{"id":192,"date":"2012-10-01T16:52:52","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T16:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=192"},"modified":"2012-10-01T18:30:30","modified_gmt":"2012-10-01T18:30:30","slug":"black-parents-decisions-to-home-school-four-key-themes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=192","title":{"rendered":"BLACK PARENTS’ DECISIONS TO HOME SCHOOL: Four Key Themes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record: \u00a0<\/strong>Cheryl Fields-Smith and Meca Williams, \u201cMotivations, Sacrifices, and Challenges: Black Parents\u2019 Decisions to Home School\u201d in Urban Review<\/em> 41 (2009): 369-389\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Summary:\u00a0 <\/strong>Fields-Smith, a professor at the University of Georgia, and Williams, at Georgia Southern, here offer an important contribution to the literature on parental motivation for homeschooling.\u00a0 This article is the first to look carefully at African American homeschooling parents to determine their motivations.\u00a0 The authors used a \u201ccommunity-nomination process\u201d to find black homeschooling parents to study.\u00a0 That means that they used contacts they had with individual homeschoolers to gain access to others.\u00a0 This approach netted them 24 families, all residing in the greater Atlanta region.\u00a0 Fields-Smith and Williams then had these families fill out an open-ended survey of attitudes and demographic data, conducted lengthy personal interviews, and held focus-group sessions every six months over a period of two years.<\/p>\n

Demographically, the families were mostly two-parent, multiple child, middle-income.\u00a0 Most mothers had completed college and most had been homeschooling for many years.\u00a0 With the exception of race, these families look very similar on paper to most white homeschoolers.\u00a0 Compared to national averages for African Americans however, these families tend to be better educated, have higher incomes, and maintain more stable marital bonds.\u00a0 As with whites, mothers tend to do most of the actual homeschooling, often quitting jobs to do so.\u00a0 Most homeschooled their children from birth or after a few years in elementary school.\u00a0 For all of these generalizations, however, the sample also included outliers\u2013there were single mothers, some very poor families, some with only a high school education, and so on.\u00a0 One significant difference with white averages is that 1\/3 of the children in the sample were designated as special needs.<\/p>\n

Fields-Smith and Williams separate their findings into four categories.\u00a0 First, they discuss the salience of race as a motivation.\u00a0 19 of the 24 parents interviewed said that experience of racial discrimination or inequality was a significant motivator.\u00a0 This was especially the case for parents of black boys.\u00a0 The authors include some powerful representative quotations of these parents\u2019 frustration with the destructive social pressures schools place on black males.\u00a0 Parents also noted that the homeschool groups, co-ops, and sports programs to which they belong are far more racially integrated than the nearly all-black public schools their children would otherwise be attending.\u00a0 Homeschooling also allows these families to infuse \u201can afrocentric or Black American focus\u201d into the curriculum (19 reported doing so).<\/p>\n

The second topic the authors discuss is religion.\u00a0 21 of the 24 families had religious motivations for homeschooling.\u00a0 For six of the families religion was the primary motivator, giving them the strength of conviction to make and stick with the difficult choice to homeschool.\u00a0 For the rest it was a contributing factor.\u00a0 Though this section is not developed as fully as it might have been, the authors generalize that the religious motivation for African Ameircans is cast in a more liberatory mode than for white Christian homeschoolers.\u00a0 Homeschooling allows these families to connect the strong tradition of liberation theology that is at the heart of Black Christianity in the United States with their schooling.\u00a0 Unlike many white Christians, whose faith leads them toward nostalgia for early American history and a desire to restore some form of \u201cChristian America,\u201d for blacks it is more about personal and racial liberation from<\/em> the very culture many white Christians want to restore.\u00a0 Christian faith becomes an asset and resource for liberatory education rather than something that must be kept out of the curriculum as in public schools.<\/p>\n

The third theme discussed is the amount of sacrifice black families make to homeschool.\u00a0 Historically, black women have worked at a much higher rate than whites, and for many of these families it was a considerable financial sacrifice to forgo a second income, not to mention that they now must pay for schooling resources.\u00a0 Furthermore, many of these mothers face criticism from other black Americans, many of whom see the well-educated stay-at-home-mom as an \u201cabandonment of the rewards obtained from a long struggle toward equality in the workplace\u201d (381) and of all of the civil-rights struggles to get black children in public schools in the first place.\u00a0 Several of the parents report that their neighbors are angry at them because deep down these parents also know that public schools do not serve black children well, but they are not willing to sacrifice careers to teach their own children.<\/p>\n

Finally, the authors address challenges these homeschooling families face.\u00a0 Some of them are familiar to all homeschoolers\u2013how to get everything done without going crazy (especially when babies and toddlers are in the picture), how to tailor instruction to each child\u2019s unique learning style, how to maintain the joy of learning (especially in the higher grades), and maintaining patience when things don\u2019t go as planned.\u00a0 Like their white counterparts, these parents have found support groups to be a tremendous help in dealing with the daily grind.\u00a0 Also like whites, homeschooling mothers are often held suspect by extended family, but as stated the pressure here is magnified by the association in the black community of racial progress with school success and female employment.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, Fields-Smith and Williams note that while these black homeschoolers are similar to white homeschoolers in many ways, they \u201cdo not necessarily represent the \u2018Conservative Right\u2019\u201d (384) that is the typical homeschool stereotype.\u00a0 They are motivated by a desire to escape the destructive racial stereotyping public schools so often perpetuate, and they experience not only the usual stresses of homeschooling but the added stress of being cast by some as traitors to the cause of black integration.<\/p>\n

Appraisal: <\/strong>\u00a0This is a wonderful paper to have in print. The empirical approach here for the first time takes the study of black homeschoolers beyond the domain of anecdote and editorial and organizes everything into one convenient and well-constructed piece.\u00a0 As with so many other studies of homeschooling, it\u2019s unclear how far we can generalize from this this non-representative sample of 24 families all from one geographic region.\u00a0 And we don\u2019t get any sense from this article whether homeschooling is growing or declining among African Americans nationally.\u00a0 But at least it\u2019s a start.\u00a0 Future studies of black homeschoolers will use this article as a starting point.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: \u00a0Cheryl Fields-Smith and Meca Williams, \u201cMotivations, Sacrifices, and Challenges: Black Parents\u2019 Decisions to Home School\u201d in Urban Review 41 (2009): 369-389\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 Summary:\u00a0 Fields-Smith, a professor at the University of Georgia, and Williams, at Georgia Southern, here offer an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[126,127,108,125,128,109,110],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parental-motivation","category-raceethnicity","tag-afrocentric","tag-afrocentrism","tag-cheryl-fields-smith","tag-community-nomination-process","tag-liberation-theology","tag-meca-williams","tag-urban-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}