For those of you who look down on homeschooling, let me tell you about my experience.  Both my children have attended Tehachapi schools since 1st grade.  My son flourished, while it seemed my daughter was getting left further and further behind.  After several evaluations, she was placed in RSP for children with learning disabilities.   Progress in reading was painfully slow, despite 2 hrs of homework (in the 2,3, and 4 th grade) every evening,   We drove her to Bakersfield 2-3 times a week to Sylvan and still she was behind.  In 2006, the state testing placed her at grade level 2 for reading, and she was 11 yrs old.  I then decided to home school her as I felt it was her only chance at receiving the help she needed.  She is now a student at Valley Oaks Charter School, a home school program thru Kern County Superintendent of Schools.  She has a wonderful resource teacher, Mrs. Rosander, and together we developed a curriculum to meet my daughters needs.  Well, after one year of homeschooling, she has gone from grade level 2 in reading to grade level 5-- a remarkable feat!  Her state test scores in general were falling 30-50 points every year, but this year she stopped the backward slide and even gained 40 pts. She is still 2 years behind, but I believe she will be close to grade level at the end of this year. The one size fits all education model offered by the school district leaves many children behind.
I do find it interesting that when you home school, the student to teacher ratio is 20:1, yet when she was at Techachapi School district, she had as many as 36 other students her classroom.