I apologize in advance for the wall of text but there's a lot to unpack.
We didn't home school for religious or similar reasons. We home schooled because our local school district is shit. My kids aren't into sports. They're into art, music, and stuff like that. They were both good academically too.
I won't go into exhaustive detail but some of the things we had to deal with:
- Curriculum issues. We've talked about this in the DC subforum and elsewhere but my wife and I became increasingly aware that things like Common Core were teaching kids inefficiently and in some cases, just plain wrong. There was a growing emphasis on "showing your work" - giving kids credit for the attempt, even if the answer was wrong, as long as they used the correct methodology. There was also the constant testing. Funding depends on standardized test scores so they spent more time practicing testing than actually teaching.
- ridiculous lack of logistics when it came to bussing rural kids. Near the end, my kids were on the bus for one hour and five minutes, twice a day. It's actually against the law in Iowa to be on a bus that long.
- defunding art, music, and other things we wanted. My oldest was just finishing elementary school when they got rid of her TAG program. Every year the number of para's (basically babysitters for disruptive kids, because they can't be segregated anymore) goes up and the programs for high achieving kids get cut.
- Other fiscal decisions like spending $3M on a new building that doesn't house students even though it's only 20 years old. Or spending $750K to "fix" the 150-year old school near the country club only to close it completely 3 years later because it's beyond repair.
- Bullying - my kids weren't subjected to it much but we never really gave it much chance. It was almost like mobs were running the school and the admin acted like they were powerless. When a local kid got stabbed across the street from the school, that was kind of the last straw.
We brought a lot of these grievances to the school board as a community because there were dozens of us homeschooling at the time. The school district treated us with contempt and scorn. They never once tried to address the issues or cooperate with us. From the start, we were adversaries. They talked to us like we were heretics from the 10th century, like anyone that dared to question was a witch.
Anyway, we used an online curriculum, some of the classes were the same as what they would get in school but some were above and beyond. The only subject my kids bitched about was history/social studies but I love history so they took it.
I'm not sure what else to say, I could talk about this for hours and hours, there's so much to it. The bottom line is my kids are social, well-adjusted, and even mildly successful (my oldest is the director of our art center and she's only 24). Instead of sitting in a classroom all day, they went on field trips to places school would never take them. They did crazy projects for weeks on end, activities school couldn't accommodate due to rigid schedules and testing quotas. And most of all, they had the freedom to not only truly learn but to excel and not be held back.