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School’s out forever for some California kids.
Elite techies in the San Francisco Bay Area are part of a nationwide rise in homeschooling that bucks the stereotypes of rural Bible thumpers or hardcore hippies — as they ditch traditional classrooms in favor of using AI to give kids home lessons.
Mrugesha Sathappan, a 32-year-old mother of three living in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood, is at the forefront of a small but growing cohort of families exploring tech-fueled homeschooling for their preschool and elementary-aged children, believing it will give kids the “agency” to survive societal disruptions.
“I just want to be able to pay as much attention as possible to what my kids are learning, what are the values they’re learning — whether that is, being adaptable, being kind, being useful,” said Sathappan.
“It’s not so much about getting a job in the future. It’s more about how do I make this individual adaptable to whatever comes next,’ she added.
A typical day teaching her preschool-age son involves about 20 minutes of phonics or math alongside projects and outings to local museums, parks or even tech offices — sometimes with other homeschooled kids. Sathanppan and her husband, investor Kartik Sathappan, have launched a meetup group for families who are also delaying or skipping traditional school.
The couple uses AI to create custom games in phonics and STEM alongside “child led” field trips and activities, and says their son devours 15 to 20 books in one sitting.
“He recently picked up being into rockets. So we just bought him like a rocket kit … and we’re going to build this rocket that can go like, 500 ft into the air,” Kartik added.
“You can’t really do when you’re in school.”
Their theory is that traditional schools stifle creativity by focusing on boring repetitive tasks and sitting still instead of hands-on problem solving that gives children “agency” to chart their own path.
“Schools can be disrespectful of kids’ time, and [parents] want their time to be used widely,” added AI researcher Brady Neal, another San Francisco homeschooling dad.
Kartik 34, has skin in the game as an investor in alternative education firms through his investment fund, Families Fund.
He sees a fast-growing number of “normie” parents who got a closer look at kids’ education during the COVID pandemic and decided they may as well do it themselves.
Homeschooling skyrocketed from around 3% of American children in 2019 to more than 6% today — making it the fastest-growing form of alternative education, according to the educational reform nonprofit EdChoice.
Enrollment at California public schools fell by 612,000 between 2015 and 2025 as alternatives like charter and “microschools” grew more popular, per California Policy Center.
Even some mega-wealthy parents who could afford private school have opted to homeschool — including Mark Zuckerberg, who ran a small school pod out of his Palo Alto home during the pandemic, or tech founder Jesse Ganet, who homeschools four children with the help of AI agents.
Jamie Heston, a homeschooling consultant based in the Bay Area, said she’s increasingly getting calls from wealthy families who are unimpressed with what posh private schools are offering for $30,000 a year or more.
Unlike many other states, California offers no stipends or “school choice” vouchers for families who choose to homeschool or attend private schools.
States such as Arizona and Florida offer cash reimbursements to homeschoolers for textbooks and other educational resources, but a legislative proposal that would have offered $8,000 “school choice” accounts in California failed to advance this year.
California families can qualify for roughly $2,200-$3,800 in annual funding if they homeschool through an established charter school, but must comply with strict testing and tracking requirements.
Heston says that while homeschooling isn’t for everyone, it can build “creativity, critical thinking and executive functioning” in students who struggle in traditional classrooms for one reason or another.
“This is not some scary movement,” she said.
“It’s not just the individualized education. Bullying, drugs – you can avoid a lot of that. And you can change on a dime and tailor the education,” Heston said.
The Sathappans say they are not categorically anti-school. Later on, they might consider options like Alpha School, a chain of private and charter schools founded in Austin, Texas that combines AI bots with “life skill workshops” like assembling IKEA furniture or solving a Rubik’s cube.
However, they insist on giving their children a better educational experience than they had — he in a traditional classroom that left him bored and over-medicated, and she at a crowded school in India that offered nothing in the way of personal instruction.
“If at some point he just tells us like, ‘Hey, guys, like, I really want to go to school for X, Y, and Z reason,’ then it’s like, okay we succeeded because he has the agency to make the decision for himself. And that’s fine,” Mrugesha said.
