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DaFranker comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - LessWrong
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Modern compulsory schooling seems to have at least three major sociological effects: socializing its students, offloading enough caregiver burden for both parents to efficiently participate in the workforce, and finally education. For a widespread homeschooling system to be attractive, it's either going to need to fulfill all three, or to be so spectacularly good at one or two that the shortcomings in the others are overwhelmed. Current homeschooling, for comparison, does an acceptable job of education but fails at the other two; consequently it's used mainly by people with very strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects of the school system. That's a small and inelastic market, and you aren't going to enlarge it much without some significant incentives.
Socialization could be addressed by integrating access to hobby groups, sports teams, Scouting-like services and what have you into the program's structure; you'd probably have to push this hard to overcome the perception gap, but it ought to be doable. Some facility for students to self-organize into study groups might also help at the high school level, but it's unlikely to be practical at younger ages.
Offloading caregiver burden is a trickier problem. There seems to be a time/money tradeoff here: you can reduce or eliminate parental involvement during working hours if they're willing to pay for tutoring services and similar resources, but those aren't cheap, and both routes make homeschooling less attractive relative to traditional schooling. Study groups again would help here, but I don't think they can substitute for an expert human without some exceptional cleverness.
The market is most likely still larger than sufficient for the enterprise to be worth it. I only have personal WAG estimates to rely on, but it's pretty hard to get market data on a currently-counterfactual service that people have never even seen.
Anecdotally, out of a sample size of over 60 high school students, at least 8 (including myself) had confirmed to me they would definitely jump right on any alternative form of education that would still be officially recognized, since here homeschooling is very, very difficult to get approved and recognized as equivalent to a standard education. A single institution that you just sign up, and work through the material, and perhaps attend meetings to socialize, but that isn't bogged down by all the problems of shitty teachers and teacher-politics and crappy coursework? That would have (and still does) sounded like an utopian dream by comparison to the dreary and painful system we were stuck in.
Of course, that's just the students themselves, and parents are a different problem to solve too. However, 10-15% of high school students is not a small market. I'm quite certain (.98) that there are at least twice as many people with strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects as there are who actually do use current alternatives, simply by factoring in the amount of people held back by legal / institutional restrictions that require the child to go through regular compulsory education. From what I understand, bypassing this hurdle is exactly the primary service of this hypothetical company.
Also, as long as you can keep the total cost of the company's services for one child equal or under the current standard costs of compulsory education without sacrificing superior education quality, the inherent scalability of the proposed teaching techniques will mean that as your clientbase grows, your ability to provide workspaces, study groups and competent staff increases, which would further expand the market and clientbase, and then...
Yeah, lots of optimistic and positive thinking there. However, I'd really like to do what I can to save other people from the depressive ugh field that I got stuck into throughout high school - an ugh field that eventually killed my hopes of "things getting better" by the time I got to cégep and realized that even there, perfect answers with clear, written reasoning on a math test was still only worth 75% if you didn't have the right passwords (though I didn't think of it in these particular terms at the time, but that's what it was).
A good solution to those problems would have meant less time wasted in high school, and not dropping out of cégep, for this particular individual. Which, incidentally, also means I wouldn't have gotten this job with a ton of free time to read LessWrong, but that's another story.