Episode 5: On Black Homeschoolers

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, we're joined by Cheryl Field Smith from the University of Georgia. We'll talk about black homeschoolers, the history of homeschooling, and her new book, Creating Educational Justice. We're all here with Cheryl Field Smith from the University of Georgia. Cheryl, thank you for joining me today. Thank you for the invitation. Great. Why don't we start with you just telling us about your background and your work in general? Well, I'm a former elementary school teacher. I taught first grade, second grade, and fourth grade in Connecticut. That's where I'm from. And along the way of doing that, I taught in different districts. One was urban. The other two were more suburban. And I had a lot of questions about the equity teaching in the urban education setting compared to being just 10, 15 minutes down the road. And the quality of resources that were available, it just didn't seem right to me. And so that's what made me pursue my PhD. I chose to go to Emory University and was very grateful for that experience. And along the way, I realized that it wasn't just the equity, the urban suburban equity. But when I started hearing about black educational history from Dr. Vanessa Siddler Walker, that set me down this path of wondering, well, wait a minute. And also Dr. Jackie Irvine, I teased with her. And those students were reading about the perception of black parents not being involved in their children's education. And I thought, well, who would get that perception? I've never met a black person that didn't care about education. And so that-- and then when you compare that to the history, I was like, well, wait a minute. Something's wrong here. Because before desegregation, black parents were intimately supportive of their children's schools. And now today, where perceived does not engage, something's wrong. And so that's what my dissertation was about. How do black parents today conceptualize their own engagement in their children's education? And then when I got to UGA, I tried to replicate that work in the same school settings, but among younger parents. And I found out that older parents don't really socialize with the younger parents. So they couldn't refer me to a younger parent. And so I was like, OK, this is really troublesome. But somebody referred me to a black woman who was in my age range that I was looking for in the 30-something age range. But she was homeschooling. And I didn't know that black people homeschooled. This was 2005. And I just had no awareness. And so I said, OK, I would love to meet this person and find out how they homeschool, why they homeschool. And that sent me down this path. I have to say, rather reluctantly, initially, because I'm at a public institution, a state institution, where I help create public school teachers and help them develop. And here I am going down this homeschool path. It was really contentious. But I received a Spencer Foundation grant to do a two-year study on black home education. And that was the beginning of 17 years of work. I've been doing it ever since. And it's been an amazing career for me, research-wise. Yeah. So that's very nice. So now you know a lot more than you did in 2005, right? Could you give us a little bit of history of black home schooling? You've got this-- there's this common-- I think it's less common now-- but the kind of received history of homeschooling as well. Either that's how we always did it until 100 years ago, or it started with religious conservatives in the '70s. But then if you scratch-- you don't even have to scratch that hard. But if you look a little bit, you realize, well, that maybe is true. But there were also a lot of more left-wing homeschoolers in the '70s. And then the black home schooling experience is another angle. So can you kind of tell us a little more about what you've learned about that since you reluctantly got pulled into it? So when you look historically, if you go all the way back to slavery, we know it's been well documented that we weren't allowed to read, right? And literacy was kept from us legally. And we still pursued it. We, in secret, we had to do it in very clever, hidden ways so that we could learn to read. And we pushed for learning to read because we equated literacy with freedom. And so we were self-taught because we were doing it in secret. And the other thing about that the slavery community is that we-- if I learned to read, I didn't keep it to myself. I taught people around me in secret, again, risking our lives to do so. And so we've always done that. Now, in the traditional-- like today's sense of what homeschooling is, there's a gap. We don't know exactly when we began as black home educators in today's sense of homeschooling. I can trace it back to the 1990s and the 1980s with my research. And that was before No Child Left Behind. So when I started this work in 2005, I thought maybe No Child Left Behind and the emphasis on the tests was the motivation-- possibly one of the motivations, because we know that-- like from Diane Ravich's work, right, that push for the test scores has narrowed the curriculum. And so I thought maybe that was part of it. But people at homeschooling in the 1990s and the 1980s didn't have No Child Left Behind. And so really what they were thinking about-- I'm thinking about even Paula Penneberitz's book, "A Morning by Morning." A lot of it was the institutionalized and individual racism that her children experienced in schools, and her being shut out as a black woman, not able to advocate for children of color in private schools. So that was part of why she homeschooled. And she was at the time situated up north. And so that wasn't necessarily the southern perspective, right? So just trying to understand, I focused on the people that I had, but I think there's more to that history than we realize. And I really would love to go backwards. And like who-- the people who were homeschooling in the 1990s and 1980s to get more of that-- like what was going on at that time that led you to homeschooling? I could imagine, if you think about particularly in the south, what we know is that the south did not really desegregate until the '70s, right? And maybe black families chose to homeschool because they didn't want their children to go through what the Little Rock 9 went through. I mean, I could understand something like that being a rationale. We do know from Jackie Jordan Irvine's work that a segment of the black community chose to go to parochial and Catholic schools instead of the public schools that were being desegregated. And mostly for that reason, right, to avoid what the Little Rock 9-- what the-- and it's not just the Little Rock 9. We know that that story is replicated all over. So it was very contentious to be going to public schools as a black person in the south in the 1970s in most places. I think I've heard the story here at Athens. It's a little different, for example. But everybody experienced something and that might have motivated a black homeschool movement earlier than we've actually documented as the-- but we've always been self-taught. And so when I think about what black families are doing today, I have always situated it in our African-American resistance to the status quo. And so when you look at the statistics for black children in public schools in particular, there's achievement. gaps, attainment gaps, access gaps, that make the statistics look really dismal, right? For many black parents, and so I often ask, what does it take for a black child to be successful in pre-K to 12 education today, particularly in different settings or different, some are more contentious than others, and it's public and private schools. We have the documentation to show that it's not just public schools, it's also private schools. When we have the discipline issue, the discipline disproportionality issue, we have the lack of access to gifted education and overrepresentation in special ed, like these are the things that black families are overcoming by homeschooling, and they're getting around those things, and avoiding those situations for the school. That is just a really, an angle that a lot of homeschool research hasn't addressed until sort of recently, until you started working on this because I've read your previous book, and we'll talk about your new one in a minute. I'll read through your previous books, all these motivations that I hear, the push and pull of, I feel like I need to leave school, or I feel like homeschooling might be a good answer for me. Sound similar to a lot of other homeschool resources out there, but then there's this other very major issue, which is what you've just mentioned. Yeah, definitely. There are similarities among probably all groups of why we homeschool. Definitely the focus on the test scores and the narrowing of the curriculum is part of it. The inability, it seems, to provide individual personalized learning. Now, there are places where public schools are doing that and able to do it well, but it's definitely not across the nation. Sure. A lot of this work has, I don't want to say culminated because you're still here and you're still going, right? But you've got this new book, Creating Educational Justice. And you can you talk about how you landed on this work and kind of walk us through what it's all about? Yeah, so this work is, the premise of it is based on Nigerian Peters, who is a legal scholar at the University of Kansas, wrote an article where she used privacy laws. She analyzed the privacy laws for children, children's privacy laws and found that when you look at the precedents, we've protected particular rights like self-determination, the freedom to be and to become for certain groups, but we haven't done it with regards to the experience of racism in schools. And so she labels, she characterizes black home educators as children's privacy protectors. Because when you are a black home educator, you are creating educational justice, right? What I called it for your child. So your child now has the freedom to be whoever they are and whoever they want to be and to become who they want to be in a way that they don't necessarily experience in public schools. And so when I read that, I was like, wow, this is yes. And my research over these 17 years can really extend this idea and I can show you multiple ways that that is true for black families. And Harvard Ed asked me to write a book where I was like, what are the lessons that we can all learn from your research in black homeschooling? And so in this book, I began to conceptualize, well, what do black home educators and regular educators have in common? We have, there are some things that we have in common, teachers who are really there for the children. And most of them are, I want to believe still, there's things that get in the way, right? The way we do school is problematic. And so I highlight just some, you know, broad ideas like, for example, what does it mean to really put children first in their learning? How can we do that? Well, how do black home educators do that? But how can we take some of that up in a public school, our traditional school setting? How can we healing? A lot of the black home educators talk about when they first begin, especially, they have to engage in some unlearning of, you know, what they learned in school, you know, that it's okay if you only perform here and not going further. So we've got to unlearn that. No, we should always put our best foot forward. But also healing from past herks, from being labeled a troublemaker, from being told, you can't are you less than and healing from that and having to have a mind shift for the child, right? And sometimes parents, let's be honest, home school parents sometimes have to go through a mind shift because most of the people that I talk to, they weren't homeschooled themselves, we'll have to go through this period of what is learning and what does it mean for me to be a teacher of my children? How did I learn? Well, how I learned is not how they learned. So I've got to learn how they learn. And so there's a lot of, you know, it just, it takes time and time to heal what, you know, undo what we've learned that is harmful about learning, you know, those pressures that are put on us to learn and how we should learn and being coming open to new ways of thinking about learning and new ways of thinking about teaching. What does it mean to have my child be independent, an independent learner as opposed to, you know, do this, do this, do this, do this. No, what do you want to learn today? What do you want to learn about this? How do you want to, like giving them responsibility for their learning? So a lot of that, talk about that. And yeah. Yeah, it's, it's different. This is more, I'm not, the people that I talk to, the majority of them will call them, they will say, I am not a school basher. I want public schools to succeed. They just did not work for my kid or my kids. And so it's different. It's a different discourse. It's not, there's not a contention between public schools and homeschooling in this book. It's where do we overlap and how it builds on. Yeah, it's interesting because this has struck me over and over again, right? You'll remember that, that that James Anderson book, education of blacks in the South. I mentioned this book all the time because he tells this super interesting story about in reconstruction where they were going to send this army of teachers down from New England to fix everything that was happening. And when they got here, they realized, well, everybody was kind of handling their business, right? But the way that the people who are running those schools talk about them is not, like, they don't often don't use words like education freedom or I'm going to like get out from under the system or something like that. But just we're going to do the kinds of things that you said we're going to make our kids grow and learn the way we want them to. And you're very careful in the book to not take shots, right? And say, well, we need to dismantle public education or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, because I don't believe that. I think we need public schools. Not everybody can homeschool. Not everybody can afford private schools. And I think a good nation is dependent on a good quality educational system that should be free. I mean, I believe in choice. And I think public school should be one of the choices. But it is hard. I mean, when I am preparing my teachers at UGA, I don't know, and I tell them, I don't know what kind of setting you're going into. It's not the setting that I taught in because things have changed. And you're going to be handed scripts. I'm as your teacher educator. I'm not teaching you to be an actor or an actor. I'm teaching you to be a professional to decide what is best for your students. The degree to which you get that professional freedom to make those decisions for your kids, that depends on the kids. You mentioned some teachers in the book. I don't know. Would you be interested in giving a story, one of them, how a teacher got involved in homeschooling her kids? Well, yeah, there's quite a few of them. One of them, for example, when she first started teaching, she didn't have children. And so when she got pregnant, she had to have a conversation with her husband. And the conversation is like, "I'm not sure that I want my child to go to public school. I'm teaching first grade, and I know what first grade is. And first of all, when she was home with her baby, she realized that she could bring her child further than what was expected in first grade. And there's not really a space always for a child who is above grade level. And so that was one of the concerns. Another concern was, which is really this shocked me, but even though she was a teacher in the school, she didn't feel she would be able to identify the particular teacher for her kid. So it would, she literally said it would be a role of the dice, which teacher, whether her child would get a good or bad teacher, even within her own building where she worked. And so not having that capacity to choose is what kind of drove her to homeschooling. And she started a homeschool school, if you will, in her home. Because in her state, there was no restriction on how many people outside of her family she could homeschool. So homeschool families could hire tutors and other professionals to support the learning of their children. It didn't have to come directly from the parent. And I don't think that's true in all states, but her state allowed it. And so people would pay her to homeschool their children, for part of the week, not every day, not every day and not all day, but for a certain number of hours. Right. So it sounds like she set up a hybrid, micro school, and her house. Right. So the world is so big. What's the point of that? Or how do you think that will address things like the healing that you talked about or just kind of restoration of civil society? Like, these little groupings of people, not just homeschooling, but coming together in groups like that. What kind of effect do you think that'll have on culture and society? It's hard to predict, but I do think that if we put the children first, those smaller sizes, because we've known for decades, I mean, when I was getting my PhD, I remember reading wonderful research that showed beyond a doubt that smaller class sizes were better for kids and for teachers. And yet here we go. We've got 28, 29, 30 in a classroom. So we ignore, you know, when I say we, school district, states, whoever is in charge, ignore that, right? We can't get enough teachers. Well, we're the teachers leaving. Let's dig into why they're leaving, right? But so I think that having the smaller, like a micro school, a homeschool co-op, or whatever group it is, it gives you that smaller learning context that the research shows us is correct and is the best. I think we have to be careful. One of the things I talk about in the book, too, is black families who went to Christian predominantly white homeschool co-ops and still experience the racism, the isolation, and the prejudice that they would experience in public schools, which is why we also fragment ourselves to predominantly black settings to have that protection for our children so that we can learn. I mean, you think about the society. It is not easy growing up in America being black and coming out with a positive self-identity, a positive perspective on your own racial identity. Parents and everybody that comes in contact with black children should take up that responsibility. If we really cared, right? We should have black model, role models. We should have black representation, Hispanic representation, Asian everybody. Not just the broad ones, but break it down. Colombian, Mexican-- It doesn't take a lot of people. Spanish, I mean-- To start something like this. It doesn't. It really doesn't. It doesn't. I think you have to get to know your students. I always teach about that. It's not enough to know that you have a Latino student. Where's the family from? That matters. And how much trouble is it for you to find that out? And to figure that out. And what do you do with that information? Well, we know from culturally relevant pedagogy, we know the more relevant that we can make our instruction, our standards, our curriculum, than the more our children learn. So for me, it always goes back to care. Do you really care? Because if you care, then you're going to get to know these aspects of your kids. Whether you're in a hybrid or a micro school, or if you're in a home school co-op, or if you're in a traditional school. And that's kind of the head space that I wrote this book in. It's that, what do we have in common? And if we care, then this should matter. Because having the viewpoint, oh, I don't see color, we know that's not the right viewpoint. But yet, it still exists. People don't want to take up color. They don't want to take up gender. That's another huge issue that our children are facing. And they don't want to take-- I don't believe in that. That's not my religious belief. And so we don't want to take that up. Well, you know what? If you have kids in your setting, whichever setting you're in, do you have a right not to take that up? Because that's a part of who they are. And that's the question that I would ask. What does it really mean to put children first? You've got to put their interests first. We have curriculum here in Georgia that has six Native American tribes that the students have to learn about. The seminals are not on that list. And yet, our kids-- a lot of our kids play on sports teams. And the team is called the seminals. And they will come to class. Oh, and they learn they're going to learn about Native American groups. Oh, can we learn about the seminals? I wear that on my uniform. And sometimes the teacher says, oh, no, they're not on our list. Yeah. So this is a good example of issues with standardizing things for-- however many hundreds of thousands of kids we have in an individual state. What about the flip side of this, though? A common argument about all these kinds of schools and homeschooling as well. Look, the conventional situation might not be great, but at least you're getting exposure to other people. And at least you're suffering, but you're suffering together. So what would you say to that? You just talked about fragmenting as much as you can, right? Maybe that's worse for a culture in society. Yeah. For us to break off in our groups, I don't know. I think we have to meet children where they are. And we have to think about the foundational-- laying a good foundation for kids and having a good outlook on who you are, your race, your culture, your gender, whatever. And if we have to fragment in order to do that, then I think we need to prioritize that to some degree for their development. But I wouldn't say they should stay there. And I've never met a group that didn't also branch out into society. So they visit other places. They meet other people. And if you really look at-- what happens at least in the black homeschool communities that I've met, they normally belong to more than one group. So one group might specialize in this and another one will be more broadly this, and so they offer their children a variety of different spaces in which to mingle and interact with different types of people. They're not doing it in complete isolation. And so it's a trade offer. I think that's important. Between, like, there's value in coming together, but if you're in, if everybody's in a hyper-specialized school, I mean, you have life outside of school, you're going to encounter other people. So, but maybe you need that home base of maybe just your parents, or maybe it's a small group of people to kind of help you, it's a home base, right, to be sure you're good where you are, right? So if you were, if you were going to work with, I think, a hybrid or a microscope community, what are some, what's maybe one key principle from your book that you'd urge them to prioritize to support black students and families, right? Is there specific lesson that you might guide them? I think one of the most important things would be really to know where you are, your community, what's around you, what resources you have. So I was a bank street teacher when I was, so my school's, most of, here to the Bank Street model, which put social studies first, right? And so that's what's making me think that. I, one of the places I taught was a harbor town, and now what Connecticut's actually where I was raised. And so there's a huge harbor, and that harbor, well, it's not that big, but anyway, the harbor is really important to the community, right? We do the oyster festival, and it's a lot of people, you know, so the water is important. And so a lot of our curriculum was based on the waterways, because that's what we had access to. So knowing, really knowing your community, and using what the kids see around them in and outside of school, and how we can make those, whatever you're trying to teach, the content, make it come to life, because it's in their setting that they're used to. What's in their homes, what's in their neighborhoods, what's in the city, and, you know, if you're studying fourth grade, what's in the state, you know, those kinds of things, I think that's really key, because they can, I guess, I guess I never really, I'm, I am, I believe in experiential learning. I think kids do more learning outside of school. I think it's really important, if I'm teaching you things that you need to go see in an action, and experience, or I need to bring it into the classroom. I don't think telling you something is teaching. Yeah. And so that is, that would be something that's really important. And letting the children have a sense of wonder and a sense of discovery, not me telling you, but let's go see this in action. What do you see? What does it remind you of? Making, letting them make those connections, and letting them create the meaning. And it takes time. Absolutely, it takes time. But when you do things like that, the kids, they don't, they won't forget. They won't forget because it's learning that they, they chose to actively engage in them. And yeah, they can see the excitement. And so empowering the kids is really, I think that's really like to see themselves as learners and as the having the responsibility for their learning. I think that would, and that's a, that's a shift a lot of teachers don't want to give up that, the power of teaching, right? But I know firsthand if I tell you something, it doesn't mean you've learned it. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. All right. So last question for you, for you, Cheryl, what, you just finished a book. So I do kind of want to give you a break. But what's the most interesting thing you're working on right now? Or what's the most interesting thing people involved in in black home education or hybrid and micro schooling might be interested in hearing about? We, so I have a group, a small group of black home educators and researchers that we meet monthly. We, and we had a presentation at AERA this year that was focused on the role of community in black home education. And so we will meet, this is May, yeah, we'll meet sometime this month, hopefully, to further discuss what we're going to do with that work next. But that, just thinking about how important the role of community is, the idea of the African worldview, one of the African worldviews is umbuntu. I am because you are the interdependence of a black home school community. We have veteran home educators, whose children are grown and out the house adults. But they are still deeply engaged in the black home school community. And even so even though home schooling has drastically changed because when these people home school, they didn't have the technology the way that we have it now. The social media and all that stuff. And, but they're still able to inspire and they're still very active. And that's amazing. They're an integral part of the community. And so understanding each person contributes and to talk about that. So I think that's one of the things we'll do next is how do we describe this community? What do we want to share about the role of community in home education from a black perspective? This is great. I hope you'll visit some hybrid and micro schools around the country. Or talk to them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, University of Georgia and fellow professor and fellow Emory Eagle Cheryl Field-Smick, thank you for being with me today. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having us again. Thank you too. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project and Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid.