The January 2 Chicago Tribune features an article titled African-Americans Choosing to Home-School:

Home-schooling experts say more African-American families are choosing to school their children at home, opting out of public schools, which critics say may be not only failing their children, but also in some cases shortchanging them of their history.

“That is the No. 1 reason … the black curriculum,” said Joyce Burgess, who with her husband founded the National Black Home Educators organization, based near Baton Rouge, La. “They’ve taken black history out. It wasn’t just Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth … and Harriet Tubman. It was also Condoleezza Rice, Shirley Chisholm; it was also Marian Anderson and the Tuskegee Airmen. They’re heroes, and our children need to learn about our heroes.”

Although numbers reflecting the trends and demographics of home-schooled children are hard to come by — for example, in Chicago, parents who choose to home-school are not required to inform the school district — experts and leaders in the field say there is no doubt that minority participation is growing.

CBS affiliate News Channel 7 in Asheville, SC has a two and a half minute video newsclip about homeschooling and a short summary titled Homeschooling Numbers Up in South Carolina:

In South Carolina the number of parents choosing home school for their kids is growing. Studies show over the last ten years, home schooling has more than doubled across the state. Right now the South Carolina Association of Independent Home Schools estimates 19,000 children are homeschooled statewide, up 131 percent from 1999.

Channel 15, an ABC affiliate out of Phoenix, Arizona, featured a piece with reporter Allison Dugaw interviewing two homeschooling moms in Ever thought of homeschooling your kids? 2 moms share their experience:

PHOENIX – Several studies show that homeschooling kids may benefit some children later in life. But a lot of parents don’t really know where to start.

Kim Wilson, a mother of five from Gilbert, just started lessons with her 7-year-old son Kyden. She says he liked kindergarten but struggled with first grade so she decided to try out homeschooling.

Raeleen Brown is a mother of seven who homeschools all of her children. She says her decision was based on being in charge of the content of the curriculum, teaching responsibilities at home and teaching about the family’s faith.

Continue reading or view the video clip at the link above.

Some of the inclusions in this listing stretch the definition of homeschooler, but it’s an interesting collection nonetheless, titled The World’s 15 Most Extraordinary Homeschoolers and including some we’ve covered in the past (Astra Taylor, Tim Tebow), some we weren’t familiar with but will definitely check out (Jedediah Purdy, Sho Yano), and some we were surprised to learn about (Condoleezza Rice, Julian Assange):

Boring, unathletic, antisocial, fashion-challenged, politically retrograde, culturally backward, religiously extreme…the list of homeschooler stereotypes is seemingly endless and almost entirely negative. Despite the growing popularity of the homeschooling movement in the United States and around the world, homeschooling and its graduates continue to be viewed with suspicion, and not a little condescension, by the mainstream. But as our list of the world’s 15 most extraordinary homeschoolers shows, the homeschooling population is extraordinarily diverse, defying every attempt to shoehorn them into a single mold. The homeschoolers on this list are geniuses and jocks, conservatives and progressives, fundamentalists and hippies, scientists and artists….

Continue reading at the link above.

Check out this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling: The Tryptophan Edition at Apollos Academy:

“There are wonderful holiday-themed lesson plans, imaginative plans for common subjects, and just some wonderful families enjoying life and their homeschooling journeys by kicking up their heels and taking advantage of this sometimes chaotic time of year to try something new and different.”

Typical local homeschooling piece, Homeschooling in Huntsville, for WAAY-TV, asks the usual questions, provides the usual answers: “HUNTSVILLE, AL—From the first day of kindergarten to graduation, a student’s progress through school is marked with regular rites of passage. Lockers, hall passes and high school cliques are all part of life along the way. But more and more families are choosing a different path: homeschooling.”

In this brilliant video lecture, The history of alternative schooling and homeschooling, Canadian-American documentary filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor describes her own homeschooling – specifically unschooling as promoted by John Holt in his ground-breaking publication Growing Without Schooling (“delivered to our mailbox in a brown paper bag”). She contextualizes her unschooled experiences and the progressive homeschooling movement by reference to the history of alternate education, especially the public conversation about it in the sixties and seventies:

“Raised by independent-thinking bohemian parents, Taylor was unschooled until age 13. Join the filmmaker as she shares her personal experiences of growing up home-schooled without a curriculum or schedule, and how it has shaped her educational philosophy and development as an artist.”

This piece – Homeschooling the right choice for Great Falls family – is short, predictable, and merely a lead-in to an evening newscast for Great Falls, Montana, but still…

“It’s a common afternoon scene in kitchens across the country: a teenager sitting at the kitchen table doing homework.

“But for 8th-grader Ryan Keith in Great Falls, the kitchen table isn’t just a place to do homework – it’s his classroom.”

Susan Ryan at the Corn & Oil blog is upbeat about an article on homeschooling titled Grooming the Next Generation of Leaders. Good quotes:

“We have greater opportunities as homeschoolers to dance to the beat of our own drums,” Alyssa said, adding, “The only downside is that we can never just watch a movie without having to dissect the plot afterwards.”

“As a mother, I am always told, ‘You homeschool? I could never do that.’ I consider myself the most fortunate woman in the world to have the privilege to invest my life in three spectacular young ladies,” Austin-Taitt said. “In the process of teaching them through the years, it is I who have learned the greatest lessons from them. I have learned to laugh hilariously, cry passionately – and learn incessantly.”

This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling, at The Homespun Life blog, features some great articles, covering a variety of subjects, including lifestyle, faith, and classical music, and beginning with the founder of the Homeschool Carnival, Henry Cate from ‘Why Homeschool’.