In response to the original question, you should see if your state offers Post-Secondary Enrollment Option, often referred to as PSEO. This program lets honor students like your daughter take college classes on a college campus instead of high-school classes in their senior year. The state and school district pay for tuition & fees, though you may need to buy some books. A couple of my friends went to college full time in their senior year and basically had 25% of their degree paid for through this program. Certainly, this will be more expensive next year than home schooling or going to the other public school, but it's nothing compared to what you save by missing an entire year of college expenses. Long term, this is a fantastic value.

I really thought Paul Graham's essay " Why Nerds are Unpopular" perfectly described my experience in high school. In this essay, Graham makes the point that public schools are basically places to store children while (usually both) parents are off working. Anything they learn is purely secondary. That basically makes public schools prisons, which is exactly what my high school looked, felt and smelled like. The cruel, "bullying" schoolkid culture has gotten some publicity lately, but nobody seems to notice how similar the schoolkid culture is to gang-based prison culture, and for essentially the same reason: people forced against their will to be in a useless institution with tons of petty rules and bureaucracy with very little control over their own lives. Violent criminals may deserve to be in such a place, but I sure resented it when I was in high school.

Graham's advice to us nerds is to hang on and wait it out, because high school is a dystopian fantasyland that bears little resemblance to real life, which begins in college. Graham assures the kids that things will be instantly different in college, and again, this was my exact experience.

In my opinion, there is absolutely no positive value in the high school "social" experience. Get your kid out and into college where they can develop real relationships, where ideas and thinking is valued and where they can begin to see the bigger world that is around them. Aim higher than just a high school diploma or GED for your daughter and see if she can finish her last year of high school with a year head start in college.

I also find the rest of the discussion on this topic very interesting. It's amazing how quickly the debate goes to school policy. As an anti-collectivist person, I can't help but point out that the root of the problem is having the federal government up to its neck in school policy. Not only does the federal government have no authority to meddle in schooling, but when it does, groups will battle for ideological control over curriculum.

Why not let individuals at the community level create the schools in the image they please? Let the Christians make Christian schools, and let the reason-minded create secular schools that actually prepare kids for the technical world. Then let the parents choose where to send their kids. If a community wants a public school, then let them build one and create a community school board to oversee it. When the federal bureaucracy controls things, we get schools in the image of drivers' license bureaus, watered down, inefficient behemoths that accomplish nothing except political correctness. The result is America ranked 37th in math education, despite being among the highest per-capita spenders on education. A genuine free market in schools and school labor would solve this almost overnight.

Colleges don't escape federal meddling either. I hear many news stories about the "soaring costs of college", but not a single one manages to see the obvious cause. Just like government-created expansionist monetary policy of essentially zero interest rates caused a huge boom in housing prices, artificially-low interest student loans with easy qualification and ever-increasing limits are causing a boom in tuition prices. It's no more complicated than that. Money expansion leads to rising prices. Period.

The result is 22 and 23 year old college graduates saddled with over $100k in debt that can't be bankrupted away. That kind of debt, at that age, basically condemns a person to a hand-to-mouth life. Have you seen the studies that show how if a person in their twenties contributes to a retirement fund from 20 years old to 30 years old and then stops, and another person starts at 30 years old, then the 30 year old contributor will never catch the 20 year old in savings? That's compound interest, and the same applies to debt, only in reverse. Policies that encourage that level of indebtedness by young people are totally reprehensible.

I would also recommend the movie "Waiting for Superman", if you haven't seen it yet.

Jim