Tech-industry families in San Francisco are pulling their children out of traditional schools and building AI-powered home curricula, part of a nationwide homeschooling surge that has doubled since 2019.
In the Nob Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, 32-year-old Mrugesha Sathappan starts her children's school day with a 20-minute phonics or math session built by artificial intelligence. After that, her preschool and elementary-aged kids head out on field trips she and her husband design around whatever subject has captured their attention that week. Lately, it has been rockets. Her husband Kartik, a 34-year-old investor, bought their son a rocket kit that can reach 500 feet. No permission slip required.
The Sathappans are not religious traditionalists or off-the-grid survivalists. They are part of a growing cohort of wealthy, tech-connected Bay Area parents who have decided that conventional schools, public or private, are failing their children. And they are using the same AI tools that power their professional lives to build something they consider better.
The numbers behind the movement are hard to dismiss. The educational reform nonprofit EdChoice reports that homeschooling has become the fastest-growing form of alternative education in the country. Roughly 3% of American children were homeschooled in 2019. That figure now exceeds 6%.
California's public school system has shed 612,000 students between 2015 and 2025, a decline attributed to the California Policy Center. And the state offers no stipends, no school choice vouchers, and no meaningful financial support for families who opt out. A legislative proposal that would have created $8,000 school choice accounts failed to advance this year.
Families who homeschool through an established charter school in California can qualify for roughly $2,200 to $3,800 in annual funding, but only if they submit to strict testing and tracking requirements. Compare that to Arizona and Florida, where the state reimburses homeschooling families directly for textbooks and other educational resources.
The result is a system that punishes parents for leaving, rather than asking why they left. That dynamic has not slowed the exodus. New York has seen a similar surge, with homeschooling enrollment jumping even as per-pupil spending climbs well above the national average.
Brady Neal, an AI researcher and San Francisco homeschooling father, put the frustration plainly.
"Schools can be disrespectful of kids' time, and [parents] want their time to be used widely."
That word, "disrespectful", carries weight coming from a community that builds tools designed to eliminate inefficiency. For parents like Neal and the Sathappans, the traditional classroom model looks like a legacy system: rigid schedules, one-size-fits-all instruction, hours consumed by administrative routine rather than actual learning.
Mrugesha Sathappan grew up in a crowded school in India that offered nothing in the way of personal instruction. She does not want that for her children. She uses AI to generate custom phonics games and STEM projects tailored to each child's pace and interest. Her eldest son devours 15 to 20 books in a single sitting.
Kartik Sathappan described the flexibility this approach allows:
"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."
He added bluntly: "You can't really do when you're in school."
The couple has launched a meetup group for families who are delaying or skipping traditional school altogether. They are not alone. Jesse Ganet, a tech founder, homeschools four children with the help of AI agents. Even Mark Zuckerberg ran a small school pod out of his Palo Alto home during the COVID pandemic.
Kartik Sathappan credits the pandemic with accelerating the shift. When schools shut down and parents suddenly watched their children's instruction up close, many did not like what they found. He described seeing a fast-growing number of "normie" parents, not ideologues, not activists, choosing homeschooling after that experience.
Jamie Heston, a Bay Area homeschooling consultant, has watched her phone ring more often as wealthy families grow dissatisfied with private schools that charge $30,000 a year or more. She pushed back against the idea that homeschooling is fringe or dangerous.
"This is not some scary movement. 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."
That last point matters. Critics of homeschooling often frame it as isolating or selfish. Heston's argument is the opposite: parents are not withdrawing from education. They are demanding more of it, and refusing to pay premium tuition for a product they can build themselves.
Mrugesha Sathappan framed her philosophy in terms that would sound familiar to any parent who has watched a child sit through a class that teaches nothing:
"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."
She added:
"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 is also clear-eyed about the limits of her approach. If her son eventually decides he wants a traditional classroom, she will consider that a success, because it means he developed the agency to make the choice himself.
"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."
That openness distinguishes this cohort from the caricature. These are not parents who distrust all institutions on principle. They distrust institutions that have stopped earning trust, and they have the resources and technical fluency to act on it.
The Sathappans have also looked at Alpha School, a chain of private and charter schools founded in Austin, Texas, that combines AI-powered instruction with hands-on life-skills workshops, assembling IKEA furniture, solving a Rubik's cube. It represents a middle path between full homeschooling and the traditional model, and its existence signals that the market is responding to what these parents want.
Kartik Sathappan has a financial stake in this space. He runs Families Fund, an investment fund focused on alternative education firms. That conflict of interest is worth noting, he is both an advocate and a beneficiary of the trend he describes. But the underlying data on enrollment decline and homeschooling growth come from third-party nonprofits, not from his fund's portfolio.
The policy landscape remains uneven. States like Arizona and Florida have moved to support families who choose alternatives to public schools. California has not. Arkansas has seen test scores climb after passing education reform that expanded parental options, a result that undercuts the argument that only traditional public schools can deliver outcomes.
Meanwhile, California families who homeschool without a charter school umbrella receive nothing from the state. The failed $8,000 school choice proposal would have offered modest relief. Its defeat left families to fund their children's education entirely out of pocket, while their tax dollars continue flowing to the public system they left behind.
Parental rights in education remain contested ground. Legal battles over who controls a child's education have reached the Supreme Court, and other countries have gone further, in one case, a foreign court sentenced homeschooling parents to prison for failing to teach a government-approved curriculum.
The San Francisco homeschooling trend is small. It is concentrated among families with money, technical skills, and the luxury of a parent who can stay home. It is not a universal solution, and its advocates do not claim it is.
But the impulse behind it is universal. Parents who watch their children waste hours in rigid classrooms, who see bullying go unaddressed and curricula drift from basics, who pay tens of thousands in tuition or taxes and get mediocrity in return, those parents are not radical. They are rational.
The question is not whether AI-powered homeschooling will replace traditional schools. It will not. The question is what it says about the schools that 612,000 California families have already walked away from, and whether anyone running those schools is paying attention.
