One area where American education is singularly ineffective is foreign languages.
In the US, children typically have a Srta Garc?a pop in two or three times a week and she shows pictures of people and things South of the Border, plays a song or two, teaches the ni?os to count from uno to diez and talks about the pi?ata.
Some time in high school, usually the sophomore year when the boys voices are changing and the girls are trying to spell their names in some exotic way (Lynda rather than Linda, Nancee rather than Nancy) some students take a foreign language, usually Spanish or French. After a couple of years, that is all the FL that is studied, and it is a rare American who can actually carry on even a simple conversation en espa?ol.
In Europe, one finds Belgians, Dutch, Germans, Swedes and Danes and to a lesser degree French and Spanish who can speak nearly perfect English, who can and do read in English and who watch English-language films and listen to American music.
In the US the curriculum is determined mostly by several citizens on an elected school board with little or no special training and almost never any degree of fluency in any froeign language. The curriculum produces very few Americans who can read in Spanish or French. Strangely, very few Americans have evean a passing knowledge of English grammar, and could not tell the difference between the subjunctive mood and the pluperfect. Even though Americans study 12 years of English, mostly all that is taught is remedial stuff: not to say " He go", " liberry" and "ain't". There is never any attempt to apply what has been learned in English class to the learning of the foreign language or vice versa. The de facto motto of the United States is not "E Pluribus Unum", but "I studied Spanish in high school, but I can't remember how to say anything except Bonus diaz".
In the more prosperous nations of Western Europe, the curriculum is designed by bilingual or trilingual professional educators. By high school, students are studying academic subjects in English in addition to their English language classes. American education is a lot better than it used to be, but compared to what many Europeans get, it is rather poor. Most Americans know next to nothing about other countries in the world. I have had many classes in college where not one student could name the capital of Canada, for example.
So home schooling COULD be a lot better than the average US eduication, but it could also be a lot worse. It depends only on what the parents know themselves, and what they think is essential to pass on to their children.
Only about half the graduates in science, math or engineering from US universities are US citizens. Very few US college graduates can carry on an intelligent conversation in any language other than English. This is not a good thing.
I hear we are better than the Australians at teaching foreign languages, butnthat is like Arkansas thanking God for Mississippi.
