Behind Whom?

What "falling behind" really means, and who decided what "behind" means

Mary Cassatt, Nurse Reading to a Little Girl (1895)

When someone learns that a family homeschools, one of the first concerns they raise is whether the children might fall “behind.” It is a reasonable question. It deserves a serious answer.

But before we can answer it, we have to ask a clarifying question of our own: Behind whom? Behind which benchmark, set by which authority, measured by which instrument, on which timeline? The word “behind” smuggles in an assumption that there is a single, agreed-upon pace at which all children should learn, and that deviation from that pace is a problem to be solved. We are not convinced that assumption holds up under scrutiny.

What we want to explore here is not whether homeschooled children score higher on tests (though the data is generally encouraging¹). We want to explore something more structural: What happens when you change who is accountable for a child’s education, and what that change makes possible.

The Accountability Question

In a conventional school setting, responsibility for a child’s learning is distributed across a remarkable number of actors. State legislatures set standards. District offices select curricula, usually from a selection of vendors predetermined by the state. Principals manage buildings. Teachers deliver instruction. Counselors handle social-emotional concerns. Parents provide support at home. Each of these actors has genuine authority over some slice of the child’s experience, but none of them has full authority over the whole.

This is not an indictment. It is simply a description of how large institutions work. Distributed responsibility is the natural architecture of any system that serves millions of children simultaneously. And within that architecture, many dedicated people do extraordinary work. We have met public school teachers whose creativity, patience, and devotion to their students humble us. The complexity of what they manage every day — many children with many different needs, operating under constraints they did not choose — is staggering. Once upon a time, Hannah did this every day.

But distributed responsibility has a structural cost: When something goes wrong, root-cause diagnosis is difficult. If a child is struggling to read, the question of why can touch curriculum design, classroom instruction, peer dynamics, home environment, developmental readiness, and a dozen other variables. Each actor in the system can reasonably point to factors outside their control. This is not blame-shifting. It is an honest description of the epistemic problem created by distributed governance.

Course-correction in such a system is slow by design. Changing a curriculum requires committee review. Adjusting a classroom approach requires working within contractual and administrative frameworks. Escalating a concern requires navigating layers of bureaucracy. Again, none of this is malicious. It is simply what happens when many well-meaning people share partial authority over a complex process.

Concentrated Accountability

In a homeschooling family, the accountability structure is radically different. The parent (or parents) who direct the child’s education own the outcomes.

All of them.

If the child is thriving in mathematics but struggling with writing, there is no ambiguity about who is responsible for noticing and who is responsible for responding. The diagnostic loop is short. The feedback is immediate. The authority to change course is held by the same person who observed the problem.

This is not a claim that homeschooling parents always make good decisions. They do not. We do not. Concentrated accountability means that when a parent makes a poor curricular choice, or misjudges a child’s readiness, or neglects an area of development, that failure also belongs entirely to them. There is no system to catch what they miss. The same structural feature that enables fast correction also enables unchecked error.

We think this tradeoff is worth naming honestly, because it clarifies what homeschooling actually offers. It does not offer a guarantee of superior outcomes. It offers agency: The practical ability to observe, diagnose, and respond to a specific child’s needs on a short timeline. Whether that agency produces good results depends entirely on whether the parent wields it with diligence, humility, and a willingness to seek help when they reach the limits of their own competence.

What “Behind” Actually Looks Like

When we sit with our children and notice that one of them is not yet reading fluently at age seven, we can ask a precise question: Is this a problem, or is this a pace? We can consult developmental research. We can observe whether the child is making steady progress or is genuinely stuck. We can pause the current lesson, and review. We can hit the same concept twice in one day. We can throw the current curriculum out and try a different approach next week. Not next semester, not after the next standardized assessment window, but next week.

The research on reading development, for example, suggests that the normal range for reading readiness is far wider than most school timelines acknowledge.² A child who begins reading fluently at eight is not “behind” in any developmental sense. That child is behind only relative to an institutional schedule designed for batch processing; a schedule that exists for legitimate logistical reasons but that does not reflect the biological or cognitive reality of how individual children develop.

This is where the word “behind” reveals its hidden politics. In an institutional context, “behind” means “not keeping pace with the schedule we need to maintain in order to serve all children simultaneously.” That is a real operational concern for a school. It is not, however, a diagnosis of a child. Homeschooling families have the freedom to decouple the child’s development from the institution’s schedule, and to let the question be simply: Is this child learning? Is this child growing? What does this child need next?

This same set of questions and answers also applies to exceptionally gifted students. If you have a child who is doing math at a 6th grade level in 2nd grade, but they are in a classroom with other second graders, the same kind of difficulties will arise. Being able to meet a gifted child where they are and encourage them with more challenging work is also something with which traditional school setups struggle.

A Note on Peer Effects

There is another dimension to this conversation that deserves attention, though we will treat it briefly here and return to it in a future post. The peers a child spends their days with exert a powerful influence on their behavior, motivation, and development. The research on peer effects in education is substantial and sobering.³ Children are shaped not only by their teachers and their curriculum but by the social environment of the classroom, both for good and for ill.

In a large school system, families and teachers have limited practical control over the composition of a child’s peer group. Classroom assignments, school zoning, and the demographics of the surrounding community largely determine who a child spends six to eight hours a day with. A gifted teacher can shape classroom culture, but even the best teacher operates within constraints.

Homeschooling families, by contrast, have significant (though not unlimited) agency over their children’s social environment. This is not about sheltering children from the world. It is about curating the conditions under which they learn to navigate it. We believe this agency is underappreciated in conversations about educational outcomes.

What This Means for Parents Considering Homeschooling

If you are a parent wondering whether your children will fall “behind,” here is what we would offer.

Name the benchmark. When someone says your child might fall behind, ask them: Behind what standard? Measured how? It is not a hostile question. It is a clarifying one. You may find that the concern is anchored to an institutional timeline that does not apply to your situation.

Embrace the weight. Concentrated accountability is a gift and a burden. Do not pretend it is only a gift. You will make mistakes. You will miss things. Build systems that help you catch your own blind spots: Regular assessments (formal or informal), honest conversations with your children, and relationships with other homeschooling families who will tell you the truth.

Keep the diagnostic loop short. One of your greatest advantages is the ability to notice and respond quickly. Do not squander it by locking yourself into a rigid curriculum for the sake of consistency. Consistency matters, but responsiveness matters more. If something is not working, change it. You have the authority. Use it.

Seek expertise you do not have. Concentrated accountability does not mean you must do everything yourself. It means you are responsible for ensuring it gets done. Hire tutors. Join co-ops. Use online courses. Ask for help from people who know more than you do about subjects where you are weak. Owning the outcome does not require performing every task. We have first hand experience with this. Our oldest child was once taught science at our co-op by a retired nuclear engineer, something we most definitely are not.

Respect the institution you are leaving. If you are transitioning from public school, do so with gratitude for the teachers who served your children and with honesty about your reasons. The decision to homeschool is not a verdict on the people who work in schools. It is a decision about governance, and where you believe accountability for your particular children’s education should reside.

The question is not really whether your children will be behind. The question is whether you are willing to own the answer, whatever it turns out to be. That is what homeschooling asks of you. We think it is a question worth taking seriously.

1. Multiple studies have found that homeschooled students score above average on standardized academic achievement tests, though selection effects make causal claims difficult. See Ray, B. D. (2010). “Academic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students,” Academic Leadership Journal, 8(1). Available at https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/

2. Research on reading readiness suggests a wide developmental window. See Suggate, S. P. (2009). “School Entry Age and Reading Achievement in the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA),” International Journal of Educational Research, 48(3), 151–161. Sebastian Suggate’s work found that early formal reading instruction did not confer lasting advantages over later instruction.

3. For a review of peer effects in education, see Sacerdote, B. (2011). “Peer Effects in Education: How Might They Work, How Big Are They, and How Much Do We Know Thus Far?” in Handbook of the Economics of Education, Vol. 3. Elsevier. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780444534293000042