this is easy, but I'd imagine by the time you're getting to high school level classes, college AP material, etc. the material becomes challenging for anyone who hasn't already been a professional teacher or homeschooled their other kids. At this point, the teacher must become the student, and not all parents will be able to keep up. This is also one of the benefits of home schooling, that it motivates the parents to keep learning, but not everyone is going to have the kind of focus necessary to learn the material well enough to teach it properly.



I think one can simultaneously believe that (a) our public education system is very troubled and (b) home schooling is not the answer for an overwhelming majority of children. I think (b) almost proves itself just when you factor in its lack of applicability to most dual-income and single-parent situations, leaving aside the admittedly more difficult to prove critiques pertaining to social aspects, the lack of objectivity, parental teaching aptitude, etc. I also think that resolving (a) by focusing on improving the public schools rather than abandoning them is better for our society than everyone turning inward and fending for themselves.

Redrum, for your situation specifically, I just can't see how changing horses mid-stream (or toward the end of the stream) makes sense. What is so bad about this school? Your daughter has managed to do very well academically in this supposedly terrible environment. She's got one year left. What could possibly be so bad to cause you to try to make this change at the 11th hour? Not to take anything away from your wife, who I'm sure is a very capable teacher, but is she going to have enough detailed knowledge of all the subjects your daughter is going to want to learn, and is she going to have the time to learn the portions she needs to bone up on in time to teach them to your daughter?

This, combined with the possibility of colleges / scholarships looking down on a GED, or questioning the decision to home school the final year, I just don't see what's really gained by making such a drastic move this late in the game.