"I am a retired high school teacher. I could tell a home schooled kid the first day they were in the room."
Public school defenders always insist that they can't do a good job without reducing class sizes. Well, home schooled kids have a class size (usually one to four) that public school teachers can only dream about. Home schoolers should toss THAT argument back at their critics.
In my experience most of the home schooled students I had were the kids of a traditional family (military) where one or both parents had a college degree.
A huge number of students in the public school arena had a single mom parent and she was probably, at best, a high school graduate.