Agreed. Read to your kids for at least 15 minutes before bed every night (I prefer 30 minutes). Teach them to read, not as formal lessons that are a chore, just showing them the words as you read, from time to time telling them what letters make a particular sound or using a book with lots of rhymes, "oh, look, there is another 'a-t' which says 'at' so after a C that must be k-at cat, and the cat is wearing a h-at hat. How about that!" Then back to the story. My kids are good readers and love reading, and I think reading to them every day, even once they could read on their own, was a big part of that.
The same is true for math. Parents should teach their kids math, number sense, and thinking about whether answers are reasonable. If you wait for a teacher to do everything, your kids will lose relative to kids whose parents are involved in education. As for social studies, kids should grow up knowing our history (the positive history of an America that is a force for good in the world), our Constitution, and the writings of the Founding Fathers. They shouldn't learn just a whitewashed history, they need the warts too so that won't be a shock later, but they should understand just how overwhelmingly the good outweighs the bad in our history.
If you do that well, it doesn't matter much whether you homeschool or send your kids to a good public or private school. If you're not involved, it won't be pretty no matter what school your kids attend.
“The same is true for math. Parents should teach their kids math, number sense, and thinking about whether answers are reasonable.”
I am shocked weekly by the <40 year old businesspeople I work with who trust every figure or graph that is emitted from a spreadsheet, an SQL query, or a computer program. It’s a lack of critical thinking skills, really, and it goes far beyond math.