Are you considering if homeschooling is better for your family? Let me help you analyze your options based on my family’s experience.
As a family, we have now tried homeschooling, public school, and private school. That puts me in a perfect position to compare all three options.
In prior posts I gave 10 reasons to use public school and 20 reasons to homeschool. In that analysis, homeschooling won not because there were more reasons, but because those 20 reasons mean more to me than the 10 reasons in support of public school (which largely apply to private school, too).
Why I didn’t homeschool last fall
Disclaimer: It wasn’t really by choice. In all of my analyses, homeschooling subjectively wins.
Our kids went to private school for nearly half of the 2024-2025 school year because we did not find a suitable nanny. Since I started working full time from home in late 2023, we needed a nanny to homeschool. I wouldn’t quite say my job is essential, but it greatly reduces our financial stress.
The transition to private school was very hard for me, which I kind of expected after our brief experience with public school last fall. I knew that sending our kids to school took lot of extra work outside of school hours to facilitate my kids’ attendance, so I anticipated being tired for the first few weeks. The problem is that it didn’t abate. I still struggled to get enough sleep alongside all of my other obligations nearly three months in.
That led me to objectively assess (as much as I can) the time and money each schooling option takes. How much time and money could we save (or not) by homeschooling?
The results surprised me.
How much time and money
could we save (or not)
by homeschooling?
Homeschooling saves time
Time is perhaps my most valuable personal resource. Once I use it, I can’t get it back. Homeschooling and mass schooling present very different cases for my daily schedule. (Your mileage may vary.)
Time needed for homeschooling
Homeschooling does not have to be nearly as time consuming as many people think. How much time do the teacher and students spend transitioning between subjects or classes, managing behavior and attention in a class of 20-ish kids, or catering to kids working at a different speed than your child? I’m going to make a wild supposition that 30% of the teacher’s time with students is spend in these ways.
Then there are whole chunks of time you can remove from the schedule. You can take out lunch and recess since those are not instructional time. Granted, I would not neglect to feed your child or ban time to play and exercise, but that can be done outside of the homeschool time and with much more freedom of choice and timing than at school. Joining the a local soccer team or taking gymnastics classes could count as gym class, supplanting the need for yet another class. Library time can just be a family outing every month or so. Those chunks added up to about 6.5 hours each week at my kids’ school, or about 1.3 hours on average each day. (Note: This is not to criticize my kids’ school. These are just artifacts of mass schooling.)
Starting with a 7-hour school day, taking out those chunks leaves about 5.7 hours. Then multiply that by 70% to account for classroom management and it’s down to about 4 hours per day for direct instructional time, independent work and reading, and the myriad assessments that make student monitoring easier in mass schooling. I’m not sure how to account for the parts of this that are not teacher intensive, so I’ll leave it at that. Only about 55%-60% of the week is spend on academic schoolwork, and some of that is independent work.
Time for public or private school
I’m going to treat the school day at a public or private school as a black box. The kids are at school, no matter what they’re doing there. Sticking with the numbers from my kids’ most recent private school, a school day is 7 hours long. For this school, we as the parents spent about an hour and a quarter on transportation at both ends of the school day–two and a half hours of transportation daily. Winter weather would lengthen the drive even more since we live in Wisconsin.
We spent about an hour prepping the kids for school in the morning, and even that is a rush. Then we spent another approximately 90 minutes clearing out lunch boxes, supervising homework, and prepping kids’ shoes, socks, and clothing in the evening. Each week, I probably spent another hour or two washing and organizing uniforms and organizing backpacks and outdoor gear.
The total approximate time consumption outside of school hours: more than 4 hours per school day. Mind you, the kid’s school day is only 7 hours. Some of those prep hours overlap with the 7 hours in a school day, so I didn’t actually get 7 hours of work time either. It ended up being more like 4 hours of work time if I squeezed in a short workout, which is critical to preventing migraines and long-term joint problems for me. It also ignores house and farm maintenance, organization, cleaning, or other life activities.
Homeschool vs. public or private school
For more visual people (myself included), let’s look at the actual schedules for our three school options. This assumes four hours of nanny time while homeschooling, bus service for public school, and a private school that is 25-30 minutes away.
When I compare these schedules side by side, I understand why I’m so tired and feel like I never have free time. I’m over scheduled and I don’t have free time. (Duh!)
More seriously, I was truly taken aback by the numbers. I didn’t realize how much of a difference homeschooling made in our daily schedule.
I’d like to highlight a few things in these schedules.
Unscheduled (mostly free) time
Look at the columns labeled with M (for munchkins) under each option. Do you see that beautiful block of three hours in the morning after a generous breakfast period? That is mostly free time. If they don’t dawdle too much, they can have a bit of a recess after lunch, too. Then there’s another big block of free time in the afternoon after a few hours of school and computer learning time. That amounts to six hours of free time for them to explore their interests, learn to run their lives (change sheets, do laundry, etc.), exercise, or get extra rest if they need it. Compare that to the measly two hours for any of the mass schooling options.
Sleep time
Homeschooling allows for up to 11.5 hours of time in their rooms for sleep or settling in to sleep. Kids in elementary school are supposed to sleep 9-12 hours each day. Private school allows for about 9.5-10.5 hours in their rooms, which includes time to fall asleep. Public school allows about 10.5-11 hours–a bit better than private school, largely because it’s closer to home. I also assume no homework from public school. When the kids attended the local public school last year, they didn’t have homework, at least up to second grade. Assuming the kids take 30-60 minutes to fall asleep, neither of these allows enough time for the kids to rest their bodies if they are very active or fighting off illness. If they need extra sleep, it has to come of out of their paltry 2 hours of free time.
Homeschooling allows up to 11.5 hours of time in their rooms, which is flexible based on what they need. Miss M, for example, would get to bed 1-1.5 hours later than the bold bedtime line on this particular evening. She’d still have 10-10.5 hours of time in her room if we wake her up at 8am–or we could just let her sleep in a little the next day to make up for it. She could also get up at 8am and take a nap later in the day if she’s still tired.
Homeschooling allows so much more time and flexibility! I knew it was more flexible by a long shot. I didn’t realize how much time it saves until I mapped out the schedules side by side.
Once it starts snowing, the kids would lose either sleep or free time to the increased transportation and prep time (outdoor gear). I don’t know how much time that would take, but I would say at least half an hour.
Time to eat
Breakfast is usually in the van on the way to school right now. (Our van is messier than ever, by the way.) They’ve been eating A LOT of bagels lately simply because they’re portable and don’t crumble. Lunch time at school is about 20 minutes, which includes some overhead for organization like finding a table. When homeschooling, the kids have up to an hour to eat at both breakfast and lunch. I don’t think they’ll take this long, so the remainder is free time in addition to the 6 hours I already added up. They also won’t run out of time to eat a full meal at home.
What’s harder to quantify is that they have much more variety in what they eat when we homeschool. Meals usually don’t have to be portable. School lunches are hard to make for six kids! We were stuck with lunch meat and cheese sandwiches or some variation on PBJs for the main part of lunch. Then I threw in some prepackaged snacks and an applesauce pouch. I tried sending other things like trail mix, fresh fruit, summer sausage with crackers, but they all ate into my meager free time to prep them, wouldn’t survive the trip, or came back home because half the kids didn’t like it. If I sent something experimental to try to increase the variety in their diet, they might just not get lunch that day. There were no backup options like there are at home.
Work time for parents
In these scenarios, Jeff always gets at least as much dedicated work time as I do because I scheduled a workout for myself in the morning in addition to picking up the kids in the afternoon or taking lunch duty. Private school only allows 4 hours of dedicated work time for me, assuming I do nothing in those four hours besides work; Jeff gets about 5.5 hours because he can keep working while I drive around picking up kids. Public school allows 6.5 hours for both of us. There’s not much difference between our schedules because the school is only five minutes down the road.
When we homeschool, I have 6 hours of mostly dedicated work time. For part of that, I might get interrupted a bit to explain their independent work, but that 1pm-3pm block is still mostly work time. Jeff has 7 hours of dedicated work time–basically a full work day.
The homeschool work times are very similar to the public school work times, so there is no clear winner. There is, however, a clear loser: private school, mostly because of transportation time. If the school were closer to our house, it would be less of a problem. As a point of interest, all private schools are farther from our house than the public school by at least a factor of three.
Does homeschooling save money, too?
I also compared the costs involved in our three school options, both with daycare costs and without depending on Mr. B’s age. Gotta watch the budget!
Homeschool vs. Private School Costs
There is no age-based difference with homeschooling. We either have a nanny or don’t. Many of the factors listed here don’t have dollar amounts assigned because I cannot quantify them or they don’t have a direct monetary cost. For example, we don’t pay money if we get less sleep, but it certainly compromises everyone’s health and behavior.
The main expenses I quantified are tuition, daycare, gas, clothes, and supplies. Looking only at those items, homeschooling saves us nearly $1200 per month over private school with Mr. B in daycare. Daycare for one child costs nearly as much as tuition for six kids at a Catholic school! That is the only case in which homeschooling is obviously cheaper.
Next school year, Benny could attend the private school full time, so our daycare cost would go away. His 3K tuition would be free, per school policy for more than four kids per family. We’d save over $200 even at the private school. Is that $200 worth foregoing all of the time, nutrition, and other advantages of homeschooling? I suspect that buying convenience foods so I can survive preparing seven portable, durable lunches every day would eat up at least half of that.
Homeschool vs. Public School Costs
All of the public school scenarios save us money over homeschooling. Right now, we’d save more than $500 each month if the kids went to public school. That’s not easy to ignore. Are all of the time, nutrition, and other advantages of homeschooling worth giving up to save $500 per month?
I’m not sure if the public school with Mr. B in school would even be relevant. By the time that happens, Jeff will be retiring, our oldest twins will be 12 years old, and our youngest child will be nearly 6 years old. I don’t think we’d need a nanny to homeschool anymore. Realistically, I think this comparison only applies to this year and two more school years. That’s only about 24 months of school year time. After that, I suspect homeschooling and public school would be nearly evenly matched.
My conclusion is that homeschooling costs more than public school, even if I don’t give up my job (thereby losing income) to teach my kids. Private school is always equivalent or more expensive.
Which option wins?
I can say with certainty that homeschool wins when it comes to time and flexiblity. Financially, public school is the winner. However, homeschooling might be worth the extra cost compared to public school to reduce everyone’s stress, improve nutrition, and generally allow more flexibility. That is up to you as the parent.
For me, homeschooling wins.
