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But if that's so and yet 25% of P.S. teachers are working outside their majors, it must on average be even worse than that outside your kids' district.

My kids' district (Fairfax County, Virginia) is the best in the country, but you're not going to get me to say that all is well in the public school system. Even if teachers do teach outside their major (which they shouldn't), at least they have some formal education beyond the high school level, which I think is terribly important.

What I see as a fallacy in your argument is, to put it bluntly and at the risk of overgeneralization, All learning comes from education, and all education is documented in credentials.

I recognize that that is a fallacy. But we need to determine teacher competence with some measurement, and until some superior means is found, academic quallifications are the least-bad way of doing so.

It is doubtful if any learning occurs without motivation.

Absolutely. And good teachers, regardless of their academic quallifications, motivate their students. Bad teachers don't. But if a teacher has only a rudimentary high school education and doesn't have the requisite information or skills to pass on to his or her students, all of that energy goes for naught. Academic qualifications are a starting point, an extremely relevent starting point, but a starting point nonetheless, to finding good teachers.

The parent will concentrate on what s/he deems the most important knowledge based on the parent's own experience and education.

But if a parent has little experience, and less education? What's the point? I confess, I didn't much like my math classes in high school. If I homeschooled my kids, I'd naturally spend less time teaching math, and I'd probably give them an insufficient and possibly incorrect interpretation of what they need to know to succeed. They'd loose out, solely because of the failures of my education. They could still live and prosper, but many doors would be closed to them, doors to any career with a significant reliance on math. And that isn't fair to them.

And if the parents would just get out of the way would the schools necessarily do better now? They instead seem, at least in some aspects, to tend to do worse.

Who said anything about parents "getting out of the way?"

All of which is beside the point that the typical parent who chooses to tutor probably is not the great unwashed but themselves above average in book learning--but perhaps not in "education" courses which at most are primarily relevant to classroom instruction rather than tutoring (and which typically tend to repel those with high SAT scores from acquiring teaching certificates).

Again, I'm not inextricably opposed to home-schooling. But if you're right, and the typical homeschooling parent isn't underqualified, why don't you simply agree to oversight to make sure that the odd totally unqualified proverbial bad-apple, isn't ruining her kids' potential? What are you afraid of?

Not only so, but reportedly PS education tends to be disorganized at the same time it is overcentralized.

I think its you who are pursuing the logical fallacy. Many public schools are highly flawed, and we can discuss the reasons for that at length. But the alternative isn't necessarily homeschooling, and I think you're being dishonest by painting it as such. I think the vast majority of children benefit from the social interaction, diversity of opinions, and access to different subject matter that they get in schools. Some clearly don't. But if there must be homeschooling, there must be some oversight.

the typical parent who chooses to tutor probably is not the great unwashed but themselves above average in book learning--but perhaps not in "education" courses which at most are primarily relevant to classroom instruction rather than tutoring (and which typically tend to repel those with high SAT scores from acquiring teaching certificates).

Again, I'm not inextricably opposed to home-schooling. But if you're right, and the typical homeschooling parent isn't underqualified, why don't you simply agree to oversight to make sure that the odd totally unqualified proverbial bad-apple, isn't ruining her kids' potential?

The credentials of the typical homeschooling parent is far better than necessary to educate the child as well as the typical PS student actually is educated. In fact I would venture, given how much easier it is just to go with the flow and send your kid to school, that it would be the rare parent who would homeschool in the teeth of unsatisfactory results. Results, that is, no better than the same child achieves in public school.
Public school can experiment with phonics-free reading and incoherent math instruction and God only knows what else, on whole cohorts of American children--but you are afraid, so you say, that one child will get an education which is even inferior to that!

What are you afraid of?

This is an explicitly conservative American web site. Someone who is not afraid of imposed belief systems and government regulation is not a conservative American. A conservative Saudi, possibly--but a conservative American, no.

I think the vast majority of children benefit from the social interaction, diversity of opinions, and access to different subject matter that they get in schools.

You are trying to make a virtue of necessity. There really is not much benefit to putting a child into an environment dominated by uneducated and, occasionally, uneducatable children. The homeschooled child is in a much more natural and controlled environment.
But then, that would be bad if the parent controlling that environment were evil, I suppose. And that is the operating assumption of the socialist. It is not mine. In fact, the truth is that if the parent is evil the kid doesn't have much chance in or out of public school.