Chicago Defender, Chicago, Illinois, 13 April 2007, Cheryl Fields-Smith is conducting a study of African-American homeschooling families in Georgia
The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” is finding new application among African-American parents who are opting to educate their children at home.
… Cheryl Fields-Smith is conducting a two-year study into black homeschooling in the southern states. She was in Chicago on Thursday to talk about the study and called the homeschooling movement among African-Americans “an extreme form of parental involvement.”
I had to look up Cheryl Fields-Smith. At the College of Education at the University of Georgia’s web site, her C.V. gives her title as, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education. That may explain her view of parents assuming their natural educational role as “extreme.”
Parents of black children are teaching them at home for various reasons, Fields-Smith found. Reasons included infusing black history and perspective into education, countering negative images of black children, demanding higher expectations from their children and sheltering them from bad influences in public schools.
I wouldn’t think that those goals are extreme.
One area, though, could lead to a feeling of conflict.
Others have the mentality that African-Americans have worked so hard for public school integration, it seems counterintuitive to pull their children out of school, she added.
Jennifer James, the director of the National African-American Homeschooler Alliance countered that idea.
African-American parents who want their children to receive an exceptional education are facing unequal resources in the schools, overt and subtle racism at times in the schools and an achievement gap that doesn’t look to be narrowing,” she said.
It is good to see that homeschooling is growing for kids who need it. Still, the idea of black parents homeschooling their children is not new. In the early 1990s, I used to buy some of our homeschooling materials from Donna Nichols-White’s catalog/magazine, The Drinking Gourd. I was sad when it went out of business, but I’m glad I had to opportunity to buy from it as Donna had collected unique science materials.
posted by Valerie
Cheryl Fields-Smith said on May 15, 2007
Valerie, my title has nothing to do with the use of the word “extreme” in my study, nor does it refer to the motivations of African American home educators. I initially titled the grant that supports my study of home schooling among African American as “extreme” in reference to the range of parental involvement found in the research literature. Prior to doing the study I believed home schooling was the most extreme form of involvement a parent could engage in. However, I have since found that that engaging in home education does not necessarily mean one is involved above and beyond public school parents. Therefore, I’ll never publish anything refering to home schooling as an extreme form of parental involvement in children’s education.
Valerie said on May 16, 2007
Thanks for the explanation, Cheryl. Interpreting writings across the wide range of material that is available online always carries the danger of my misinterpretation. Without personal discussion with individual authors, gauging the point of view is a somewhat of a guessing game, perhaps even moreso because motives for homeschooling can be read in so many ways — even among homeschoolers. The impetus to start homeschooling is different from what keeps families doing it, and without bureaucratic guidelines to channel the effort, it can grow in different ways depending on the character of the ‘soil,’ ‘rainfall,’ and ‘number of sunny hours’ in the day. (I’m gazing out at my garden over the screen of the laptop, so ‘agricultural’ metaphors are jumping out at me.)
Writing online itself is a challenge because shorter-reads-better, but leaves so much interpretational wiggle room. Writing longer-and-in-depth explains more, but carries the risk of someone looking at *all that stuff* and instantly clicking away. Writing in public isn’t for wimps.