Exploring Options, Tradeoffs For Our Daughter’s Homeschooling Experience

And Emily Oster speaks about being a public intellectual on a college campus

It should be an article of faith that there’s never a “perfect” solution–for anything. Navigating life is about making tradeoffs. Some are big tradeoffs, and others are relatively minor or barely noticeable.

That’s certainly true in the pandemic. Rather than compare any choice to some mythical idea or the way it all used to be, it has to be compared to the set of actual alternatives. Families have to figure out what their priorities are and what progress looks like for them; what tradeoffs they are willing to make to accomplish that; and what level of risk are they willing to bear as they do so.

This equation applied as much to Thanksgiving last week as it does to parents’ choices around their children’s schooling this fall. But in my opinion parents ought to lean in a bit more on some of these choices even in regular times.

It’s why I’m chronicling some of our experience in choosing to homeschool this fall and how we have thought about the decisions and tradeoffs we’ve made in the process of shaping what that homeschooling would look like. Not to argue that parents ought to homeschool in regular times, but to give people a window into some of the key questions they might think about as they either generate schooling options or work with their child’s school about what the day-to-day experience looks like. This is a hot topic now of course: Enrollment in public schools in Massachusetts is down nearly 4% this fall, for example; private school enrollment has doubled in the Commonwealth; and the number of homeschoolers climbed nearly tenfold.

But more generally, parents ought to be savvy consumers of their children’s educations. Amidst the horror of this pandemic, I’m hopeful that we will exit it with parents asking more critical and forward-thinking questions than they have in the past.

If you’re interested in our own journey, check out my latest for Forbes on the topic, “Exploring Options, Tradeoffs For Our Daughters’ Homeschooling Experience.” With four priorities for the year ahead—safety, socialization, outdoors, and childcare—we cycled through three options before we settled on our direction for the fall. You can read the piece here.

Helping Older Adults Learn Online Socially

On my YouTube channel, education entrepreneur Neil D’Souza joined me to talk about his hot startup, GetSetup (https://www.getsetup.io/), which offers live online classes for older learners in a social format. The classes help older adults battle social isolation and create new opportunities, and the company recently attracted $10 million in Series A funding from such noteworthy investors as Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus, John Danner, and Jerry Yang. Check out the conversation here.

The Role of the Public Intellectual

On Future U, Brown University economist Emily Oster joined me and Jeff Selingo. As the debate over reopening K–12 schools and colleges has reached a fever pitch, Oster—who gained her fame dispensing advice to parents based on data—has been at the forefront of the public conversation about schools and COVID-19. We asked her about the dynamics of being a public intellectual on a university campus and how she deals with criticism. Listen to the podcast here.

Learning differences, voice recognition, and video cameras

Different students have different learning needs at different times. Want to know if an edtech product supports those different needs? Check out this YouTube conversation with Vic Vuchic, executive director of the Learner Variability Project at Digital Promise Global.

And if you’re curious about the potential for voice recognition in remote learning, take a look at this piece in Forbes titled, “SoapBox Labs Gives Voice To The Obstacles, Opportunities Of Remote Learning.”

Finally, in Class Disrupted, Diane Tavenner and I dig into the debate among educators about whether students ought to keep their video cameras on during live classes—and ask whether policies that punish students for not having their cameras on miss a bigger set of opportunities. You can listen to our podcast and conversation here.

As always, thank you for reading, listening, and writing.