I am a middle school teacher. My husband has a Ph.D in engineering. We want to homeschool our children because we both had very bad experiences growing up attending public school and because too much time is wasted on classroom management in public schools.
I began reading at age two, and by the time I entered kindergarten, I was reading chapter books. I exhausted the 1st - 6th grade reading curriculum during my first two weeks of first grade and had to "sit there" for years waiting for the others to figure out how to stumble their way through "The Cat in the Hat". I read most of the books in the public library (excluding some adult romance novels, which I didn't find interesting) by the time I finished elementary. My teachers generally refused to call on me in class because my answers to simple questions were too detailed. I dropped out of high school several times, and failed most of my high school classes because I had skipped classes and never learned how to work hard when I was younger. Fortunately, I did manage to graduate college Phi Beta Kappa with Honors, but I really had to struggle to learn the self-discipline I had never been taught in school.
My husband was teased mercilessly because he was "odd" (dxd with Aspergers). He felt out of sync with kids his own age, preferring to talk to older kids and adults. Even as an adult, he gets along remarkably well with older adults. He is generally well-liked by people our age, though he still has a tendency to become overly-technical when trying to explain things to non-engineers. He is a deeply sensitive and caring person, and he has a strong desire to seek social justice in the world. I do not believe his "lack of social skills" means that he is socially inept; he simply approaches the world and the people in it differently than others.
Even children who are not intellectually gifted could benefit academically from an educational environment with fewer than 36 students. I waste more than half my time in the classroom dealing with discipline issues, and the kids who are motivated to learn suffer because of it. Without the discipline issues, our kids could be years ahead in terms of the curriculum, and they would have time to learn additional subjects not generally taught in elementary or middle school, to get involved in extracurricular and/or social activities, or to explore areas of particular academic interest to individual students. At the very least, they would have more time to approach regular academic content in ways that encourage creativity, problem solving, moral development, and higher-level thinking skills. Sadly, these skills are rarely practiced in most elementary and middle school classrooms.
My parents are both career teachers with 35+ years of teaching experience each. They agree that, if they had kids now, homeschooling would be a better option than public school.