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My wife and I are both ex-teachers.

Public schools are as different as the types of CHLers. There are those who are energetic and dedicated toward their mission and others where the school seems to exist without any real sense of purpose or direction. The term "going through the motions" comes to mind.

Our personal experience with public schools is that most of them seem to take a "one size fits all" approach. Not all kids learn the same and need different pathways to learning. There are students, like our daughter, who can absorb almost anything quickly,inherently understanding testing and do extremely well with it. If the student fits into the pattern that the school establishes, they usually do well. Visual learners fare the worst in the school environment since schools rarely fit many visual learning techniques into the curriculum.

I taught music in a magnet school with a range of students from the cream of the crop that were academically talented to several types of special needs kids (they were not "mainstreamed" in those days) with physical and emotional limitations. I often struggled to find different ways to help my students learn since I could not afford the one size fits all approach. I found several kindred spirits among the faculty and we often shared our successes and failures with one another.

My wife quit teaching early, mostly out of sheer frustration. Too often, the schools specifically mandate a style of teaching and if that style is not working with the kids that year, there is no flexibility to try something different. Especially in elementary school, some grade levels just require a different approach than was used for that same grade level the previous year. I generally hate sports analogies with education but it is somewhat like a defense scheme in football. It has to be flexible to adapt to the approach that the offense is taking. The good schools adapt, the bad ones don't.

Our experience with home schooling is pretty much the same as others. Some are extremely successful with it, both academically and socially. Some kids are saved through home schooling because they didn't fit the method of learning that the public school was providing and flourished when the educational approach was oriented to the way that they learned. The percentage that were worse off because of home schooling seemed significantly less than the percentage that were worse off in the public school environment.