Significant growth in black families’ participation in home schooling is beginning to show up on the radar screens of researchers. The National Center for Education Statistics computed African-Americans as 9.9 percent of the 850,000 children the federal agency figured were being home-schooled nationally in 1999. Veteran home-schooling researcher Brian Ray figures blacks are currently about 5 percent of the 1.6 million to 2 million home-schooled children but he agrees that black home schooling is growing rapidly.

One sign of growth is the rise of support organizations, such as the Network of Black Homeschoolers and the National Black Home Educators Resource Association, which use the Internet, telephone, conferences, workshops, and newsletters to help families making the big commitment to home schooling.

 In Prince George’s County, Maryland, there’s a boom in home schooling evolving in part out of an active support organization for stay-at-home “moms of color” called Mocha Moms. New and veteran black home schoolers alike tell how deterrents to black home schooling are fading as more people realize the educational benefits of making this personal choice and total commitment.

The rise of black home schooling coincides with an overall diversification, as more so-called mainstream families come on board with a movement begun largely by religious fundamentalists and so-called “unschoolers.”

The outlook is for continued brisk growth in home schooling among ethnic minorities. Tax breaks could help more families make the commitment for one parent to stay at home to teach the children.

 Details follow.

  When the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), an arm of the U.S. Department of Education, published the results of its survey of American home schoolers in July 2001, some of the figures on demographic distribution fairly jumped off the pages.

By race/ethnicity, the NCES reported that there were an estimated 850,000 home-schooled children nationwide in 1999 and they divided on a racial/ethnic basis as follows:[1]

Those numbers fly in the face of the stereotype about home schooling being in the domain almost exclusively of white religious fundamentalists. They also ran counter to some earlier research by home-schooling advocates. One study in 1998 indicated that of 20,790 respondents to a random sampling, less than 1 percent (.8%) were black .[2]

It may well be that the federal researchers have underestimated the total number of home schoolers and somewhat overestimated  the proportion of black and other minority home schoolers.

 Home-schooling advocates believe a significant number of home-schooling parents did not participate in the survey because they were leery of government involvement. Dr. Brian Ray, who heads the National Home Education Research Institute and has been doing widely respected studies of home schooling for the past 18 years, estimates that in the fall of 2001 (2-1/2 years after the NCES’ survey) between 1.6 million and 2 million children were being home schooled in the U.S. Of that number, he estimates that 5 percent are African-Americans.[3]   (For cultural and historical reasons, minority home schoolers may have been more willing than white home schoolers to cooperate with the government’s phone surveyors, but that is a matter of speculation.)

But even though precise figures are lacking, many signs point to a surge of black participation in the home-schooling movement, which is one of the strongest signs of a broad-based demand for educational freedom. Dr. Ray commented that from a little research and a good deal of traveling the country and meeting with home schoolers, he concludes that “African-American home schooling is growing and growing fast.”[4]

Support Organizations

One sign of the growth of home schooling among African-Americans is that organizations have been springing up to provide encouragement and support within this growing segment of the movement. Two notable ones of recent vintage are the National Black Home Educators Resources Association (NBHERA), begun by Eric and Joyce Burges of Baker, Louisiana, and the Network of Black Homeschoolers (NBH), founded by Gilbert and Gloria Wilkerson of Richmond, Virginia.[5]

The Burgeses and the Wilkersons are in the vanguard of what The Home School Court Report  has termed “the new pioneers” – African-American families who, like the earliest home educators in America, are defying stereotypes and cultural pressures to give their children a good education at home. The Burgeses have home schooled for 12 years, the Wilkersons for 13.

“Black families felt and still do feel that an education is the door to our people’s freedom,” says Joyce Burges. “Many black families across the nation are returning to the old-fashioned method of teaching learned years ago from our ancestors.”[6]

Cultural obstacles sometimes appear as a result of a stuck-in-the-Sixties mindset. Some African-Americans who were involved in the heroic civil-rights revolution regard it as a betrayal of the movement if blacks leave public education after all the struggle to gain them a place at the table. The flip side of that, though, is that many public schools have not lived up to the promise of providing equal educational opportunity.

Commented the NBH’s Gilbert Wilkerson: “I want to help black people come out of the mentality that we’ve been sold, that’s been engrained in us, that we’ve been so cemented in for years and years. My goal, not only with homeschoolers, but with all African-Americans, is to bring them up to a higher level of thinking. I know we can do better. We have the courage, the strength, the spirituality, the economics – everything we need within the black community. Why are we waiting around for somebody else, like the government and others, to give us a hand for something we can do ourselves?”[7]

Founded in 1998, the Network of Black Homeschoolers seeks to “unite, strengthen, encourage, inform, and update African-American home educators regarding issues, laws, and information in educating their children.” NBH seeks to foster unity through publications, seminars, and conventions, and is dedicated to perpetuating the “proud heritage of the black family.” Members receive newsletters and discounts to events, NBH materials, and conferences. Via the Internet, telephone, or support groups, NBH members share information and form friendships. NBH’s future plans include a database of African-American studies and inventors. Wilkerson said the volume of e-mails, phone calls, and letters is growing so rapidly that he and his wife are considering adding some help to handle the requests.[8]

Contact Information:
Network of Black Homeschoolers
P.O. Box 28325
Richmond, Virginia 23228
Phone: 804-562-2684
E-mail: NBH4@yahoo.com
Membership:  $20 a year.

Founded in 2000, the National Black Home Educators Resource Association seeks to “assist black families nationwide who share the common responsibility of teaching their children at home by providing these families with resources and other materials to facilitate and maintain an efficient and effective home-school environment.” Among the NBHERA’s services: Provide information on getting started in home education; network with national organizations and pair new home-schooling families with veterans; publish and keep updated state and national news events affecting home educators; provide teaching materials and curriculum recommendations.

Explains Joyce Burges: “NBHERA exists to be another voice in society that says, ‘Families still work. Husbands still love wives. Wives still love husbands. And children’s hearts still can be turned to the parents.’ Now that’s a tall order.  It will take God to raise it up to that point.”[9]

Mrs. Burges added that the NBHERA database of families has grown to more than 300 representing “pockets of support across the country” since they started keeping it a year ago. “I think it will continue to grow because African-Americans still believe that education is the door to our ‘peoples’ freedom – home schooling is a way to reclaim it for ourselves.”[10]

Contact information:
National Black Home Educators Resource Association
6943 Stoneview Avenue
Baker, Louisiana  70714
Phone: 225-778-0169
E-mail: nbhera@internet8.net
No membership fee. Quarterly newsletter is $35 a year.

Black Homeschooling Across the Land

Prince George’s County, Maryland: In this middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., the black home-schooling movement is thriving. Although no one has taken an official count, black children are prominent in the ranks of gymnastics classes and scouting troops among the county’s several thousand home-schooled children. A real sense of community appears to exist among many of the African-American home schoolers.

Joby Dupree, who has begun the seventh year of home schooling her three children, believes parents who are serious about educating their children in her county have two choices: “Either go to work and earn the tuition to send your child to private school, or stay at home and teach them yourself.” There are many reasons that is so, but perhaps the unspoken one is that “families are not doing what they need to prepare their children for school.” That, plus public-school classes of 30 to 35 pupils, make classroom management difficult for teachers. [11]

An unofficial tracking of African-American students occurs, Mrs. Dupree believes, that stems from low expectations for black children’s success.  “There is tracking, and always has been. My brothers were referred to shop, and I was placed in home economics. They do not want to put my children in college preparatory, liberal-arts courses. It’s part of society: Educators look out on the sea of faces and see the black ones and think ‘There’s a criminal, a future inmate,’ not ‘There’s a future college professor.’ More black children are given labels, and referred to special education.”

She believes the propensity to administer Ritalin to active children, especially boys, is “creating a whole generation of Zombies,” and she doesn’t want her children exposed to that.

African-American home schoolers do encounter more community pressures than do whites in getting started, she believes. Particularly some older blacks recall the civil-rights struggles of the Sixties and feel that “we did work hard to have equal access to public schooling. We still don’t have it, but there’s a feeling you’re deserting the system.” In addition, since a family must typically forfeit one income in order to home-school, blacks are at a disadvantage from having lower household income, on average, than do whites.

However, African-American home educators in Prince George’s County benefit from an array of support groups: “It doesn’t get any better than PG County,” remarked Dupree, adding that there may be comparable networks in Atlanta and California. One of the strongest bases of support is Mocha Moms, an organization of “moms of color” who have decided to put their careers on hold in order to care for their children at home on a full-time basis. While not all Mocha Moms decide to home-school as their children reach school age, making the commitment to do so is a natural next step for some of them.

One such mom is Elaine Johnson, who “officially” began home schooling 5-year-old Sydney this fall, with 3-year-old Colby also participating in some of the kindergarten activities. Mrs. Johnson pointed out that for stay-at-home parents, home schooling is “really not new” because there is a continual process of teaching children new things, from the colors to basic life skills, that is not circumscribed by formal school hours.  After scouting the Prince George’s public schools, she was not satisfied that they would give her children what they needed in the way of an academic foundation, and the Christian schools in the neighborhood “were really very expensive.”[12]

In her home school, she uses the Abeka Curriculum, which is widely used among home schoolers and a number of Christian academies. The program provides for phonics, language arts, cursive writing, poetry, arithmetic, science, and other basics. Like many home schoolers, Elaine is sensitive to outside critics’ insinuations that home-schooled children may be smart but lack social skills. She takes her children regularly to a Small Fry program for 3-to-5-year-olds at nearby Watkins Park, and also to tennis lessons once a week at College Park. Sydney also will be in ballet soon. Actually, home schoolers “have the latitude to be involved in a lot of things; we have the flexibility.” She conducts classes until 11:30 a.m., which leaves the afternoons free for a variety of social activities.

Home schooling also provides children the opportunity to explore in some depth what interests them, Mrs. Johnson noted. For instance, when the basics are covered, she allows her daughter to take a topic that intrigues her and prepare a project on it. “Spiders” was a recent production. Sydney made a spider, and visited the library and used the Internet to research how spiders weave their webs.

Mrs. Johnson and her husband will consider other educational options, such as a private school with strong academics, as the children grow older, but “right now we would like to give our kids a good solid foundation.” She’s not sure that’s possible in the early grades of the local public school, where teachers are forced to concentrate on minimal hygienic skills, like brushing one’s teeth.

Elaine Johnson does sense some eyebrow-raising within the family and the community, particularly among the older generation, along the lines of “why isn’t that child in school.” When she and her daughter are out in a public place in early afternoon, some adults will pointedly ask where the child goes to school. Mrs. Johnson has cleverly handled that by naming her home school “Johnson Academy,” a reply Sydney has given to inquirers. “It’s an ice-breaker,” she says. In time, as family and friends see the huge benefits of home schooling, skeptical reactions will fade, she believes.

Atlanta:

The media portrayal of Americans who choose to school their children at home usually doesn’t get much past white, religious fundamentalist, and political conservative. But then there is Deidre McCalla, who is none of the above.

Ms. McCalla is a talented songwriter and singer whose performances blend tender ballads, humor, and politically progressive thought. Deidre has three critically acclaimed albums to her credit, and has done concerts in venues ranging from coffeehouses to Carnegie Hall. Her professional profile proclaims that she is “a black woman in a white world viewing America’s strengths and weaknesses from an African-American lesbian perspective.”[13]

What attracted her to home schooling? Her mother, a waitress, and father, a warehouse worker, had sacrificed to send her to private Catholic boarding school, after she’d started in New York City public schools, and “perhaps as a result of private-school bias, I was never impressed with the behavior of kids I occasionally met from public schools.”

After moving to Georgia, she was all the more determined not to rely on government schools, given their segregationist past. She assumed she’d figure a way to send her son to a private school, but then she picked up a book entitled, The Home Schooling Handbook by Mary Griffith. Inspired by the work, “I then read everything I could get my hands on about home-schooling and realized how eminently do-able it was.”

One of the advantages she sees in home-schooling is the flexibility to deal with individual differences: “I’ve had to learn that he is a very different kind of learner than I am; he needs lots of hands-on-type materials, frequent breaks, and can be most attentive when he is allowed to move. I do not use a boxed curriculum because one size does not fit all. I spend a lot of time seeking out the best materials for him – and if it doesn’t work for him, I’ve learned to dump it and try something else.”

Her progressive world-view also informs her approach. She takes care to keep her son’s outlook as free as possible of sex-role stereotyping, and his studies include “the contributions of women, people of color, and the impact of colonialism on the indigenous peoples of the world. . . .”

A Perspective on Diversity in Home Schooling

The increase in home schooling among African-Americans is only one signal of the growing diversification of the home-schooling movement. In its swelling ranks are Americans of greatly varying beliefs and backgrounds. And the movement is by no means restricted to the United States. A recent study for The Fraser Institute by Patrick Basham found that home schooling is thriving both in Canada and the States. It also presented evidence that both the academic levels and socialization of the average home-schooled child are superior to those of the average public school student.[14]

As Deidre McCall put it, one thing unites otherwise diverse home schoolers: a belief that “conventional schooling is not serving the educational and social needs of our children.”[15]

The Lexington Institute surveyed members of a California home-schooling network and found many interesting perspectives on diversification of the movement. One of them, Linda Sternhill Davis, whose family has been home-schooling in Southern California for 11 years, offered these thoughts:

“In the ‘old days,’’ said Mrs. Davis, a Trustee of the California Homeschool Network, “home schoolers seemed to be divided into two main groups. There were families who home schooled for religious reasons. These parents didn’t want their children being exposed to certain controversial subjects being taught in the public schools such as evolution, sex education, homosexuality, and the like. For the most part, these families would be labeled as right-wing, Christian conservatives or fundamentalists.[16]

“The other original group of home schoolers were the very liberal, left-wing, antigovernment, former ‘hippies’ who didn’t want any government intervention into their families’ lives or their children’s educations. Of course, many Libertarians and right-wing so-called ‘patriots’ would also fall into this ‘separation of school and state’ category. All inclusive home-schooling support groups usually have an amalgam of many people with often extremely diverse viewpoints. It is interesting how home schooling has brought together those otherwise very disparate groups.

“During the last few years, an increasingly more ‘middle-of-the-road’ population has embraced home schooling for their children. Since I have been a local contact for a state-based home-schooling support network for six years, I often receive telephone calls or e-mails from families looking into home-based education. I have, therefore, been in a position to see how the home-schooling community has been changing over the years.

“Many of these ‘moderate’ or ‘mainstream’ (for lack of a better term) families are seeking alternatives to public education for their children. Our own family started to home-school when we realized that even the allegedly best public schools could not always meet the individual needs of the child. There are tired and abusive teachers in the system. Some were beginning to negatively affect my two children. We discovered home schooling, and this has been a wonderful alternative for our family. Now, both of my children are in college, while my youngest completes her last year of ‘compulsory’ education, combining at-home studies and community college classes. We are all happy, life-long learners.

“Many of our fellow ‘mainstream’ families have elected to home-school for similar reasons. Public schools were/are unresponsive or even damaging to their children. Some families have sought alternatives because of the violence in public schools. Some because of the emotional stresses of negative peer pressures and the lack of support and/or responsiveness from teachers, administrators, and staff. Some now home-school because their children were bored or lost or unmotivated or floundering in their public school classrooms. Their one-on-one interactions through home schooling, in a usually loving and supportive environment, have positively affected their children’s learning and emotional stability. Each family has its own story – and reasons – for home schooling.”

According to the National Center for Education Statistics survey, these were the top 10 reasons parents gave for home schooling and the percentage citing each reason (respondents were allowed to pick more than one):[17]

The Future

The outlook of younger Americans suggests that growth in home schooling could occur fastest among ethnic minorities, according to education researcher Patricia M. Lines. A survey taken among selected students at Vanderbilt University, a selective institution, and Nashville State Tech, a two-year college, found that 45.3 percent of African-Americans said “yes” or “maybe” when asked whether they would ever home-school their own children. By contrast, fewer than one-fourth of white students gave that response.[18]

Although the sample was small, the results were striking. Wrote Ms. Lines: “Public educators who count on the loyalty of ethnic minorities as the backbone of their big-city clientele may be in for yet another surprise.”

What are the public policy implications? What can government do to help? Primarily stay out of the way. As recently as 20 years ago, most states outlawed home schooling. Those laws have fallen one by one, but some jurisdictions still attempt to regulate home-schooling heavily, even though no evidence exists that regulation produces higher achievement.

Besides getting out of the way of home schoolers, one positive step policymakers could take is to recognize the economic as well as social dividends home schooling pays for communities. On average, American home-schooling parents spent $546 per child per year while government schools spent 10 to 20 times that. And home schoolers attained an average 85^th percentile ranking on achievement tests, 35 points above the public-school average.[19]

Because home schoolers spend their own money for education resources while paying property taxes that bankroll the public schools, policy-makers should consider tax breaks that would allow them to keep more of their own money. After all, by educating their children at home, and doing it well, they are saving governments at all levels a lot of money. Tax breaks for home schooling could particularly help and encourage African-American and other minority home schoolers, who have household incomes lower on average than the white majority.

Endnotes

1.    “Homeschooling in the United States: 1999,” National Center for Education Statistics, National Household Education Surveys Program, Washington, DC, July 2001.

2.    “The New Pioneers,” The Home School Court Report, Vol. XVII, No. 4, July/August 2001, available online at www.hslda.org/courtreport/V17N4/V17N401.asp

3.    Interview with Dr. Brian Ray, October 15, 2001.

4.    Ibid.

5.    “The New Pioneers,” op. cit.

6.    Ibid.

7.    Ibid.

8.    Ibid.

9.    Ibid.

10. Interview with Joyce Burges, October 18, 2001.

11.Interview with Joby Dupree, October 15, 2001.

12. Interview with Elaine Johnson, October 18, 2001.

13. Interview with Deidre McCalla, September 11, 2001.

14. Patrick Basham. “Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream,” Public Policy Sources, No. 51, The Fraser Institute, Vancouver, BC.

15.  Interview with McCalla, op. cit.

16. Interview with Linda Sternhill Davis, September 16, 2001.

17. “Homeschooling in the United States,” op. cit.

18. Patricia M. Lines, “Homeschooling Comes of Age,” The Public Interest, No. 140 (Summer 2000): 74-85.

19. Basham, op. cit.