Support Group Management

More and more American parents are choosing to educate their children at home. What accounts for this trend? Reasons include faith preferences, the individual approach to education, and a desire for a stronger family unit. 

This academic paper exposes the expansion of information gathering and dissemination via the United States public school system and facilitates parental choices on how best to educate their children if privacy issues are a concern. Privacy is fundamentally the omission of outside interference; therefore, in attempting to demonstrate the privacy advantages of homeschooling, this work, for the most part, proves a negative by comparatively cataloging how much privacy is denied, or potentially denied, when students attend public schools. It then compares and contrasts students’ legal requirements regarding the types of information students must provide to government educational institutions and the information public schools and homeschools must or may gather or release. Finally, it examines homeschooling’s legal foundations and regulatory issues. and postulates challenges facing the future of homeschooling’s privacy advantages.  

Margaret is a homeschool veteran who explains why traditional schooling was never an option for her children. Margaret’s narrative documents the complexity of being a single Black mother and choosing to live in a low-income housing community, and not working full-time in order to fulfill her rights as a mother to do what she determined would be best for her children. Her account also demonstrates the role of faith, spirituality, and the complexity of building a curriculum to meet her children’s needs.

Homeschooling has been on the rise in the United States over the last ten years. According to the U.S. government and education researchers, the number of students being homeschooled has doubled in the last decade. So, why do parents choose to homeschool their children? Through and anecdotal evidence, Calvert Education has put together the top five reasons why parents decide to homeschool their kids: avoiding a negative school environment, getting a higher quality education, improving social interactions, supporting a learning disabled child, and educating during family times of change. 

This work looks at contemporary Black homeschooling as a form of resistance among single Black mothers, exploring each mother's experience and perspective in deciding to homeschool and developing their practice. It faces the many issues that plague the education of Black children in America, including discipline disproportionality, frequent special education referrals, low expectations in the classroom, and the marginalization of Black parents. Most importantly, this work challenges stereotypical characterizations of who homeschools and why.