- Tuesday, March 04, 2025
By: Pramod Kumar
THE Covid-19 pandemic and last summer’s national reckoning over race have prompted many parents of colour in the US to pull their children from traditional schools entirely which fuelled an explosion in the popularity of home schooling, the Washington Post reported.
The percentage of schoolchildren in home-school has nearly tripled since mid-2019. By May of this year, the US Census Bureau found more than one out of every 12 students were being home-schooled.
Though home schooling has often been considered the domain of religious White families, the most significant increases were seen among black, Latino and Asian households.
Between 2019 and May 2021, home schooling rates jumped from about one per cent to eight per cent for black students — a more than sixfold increase. Among Hispanic students, rates jumped from two per cent to nine per cent.
According to the report, the increase was less dramatic for white families, where home schooling doubled from four to eight per cent over the same period. Between 2016, the year of the most recently available data for Asian American families, and May, home-school rates went from one to five percent.
Educators hope black, Latino and Asian parents, who had expressed the greatest reluctance to return to classrooms, will feel confident enough to put their children back in school buildings when vaccination levels are high and infection rates are low.
Previous studies of black home schooling families found they were often pushed out of traditional school systems when their children encountered racist treatment in the classroom. In interviews, Latino families expressed similar concerns. And Asian families sought to influence their children’s cultural education, the Post report added.
In many cases, the migration from mainstream education shows the rising fears among parents of colour that schools are failing their children, and the growing awareness of racial disparities in the treatment and outcomes for children of colour.
“I feel like the school system is setting these kids up for failure, and I don’t want my child being a part of it,” Jennifer Johnson, a former Baltimore city schoolteacher who is now raising — and home schooling — her seven-year-old cousin Donovan Bien, told the Post.
The underfunded city schools — where three-quarters of students are Black and at least 58 per cent hail from low-income households — are emblematic of the kinds of schools Black children attend across the nation, the report added.
Bernita Bradley, an education activist in Detroit who works with the National Parents Union, said the pandemic lay in stark relief the disparities between the city and more affluent suburbs. After schools closed last March, suburban districts swung into action and started remote schooling while Detroit was still trying to get laptops to students.
Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman, a scholar who is now working on a book about Black home schooling, said many Black parents fear that some traditional public schools will exact a mental and psychological toll on their children.
Another concern is black and Latino children and special education students are overrepresented in suspensions, expulsions, and school arrests for reasons some attribute to racial bias.
