In African-American Communities, Growing Interest In Home-Schooling

On a quiet street in Detroit, light pours into the back windows of the Kirksey home. In the back of the house the walls are lined with textbooks, workbooks and multicultural children's books. It's a home — but it's also a classroom.

Brandon, 8, is wearing pajamas and a paper crown from Burger King. He heads into the back room and pulls a large laminated world map off the bookshelf.

"This is the whole entire map! Michigan," he says enthusiastically pointing to his home state. His two siblings, Zachary, 3, and Ariyah, 1, echo him.

Their mother and teacher, Camille Kirksey, ushers them into the dining room. Sitting among bowls of fruit and stacks of books, the kids figure out the date and the weather.

This is a typical start to Brandon's school day. Today's agenda: poetry recitation. Then, it's time for reading and math. Fridays are reserved for science experiments and field trips.

Brandon is part of a distinct subgroup of the U.S. home-schooling population: African-Americans.

"Black home-schooling is definitely on the rise," says Ama Mazama, a professor of African-American studies at Temple University.

It's hard to determine the exact number of home-school students, let alone the racial breakdown. Most estimates put the total figure at roughly 2 million and suggest that between 5 and 10 percent are black.

Mazama says black home-schoolers tend to come from urban, two-parent households.

The key question, she says, is why these families are deciding to leave traditional schools. Research suggests black families often choose to home school for very different reasons than white families.

"White home-schoolers, the No. 1 reason they give when asked is religion," Mazama says. "For the black families, it was not the case at all. It was racism."

This is particularly interesting, she says, because African-Americans are consistently the most religious subgroup in America. They pray more. They go to church more.

"And yet, religion was not No. 1, not No. 2, not No. 3."

Religion was not the driving issue for the Kirksey family. A few years ago, home-schooling hadn't occurred to them.

"I've never seen anybody — especially black people — home schooling," Camille Kirksey says.

Camille Kirksey helps Brandon with math at the dining room table. Kirksey says black children at Brandon's private pre-K weren't given the kindness she thought they needed, so she decided to home-school him.

Gabrielle Emanuel/NPR

At the time, Brandon was enrolled in a private pre-K.

"It was a mostly black school with mostly white teachers, which didn't really bother me until I saw the difference in how they treated certain kids — especially boys," she says. "They seemed to be very harsh, kinda barking at them, ordering them around."

Brandon says his teacher "didn't really treat anybody nicely."

That matched a pattern Kirksey says she's seen elsewhere: black children who aren't given the kindness she thinks kids need.

Kirksey was trying to figure out what to do about the situation when she saw a post on Facebook. It profiled an African-American home-schooling family. Before long, she'd convinced her husband, quit her job of 10 years and started teaching.

She says she was particularly excited to teach her kids a version of history that features their own ancestors.

"As black people, I really want my children to understand that we are a huge part of history that is not always told," Kirksey says.

It wasn't long before Kirksey found a local home-school co-op where most of the other families are also black.

While the decision to home-school was largely driven by concerns about race and racism, Camille Kirksey says it's worth it for another reason too: It made them a closer, stronger family.