Exploring the Black Parental Imaginary: How Black Parents (Re)imagine Education Through Home-Education

• In Event: The Complexity of School Choice for Historically Marginalized Families

Abstract

Black parents face an incredible decision when choosing how their children will be educated. They must choose whether to persist in traditional public schools, which researchers have found has often been an overwhelmingly assaultive social enterprise (Dumas, 2014; Love, 2016; Posey-Maddox et. al., 2021), or fully remove their children from traditional public schools into alternative school arrangements, like home-education or independent schools. Warren and colleagues (2022) contend that antiblackness—the logics of disdain for Blackness, and as a result Black people—is ever present in today’s schools “…shading how Black boys are seen, known, and understood” (p.114). The dehumanization of Black bodies in the United States became institutionalized through slavery, codified in the law, and continues to be reflected in all systems and structures built in the wake of slavery, including the American school system (Sexton, 2008; Sharpe, 2016). It is within this context that I examine the decision of Black parents to home-educate as an attempt to disrupt racialized harm in schools. This mixed-methods dissertation explores the very understudied relationship between factors shaping a Black parent’s decision to homeschool, visions of schooling they have that promote their children’s holistic wellbeing, and the culture of school Black parents create within their homes to achieve that vision. This study both examines the broader socio-political context within which Black parents make the decision to homeschool through the analysis of large-scale nationally representative datasets and utilizes interview and ethnographic methods to further probe their motivations and practice. I ask: What is the relationship between a Black parent’s choice to homeschool and their visions of an educational experience that promotes their children’s wellbeing?

During the first phase of the study, I use a correlational research design to estimate the extent to which various state and local characteristics, including racial isolation and school quality, are associated with the probability a child is home-educated. Preliminary evidence from the analysis of the administrative data suggests that the degree to which a family is racially isolated within their county is positively associated with the likelihood that the child is homeschooled. Similarly, discipline rates, teacher-student ratios, and school quality are all associated with the likelihood that a child will be homeschooled. However, the differential relationships of Black children to these characteristics were not statistically significant.

In the subsequent interview and ethnographic phases, I find that, although differential effects were not detected quantitatively in the sample, race colors Black parents’ perspectives on many of the previous findings. For example, many Black parents who homeschool in a suburban context argued that they were hesitant to re-enroll their children in more traditional schools because their assigned school or district had low graduation rates and high discipline rates among Black students. Many spoke of a mindset shift, wanting their children to be critical thinkers who didn’t accept generalizations about their identity. All participants argued that they believed education should be a less stressful and more humanizing experience for Black children.

Author

• Carla P. Wellborn-Watts, Vanderbilt University