Home schooling becoming popular with African-Americans
African-American parents and guardians are increasingly joining the ranks of families in the nation that opt to home school their children. According to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, poor-performing schools and the desire for a more cultural educational experience for their children rank as the top reasons why some African-American parents are choosing the home school method over a traditional brick-and-mortar school for their child's education.
"That is the No. 1 reason … the black curriculum," Joyce Burges told the Chicago Tribune. "They've taken black history out. It wasn't just Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth … and Harriet Tubman. It was also Condoleezza Rice, Shirley Chisholm; it was also Marian Anderson and the Tuskegee Airmen. They're heroes, and our children need to learn about our heroes." Burges, along with her husband, founded the National Black Home Educators, which is a Louisiana-based, self-proclaimed "resource network" for those interested in home schooling their children.
The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Educational Statistics reports that some 1.7 million children were being home schooled in 2007, up from 1.1 million in 2003 and 850,000 in 1999. White students accounted for 77 percent of the students being home schooled in 2007 with 3.9 percent of all Caucasian students being home schooled; less than 1 percent (.08) of African-American students in the U.S. were home schooled at that time. Parents are not required to report a decision to home school their child in some parts of the country, so the national figures on home schooling may not be completely accurate.
Parents most often chose home schooling because they wanted to guide their child's religious and moral instruction, according to the Department of Education's 2007 data. Concerns about the school environment and dissatisfaction with academic instruction were the top two and three reasons why parents chose home schooling for their child, the data reports.
