AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMESCHOOLING PRACTICES: Empirical Evidence

Record: Ama Mazama, “African American Homeschooling Practices: Empirical Evidence.” Theory and Research in Education, 14, No. 1 (2016): 26-44. [Abstract]

Summary: Mazama, one of the leading researchers on African American homeschooling, is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Programs of the Department of African American Studies at Temple University. In this article, she seeks to investigate the daily instructional practices of African American homeschoolers.

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AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMESCHOOLERS: Parental Motivations and Student Achievement

Record: Brian Ray, “African American Homeschool Parents’ Motivations for Homeschooling and Their Black Children’s Academic Achievement” in Journal of School Choice, 9, no. 1 (2015): 71-96. [Abstract]

Summary: Brian D. Ray is the founder and current president of the National Home Education Research Institute. In this study he explores the academic achievement of Black homeschool students in grades 4 through 8 as well as their parents’ motivations for homeschooling. The rate of Black homeschoolers nearly doubled from 1999 to 2012, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In that time, many Black parents became actively involved in the choice of their children’s school. Ray ponders why so many African Americans are choosing homeschooling when they fought so hard to be mainstreamed into the public-school system.

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AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMESCHOOLING: Curriculum and Identity

Record: Ama Mazama and Garvey Lundy, “African American Homeschooling and the Question of Curricular Cultural Relevance” in Journal of Negro Education 82, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 123-138 [abstract here]

Summary:  Mazama and Lundy have recently published several important articles on the motivations of African American parents for homeschooling, all based on interviews with a sample of 74 such parents from seven U.S. cities.  In a 2012 article they first articulated their concept of “racial protectionism” as a defining motivation for many African American parents who want to rescue their children from the institutional and individual racism they experience at school.  In a 2013 article they added the concept of “educational protectionism” to the mix, which they characterize as an effort on the part of African American parents to replace the boring, unchallenging, and rigid curriculum of schools with higher expectations, relevant (often Afrocentric) curriculum, and student initiative.  In a 2014 article they explain how a small subset of their sample, about 15% of the overall group, did not identify with the racial dynamics expressed by everyone else.  For this small subset the motivation seems to be more exclusively religious (they call it “religious protectionism”), very like the motivations of the much larger group of white fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers.  In another 2014 article they explore how homeschooling is especially attractive to African American parents of boys given the discrimination black males regularly experience in public schools.   In the article before us today they examine how some African American homeschoolers are using the method to escape the Eurocentric curriculum that permeates public schools.

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I’M KEEPING MY SON HOME: African American Males and Homeschooling

Record: Garvey Lundy and Ama Mazama, “‘I’m Keeping My Son Home’: African American Males and the Motivation to Homeschool” in Journal of African American Males in Education 5, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 53-74. [Available Here]

Summary: Mazama and Lundy have recently published several important articles on the motivations of African American parents for homeschooling, all based on interviews with a sample of 74 such parents from seven U.S. cities.  In a 2012 article they first articulated their concept of “racial protectionism” as a defining motivation for many African American parents who want to rescue their children from the institutional and individual racism they experience at school.  In a 2013 article they added the concept of “educational protectionism” to the mix, which they characterize as an effort on the part of African American parents to replace the boring, unchallenging, and rigid curriculum of schools with higher expectations, relevant (often Afrocentric) curriculum, and student initiative.  In a 2014 article they explain how a small subset of their sample, about 15% of the overall group, did not identify with the racial dynamics expressed by everyone else.  For this small subset the motivation seems to be more exclusively religious (they call it “religious protectionism”), very like the motivations of the much larger group of white fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers.

In the present article they again use their rich study of 74 African American homeschoolers to focus particularly on boys. 

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AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMESCHOOLERS: Religion and Race as Motivators

Record: Ama Mazama and Garvey Lundy, “African American Homeschoolers: The Force of Faith and the Reality of Race in the Homeschooling Experience” in Religion and Education (forthcoming).  [First page here]

Summary: In previous articles Mazama (of Temple University) and Lundy (of Montgomery County Community College) have drawn on what is to date the largest and most geographically diverse sample of African American homeschoolers ever collected to probe parental motivation.  In a 2012 article they first articulated what has become a standard theme of their work, the idea that African American homeschoolers are motivated largely by what they call “racial protectionism,” a desire to protect their children from the racism they often face in conventional schools.  In a 2013 piece they refined their concept, calling it “educational protectionism,” and giving it both a curricular and a pedagogical dimension.

In this article they draw on this same data to add yet another dimension to their account of parental motivation.  Here they focus particularly on religion. 

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AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMESCHOOLING: A Large-Scale Study

Record: Ama Mazama and Garvey Lundy, “African American Homeschooling and the Quest for a Quality Education” in Education and Urban Society 20, no. 10 (2013): 1-22. [Abstract here]

Summary:  Mazama, a professor of African American studies at Temple University, and Lundy, a professor of social sciences at Montgomery County Community College, here present results from the largest survey yet attempted of African American homeschooling families, looking specifically at what motivates these families to choose homeschooling.

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The 2013 NCES Homeschooling Data

Every four years the National Center for Education Statistics’ enormous National Household Education Survey includes questions about homeschooling.  The results of the latest round of homeschooling questions (from the 2011 survey) were released in August of 2013.  This massive survey (n=17,563) provides us with the best data by far on homeschooling, consisting as it does of a representative sample of the entire population of the United States.  You can read the preliminary results in tables 7 and 8 of the latest survey here.

Five years ago I summarized what previous rounds of the NCES survey had uncovered about homeschooling.  Here I will update that summary, incorporating the newer data.

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RESISTING THE STATUS QUO: Black Homeschoolers in Atlanta and Washington DC

Record: Cheryl Fields-Smith and Monica Wells Kisura, “Resisting the Status Quo: The Narratives of Black Homeschoolers in Metr-Atlanta and Metro-DC” in Peabody Journal of Education 88, no. 3 (2013): 265-283.

Summary:  Fields-Smith of the University of Georgia, whose pathbreaking work on Black homeschoolers has been reviewed before on this site, and Wells Kisura of Trinity Washington University here combine the results of their qualitative studies of black homeschoolers to make several important generalizations.

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Cheryl Fields-Smith Reviews a New Article on African American Homeschooling

As I just noted in my previous post, I am now cross-posting reviews both here and at the International Center for Home Education Research (ICHER) Reviews section.  Eventually I’ll move completely over to the ICHER site and stop updating here.  But for now I’m still posting in both locations.

Today’s post was written not by me but by my esteemed colleague Cheryl Fields-Smith, whose pathbreaking work on African-American homeschoolers I reviewed here.  Given her expertise, I asked her to review this new article by Mazama and Lundy on African American homeschooling.  Here is her review:

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Condoleezza Rice on her Childhood Homeschooling

Condoleezza Rice was Secretary of State from 2005-2009 under president George W. Bush and is currently a professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Her 2010 memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family,is a fine account of her life, including lots of great information about her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s and 60s, especially (for us) her year as a homeschooler.

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