Um, I don't think this answers my question. Online courses aren't a substitute for early-childhood daycare. You have to have actual people present in-person to do these jobs, and people willing to do these jobs for the wages offered are in short supply, or are people you really don't want watching your kids. This also extends, as you seem to say, to other jobs with high contact with young children, like elementary school teachers. There's a shortage of them too.

I suppose increasing salaries a lot might help, but we seem to be talking about government workers here, so that seems unlikely to happen.

I'm curious, would you support funding to help anyone willing to homeschooled their child as an alternative solution here?

I often hear similar arguments for the need to help parents offload certain portions of childcare so they can go to work, I don't know that I've ever really heard any meaningful push to help parents offload work so they can raise their children full-time.

No, why? Why should someone be paid to stay at home with their kids?

Homeschooling has no quality control whatsoever--parents can just teach whatever the hell they want, which usually involves a lot of religious BS and skipping over all the science stuff. On top of that, they only teach their own kids. One of the reasons kids go to school is because one teacher can handle a class of 15-30 kids. If we all paid for one parent to stay at home with 1 or 2 kids, how the hell is society going to pay for that? It doesn't make any sense at all.

Raising children full-time is a luxury. It has to be paid for by one family member (usually the husband) working enough to pay for the entire family expenses, or keeping this term short enough that savings can be used until the kid is old enough that the parent can go back to work. There simply isn't enough money to tax people, then pay a portion of that back to those same people so they can stay at home.

I ask because, to me, the idea that we should be heavily subsidizing the removal of parents from a child's life while considering parents being more involved a luxury feels very backwards.

You seem to have a base assumption that most people are bad parents and kids would be better off being raised by professionals. You also seem to have an assumption that both you and the state have the right to decide what is best for someone else's child. Maybe those are commonly held assumptions, but I definitely disagree with them and would be concerned that both could lead to a society that looks eerily similar to the Soviet Union.

Respectfully, I think the line of questioning is a bit off.

There are two components of this problem: (1) allocation & (2) efficiency

Substituting others (or parents) for child care services is a reallocation. E.g. 1 hour of parent time instead of 1 hour of day care worker time.

Efficiency is instead looking at the "How many person-hours does it take to support 1 child in this way?" metric.

Blending them together muddies the solution, because both need to be improved.

We need to make sure that the most valuable allocation is being used. Whether that's parents receiving subsidized child care, so they can do more valuable work. Or whether it's making stay-at-home parenting financially tenable. Or offering both options!

But it's also using technology to push the scaling factor. I.e. it'd be great if every child received a 1 teacher:3 children ratio, but that would bankrupt every public school system in the country. So we've settled on our current ratio. But could we improve upon that...? (IMHO, tech to replace people for early childhood is dubious, but for late-primary there begin to be some options that aren't currently widely deployed)

And if we improved the scaling factor, we'd decrease costs (personal or government), which would open up reinvestment of those savings in incentive programs.

Homeschooling can be pooled similarly to public schooling though. Historically it has been commonplace for a local community on the scale of a neighborhood to have their own schoolhouse run by parents in the community. This definitely falls outside of the modern public schooling model but handles the concern of an extremely low student to teacher ratio.

Is it fair to say you'd be on board with this kind of setup, where its effectively home schooling pooled to free up more parents to enter the workforce?

You can't put 10 yo children into MOOC on boring subject and expect them to do anything at all.

Indeed. But can you supplement a teacher with a focused MOOC, such that children receive a better education at a cheaper overall cost?

I'm less convinced that's impossible. E.g. better general classroom teacher + MOOC for math focus.

I know Khan videos were better-taught than some of my primary math courses...

Having specialized teachers, all being expected to generate their own lesson plans (based on local standards/templates, if existent), on very similar material, all across the country... doesn't seem like an efficient use of their skills.