Home schooling grows among Chicago's Black families - Crain's Chicago Business

For Black parents frustrated by not seeing their children thrive academically, the pandemic was the nudge they needed to try home schooling. While white students tend to make up the vast majority of home-schoolers, increasing numbers of Black families are making it their education option.
In Illinois, total households reporting that they home-school more than doubled, increasing to 5.4% in fall 2020 from 2.1% in the spring of that year. Among Black households nationally, home schooling increased fivefold, to 16.1% from 3.3% in the same period, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
Quiana Hardy, 47, a resident of Chicago’s Ashburn neighborhood, decided to home-school her 8-year-old son starting this fall. When he returned to in-person learning at a Chicago Public Schools magnet school last year, Hardy and other parents were alarmed to learn that their children’s teacher was frequently absent, leading to inconsistency in the classroom. Hardy feared that her son was falling behind. She says that was the tipping point.
Families like Hardy’s are making the move because of unsatisfactory remote learning and in-person experiences at traditional schools. Some parents choose home schooling because they want more oversight of their children’s curriculum, while others want less rigidity. Regardless of motive, a growing home-schooling movement could further blunt schools’ efforts across the city and state to attract families back into public school classrooms.
Illinois saw a 3% drop in public school enrollment in the 2020-21 school year from 2019-20, with kindergarten and elementary schools seeing the steepest declines, according to data from the state’s Board of Education, the board’s annual report and the State Report Card analyzed by Advance Illinois, an independent organization that promotes public education.
“It’s possible that some of those kids are being home-schooled,” Robin Steans, president of Advance Illinois, said during a City Club of Chicago education event in August. “The truth is we don’t do a good job of collecting all of that information and bringing it up to the state level. We don’t know.”
Illinois is one of the few states that doesn’t require home-schooling families to register with the state or local district.
The pandemic’s impact on education gave parents and caretakers a closer view of their children’s day-to-day academic experience. And some were underwhelmed.
“They got a chance to see exactly what the children were being taught,” says Joyce Burges, CEO and co-founder of National Black Home Educators, a national membership home-schooling organization. “And a lot of these families have reported to me that they did not like what they had been taught or how they were being taught.”
But there were other factors that contribute to the decision to home-school.
Hardy’s son has special needs and requires “a little bit more attention in certain areas,” she says. She felt the curriculum at CPS wasn’t allowing students the time and the space to grow naturally. Home schooling allows that, she adds.
A clinical therapist, Hardy meets with clients in the evening so that she can oversee her son’s education during the day.
Burges says the pandemic’s shift to remote and flexible work has allowed more Black families to consider home schooling for the first time. She also witnessed more parents gravitate to in-home learning because they felt Black history and perspectives were absent in their children’s mainstream education.
During the pandemic, Black parents “saw the whitewashing in some of the history books that their children were using,” Burges says. “They didn’t see their history—their foreparents and forefathers (contributing) at all to the making of this country.”
Jaleesa Smith integrates lessons and activities that reflect her students’ identities in her home-schooling program. The mom and educator runs Friends of Cabrini, a Chicago-based co-op that offers unschooling online, a type of home schooling where children guide their own learning. Smith’s students have done geography lessons on the continent of Africa and practiced multiplication and division in Swahili. She finds books with Latino and Black characters. There’s even been a Black History Month coding project.
Even though the pandemic is receding, Burges thinks the Black home-schooling movement is going to continue to grow.
“We just woke (up) to the fact that our children were not learning what’s important to us,” she says. “Parents are not standing on the sidelines anymore.”
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