If your kids walk into a kindergarten and can’t read, unless something is “special” about your children, you and your children already lose, IMO.
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.
My daughter didn’t read or talk in kindergarten.
She’s a senior in high school with a 4.0 at a top private school.
There’s plenty of time to catch someone up in elementary. It took 4th and 5th grade in a Multi-sensory phonetics based reading program to catch my daughter up.
What do we lose? I have had a few children go to kindergarten with no reading skills beyond reading the alphabet. I could not read when I started kindergarten.
My oldest could read the alphabet and could write her name, letters, and numbers. She could not read well until the middle of first grade. Her school taught sight words before phonics. But then they did phonics. I was confused by their methods, but over time, it worked for her. We moved to another school for second grade, and they taught all phonics all the time. By the end of second grade, daughter was reading her father’s awful Steven King novels. (He censored which ones. I was not happy.) She is a voracious reader to this day.
My children who could read when they started kindergarten do not seem to have an advantage over the ones who couldn’t. My worst reader will probably make more money in his lifetime than the readers. He has skills. He has smarts.