Choose the path, not just the school
Most families never actually compare schooling paths side by side. They compare a feeling about the assigned school against a glossy tour of a private one, or a friend’s homeschool co-op against a worry about what they’d be giving up. Each comparison happens on a different day, in a different mood, against a different worry — and the decision quietly gets made by whichever option argued its case most recently.
The School-Path Decision Helper puts all five paths on one page and holds them to the same standard: assigned public, public charter or magnet, private or independent, a hybrid or microschool arrangement, and full homeschool. It’s a weighted decision matrix built as a workbook you own — you decide what matters to your family, rate each path against it, and the workbook returns one honest score and a ranking.
It compares the path, not the specific school. If you’re choosing between two named schools, that’s a different question. This is for the one that comes first.
The two costs nobody counts
Every school-cost comparison you’ll find lists tuition and stops. Tuition is where this one starts.
The paid work a parent gives up. A path that charges no tuition is not free if an adult leaves paid work to run it — and for the home-taught paths that lost pay is usually the largest single figure in the whole comparison. The Cost Calculator prices it properly: the hours that genuinely change, times an after-tax rate, times the weeks a year it happens. It also subtracts what actually comes back to you — an education savings account, a voucher, a tax credit, school aid — so you’re comparing what each path really costs your household, not a sticker price nobody pays.
In the worked example that ships with the file, the path with no tuition at all turns out to be the most expensive of the five. That’s not an argument against it. It’s something a family deserves to see before deciding, rather than after.
The hours your family actually has. A household can run out of hours long before it runs out of money, and that failure arrives slowly, in March, when nobody has the energy to change course. So the workbook budgets time the same way it budgets money: six weekly demands per path — instruction, prep, driving, admin, homework support, required volunteering — set against the hours your household honestly has, crediting back the hours a path frees up by taking a parent out of paid work. It answers in a word: Over capacity, Tight, Feasible, or Comfortable.
It tells you why the leader won
Most decision matrices name a winner and stop there, which is exactly when you stop trusting them. This one breaks the gap between the first and second-placed paths down criterion by criterion, names the single biggest reason for the result, and tells you plainly when the margin is too thin to act on — under about 0.15 points is a tie the numbers can’t break, and it says so.
That matters because of what you do next. If the criterion driving the result turns out to be one your family doesn’t much care about, the fix is to change its weight, not to bend a rating. Bending a rating hides the disagreement; changing a weight states it out loud.
Two of the nine ratings aren’t left to a guess at all. Cost & affordability and Family bandwidth & hours are computed for you from the two tabs that already know the answer, marked (auto) on the scorecard — and still editable if you genuinely disagree.
One year is rarely the real decision
The commitment runs to graduation, and costs don’t hold still. Enter your child’s current grade and an inflation rate and every path is carried out over the years you have left. Underneath it, a switch scenario: run one path for a few years, then move, priced against simply staying put — because few families run one path for thirteen years, and the money side of that choice is worth knowing even though it’s only one side.
Built for two people to use, separately
The most useful thing this workbook does for a couple isn’t producing a winner. It’s producing two different answers and then showing you exactly where they came apart.
The Family Conversation Guide walks through it: each adult sets their own weights alone, before seeing any scores; you compare the weights first and only the weights; then you rate the paths separately and go looking for any row where you’re two points apart, because that’s usually a fact one of you knows and the other doesn’t. Two printable sheets come with it — a weighting sheet and a rating grid — so you can each fill one in without looking over a shoulder.
Try it free first
There is a free two-path scorer on this site — no signup, nothing to download unless you want to. It weighs two paths across five of the nine criteria and, more to the point, it does the true-cost arithmetic: enter what each path costs out of pocket and the paid hours a parent would give up, and it prices both. It is the fastest way to see whether the method changes your answer before you buy anything. A starter scorecard is there to download and keep as well, in both spreadsheet and printable form.
Own it, don’t rent it
This is one file you keep. It works in Excel, in LibreOffice, and as a real Google Sheet — not an import, a native copy: click the link in your download, choose Make a copy, and the whole workbook lands in your Drive with every formula, dropdown and color rule already working. No account, no subscription, no expiry, nothing to renew, and nothing that stops working when a service shuts down.
Every figure it ships with belongs to a fictional example family and is illustrative — it’s there so the file computes something real the moment you open it, and your first job is to overwrite it. This is a decision aid, not financial, tax, legal, or educational advice: confirm tuition, fees, aid, and the eligibility and award of any education savings account, voucher, or tax-credit program in writing with the school or your state before you rely on a number.
A weighted score is a way to think more clearly, not a verdict. The decision stays with your family — and it’s one you get to remake every year.
