Black home schoolers push back against racist, unregulated curricula: ‘They called slavery immigration'

The Guardian

6 days ago

In 2018, Dr Timberly Baker decided to home school her children after a local school in Arkansas failed to challenge her eldest child. Her daughter, Baker said, is gifted. But despite routinely testing off the charts during standardized exams, the school had no plan on how Baker's daughter could take more advanced classes.
Still new to home schooling, Baker decided to use a Christian curriculum, solely due to its ready-made lesson plans and promise to produce a school transcript in case her children later enrolled into mainstream schools.
But Baker, a researcher and associate professor of educational leadership at Arkansas State University, found the lesson plans 'problematic', especially with regard to social studies. A lesson about the 'triangular trade', the transatlantic trading system where people were stolen from Africa and shipped to western colonies to be enslaved, proved to be a final straw. The curriculum 'mentioned enslaved Africans as one of the products that were being shipped, but as a product, rather than in their humanity as individuals and as people', Baker recalled.
Baker came up against a common problem facing many parents of color choosing to home school their children: a lack of inclusive, educational material. Even as home schooling becomes more diverse, educational material for families is still mostly conservative, Christian and eurocentric. Major educational companies have been repeatedly condemned for racist and inaccurate material and accused of failing to implement major changes. This isn't a question of dated curriculum, said Jonah Stewart, interim executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a home schooling advocacy group. 'Those curricula are alive and well'.
In light of the gap, some Black home schoolers have taken it upon themselves to create a more comprehensive curriculum, often as a formal tool that can be used by other families. Baker chose to supplement her child's education on the triangular trade by having her watch Roots, a miniseries about enslavement based on Alex Haley's eponymous novel, reading library books, and by speaking with familial elders about their personal relationship to enslavement. 'I took on the responsibility of correcting what I saw as inadequacies or just incorrect perceptions that came out of the curriculum I chose,' said Baker.
The rate of Black parents home schooling their children has steadily increased for years, skyrocketing during the Covid-19 pandemic as education shifted to online platforms. In 2020, the number of Black households home schooling went from 3.3% to 16.1%, a five-fold increase between April and October of that year. Preliminary data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in 2023 on home schooling showed that Black students and their families participated in virtual schooling at higher rates than other groups; future data collection on the state of home schooling and other education methods has now ended after the Trump administration gutted the NCES.
Home schooling is increasing in popularity among the general population, said Stewart, and growing more diverse. The school choice movement, which encouraged parents to explore educational options for their children outside public school, has had a resurgence under Donald Trump, who has simultaneously escalated attacks on public education as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within classrooms. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal funding for schools that fail to eliminate their DEI planning. Last month, Trump also signed an executive order that instructs the dismantling of the Department of Education, a key campaign promise.
Home schooling laws vary from state to state, with a general lack of oversight, said Stewart. Only a handful of states, including Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and Vermont, require home-schooled children to participate in standardized testing for assessment. Other states don't even mandate that parents notify state officials if they unenroll their children from formal schooling.
The lack of regulations on home schooling is a double-edged sword, said experts. With more lax rules, families are able to teach and learn Afrocentric culturally-specific material without state interference, said Baker. But, extremists have also taken advantage of limited regulation. Home school materials, particularly from Christian publishers, have been known for teaching creationism versus evolution. Some home schooling material has described slave masters as 'caregivers' for enslaved people and the practice of slavery as 'Black immigration'. Rightwing material remains a baseline throughout home schooling education, with some parents sharing even more hateful material with their children. In February 2023, the Ohio department of education investigated a group of home schooling parents who reportedly dispersed pro-Nazi material in a local home schooling group.
'When states do take the effort to ensure that basic education is occurring in core subjects, it is protective against those really extreme iterations of home schooling,' said Stewart. 'It doesn't fix everything, but it is a way of just capturing intent to educate.'
For Black families, many who have reported racism and bias in public education, home schooling is a way to guarantee a culturally affirming educational environment for their children by having greater control of the lesson plan and education, said Najarian Peters, a professor of law at the University of Kansas and researcher of home education. 'We continuously have these issues with Black children in formal education, where they are disproportionately represented in exclusionary discipline, and special education that does not seek to amplify their individual talent, but categorize them as inferior learners.'
Delina McPhaull, the creator of Woke Homeschooling curriculum, which is available to home educators looking for inclusive education material, sought out home schooling in 2016 after the killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager in Florida, by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was later acquitted, sparking massive outrage across the country around racially motivated shootings. Home schooling for her family, McPhaull said, was largely due to her conservative school district in Keene, Texas. 'Seventy-seven percent of the people in this county voted for him,' McPhaull said, referring to Trump. 'These were the people educating my kids.'
Home education has been a 'tradition' for Black families, dating back to the 18th century, said Peters, a time when enslaved people were prohibited from learning how to read. Prince Hall, a prominent abolitionist in Massachusetts, ran a school for Black children out of his home after decrying the lack of educational opportunities. The African Free School, a school for children of enslaved people and free Black people, was founded in New York City in 1787.
In the 1970s, fundamentalist Christians launched the current iteration of the home schooling movement as a way to avoid what they described as moral failings in public education, such as sex education and teachings on evolution. Organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), founded in 1983, were born out of conservative anxieties about attacks against home schooling and school choice. It remains a right-leaning leadership base with connections to groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom. Will Estrada, senior counsel for the organization, contributed to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.
The potential for extremism, especially given the involvement of far-right individuals in home schooling advocacy networks, is a part of the 'good and bad of the wild, wild, west of home schooling', said Baker. 'When we talk about home schooling being a part of school choice, it is a choice,' she said. '[It's] probably one of its purest forms in terms of schooling action, because it is so unregulated.'
For Black parents and their families, the ability to craft a more individualized curriculum has become a pathway to help correct flaws in home schooling curriculum for themselves and others. McPhaull's Woke Homeschooling curriculum has served over 13,000 families since 2019. Home schooling cooperatives, like Brown Mamas in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have helped support and empower families looking into home schooling as a possible refuge for their children, including with access to culturally appropriate material.
Peters added: 'When we talk about a deficiency in materials, that's not the end of the conversation. That is just a pathway to really dig into the agency, self determination and subsidiarity engagement that Black parents have consistently done since the founding of this country.'