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The Rise of Black Homeschooling

By Casey Parks

When Victoria Bradley was in fifth grade, she started asking her mother, Bernita, to homeschool her. Bernita wasn’t sure where the idea came from—they never saw homeschooling on TV. But something always seemed to be going wrong at school for Victoria. In second grade, a teacher lost track of her during parent pickup, and she wandered off school grounds. Bernita went to see the principal, intent on getting the teacher fired. The principal asked if she would consider taking an AmeriCorps position at the school. Bernita cut back her hours at the hair salon she owned and started doing community outreach, assisting teachers and hosting parent meetings.

In 2011, Bernita moved her family—which also included her older son, Carlos—to Detroit ’s East English neighborhood, where she bought a three-story, yellow brick house for twelve thousand dollars. Victoria, then in fourth grade, transferred to Brenda Scott Academy, where two girls began bullying her. One wrote “I’m fat” in black pen on the back of Victoria’s shirt. On another occasion, one of the girls spit at Victoria. She screamed at them, and was suspended. (That year, administrators suspended three hundred and forty Black students, or forty-two per cent of the school’s Black population, and another sixteen Black girls were arrested there.)

Victoria moved to a top-rated charter school, where she lasted only a few months—she said that an administrator picked on certain Black students. By fifth grade, Victoria had attended five schools, and she was tired of being the new kid. She brought up homeschooling when she was reprimanded for having blue braids, and again in eighth grade, after some boys dared each other to try picking her up as she sat at her desk. Homeschooling, she said, would allow her to learn at her own pace, without anyone making fun of her. Bernita was sympathetic, but she told Victoria that she couldn’t teach her. She was a single mom, and she’d never completed her college degree.

For high school, Victoria enrolled in a majority-white charter school. Before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered Detroit’s school system, which serves about fifty-three thousand children, she had failed chemistry and barely passed algebra. Soon after school went remote, in March, 2020, Victoria asked Bernita if she could drop out and take a job doing nails.

During the first months of lockdown, Bernita, who works as an educational consultant, spent hours each day talking to other parents of students in the Detroit system on Zoom and Facebook. One mother told her that she had shut herself in the bathroom to cry after overhearing teachers berate her children on Microsoft Teams. Others told Bernita they’d only just discovered that their kids had been performing below grade level. (Before the pandemic, six per cent of Detroit’s fourth graders met proficiency benchmarks in math, and seven per cent in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.)

Early one evening last July, before Victoria’s senior year, Bernita and Victoria pulled into their driveway and found that a container of dish soap they’d bought at Sam’s Club had spilled in the trunk. While Bernita bailed out the soap using a three-ring binder and some old rags, Victoria looked down the cracked driveway and pointed at a swarm of fireflies. “What makes them glow?” she asked.

Bernita watched Victoria chase the fireflies around the yard for a few minutes. This, she thought, was what a Black kid’s life should feel like—happy and unencumbered. She told Victoria to find a Mason jar. They ran through the grass until Victoria had trapped a single glowing insect. Afterward, they sat on their stoop, researching the specimen on Victoria’s phone. They learned that the bugs belong to the family Lampyridae, and that a bioluminescent enzyme makes them glow.

As Victoria scrolled, Bernita laughed. “You do know this is homeschooling, right?” she asked.

Victoria looked up from her phone. The fireflies lit up around them. “Really?” she asked.

“Yep,” Bernita said. “This is homeschooling. This is science. We about to do this for real.”

Black families have only recently turned to homeschooling in significant numbers. The Census Bureau found that, by October, 2020, the nationwide proportion of homeschoolers—parents who had withdrawn their children from public or private schools and taken full control of their education—had risen to more than eleven per cent, from five per cent at the start of the pandemic . For Black families, the growth has been sharper. Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent.

Few researchers have studied Black homeschoolers, but in 2009 Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Mary Frances Early College of Education, published a study of two dozen such families in and around Atlanta. Some parents were middle class or wealthy, and wanted more challenging curricula for their children. Others hadn’t attended college and earned less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; one family lived in a housing project.

Most of the parents told Fields-Smith that the decision had been wrenching. Winning access to public education was one of the central victories of the civil-rights movement. Several parents had relatives who saw homeschooling as “a slap in the face” to the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Others worried about harming their neighbors’ children, because public schools rely on per-pupil funding from state governments. (In 2020, around seventy per cent of Detroit public-school revenues came from per-student allocations by the state.)

Still, the parents said that they felt as if they’d had no choice, with eighty per cent citing pervasive racism and inequities. Even in the wealthy families, parents said that their kids were frequently punished or seen as troublemakers. In some cases, students had been inappropriately recommended for special-education classes or medication; other students were bullied. In a study conducted in 2010 by professors from Temple University and Montgomery County Community College, homeschooling parents said that they thought Black Americans had been tricked into fighting for integration. “Somebody put in our heads that being around your own kind was the worst thing in the world. How you need to be in better neighborhoods, in neighborhoods where people don’t want you, in schools where people don’t want to teach you,” a mother in Virginia, who was homeschooling two children, said.

Bernita and Victoria first encountered a Black homeschooling family in 2015, when Victoria was in seventh grade and attending an after-school music class with a girl named Zwena Gray. Zwena’s mother, Kija, had worked for many years as a substitute teacher in the University Prep School charter system. Most schools, in her view, prioritize whiteness—the kids are taught about white politicians and white inventors, and teachers and Black children are pushed toward compliance rather than creativity. Kija’s son, Kafele, was frequently bullied. When he was in eighth grade, administrators at the charter school he was attending threatened to suspend him for not tucking in his shirt. Kija decided to homeschool him, and later Zwena, who was then in fifth grade. The children enrolled in online courses; Kija spent less time substitute teaching, and her husband, who works for the Detroit Health Department, also helped. Kafele returned to the charter school in eleventh grade, but Zwena never went back to school.

When we talked in her dining room, Kija was baking cinnamon pound cakes to sell. As she described her journey from charter-school teacher to homeschool enthusiast, she drew a Biblical parallel: “Satan was the closest thing to God, and he saw this shit for what it was, and he was, like, ‘Oh, hell no.’ He started to question things, and that’s what made him cast out, because he didn’t have blind faith—he had critical faith.”

Bernita was astonished by what Kija had achieved with her children. Zwena had built robots, written code for Web sites, and designed her own clothes. But Kija had a bachelor’s degree and a background in teaching. Bernita still couldn’t see homeschooling as an option for Victoria.

In early 2020, an online acquaintance of Bernita’s, Keri Rodrigues, a former labor organizer in Massachusetts and the president of a new organization called the National Parents Union, persuaded her to begin hosting a weekly forum for parents on Facebook Live. At the beginning of June, Bernita invited Kija on as a guest. It was a week after the police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in Minneapolis; thousands of people were protesting in downtown Detroit. The parents who spoke in the Facebook forum connected the uprising for racial justice with their experiences in the educational system. One mother said that she had tried many public and private schools; at all of them, the front office was filled with Black boys awaiting discipline.

Tesha Jordan, a single mother who works for Head Start, said that she’d been urged to transfer her son out of his middle school after his behavioral issues had scared a teacher. Jordan’s son has a learning disability, and she worried that if she homeschooled him he would lose out—the state gave his middle school money for a social worker to help him with his homework twice a week. “I’m not a teacher,” Jordan said. “I’m just a mother.”

Kija, watching from her living room, unmuted herself. “When I heard you say they had a behavioral problem—or you were told that—the thing that came to mind for me was, all Black people have a behavioral problem. It’s called trauma,” she said. “And when you said, ‘I’m not a teacher, I’m a mother’—those two things are synonymous.”

The modern homeschooling movement in America was ignited in the nineteen-sixties, after Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 prohibited school prayer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial segregation in public institutions. Although homeschooling attracted some left-leaning hippies during the sixties and seventies, by the nineteen-eighties its most vocal and influential supporters were white Christian conservatives, according to Heath Brown, an associate professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of the recent book “Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State.”

Most of the earliest homeschooling textbooks were written from a Christian perspective, and some were racist. Bob Jones University, the private South Carolina college that refused to admit Black students until 1971, began issuing homeschooling textbooks through its press later that decade. “United States History for Christian Schools,” first published in 1991, stated that most slaveholders treated enslaved people well, and that slavery “is an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin. The sin in this case was greed—greed on the part of African tribal leaders.”

Arlin and Rebekah Horton, who met at Bob Jones University, went on to found what became Abeka, a Christian publisher that produces some of the country’s most popular homeschooling materials. Abeka’s “America: Land I Love,” for eighth graders, first published in 1996 and now in its third edition, argued that slavery allowed Black people to find Jesus. Abeka’s eleventh-grade textbook “United States History: Heritage of Freedom,” first published in 1983 and now in its fourth edition, claimed that the Ku Klux Klan only occasionally resorted to violence. A 2018 investigation by the Orlando Sentinel found that Abeka was still producing textbooks stating that “the slave who knew Christ had more freedom than a free person who did not know the Savior.”

Early supporters of homeschooling wanted as little government intervention as possible and advocated against legislative proposals that would have sent money their way, Brown told me. “It was a bargain they were unwilling to take,” he said. “In exchange for small amounts of funding, they would be subject to the things they fear most, which was having to adhere to a set of standardized educational schooling practices, on everything from teacher certification to testing to curricular choice.”

In 1983, a group of white evangelical lawyers formed the Home School Legal Defense Association, to represent homeschooling parents who’d been arrested for not sending their children to school. When officers arrested two farmers in Michigan who’d been educating their children at home without a license, the H.S.L.D.A. spent nearly a decade fighting their case. In 1993, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that homeschooling parents in Michigan did not need to be certified. (Michael Farris, the founding president of the H.S.L.D.A. and its board chairman, is now head of the conservative Christian nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, which in recent years has pushed for a series of anti-gay and anti-trans bills.)

The H.S.L.D.A. offers grants directly to coöperatives formed by homeschooling parents; after the number of homeschoolers spiked during the pandemic, it doubled its grant dollars for this year, to $1.3 million. As the number of Black and Latino homeschooling families has grown, the group has attempted to diversify its membership and staff. All but one of its lawyers are white, but it recently hired several Black and Latino consultants. LaNissir James, who has seven children, ranging in age from five to twenty-three, and who is based in Maryland but “roadschools” across multiple states in her R.V., started working as a high-school educational consultant for the H.S.L.D.A. in 2019. Families “first need to understand the law,” she said, because homeschooling regulations vary widely from state to state. Then James interviews parents to assess their children’s academic needs. “Are Mom and Dad working? Is Mom home? Do they want to be online? You find their strengths and weaknesses so that you can find a curriculum that matches that family.”

For Black families like James’s, the ability to improvise a curriculum is a major reason to try homeschooling. “We are not seeing ourselves in textbooks,” she said. “I love traditional American history, but I like to take my kids to the Museum of African American History and Culture and say, O.K., here’s what was going on with Black people in 1800.” There are now hundreds of curricula to choose from, available on free or inexpensive Web sites such as Khan Academy and Outschool. Last year, one of the most popular offerings on Outschool was a course called Black History from a Decolonized Perspective, taught by Iman Alleyne, a former schoolteacher in Fort Lauderdale, who turned to homeschooling after her elementary-age son told her that school made him want to die.

James said that some of her Black clients need to know that homeschooling is something other Black families do. “That’s a normal feeling,” she told me. “And the answer is yes. There is joy for Black homeschoolers who find out about other Black homeschoolers.”

In August, 2020, Bernita applied for and won a twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant from Keri Rodrigues’s group, the National Parents Union, to fund a homeschooling collective called Engaged Detroit. She hired Kija and two other Black homeschooling mothers, at thirty-five dollars an hour, to coach a group of twelve parents, and used the remaining money to buy software, laptops, and other supplies.

In accepting the grant, Bernita became part of a decades-long political debate. The National Parents Union paid for the grant with money from Vela Education Fund, which is backed by the Walton Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute. These groups advocate “school choice”—rerouting money and families away from traditional public schools through such means as charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, and vouchers, which allow public-education dollars to be put toward private-school tuition.

Sarah Reckhow, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University and the author of “Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics,” told me that the Waltons “have been consistently a key funder of the charter-school movement.” Since 1997, the Walton foundation has spent more than four hundred million dollars to create and expand charter schools nationwide. In 2016, it announced plans to spend an additional billion dollars on charters.

School choice is an especially divisive subject in Michigan, where some of the country’s first charter schools were established, in 1994. Betsy DeVos , of Michigan’s billionaire Prince family, has invested millions, through donations and lobbying, to expand charters across the state. In 1999 and 2000, DeVos and her family backed an unsuccessful campaign, called Kids First! Yes!, to amend Michigan law to allow vouchers. In 2013, the Walton foundation doubled the budget of another DeVos project, the pro-voucher group Alliance for School Choice, when it announced a donation of six million dollars to send lower-income children to private schools. Three years later, DeVos published an op-ed in the Detroit News calling for the state to “retire” Detroit’s public-school system: “Rather than create a new traditional school district to replace the failed D.P.S.”—Detroit Public Schools—“we should liberate all students from this woefully under-performing district model and provide in its place a system of schools where performance and competition create high-quality opportunities for kids.” DeVos’s first budget proposal as Secretary of Education under President Trump, in 2017, would have cut nine billion dollars from federal education funding while adding more than a billion dollars for school-choice programs.

Advocates of school choice say that it gives low-income parents access to institutions that can better serve their children. Critics say that it lures highly motivated Black families away from traditional public schools and further hobbles underfunded districts. Presidents Clinton and Obama supported charters, but Democrats have largely cooled on them, and progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed curbing their growth. Michigan’s charters, most of which operate as for-profit companies, have consistently performed worse than the state’s traditional public schools. Yet parents continue to choose charters, which receive a large chunk of the more than eight thousand dollars per student that the state would otherwise send to non-charters, but aren’t subject to the same degree of public oversight. About half of Detroit’s students are now enrolled in charters, one of the highest proportions of any U.S. city.

The Walton foundation set up the National Parents Union in January, 2020, with Rodrigues as the founding president. Rodrigues’s oldest son, who has autism and A.D.H.D., was suspended thirty-six times in kindergarten alone; sometimes he was sent to a sensory-deprivation room that Rodrigues thought resembled a cinder-block cell. Eventually, a school representative suggested a charter school. “I didn’t know what a charter school was,” Rodrigues said. “I didn’t know I had any options. I just thought I had to send him to the closest school. I didn’t know there were fights like this in education. All I knew was ‘Oh, my god, are you kidding me—why are you doing this to my kid?’ ”

The National Parents Union was less than three months old when the pandemic closed schools. As well-off families set up private learning pods, Vela Education Fund gave Rodrigues seven hundred thousand dollars to help people with fewer resources, like Bernita, create their own. “There was an article in the New York Times about fancy white people in upstate New York creating these ‘pandemic pods,’ ” Rodrigues said. “But that’s how poor Black and brown folks survive in America—we resource-share. We don’t call them ‘pandemic pods,’ because that’s a bougie new term. For us, we called it ‘going to Abuelita’s house,’ because she watched all the cousins in the family after school, and that’s where you learned a host of skills outside of the normal school setting.”

Last summer, the nonprofit news organization Chalkbeat, which receives Walton funding, co-sponsored a virtual town hall on reopening Michigan’s public schools. Detroit’s superintendent, Nikolai P. Vitti, said that expanding to “non-traditional” options, such as learning pods, would hurt many of the city’s children. He warned that homeschooling, like charter schools, would undermine public education and cost teachers their jobs. Legislators were already drafting bills, he said, to take money away from schools so that children could continue learning in pods after campuses reopened.

“I don’t judge any parent for using the socioeconomic means that they have to create what they believe is the best educational opportunity for their child,” Vitti said. “We all do that, in our way, as parents. But that is the purpose of traditional public education, to try to be the equalizer, to try to create that equal opportunity.”

Bernita had logged on to the discussion from her kitchen. “Parents are not deciding to take their children out because of COVID ,” she told Vitti. “Parents are doing pods because education has failed children in this city forever.”

I asked Kija if it bothered her to accept money from the conservative-libertarian Koch family, who have spent vast sums of their fortune advocating for lower taxes, deep cuts to social services, and looser environmental regulations. “I guess the bigger question is, why don’t we have enough resources so that we don’t have to get money from them? It bothers me, yes—but why do they have so much money that they get to fund all of our shit?” she asked. “I shouldn’t have to get resources from the Kochs.”

Kija and Bernita describe themselves as Democrats. Bernita said that, in another era, she “would be a Black Panther with white friends.” She said that she was “at peace” with her decision to take money from the Koch family, because they fund several of the charter schools that Victoria attended, through their Michigan-based building-supply company Guardian Industries. She is not a “poster child” for her conservative backers, she added—the Koch family has no control over what or how she teaches. In a video about Engaged Detroit produced by Vela Education Fund, Bernita states, “If school won’t reinvent education, we have to reinvent it ourselves, and our goal at Engaged Detroit is to make sure families have the tools so that choice is in their hands.”

Vela Education Fund offered Bernita one year of funding, and in April she accepted another twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant, from Guardian Industries, to sustain her group through the next school year. Rodrigues imagines a scenario in which the per-pupil funding that public-school districts normally receive goes straight to a homeschooling parent. “Instead,” she said, “you have systems that are addicted to that money.”

Celine Coggins, the executive director of Grantmakers for Education, a collective of more than three hundred philanthropic organizations, including the Walton Family Foundation, says it’s not clear yet whether funders will continue to invest in homeschooling after the pandemic. Most are in “listening mode,” she said. Andre Perry, an education-policy expert at the centrist Brookings Institution, suspects that conservative-libertarian philanthropists will not prop up homeschooling as they have charters and vouchers, “but they will use this wedge issue to hurt public schools,” he said.

Perry was once the C.E.O. of the Capital One New Beginnings Charter School Network, which launched in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but he grew skeptical of the school-choice movement. Its funders tend to put their wealth toward alternatives to the public-school system, Perry told me, rather than lobbying state governments to implement more equitable funding models for public schools or to address the over-representation of Black children in special education. “Because of the pandemic, you’ve had organizations saying, Hey, this is an opportunity to again go after public schools,” Perry said. The Vela-funded homeschooling collectives don’t address root causes of educational disparities, he continued: “When people only focus on the escape hatch, it reveals they’re not interested in improving public education.”

Perry went on, “Slapping ‘Parents Union’ on something while you’re constantly trying to underfund public education—that’s not the kind of trade-off that suggests you’re interested in empowering Black people. It’s more of a sign that you’re trying to advance a conservative agenda against public systems.”

Six months into the pandemic, a consensus had emerged that many children, in all kinds of learning environments, were depressed, disengaged, and lonely in the Zoom simulacrum of school. “It’s Time to Admit It: Remote Education Is a Failure,” a headline stated in the Washington Post . “Remote Learning Is a Bad Joke,” The Atlantic declared. For some homeschoolers who rely heavily on online curricula, an all-screens, alone-in-a-room version of school can have a flattening effect even outside of a global health crisis. Kafele Gray, Kija’s son, who is now twenty-one and studying music business at Durham College, in Ontario, liked online homeschooling because it freed him from bullying. After two years, though, he was failing his classes and procrastinating, with assignments piling up. “It got kind of stressful,” he said. “You have to teach yourself and be on yourself.” He especially struggled with math. “When I’m in school, I’m better at math, because I have the teacher there to explain it to me—I’m seeing it broken down. When I was online, I would get it wrong, but I wouldn’t know why.” Still, when Kafele returned to his charter school, in eleventh grade, he’d learned to push himself to figure things out on his own. “School was less challenging” than it had been two years earlier, he told me. “I started getting A’s and B’s again.”

When the fall semester started, Bernita and Victoria tried to replicate the course load Victoria would have undertaken in a normal year. Bernita searched for online chemistry and trigonometry classes, and Victoria decided to take dance at the charter high school she’d attended before the pandemic. Bernita wanted the Engaged Detroit families to learn about Black history, so she signed them up for a six-week virtual course with the Detroit historian Jamon Jordan. Victoria bought pink notebooks and pens and a chalkboard for writing out the weekly schedule, and Bernita set up a desk for her daughter in the den. Though Bernita spent many hours on Zoom for her consulting work, the family ate lunch together most days.

As the semester continued, Victoria faded. She stayed up until seven in the morning and slept until two every afternoon, and she stopped doing chemistry. In October, Bernita told her that she couldn’t go on a planned post-pandemic trip to Los Angeles. Later that week, during her weekly coaching session with Kija, Bernita bragged about disciplining Victoria. Kija asked her to reconsider: teen-agers like sleeping in, and homeschooling allows kids to follow their natural rhythms. Besides, Kija said, Black kids are disciplined more than enough. Rather than punish Victoria, Kija suggested, Bernita should ask her daughter what she wanted to study.

The advice worked: Victoria replaced chemistry with a forensic-science class that met the state science requirements for graduation. She pored over lessons about evidence and crime scenes for hours at a time. By spring, she was waking up early to study for the core classes she needed to pass. One cold, sunny Wednesday, wearing a sweatshirt that read “Look Momma I’m Soaring,” Victoria sat down to puzzle out the trigonometry lessons that had always confused her. She emptied a pail of highlighters onto the table. At her high school, teachers hadn’t let her write in different colors, and she couldn’t make sense of her monochromatic notes. She opened a Khan Academy lesson on side ratios, and as the instructor explained the formulas for finding cosine and tangent Victoria drew triangles, highlighting each side with a different color.

The lesson included a nine-minute video and several practice questions. Every time Victoria attempted to find the cosine of the specified angle, she got the wrong answer. In a regular class, she would have pretended to understand. At home, she paused the video, rewound it, and flipped back through her notes. Eventually, she realized that she didn’t know which side was the hypotenuse. She Googled the word.

“The longest side of a right triangle,” she read. “Oh.”

She tried the formula for sine—opposite over hypotenuse—and this time a green check mark of victory flashed on her screen. Victoria solved for the angle’s tangent, and when she got it right she smiled. “O.K., I’m smart,” she said.

The parents of Engaged Detroit meet on Zoom every other Monday night. One evening in mid-March, Bernita set her laptop on the kitchen table next to a plate of broccoli and mashed potatoes. A dozen squares popped up on her screen, showing kitchens and living rooms from across the city. The parents updated one another on their children’s progress. Two preteens had started a jewelry-making business. An elementary-age boy with a stutter was relieved to be learning at home with his mom. Victoria watched for a minute, then went upstairs to feed her guinea pig, Giselle.

A mother, Jeanetta Riley, recounted how, at the beginning of lockdown, she had discovered that her daughter, Skye, a freshman in high school, was performing two grades behind in math. After she joined Bernita’s group, she found a tutor, and now, using Khan Academy, Skye had caught up to her grade level.

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Like Bernita, Jeanetta had thought of homeschooling as something only white people did. “A lot of Black people are struggling,” she told me. They don’t have the resources to stay at home all day teaching. Before the pandemic, Jeanetta worked long hours in customer service at the Fiat Chrysler plant. The company laid her off in March, 2020, and she isn’t sure when she’ll return to work. Skye is old enough to stay home alone, though, and Jeanetta plans to continue homeschooling after the pandemic, a decision some of her family members do not support. One relative berated her at a party for thinking she could take charge of something others go to graduate school to master. But Jeanetta was enjoying her weekly coaching sessions with Kija, and Skye seemed happier.

“I see such growth in her,” Jeanetta said. “She’s always painting stuff and bringing it to me. If that builds up her confidence, then I’m going for it. We didn’t even know she could paint. We didn’t know so much stuff about her. How is this my child, and I didn’t know?”

The day after the Engaged Detroit meeting, Victoria logged on to a dance class she was taking at the charter high school. Her teacher also joined from home, where she demonstrated the day’s lesson under a framed poster of the Beatles. She was a white woman who often played white music in class, Victoria said—that Tuesday, she streamed an Adrianne Lenker song as the students stretched. Victoria preferred R. & B., but she felt close to her teacher, who often e-mailed her to check in. Other instructors had disappeared early in the pandemic.

For the class’s final project, the teacher had encouraged the students to do something personal. Some choreographed a dance to music or to a poem. Victoria had written an original poem about being sexually abused as a child. Part of it read:

trauma can cause memory loss i physically remembered but consciously lost you’re so shaken up thrown around and tossed it’s up to you to ration the cost are you going to know who you are or cause family loss and you ask god to bring clarity on what you saw is this what defined who you are

Near the end of that day’s session, the teacher asked Victoria to stay online after class. When the other students had logged off, she told Victoria that she was worried about her poem. “I don’t want to censor anything,” the teacher said. “I just don’t know from a school standpoint that we can share.” The performances would be public, she said, for a “family audience.” She asked Victoria if she could revise the poem. “Some of the lines are very, very vulgar,” the teacher told her. (She was evidently referring to a stark couplet that switched the identity of “you” to disorienting effect: “you touched me in a way i never knew was true / before you could make anyone else hard he got hard off of you.”) Victoria slumped a little in her chair, but she tried to keep smiling. “O.K.,” she said.

A few nights later, Victoria opened an acceptance letter from Wayne State University. She’d won enough scholarship money to cover four years of tuition. With Pell Grant assistance, the amount came to more than thirteen thousand dollars a year. “That’s crazy,” she whispered to herself. She carried the letter around the house the next morning; she paused her trigonometry lesson to reread it. On her lunch break, buzzing with triumph, Victoria called her dance teacher on Microsoft Teams. She asked if, instead of revising her poem, she could add a trigger warning. The teacher said again that parts of the poem were “vulgar,” then laughed—a high-pitched giggle. If Victoria wanted to perform it, the teacher would need to consult with the school’s social worker: “I feel like there’s a fine line there, and I don’t know what’s acceptable for our audience.”

Victoria told her that she understood. She smiled, big and inviting, and she thanked her teacher for her time. “I appreciate it that you’re being understanding, that we’re having a good conversation about this,” the teacher said. “Other people would get into this intense thing.”

Bernita walked by and asked if she could speak to the teacher. Embarrassed, Victoria quickly closed her laptop.

“You just hung up on her,” Bernita said. “You know what I’m going to do is e-mail her, right?”

“Mom,” Victoria said firmly. Bernita stared back. Victoria bent over onto the table and buried her face in her arms. “She’s scared that [the teacher] is going to start acting funny with her,” Bernita told me. “That’s what always happens when she addresses something. The teacher turns around and starts feeling some kind of way about her, so she don’t want to address that, because she’s, like, ‘Just let me finish school.’ ”

She turned back to Victoria, who was sobbing.

“Ain’t that how you feeling?”

Victoria sat up to blow her nose, but cried harder. She nodded.

“People don’t know the damage they do to kids,” Bernita said. “She’s somewhere now thinking, ‘Oh, that went well.’ Baby, I’m going to e-mail her, O.K.?”

Victoria’s tears dropped onto her acceptance letter, soaking it.

Bernita suggested that she put her emotions into something creative, so Victoria collected herself and went upstairs to her room, returning with green and yellow ribbons and a pair of white Nike Air Force Ones. She wouldn’t have a normal high-school graduation. She wasn’t even sure what her high-school diploma would say. “Homeschool Academy”? But she wanted to celebrate, so she’d started planning the outfit she’d wear when the semester ended. Wayne State’s colors are green and gold.

For years, Victoria told people that she didn’t plan to go to college, because she feared no college would accept her. Now, the damp acceptance letter underneath her laptop, she wrapped a ribbon around the shoe and did what she’d done every year for the past twelve: she told herself that what came next would be better, and that, eventually, she’d find her place. ♦

An earlier version of this article misspelled Jamon Jordan’s name.

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America Reckons With Racial Injustice

For some black students, remote learning has offered a chance to thrive.

Elizabeth Miller

Back when school was in person, Josh Secrett was always tired.

"I used to come home and just lay down and go to sleep for like hours," the eighth-grader says. "Wake up for dinner, go to bed."

Josh's mom, Sharnissa Secrett, says teachers at his Portland, Ore., school would sometimes discipline Josh for small things, like talking when he wasn't supposed to. Those interactions would hang over him the rest of the day.

"You look in my baby's eyes, when he used to come home, he was tired...mentally tired," she says.

But ever since his school went all-virtual, Josh has been doing much better.

His mom says there are fewer distractions, he can work independently and it's been easier for him to focus.

"It's like almost the noise is shut out and we can just get to the work."

Middle school is tough for just about everyone, but for Black students like Josh, school can be even harder. That's because, in addition to learning algebra and coping with social awkwardness, they're often navigating an educational system that historically hasn't supported them.

In Texas, students have been assigned history textbooks that downplay slavery and avoid talking about Jim Crow . In Massachusetts, Black girls have been reprimanded for violating dress codes that ban hair extensions . And across the country, according to federal data, Black students are more likely than white classmates to be disciplined at school .

Disparities Persist In School Discipline, Says Government Watchdog

When Black Hair Violates The Dress Code

In Oregon, where Josh lives, Black students have lower graduation rates. They're also less likely to be identified as "talented and gifted."

All that can take a toll on kids. But for some students like Josh, remote learning during the pandemic has offered an escape.

Of course, that hasn't been every student's experience. Between mental health struggles , limited Internet access and reduced child care options, distance learning isn't working for a lot of families. Research shows students with disabilities, those experiencing poverty and Black and Latinx students are among those especially at risk of falling behind.

Still, for Josh and kids like him, learning from home has given them a chance to thrive.

"Always on alert ... always deflecting"

At school, Josh learns from predominantly white teachers in classrooms full of predominantly nonwhite students. That demographic disparity is not exclusive to Portland . National data show the U.S. public school teacher population is overwhelmingly white, while more than half of the students those teachers interact with are nonwhite. And whether it's explicit or implicit, many teachers bring some kind of bias into the classroom.

Valerie Adams-Bass is a developmental psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies Black youth and media stereotypes. She says often, in the media, Black students are portrayed as being uninterested in education, and Black boys are portrayed as scary or intimidating.

"If that's what the teachers and administrators or their peers see, then oftentimes that is what they're responding to when they're engaging with Black students in reality."

Adams-Bass says it's no surprise some Black students are doing better at home than they were at school. School can take a lot out of them.

"There is emotional energy and a cognitive energy that goes along with navigating the spaces where you don't feel welcome or comfortable. You're always on alert, you're always on, you're always deflecting, so you would be exhausted at the end of the day on top of growing," she says.

"I'm more energized. I want to do more things."

Before the pandemic, Josh says he wasn't connecting with his teachers. Instead, he put his energy into showing them he wasn't a "bad" kid.

"I didn't want the teachers to think I was the problem in the classroom, or what they thought of my skin color," he says. "I just wanted to show them I was better."

"Even that is problematic," his mom interjects. She and Josh's father often talk to him about growing up as a Black boy, and how to advocate for himself if he feels singled out by teachers or peers.

"You're not the model," she tells him. "They have to do better, to make you feel like you are seen and heard."

In the past, when that hasn't happened, Secrett says she would step in on her son's behalf.

Parenting: Difficult Conversations

Talking race with young children.

"The nagging, the 'you're not doing well' — that damages our babies' self-esteem, especially our Black babies' and our kids of color."

Now, at home, both Josh and his mom say he's more comfortable. They say Josh and his teachers have been building relationships based around his classwork and academic achievements.

"I can interact with the teachers as I need." Secrett says. "He interacts with the teachers as they need."

Secrett says she's also seeing her son's confidence go up, and she's better able to monitor how he's feeling. "I know what's going on with him. I can maintain the emotional."

She does worry about the mental health impacts of Josh learning from home, but for now she's decided the benefits outweigh the costs.

Josh can take breaks and relax, and he can spend more time with his family, including his older brothers. He's not exhausted at the end of the school day anymore.

"I'm more energized," Josh says. "I want to do more things."

How schools can help

The pandemic won't go on forever. Soon enough, Josh and his peers will be back in a physical classroom. And there are a few things schools can do to make learning in-person a better experience for all students, Adams-Bass says.

Schools could hire more teachers of color, and offer a curriculum that reflects students' culture and history.

"[Students] should see teachers, they should see administrators that look like them. And certainly, the curriculum should include them beyond one month of celebration," she explains.

Teaching Students A New Black History

Adams-Bass also recommends training current teachers to understand their own biases. She says students need caring relationships with their teachers, and "teachers that demonstrate and understand a knowledge and sensitivity to who the students are as individuals, as well as part of the classroom."

She also suggests forming groups where marginalized students can share their stories with each other.

"Affinity spaces allow them to talk about common experiences, to develop solutions, to support one another, and also to figure out ... how to navigate the larger space where they're learning."

Of course, not all of these things can happen overnight.

"Our staff is our staff," says Michael Contreras, Josh's principal at Ron Russell Middle School.

"We admit that we're a bunch of white teachers teaching mostly nonwhite kids."

Contreras says it's not easy to quickly diversify a school's teaching staff. But he's committed to supporting teachers "in teaching kids who don't necessarily have the same life experience as them." He says trust and strong relationships are important for teachers and students, no matter their differences.

Still, any changes at Ron Russell will come too late for Josh, who is heading to high school next year. His family is considering a high school in another district, one that may be a better fit.

With the right teachers, they're hoping Josh's newfound energy — both during school and after — extends beyond the pandemic.

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Nearly one-in-five teens can’t always finish their homework because of the digital divide

Some 15% of U.S. households with school-age children do not have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of 2015 U.S. Census Bureau data. New survey findings from the Center also show that some teens are more likely to face digital hurdles when trying to complete their homework.

School-age children in lower-income households are especially likely to lack broadband access. Roughly one-third of households with children ages 6 to 17 and whose annual income falls below $30,000 a year do not have a high-speed internet connection at home, compared with just 6% of such households earning $75,000 or more a year. These broadband disparities are particularly pronounced for black and Hispanic households with school-age children – especially those with low household incomes. (The overall share of households with school-age children lacking a high-speed internet connection in 2015 is comparable to what the Center found in an analysis of 2013 Census data.)

This aspect of the digital divide – often referred to as the “homework gap” – can be an academic burden for teens who lack access to digital technologies at home. Black teens, as well as those from lower-income households, are especially likely to face these school-related challenges as a result, according to the new Center survey of 743 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted March 7–April 10, 2018.

At its most extreme, the homework gap can mean that teens have trouble even finishing their homework. Overall, 17% of teens say they are often or sometimes unable to complete homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection.

This is even more common among black teens. One-quarter of black teens say they are at least sometimes unable to complete their homework due to a lack of digital access, including 13% who say this happens to them often. Just 4% of white teens and 6% of Hispanic teens say this often happens to them. (There were not enough Asian respondents in this survey sample to be broken out into a separate analysis.)

Teens also differ by income level when it comes to completing assignments: 24% of teens whose annual family income is less than $30,000 say the lack of a dependable computer or internet connection often or sometimes prohibits them from finishing their homework, but that share drops to 9% among teens who live in households earning $75,000 or more a year.

Other times, teens who lack reliable internet service at home say they seek out other locations to complete their schoolwork: 12% of teens say they at least sometimes use public Wi-Fi to complete assignments because they do not have an internet connection at home. Again, this problem is more prevalent for black or less affluent teens. Roughly one-in-five black teens (21%) report having to at least sometimes use public Wi-Fi for this reason, including 10% who say they often do so. And teens whose family income is below $30,000 a year are far more likely than those whose annual household income is $30,000 or higher to say that they do this (21% vs. 9%).

Lastly, 35% of teens say they often or sometimes have to do their homework on their cellphone. Although it is not uncommon for young people in all circumstances to complete assignments in this way, it is especially prevalent among lower-income teens. Indeed, 45% of teens who live in households earning less than $30,000 a year say they at least sometimes rely on their cellphone to finish their homework.

These findings reflect a broader discussion about the digital divide’s impact on America’s youth. Numerous policymakers and advocates have expressed concern that students with less access to certain technologies may fall behind their more digitally connected peers. There is some evidence that teens who have access to a home computer are more likely to graduate from high school when compared with those who don’t.

The Center’s survey of teens does show stark differences in teens’ computer access based on their household income. A quarter of teens whose family income is less than $30,000 a year do not have access to a home computer, compared with 4% of those whose annual family income is $75,000 or more.

Note: See full topline results and methodology here (PDF). 

• Age & Generations
• Digital Divide
• Economic Inequality
• Education & Learning Online
• Teens & Tech
• Teens & Youth

Monica Anderson is a director of research at Pew Research Center

Andrew Perrin is a former research analyst focusing on internet and technology at Pew Research Center

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The myth about smart black kids and “acting white” that won’t die

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You've probably heard it before: Too many black students don't do well in school because they think being smart means "acting white."

Just last week, Columbia University English professor John McWhorter mentioned it in a piece for Vox to support his critique of elements of the Black Lives Matter platform. Key to his argument was the assertion that the similar goals of the 1960s “war on poverty failed,” in part, due to black people’s “cultural traits and behaviors.”

While the “acting white” theory used to be pretty popular to bring up in debates about black academic achievement there’s a catch: It’s not true.

At best, it's a very creative interpretation of inadequate research and anecdotal evidence. At worst, it's a messy attempt to transform the near-universal stigma attached to adolescent nerdiness into an indictment of black culture, while often ignoring the systemic inequality that contributes to the country's racial achievement gap.

Yet McWhorter — despite being a scholar of linguistics, not sociology — has become one of the primary defenders of the “acting white” theory and has dismissed those who debunk it as “pundits” who are “uncomfortable with the possibility that a black problem could not be due to racism.” But the people who challenge it are not pundits — they’re academics who’ve dedicated significant time and scientific scrutiny to this theory. Here’s why they say it’s a myth.

Where the “acting white” theory came from

The “acting white” theory — the idea that African-American kids underachieve academically because they and their peers associate being smart with acting white, and because they're afraid they'll be shunned — was born in the 1980s. John Ogbu , an anthropology professor at the University of California Berkeley, introduced it in an ethnographic study of one Washington, DC, high school. He found what he dubbed an "oppositional culture" in which, he said, students saw academic achievement as "white."

The acting white theory has since become a go-to explanation for the achievement gap between African-American students and their white peers, and is repeated in public conversations as if it's a fact of life.

Authors such as Ron Christie in Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slu r and Stuart Buck in Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation have written entire books (heavy on personal observations, anecdotes, and theories) dedicated to the phenomenon.

Even President Barack Obama said in 2004 , when he was running for US Senate, " Children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."

Perhaps aware of some of the research debunking this as an academic theory in the intervening years, he noted in 2014 remarks related to the My Brother's Keeper program that it was "sometimes overstated." But he still offered the theory in the form of a personal observation, saying that in his experience, "there's an element of truth to it, where, OK, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that? Or why are you speaking so properly?"

It's no surprise that the "acting white" narrative resonates with a lot of people. After all, it echoes legitimate frustrations with a society that too often presents a narrow, stereotypical image of what it means to be black. It validates the experiences of African-American adults who remember being treated like they were different, or being smart but not popular in school. And for those who are sincerely interested in improving educational equality, it promises a quick fix. ("If they would just stop thinking being smart was 'acting white,' they could achieve anything!")

The "acting white" theory also validates a particular social conservative worldview by placing the blame for disparate academic outcomes squarely on the backward ideas of black children and black cultural pathology, instead of on harder-to-tackle factors like socioeconomic inequality, implicit racial bias on the part of teachers, segregated and underresourced schools, and the school discipline disparities that create what's been called the school-to-prison pipeline .

The "acting white" research was weak to begin with

"The acting white theory is difficult to assess through research," Ivory Toldson — a Howard University professor, senior research analyst for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and deputy director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities — wrote at the Root in 2013. "Many scholars who claim to find evidence of this theory loosely interpret their data and exploit the expert gap to sell their finding," he said.

Despite abundant personal anecdotes by African Americans who say they were good students in school and were accused of acting white, there's no research that explicitly supports a relationship between race, beliefs about "acting white," social stigma, and academic outcomes.

Even those who claim to have found evidence of the theory, Toldson explained , failed to connect the dots between what students deem "white" and the effect of this belief on academic achievement.

"Observing and/or recording African-American students labeling a high-achieving African-American student as acting white does not warrant a characterization of African-American academic underperformance as a response to the fear of acting white," he said .

Studies suggest that the highest-achieving black students are actually more popular than the lowest-achieving ones

A prime example of a shaky study on this topic, according to Toldson, was Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer's 2006 research paper "Acting White: The Social Price Paid by the Best and the Brightest Minority Students ." Published by Education Next , the paper purported to affirm Ogbu's findings by using Add Health data to demonstrate that the highest-achieving black students in the schools Fryer studied had few friends. "My analysis confirms that acting white is a vexing reality within a subset of American schools," he wrote.

But the numbers didn't actually add up to support the "acting white" theory, Toldson said. To start, the most popular black students in his study were the ones with 3.5 GPAs, and students with 4.0s had about as many friends as those with 3.0s. The least popular students? Those with less than a 2.5 GPA.

It seemed that the "social price" paid by the lowest-achieving black students was actually far greater than the price in popularity paid by the highest academic achievers.

Fryer conceded this. He said there was "no evidence of a trade-off between popularity and achievement" for black students at private schools, poking another hole in the theory.

Plus, Toldson pointed out, even if the results had shown that the highest-achieving students at all schools had the fewest friends, that would have indicated a connection between grades and popularity, but wouldn't have supported the core of the "acting white" theory itself. "Methodologically, the study has to make the ostensible leap that the number of friends a black student has is a direct measure and a consequence of acting white," he explained .

In 2009, the authors of an American Sociological Review article, “The Search For Oppositional Culture Among Black Students,” concluded that high-achieving black students were in fact especially popular among their peers, and that being a good student increased popularity among black students even more so than for white students.

McWhorter has dismissed this study as one that “encourages us to pretend,” because he says that black kids may be dishonest when asked if they value school. It’s unclear why the suspicion of dishonesty only applies to black students and not the white students who were also studied. He’s also written the self-reports can’t be trusted because, according to reasoning he attributes to Fryer , “[a]sking teenagers whether they’re popular is like asking them if they’re having sex.” That may be fair, but it doesn’t explain the stronger link between being a good student and self-reports about popularity for black teens than for white teens.

In 2011, Smith College's Tina Wildhagen, in the Journal of Negro Education , tested the "entire causal process tested by the 'acting white' theory," using the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, and found that "the results lend no support to the process predicted by the acting white hypothesis for African-American students."

Research suggests that black students have more positive attitudes about education than white students

There is an established phenomenon called the attitude-achievement paradox , which refers to the way positive attitudes about school can fail to translate to successful academic outcomes among black students. Originated by Roslyn Mickelson in 1990, it's been the subject of extensive sociological research.

For example, in a study published in the American Sociological Review in 1998, James Ainsworth-Darnell and Douglas Downey, using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, found that black students offered more optimistic responses than their white counterparts to questions about the following: 1) the kind of occupation they expected to have at age 30, 2) the importance of education to success, 3) whether they felt teachers treated them well, 4) whether the teachers were good, 5) whether it was okay to break rules, 6) whether it was okay to cheat, 7) whether other students viewed them as a "good student," 8) whether other students viewed them as a "troublemaker," and 9) whether they tried as hard as they could in class.

Findings like these fly in the face of the idea that black students think academic achievement is "white" or negative, or that it's something they must actively shun for acceptance and popularity.

When Toldson analyzed raw data from a 2005 CBS News monthly poll of 1,000 high school students who were asked their opinions on being smart and other smart students, he saw this reflected again.

Students were asked, "Thinking about the kids who get good grades in your school, which one of these best describes how you see them: 1) cool, 2) normal, 3) weird, 4) boring, or 5) admired?" The responses of black boys, black girls, white boys, and white girls were around the same. But black boys were the most likely (17 percent) to consider such students "cool."

Students also answered this question: "In general, if you really did well in school, is that something you would be proud of and tell all your friends about, or something you would be embarrassed about and keep to yourself?" Eighty-nine percent of all students said they would be "proud and tell all." Black girls were top among this group, with 95 percent saying they'd be proud. Meanwhile, white boys, at 17 percent, were the most likely to say they would be "embarrassed or keep to self" or report that they "did not know" how they would handle the news that they were doing very well academically.

As recently as 2009, researchers have revisited the theory and confirmed the findings of pro-school attitudes among black students .

All racial groups have nerds

Fryer's research found that the very highest-achieving black kids were the least popular — but this likely had much less to do with beliefs about acting white and more to do with the fact that the very smartest kids of any race tend to suffer social stigma.

"In my own research , I have noticed a 'nerd bend' among all races, whereby high — but not the highest — achievers receive the most social rewards," Toldson said . "For instance, the lowest achievers get bullied the most, and bullying continues to decrease as grades increase; however, when grades go from good to great, bullying starts to increase again slightly. Thus, the highest achievers get bullied more than high achievers, but significantly less than the lowest achievers."

In a 2003 study titled "It's not a black thing: Understanding the Burden of Acting White and Other Dilemmas of High Achievement," published in the American Sociological Review , researchers concluded that the smartest black and white students actually had similar experiences and that the stigma was similar across cultures:

Typically, high-achieving students, regardless of race, are to some degree stigmatized as "nerds" or "geeks." School structures, rather than culture, may help explain when this stigma becomes racialized, producing a burden of acting white for black adolescents, and when it becomes class-based, producing a burden of "acting high and mighty" for low-income whites.

So very high-achieving kids of all races experience social isolation at times. This is why there are plenty of high-achieving black kids to provide anecdotes about being socially shunned (and there are probably plenty of white kids who could do the same, but there isn't the same appetite for collecting these stories to explain the white experience). There are also plenty of black kids — many of whom are also smart — who have been accused of "acting white." But there doesn't appear to be much of a basis to connect the two experiences.

Jamelle Bouie gave his take on the distinction between these two experiences in a 2010 piece for the American Prospect :

As a nerdy black kid who was accused of "acting white" on a fairly regular basis, I feel confident saying that the charge had everything to do with cultural capital, and little to do with academics. If you dressed like other black kids, had the same interests as other black kids, and lived in the same neighborhoods as the other black kids, then you were accepted into the tribe. If you didn't, you weren't. In my experience, the "acting white" charge was reserved for black kids, academically successful or otherwise, who didn't fit in with the main crowd. In other words, this wasn't some unique black pathology against academic achievement; it was your standard bullying and exclusion, but with a racial tinge.

Why it matters that we get this right

The "acting white" theory is tempting to believe because it does contain pieces of truth. Yes, there's a racial academic achievement gap. Yes, there are plenty of African-American adults eager to tell stories about how they were shunned because they were brilliant.

(McWhorter has vigorously defended the “acting white” theory against academic critics primarily by citing 125 letters he says he received from people describing their experiences that reflect the theory. While he argues that accounts in these letters should be accepted without question, he disregards data such as the scientific study responses indicating pro-school attitudes among black kids because of his view that “personal feelings are not reachable by direct questioning.”)

And, yes, some high-achieving black kids — like kids of all races — experience social stigma. These individual facts are painful, and they resonate with people in a way that makes it easy to blur what's missing from the "acting white" equation: an actual, causal connection between the accusations of acting white, social stigma, and lower academic outcomes. There isn't one.

It's particularly troubling that this myth persists, because stories about the sources of educational inequality can shape public attitudes and policy. A perfect example is in McWhorter’s recent Vox piece. Readers who believed his assertion about the “acting white” theory may have been more likely to be convinced of his larger argument that “cultural orientations” of black communities are a cause of inequality. That is, of course, a very damning charge that could shape attitudes about black people and perpetuate racism. But the most glaring problem with it is that it’s an outdated theory that has fallen out of favor with actual sociologists.

A continued willingness to believe that solutions lie in simply repairing backward attitudes about getting good grades will continue to distract from the real problems: poverty, segregation, discipline disparities, teacher biases, and other structural factors. Unfortunately, none of these issues are as easy to fix as simply changing the beliefs of black students.

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Black Americans homeschool for different reasons than whites

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When Michelle, a white stay-at-home mom, decided to homeschool her 8-year-old daughter, Emily, the decision was driven by what she saw as the lack of individualized attention at school.

“We wound up feeling frustrated that the school wasn’t following the child,” Michelle, a former communications specialist, explained of the decision by she and her husband, a software engineer, to homeschool their daughter.

She described her daughter as “exceptionally gifted” and said after repeated attempts to get her daughter’s school to provide advanced coursework, “it just felt like so much energy that I might as well do this thing myself.”

Michelle’s decision to homeschool stands in stark contrast to that of Lynette, a black mother who told me her son, Trevor, was seven when he started having a hard time in school.

“I don’t want to say that it was bullying but that’s what it kind of ended up being and it wasn’t from students,” Lynette explained. “It was from teachers.”

“He’s seven but he looks like he’s 10,” Lynette continued. “And they kind of acted like they were afraid of him. He’s never acted out violently but they made it sound like he was going to.”

Like Michelle, Lynette grew tired of making visits to her child’s school, but for a different reason.

“I just didn’t want to have to keep going to the principal’s office,” Lynette recalled during an interview at a cafe in the suburbs of a Northeastern city. “I’m like ‘you’re really targeting my kid for no reason because he’s the second biggest kid in the school.’”

Motives differ

The sharp contrast between Michelle and Lynette’s reason for homeschooling their children is common.

As a sociologist who has interviewed dozens of homeschooling parents, I’ve found that whereas most white parents homeschool to make sure their children get an education more tailored to their needs and talents, most black parents homeschool to remove their children from what they see as a racially hostile environment.

Now that schools are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, families of all racial, ethnic and class backgrounds have been forced to spend more time educating their children at home, or at least making sure their children do whatever work the school has assigned.

It is unclear as to whether schools will reopen in the fall. It is also unclear how homeschooling – or at least the ability to oversee at-home learning – will be impacted by the pandemic. Based on existing research and data , I don’t see why reasons that parents previously decided to homeschool – whether they are black or white – will change or disappear. However, concerns about sending their children back to school amid the pandemic could become an additional reason.

Black students disciplined more

There is no shortage of research to support the view that America’s public schools treat black students more harshly than their white peers.

For example, a study by sociologists Edward Morris and Brea Perry found black boys are twice as likely as white boys to receive disciplinary action such as office referral, detention, suspension or expulsion. The same study found black girls are three times as likely as white girls to be disciplined for less serious and arguably more ambiguous behavior, such as disruptive behavior, dress code violations or disobedience.

The middle-class black mothers I interviewed say that despite their college education, salaries and advocacy on behalf of their children, they were unable to protect their children from the racial hostilities at school. The black families I spoke with told me they chose to homeschool only after they tried in vain to address discriminatory discipline practices at their children’s schools.

Money matters

Though the reasons why families chose to homeschool varies by race, other researchers and I have found that homeschooling is more common among two-parent households where one parent is the breadwinner and the other – most often the mother – educates the children. Homeschooling parents are also most often college-educated. One 2013 study found that among the 54 black homeschooling families interviewed, 42 of the families had one parent with at least a college degree, while many (19) also had graduate degrees.

If the ability to work from home makes it possible to homeschool, although incredibly challenging , data also suggest that homeschooling is more likely among families with higher incomes. That’s because the ability to work from home is largely tied to income. Federal labor data show that in 2017 and 2018, 61.5% of workers in the top income quartile could work from home. For workers in the second highest quartile, 37.3% could work from home. But for those in third and fourth highest income quartiles, only 20.1% and 9.1%, respectively, could work from home.

If reducing the risk of exposing their children to COVID-19 becomes a reason to homeschool this fall, these data would suggest that more well-to-do families are in a better position to see that their children are educated at home. By contrast, low-wage workers are less likely to easily exercise this choice. Some scholars speculate that this will lead to more well-off families deciding to continue their children’s learning at-home as a way to avoid virus exposure.

Future growth?

The percentage of U.S. children who are homeschooled rather than attending public and private schools was rising before the pandemic . Between 1999 and 2016 , the percentage of the school age population who were homeschooled doubled from 1.7% to 3.3%, or close to 1.7 million students.

Black homeschoolers account for roughly 8% of this population, up from an estimated 4% in 2007 . The 8% in 2016 represents 132,000 black homeschooling kids, according to the NCES data.

In 2017, black kids made up 15% of public school students, or 7.7 million kids of the roughly 50.7 million public school kids that year.

A 2019 federal report shows parents homeschool for a variety of reasons. Just 16% of homeschool families report moral or religious instruction as the primary reason for homeschooling, while 34% report their primary reason is concern with school environment. This report does not document how reasons vary by race. Yet my study would suggest that black parents, like Lynette, may be dissatisfied with school environment in very different ways than white parents, like Michelle.

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Black Students in the Condition of Education 2020

On May 25, a Black father, George Floyd, was tragically killed as a result of police brutality. Floyd has been described as a loving father of two girls who wanted to better his life and become a better father. His wish represents the desires of millions of American parents: to get out of poverty and be able to support their children with better education.

Better education for every student is a pivotal change that public schools are pursuing. However, the recently released congressionally mandated annual report — the Condition of Education 2020 — painted a very unsettling national picture of the state of education for Black students. The report, prepared by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), aims to use data to help policymakers and the public to monitor educational progress of all students from prekindergarten through postsecondary education in the United States.

The Center for Public Education (CPE) selected relevant data from this report to help school leaders not only monitor the educational progress of Black students, but also rethink what public schools can do better for Black students. We follow the NCES report using the term Black or African American — “a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. Used interchangeably with the shortened term Black.”

The poverty rate is still the highest for Black students

In 2018, nearly one third of Black students lived in poverty ( 32% ), compared with 10% of white students in families living in poverty. The percentage of Black students who lived in households where the highest level of education attained by either parent was a bachelor’s or higher degree was 27% , compared with 69% of Asian students and 53% of white students.

Figure 1 shows that among Black students from families living in poverty,

• 64% have parents whose education level is less than high school.
• 45% live in mother-only households.
• 35% live in father-only households.

Figure 1. Percentage of Black students from families living in poverty, by parents’ education level or family structure: 2018

A lack of internet access at home has become a barrier for Black students to learn

In 2018, 90% of Black students had home internet access. However, this percentage was lower than their peers who were Asian (98%) and white (96%).

• Among Black 3- to 18-year-olds, 11% had home internet access only through a smartphone, compared with only 2% among Asian and 3% among white students.
• Among Black students without home internet access, 39% said that it was because internet was too expensive, suggesting that their families could not afford it. This percentage for Black students was much higher than that for white students.

A high percentage of Black students attend high-poverty schools

In fall 2017, of the 50.7 million students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, 7.7 million were Black. Only 7% of Black students attended low-poverty schools, compared with 39% Asian and 31% white students.

• 45% of Black students attended high-poverty schools, compared with 8% of white students.
• About 25% of Black students were enrolled in public schools that were predominantly Black.

More Black students with disabilities receive services for emotional disturbances

In the 2018-19 school year, 16% of Black students were served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), compared with 14% of white students. Of all students served under IDEA, 5% received services for emotional disturbances, but 7% of Black students served under IDEA received services for emotional disturbances.

Research shows that Black students may be disproportionally represented in educational programs for students meeting eligibility criteria for emotional disturbance. “Although special education services are designed to improve student outcomes, the provision of services may result in social stigma, removal from the general education setting, and inadequate learning opportunities” ( McKenna, 2013 ).

It should be noted that among Black students ages 14–21 served under IDEA who exited school in school year 2017–18, only two thirds graduated with a regular high school diploma, which was the lowest rate compared with students of other racial/ethnical groups. However, it is unclear whether there is a connection between overrepresentation in this disability category and the educational attainments of Black students.

The disproportion between Black students and Black teachers has not been improved

In 2017-18, only 7% of public school teachers and 11% of public school principals were Black. Yet, more than 15% of Black students attended public schools (Table 1). At the same time, while the average salaries for Black teachers were lower than that of their white colleagues, the average salaries for Black principals were higher than their white peers.

• The average salaries for Hispanic ($58,300) and white ($57,900) teachers were higher than those for Black teachers ($56,500).
• The average salaries were higher for Asian ($125,400) and Hispanic ($105,100) principals than for Black ($101,100), white ($99,400), and American Indian/Alaska Native ($86,700) principals.

Table 1. Percentage of public-school students, teachers, principals & average salary for public school teachers and principals, Black vs. white: 2018

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/

The achievement gap between Black and white students has not been closed

The long-term trend shows that the achievement gap between Black and white students has narrowed. However, the progress is minimal, and the gap is still there. The National Report Card ( NAEP ) shows that from 1992 through 2019, the average reading and math scores for Black 4th, 8th, and 12th graders had always been lower than those of their white peers.

Figure 3 shows that in the recent national assessments in all 8th grade subjects, Black students still fell behind. For instance,

• Only 9 out of 100 Black students performed at or above the NAEP proficient level in civics.
• Only 13 out of 100 Black students performed at or above the NAEP proficient level in math.
• Only 15 out of 100 Black students performed at or above the NAEP proficient level in reading.

School dropout rate keeps high among Black students

Nationwide, the overall dropout rate decreased from 9.7% in 2006 to 5.3% in 2018. During this time, the dropout rate for Black students decreased from 11.5% to 6.4%. Nevertheless, the dropout rate for Black students remained higher than that for white students (4.2%). Additionally, 22% of Black 18- to 24-year-olds were neither enrolled in school nor working, which was much higher than the percentage of all U.S. 18- to 24-year-olds youth (14%).

Figure 2 shows that among 16- to 24-year-olds,

• Nearly 8 out of 100 Black males dropped out of school.
• About 6 out 100 U.S.-born Black students dropped out of school.
• About 37 out of 100 institutionalized (such as in correctional or health care facilities) Black students dropped out of school.

Graduation rates and college enrollment rates remain low for Black students

In school year 2017–18, the national adjusted cohort graduation rate (ACGR) for public high school students was 85%. However, the ACGR for Black students was 79%, below the U.S. average.

• The graduation rates for Black students ranged from 67% in the District of Columbia to 88% in Alabama.
• Arkansas, West Virginia, Texas, and Alabama were the only four states in which the graduation rates for Black students were higher than the U.S. average.

From 2000 to 2018, college enrollment rates among 18- to 24-year-olds increased for those who were Black (from 31% to 37%). Among Black males, college enrollment rates were higher in 2018 (33%) than in 2000 (25%). However, among Black females, the rate in 2018 was not measurably different from the rate in 2000.

Of the 16.6 million undergraduate students enrolled in fall 2018, 2.1 million were Black. Although there were 101 degree-granting, 4-year Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and 2-year HBCUs in operation—51 were public institutions and 50 were private nonprofit institutions, the number of Black students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is still low.

In 2017-18,

• 13% of Black students obtained bachelor’s degree conferred in a STEM field.
• 7% of Black students obtained associate’s degrees conferred in a STEM field.
• 6% of Black students obtained master’s degrees conferred in a STEM field.
• 5% of Black students obtained doctor’s degrees conferred in a STEM field.

Black students in the Condition of Education 2020

Millions of Black parents expect public schools to help their children to be better. Millions of Black students depend on public education to pursue their happiness. We tried hard to find a significant improvement for Black students in the Condition of Education 2020. Yet, what the data demonstrate is disappointing and discouraging.

• The poverty rate is still the highest for Black students.
• A lack of internet access at home has become a barrier for Black students to learn.
• A high percentage of Black students attend high-poverty schools.
• More Black students with disabilities receive services for emotional disturbances.
• The disproportion between Black students and Black teachers has not been improved.
• The achievement gap between Black and white students has not been closed.
• School dropout rate keeps high among Black students.
• Graduation rates and college enrollment rates remain low among Black students.

In brief, this annual report mandated by the U.S. Congress suggests that changing the condition of education for Black students needs true commitment of every policymaker, school leader, and educator. As Justice Clarence Thomas remarked, “It takes a person with a mission to succeed.”

Jinghong Cai Senior Research Analyst

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5 Strategies to Help Black Students Feel at Home in School

White teachers who take the time to know their Black students as individuals can foster a feeling of belonging that students need.

This past year of protests calling attention to systemic racism and police brutality has no doubt impacted our students, inviting conversations on the experiences of Black students within our classrooms. Many White teachers have been examining the ways in which they can make their classroom environments more welcoming and inclusive to Black students. To bring justice to the center of our work, White teachers can implement strategies to ensure that their spaces allow for Black children to feel seen, valued, and heard. In doing so, White teachers are fostering a learning environment where Black identity is affirmed, creating a culture of care and concern that fosters a sense of belonging.

5 Ways to Help Black Students Feel Welcome

1. Pronounce the names of your students correctly. Names are a part of one’s story, cultural heritage, and family history. Honor the identity of your students by genuinely making an effort to pronounce their names. Do not abbreviate or simplify their names. Instead, let them know they matter by getting their names right. If you are unsure, ask the student how they pronounce their name, and you can spell it out phonetically in order to help the class also get it right. Keep trying until you have it down confidently, and ask the student to correct you if need be. This models for the class that it’s OK to make mistakes and shows the importance of using mistakes as learning opportunities to improve.

2. Get to know the Black children in your class. Black children are not a monolith. Through knowing your students as individuals, you can celebrate what they bring to the classroom. Also, be careful not to call them by the name of another Black student in the class. Many students as young as first grade speak to the experience of being called the name of another Black student in their class. This is harmful and traumatic. It sends a message that you do not know who your students are and that you do not value who they are as individuals in your classroom.

3. Present Black history and culture in ways that are affirming—not from a deficit model. When you speak about the Black experience, do not start those conversations from a place of struggle or pain. Black children need to see images and stories of Black joy. The world is heavy enough. Their experiences in school should be where they are affirmed and celebrated, from the stories they read to the images that are placed in the classroom.

4. Present diversity within the Black aesthetic. Often, when Blackness is shown, it prioritizes Whiteness, and students who are darker in skin color are on the periphery. Find images of people that span the Black diaspora and feature dark skin, textured hair, braids, and other styles. This is so important to fostering a healthy sense of identity where all Black students can see themselves represented throughout the classroom and not tokenized.

5. Do not make the Black students be spokespeople for the Black community. When teaching to all the students, do not signal a Black student out to comment or put them on the spot to ask them their feelings and thoughts about issues affecting the Black community. Sensitive historical events, such as enslavement, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement, and current events, such as the Crown Act, voter suppression, and the murder of George Floyd, will have an impact on your Black students, and it’s important that they not be burdened in the classroom to offer their perspective. Black students are already processing these events and what they mean for them as they navigate their Black identity in the racialized world, a task that is incredibly complex. Creating classroom spaces free of the burden of representation places Black students where they will not just survive but thrive.

One of the most important things White educators can do is de-center themselves as they work to bring meaningful change to their classrooms and teaching practices. Acknowledge that there is work still to be done around racial justice and equity, and commit to doing the work. This work cannot begin from a place of defensiveness or exceptionalism, separating who we are from a system that we have all been socialized to participate in. Instead, recognize that you still have learning and growing to do, and share this with your students. This will serve as a model of what it means to be a lifelong learner, as well as how it is incumbent upon all of us, but especially White people, including teachers, to be engaged in the work of challenging systemic racism and anti-Blackness.

Prioritizing and implementing these strategies into action are essential to creating a welcoming environment for Black students. These actionable steps cultivate a culture of care and concern where Black students know that they are affirmed and valued, regardless of the messages they receive outside of school.

11 Surprising Homework Statistics, Facts & Data

The age-old question of whether homework is good or bad for students is unanswerable because there are so many “ it depends ” factors.

For example, it depends on the age of the child, the type of homework being assigned, and even the child’s needs.

There are also many conflicting reports on whether homework is good or bad. This is a topic that largely relies on data interpretation for the researcher to come to their conclusions.

To cut through some of the fog, below I’ve outlined some great homework statistics that can help us understand the effects of homework on children.

Homework Statistics List

1. 45% of parents think homework is too easy for their children.

A study by the Center for American Progress found that parents are almost twice as likely to believe their children’s homework is too easy than to disagree with that statement.

Here are the figures for math homework:

• 46% of parents think their child’s math homework is too easy.
• 25% of parents think their child’s math homework is not too easy.
• 29% of parents offered no opinion.

Here are the figures for language arts homework:

• 44% of parents think their child’s language arts homework is too easy.
• 28% of parents think their child’s language arts homework is not too easy.
• 28% of parents offered no opinion.

These findings are based on online surveys of 372 parents of school-aged children conducted in 2018.

2. 93% of Fourth Grade Children Worldwide are Assigned Homework

The prestigious worldwide math assessment Trends in International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS) took a survey of worldwide homework trends in 2007. Their study concluded that 93% of fourth-grade children are regularly assigned homework, while just 7% never or rarely have homework assigned.

3. 17% of Teens Regularly Miss Homework due to Lack of High-Speed Internet Access

A 2018 Pew Research poll of 743 US teens found that 17%, or almost 2 in every 5 students, regularly struggled to complete homework because they didn’t have reliable access to the internet.

This figure rose to 25% of Black American teens and 24% of teens whose families have an income of less than $30,000 per year.

4. Parents Spend 6.7 Hours Per Week on their Children’s Homework

A 2018 study of 27,500 parents around the world found that the average amount of time parents spend on homework with their child is 6.7 hours per week. Furthermore, 25% of parents spend more than 7 hours per week on their child’s homework.

American parents spend slightly below average at 6.2 hours per week, while Indian parents spend 12 hours per week and Japanese parents spend 2.6 hours per week.

5. Students in High-Performing High Schools Spend on Average 3.1 Hours per night Doing Homework

A study by Galloway, Conner & Pope (2013) conducted a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California. 

Across these high-performing schools, students self-reported that they did 3.1 hours per night of homework.

Graduates from those schools also ended up going on to college 93% of the time.

6. One to Two Hours is the Optimal Duration for Homework

A 2012 peer-reviewed study in the High School Journal found that students who conducted between one and two hours achieved higher results in tests than any other group.

However, the authors were quick to highlight that this “t is an oversimplification of a much more complex problem.” I’m inclined to agree. The greater variable is likely the quality of the homework than time spent on it.

Nevertheless, one result was unequivocal: that some homework is better than none at all : “students who complete any amount of homework earn higher test scores than their peers who do not complete homework.”

7. 74% of Teens cite Homework as a Source of Stress

A study by the Better Sleep Council found that homework is a source of stress for 74% of students. Only school grades, at 75%, rated higher in the study.

That figure rises for girls, with 80% of girls citing homework as a source of stress.

Similarly, the study by Galloway, Conner & Pope (2013) found that 56% of students cite homework as a “primary stressor” in their lives.

8. US Teens Spend more than 15 Hours per Week on Homework

The same study by the Better Sleep Council also found that US teens spend over 2 hours per school night on homework, and overall this added up to over 15 hours per week.

Surprisingly, 4% of US teens say they do more than 6 hours of homework per night. That’s almost as much homework as there are hours in the school day.

The only activity that teens self-reported as doing more than homework was engaging in electronics, which included using phones, playing video games, and watching TV.

9. The 10-Minute Rule

The National Education Association (USA) endorses the concept of doing 10 minutes of homework per night per grade.

For example, if you are in 3rd grade, you should do 30 minutes of homework per night. If you are in 4th grade, you should do 40 minutes of homework per night.

However, this ‘rule’ appears not to be based in sound research. Nevertheless, it is true that homework benefits (no matter the quality of the homework) will likely wane after 2 hours (120 minutes) per night, which would be the NEA guidelines’ peak in grade 12.

10. 21.9% of Parents are Too Busy for their Children’s Homework

An online poll of nearly 300 parents found that 21.9% are too busy to review their children’s homework. On top of this, 31.6% of parents do not look at their children’s homework because their children do not want their help. For these parents, their children’s unwillingness to accept their support is a key source of frustration.

11. 46.5% of Parents find Homework too Hard

The same online poll of parents of children from grades 1 to 12 also found that many parents struggle to help their children with homework because parents find it confusing themselves. Unfortunately, the study did not ask the age of the students so more data is required here to get a full picture of the issue.

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Interpreting the Data

Unfortunately, homework is one of those topics that can be interpreted by different people pursuing differing agendas. All studies of homework have a wide range of variables, such as:

• What age were the children in the study?
• What was the homework they were assigned?
• What tools were available to them?
• What were the cultural attitudes to homework and how did they impact the study?
• Is the study replicable?

The more questions we ask about the data, the more we realize that it’s hard to come to firm conclusions about the pros and cons of homework .

Furthermore, questions about the opportunity cost of homework remain. Even if homework is good for children’s test scores, is it worthwhile if the children consequently do less exercise or experience more stress?

Thus, this ends up becoming a largely qualitative exercise. If parents and teachers zoom in on an individual child’s needs, they’ll be able to more effectively understand how much homework a child needs as well as the type of homework they should be assigned.

Related: Funny Homework Excuses

The debate over whether homework should be banned will not be resolved with these homework statistics. But, these facts and figures can help you to pursue a position in a school debate on the topic – and with that, I hope your debate goes well and you develop some great debating skills!

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Homework Gap Hits Communities of Color Harder

Millions of students do not have access to adequate connectivity, but Black, Latinx, and Native children are disproportionately impacted by the “homework gap” — a term that describes the divide between students with access to home broadband and Internet-enabled devices and those without, as well as the challenges that unconnected students face. One study found that children in one out of every three Black, Latinx, and Native American households did not have broadband access at home.

These disparities are even more pressing during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which has turned the homework gap into a chasm. Schools across the country cancelled in-person instruction at the end of the last school year, and many continue to make plans for remote learning in the fall. As the nonprofit Common Sense pointed out in a recent report , “The ‘homework gap’ is no longer just about homework; it’s about access to education.”

School districts, cities, and states across the country are distributing hotspots, deploying wireless LTE networks, and paying for students’ Internet plans, among other efforts to quickly address the homework gap. However, many of these solutions are stopgap answers to a systemic problem.

UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Marguía said in a press release :

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the impact of the digital divide on the academic progress of our students, particularly from low-income, Black, Latino, and American Indian households. Roadblocks, including internet connectivity and access to a computer or tablet, have denied students of color the opportunity to meaningfully engage in online learning, resulting in learning loss and widening achievement gaps . . . We cannot continue to overlook the disproportionate impact of this divide.

Mind the Gap

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is frequently credited with coining the term “homework gap” to describe the divide between connected and unconnected students. During her time in the FCC, she has called it the “cruelest part of the new digital divide” and has advocated for federal measures to help close the homework gap.

Nearly 17 million children in the U.S. don’t have wired broadband access at home, and more than 7 million children don’t have access to an appropriate device, according to a recent report sponsored by the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed) in partnership with the National Urban League, UnidosUS, and the National Indian Education Association. A similar analysis from Common Sense found that 15-16 million public K-12 students, or about 30%, lack adequate home Internet access and/or devices, with approximately 9 million students lacking both.

Those two reports used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) to support their findings, but other sources also suggest that the digital divide affects a significant portion of students. A Pew Research Center survey from 2018 found that 17% of teens often or sometimes cannot finish homework because of inadequate connectivity or unreliable access to devices. These figures may underestimate the current extent of the homework gap because they do not capture the effects of the pandemic, which has created economic hardship for many families.

Though rural states, like Mississippi and Arkansas, have the highest proportions of unconnected students, states with greater urban populations, such as California and Texas, have larger amounts of students without home Internet access. The Common Sense report found that half of Mississippi public school students, about 234,000 students, lack adequate home Internet, while 34% of Texas public school students, or about 1.8 million students, lack home Internet. For more state-specific statistics, view All4Ed’s interactive map .

It’s referred to as the homework gap, but not having reliable broadband access at home affects students in many ways beyond homework completion. According to a study conducted by the Quello Center at Michigan State University and Merit Network, which looked at the homework gap in 15 rural school districts in Michigan, students without home Internet access also had lower grades and test scores, demonstrated less digital skills competency, and were less likely to plan to attend post-secondary schooling, even after accounting for socioeconomic differences. “Lack of fast Internet access or cell phone only access is associated with disadvantages that likely have lifelong consequences,” the study authors explained.

Black, Latinx, Native Students More Unconnected

The homework gap is greater in low-income communities but also in communities of color. Students from Black, Latinx, and Native American households are more likely to lack access to home connectivity and Internet-enabled access than their white and Asian peers.

All4Ed’s analysis of the 2018 ACS data found that children in 31% of Black and Latinx families and in 34% of Native American families did not have high-speed Internet access at home, compared to children in only 12% of Asian families and 21% of white families. The report also identified gaps in student access to devices among households of different races. Using the same data source, Common Sense likewise found that public school students who are Black, Latinx, or Native American are more likely to lack adequate broadband access than those who are white, reporting that 30-40% of the most unconnected students — those without home Internet access and without an appropriate device — were Black, Latinx, or Native American.

Similarly, the Pew Research Center 2018 survey on student broadband access found that Black and Latinx teens were more likely than white teens to report that they are often or sometimes unable to finish homework assignments because of a lack of a computer or Internet connection. It also found that more Latinx respondents relied on a cell phones to complete homework and that more Black respondents said they frequently used public Wi-Fi connections.

In its study, the Quello Center did not find a statistically significant difference between white students and students of color, reporting that 8.5% of minority students surveyed lacked home broadband compared to 6.9% of white students. But other national data sources in addition to the ACS, including the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Internet Use Survey and Pew Research Center’s broadband surveys , have found that Black, Latinx, and Native households/adults are less likely to have broadband at home than white and Asian households/adults at statistically significant levels, suggesting that race does impact connectivity.

Unaffordably high costs are one of the main reasons why people do not subscribe to home Internet access, and lower average incomes among Black, Latinx, and Native households could account for some of the broadband disparities. Many providers have low-cost programs available for eligible families, but people may not be aware of their options or may receive inconclusive information from customer service representatives.

However, a 2016 Free Press report found gaps in home broadband availability and adoption among households of different races even after accounting for other household features, such as income. Similarly, analysis from think tank Third Way showed that broadband availability is lower in counties with majority Black and Native populations compared to majority white counties. Various factors, including housing segregation, credit check requirements, and other systems that perpetuate racial inequality, could possibly explain the remaining disparities.

These ingrained injustices means that policymakers must make big changes if they want to close the homework gap, the All4Ed report explains:

America’s racial inequities stem from 400 years of systemic racism and federally sanctioned discriminatory policies . . . Public policy must not be subtle nor incremental in addressing the issues that American school-age children face. We need bold and highly focused solutions that dismantle the systems that keep our children from succeeding.

Closing the Divide

Many advocates believe that closing the homework gap, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, is a role that governments must take on. “It is unlikely that market forces alone will close the gap,” wrote the Quello Center in their report, which suggested that a cost-benefit analysis of public investment in student connectivity would justify the expense. All4Ed and Common Sense also argued for federal investment in response to the pandemic, pegging the national cost of temporarily providing home broadband access and Internet-enabled devices to unconnected students at $6-$11 million.

At the local level, states and cities are working to connect students who are impacted by the homework gap in the short term. Some governments and school districts, such as the State of Connecticut and Portland Public Schools , are covering the costs of home Internet connections and wireless hotspots for households with children, often using federal CARES Act funds. Others, like the State of Maryland and San Antonio, Texas , have plans to deploy wireless LTE networks to provide connectivity to students. Unfortunately, many of these programs are temporary and do little to address the underlying reasons why tens of millions of Americans — especially Black, Latinx, and Native Americans — are stuck with high costs and no choice of Internet provider.

On the other hand, cities with municipal broadband networks have been able to make longer term commitments to connecting their students. Even before the pandemic, Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Longmont, Colorado, had developed low-cost broadband plans for families with students. And Chattanooga’s municipal network, EPB Fiber, recently announced a partnership with the local school district that would provide free home Internet access to all students that qualify for free and reduced lunch.

The pandemic has made it clear that Internet access is no longer a luxury for today’s students. Now it’s up to federal, state, and local governments to figure out how to close the homework gap and connect our students of color.

Photo by adamkaz via iStock .

The article was originally published on ILSR’s MuniNetworks.org . Read the original here .

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Katie Kienbaum

Katie is a Researcher with ILSR's Energy Democracy initiative, where she researches and writes about equitable and decentralized clean energy and its impact on communities across the country. Before joining the Energy Democracy initiative, she was a Research Associate with the Community Broadband Networks initiative

Latest posts from Katie

• Report: How Local Ownership of Clean Energy Boosts Benefits, Busts Barriers, and Builds Power - June 14, 2023
• Advocates Applaud Equitable Clean Energy Wins in Minn. Legislation, Look to Next Session for More Progress - May 19, 2023
• ILSR Urges Environmental Protection Agency to Prioritize Grants in Low-Income and Disadvantaged Communities - December 13, 2022

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Teen sent to juvenile detention for not completing homework speaks on ‘injustice’

“There are thousands of other Graces out there," the teen's mother said.

A Michigan mother and her teen daughter, who spent 78 days in juvenile detention after a judge ruled that she'd violated probation by not completing her homework, are speaking out about their experience, which they say was an injustice in the criminal justice system.

Wishing to be identified only as Grace -- her middle name -- the now-16-year-old, who is Black and has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, had struggled to keep up with the transition to remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic last year. She was placed on "intensive probation" in April 2020 after being charged with assault for fighting with her mother and larceny for stealing a schoolmate's cellphone after her mother took hers away.

Grace, who lives in suburbs outside of Detroit, said that she knew there would be consequences for those actions, but she didn't realize they would rise to such a level, and that she thinks they did because she's Black.

"If a white girl were to steal the phone and she has the same history as me, same background, same everything ... they would probably look at her and say, 'Hey, you know, you're not brought up like this,'" Grace told ABC News' Linsey Davis. "But for me, I feel like it was more of an 'OK, this is what we expect from Black people.'"

Charisse, Grace's mother who also asked to use her middle name, called her daughter's incarceration an "injustice" that should "not be forgotten ... that should never occur again."

"My daughter was penalized because of having a learning disability, which is her chronic ADHD," Charisse told ABC News.

Stream ABC News Live Prime weeknights at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET at abcnewslive.com .

Among the terms of her probation was a requirement that Grace complete all of her schoolwork on time. But she said the transition to virtual learning made her feel overwhelmed and anxious. She was matched with a caseworker who Charisse said she thought would help Grace get the support services she needed.

"When we first met, she had shared with us that one of her roles would be to help us through any issues, to keep my daughter on the straight and narrow," Charisse said. Instead "I got a violation," she said.

Within days of hearing Grace might have been behind on her schoolwork, the caseworker referred her to the court, recommending that she be placed in juvenile detention, according to ProPublica , which first reported the case. The Oakland County Family Court Division did not respond to ABC News' request for comment.

On May 14, Grace was subsequently brought before Oakland County family court Judge Mary Ellen Brennan, who at one point during the hearing said Grace was "a threat to the community." She ordered Grace to be taken into custody and sent to a county detention center named Children's Village. Her decision came after Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's coronavirus-related order to keep juveniles out of detention unless they posed "a substantial and immediate safety risk to others."

"If we called every person who's taken something or a person who's [gotten into] an argument with their mom ... I'm pretty sure everybody would be ... a threat to the community," Grace said.

Jonathan Biernat, one of Grace's lawyers, said that in the handling of her case, the court never got "any testimony from the school or the teacher -- anybody involved with her education. They got testimony from the probation officer, the prosecutor. And the judge made her decision based on that testimony."

MORE: Judge: Teen jailed over homework released from probation

Reporter Jodi Cohen, who investigated Grace's case for ProPublica, told ABC News that 42% of youth referred to the court in the county where Grace lives are Black despite Black youth making up only 15% of the county's population.

"Cases like Grace's, and others where you see young people of color … disproportionately represented at various contact points, to me, that points out systemic failures long before the court involvement started," said Jason Smith, executive director of the Michigan Center for Youth Justice. "We wouldn't be talking about disparity rates at the confinement level if there was more support in the community. ... we wouldn't rely on the justice system to address a lot of these issues that shouldn't be criminalized in the first place."

Charisse said she's still haunted by the memories of her daughter being handcuffed and taken into custody.

"I was devastated. It just didn't make any sense and I became very angry. I was furious," she said.

Grace still holds on to all the letters of support that she received during her time in juvenile detention, but she said one still stands out for her: The first one she sent to her mother from inside.

"Dear mommy, I miss you a lot, and being here is hard. I haven't really wrote you because I had to ask God to give me strength to do so. I couldn't write without crying or feeling bad for the rest of the day. ... Please continue to send me pictures of me and you or just with anyone. I love you, mommy, and I miss you," the letter reads in part.

MORE: 6 former youth detention center employees arrested on sexual assault charges

Cohen said that she received a call from Charisse in May 2020. After Charisse told her about Grace's situation, "it didn't sound right," Cohen said.

"Most lawyers who looked at the case didn't think it was possible to get her out of the detention center," Biernat said. "It would be too difficult to convince the judge to change your mind."

Salma Khalil, another of Grace's lawyers, added that "these cases are long, they're drawn out, they're complicated [and] they require a lot of resources."

ProPublica published Grace's story in mid-July 2020 and it quickly sparked widespread outcry -- far more attention than Charisse had expected, she said.

"We immediately started to receive phone calls from all over the country. We got calls from senators, we got calls from legislators in [Washington], D.C. It was amazing," Biernat said.

Cohen said she didn't expect her article to trigger a social media movement calling to free Grace. High school students slept outside, near the facility in protest of Grace's incarceration. A petition for her release garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. And a grassroots organization led a 100-car caravan from Grace's school to the detention center.

Less than a week after the ProPublica article, as pressure to revisit Grace's case mounted, Brennan agreed to a hearing on a motion to release her from detention. During the hearing, Brennan recounted Grace's history of encounters with law enforcement, which go back to when she was a preteen, Cohen said, adding that Brennan used the hearing to make her point of view on the case public.

Meanwhile, Grace pleaded with the judge for her release, saying, "Each day, I try to be a better person than I was the last, and I've been doing that even before I was in this situation. I'm getting behind in my actual school while here [at the detention center]. The schooling here is beneath my level of education."

Brennan ultimately decided that Grace belonged in juvenile detention and denied her release. Khalil said that, at the hearing, Grace and Charisse hugged in what she described as a "heartbreaking moment."

"I think people need to remember that Grace and her mom have a very close bond," Khalil said. "Charisse raised Grace with her own hands. She's an involved mom, so the trauma that they are both experiencing and being separated from one another … it just breaks your heart that our system did that to them."

Biernat, however, said they "weren't going to sleep" until she'd been let go, and filed a petition with the Michigan Court of Appeals. It worked. Eleven days after the hearing, the appeals court ordered Grace to be released immediately.

Now, nearly a year after her experience, Grace is an honors student who enjoys taking pictures during her free time. She's also started to speak out about her experience, which has begun to catalyze change in the state. In June, Whitmer signed an executive order to create a task force on juvenile justice reform.

MORE: More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI

One of the goals of Whitmer's task force is to collect statewide data on the juvenile justice system's influence on youth who enter it, including how many youth within the justice system -- regardless of their race -- are there due to school discipline or academic issues. Smith said these numbers are currently "unknown."

"There are thousands of other Graces out there and we need to pay attention to those children," Charisse said. "Our Black girls are being criminalized. My child was criminalized because of her behavior and her ADHD, but Black girls are being criminalized just because of who they are."

Attorney Allison Folmar, a longtime family friend who is now representing them, told ABC News they are now planning to file a due process complaint against the school district where Children's Village is located, alleging that Grace was denied her right to adjust to remote learning as a student with ADHD.

"The Individuals with Disabilities [in Education] Act exists because you have to prohibit the very injustice that occurred in this case," Folmar said. "This federal act empowers students who are differently abled to learn in accordance with his or her individual ability and progress. Students cannot be forced into mainstream academic practice that leaves them at an educational disadvantage."

She went on, "So, this is about making sure that the educational system does not leave another child behind and … say we're speaking of this case, to criminalize the inability to learn in this type of situation."

While she noted that Grace is "still trying to recover academically" after her time in juvenile detention, Folmar also said that Grace "excels" when given "all of the necessary tools to thrive" and pointed to her becoming an honors student.

"We are simply trying to make her whole," Folmar said.

Since her learning plan had been disrupted by her incarceration, Folmar said they're now seeking compensation in the civil case to pay for the new school she's attending as well as the services she needs to succeed academically.

MORE: Hundreds claim decades of abuse by 150 youth center staffers

Grace said that her future plans include going to college and starting a computer information or cybersecurity business. She also said she wants to continue to advocate for others.

When asked if there was anything she would say to Brennan, Grace said she would tell her, "I'm not just what was on the papers. I'm not just what you saw from those reports or what you saw in those files. I have so many different attributes and I'm so different than just that, and I hope that she doesn't judge everyone based on just that."

ABC News' Gabriella Abdul-Hakim contributed to this report.

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People of color are more likely to work long, irregular hours that could lead to severe health issues by age 50

Hi! Fortune writer Trey Williams here, filling in for Ruth.

The often tongue-in-cheek remark that work may be killing you—long hours, a demanding schedule, and mounds of stress resulting in restless nights—might literally be true, according to  new research . 

Volatile work schedules, defined as working early mornings and well into the evening, late nights, or anything outside the traditional nine-to-five, can have material consequences for employees’ overall health and well-being, according to Wen-Jui Han, a professor at NYU Silver School of Social Work. That’s all the more true for racial and ethnic minorities.

Han’s research, published earlier this month, analyzed the work schedules and sleep patterns—whether people got enough quality sleep—of more than 7,000 U.S. workers as part of the  1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth  from the age of 22 to the time they were 50.

She found that employees who work long or irregular hours and forgo night-time sleep for their jobs suffer from depression, anxiety, and a host of other health issues that could lead to more chronic conditions like heart disease.

The health impact disproportionately affects people of color, who are more likely to work jobs with irregular hours, varied shifts, or multiple jobs. But even when Black professionals and other minorities work office jobs, Han says, they often feel the need to work harder and put in longer hours in order to succeed.

“That puts far more pressure and stress on minority groups in the workplace,” Han says. In dealing with stress, particularly work-related stress, they are much more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors like poor eating habits, drinking, smoking, and lack of sleep, she adds.

The study found that while just a third of the global workforce has what’s considered standard nine-to-five hours, Black Americans are more likely to work irregular hours and night shifts and, ultimately, get less sleep. On top of that, women still carry much of the childcare responsibility, which compounds the issue of irregular hours and the amount and quality of sleep.

Although there’s not a direct line between the amount of sleep one gets and poor health, Han’s research found that Black men, who reported receiving the fewest hours of sleep, were also the most likely to report having health issues if they had worked early hours and a volatile schedule earlier in life. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly a third of U.S. adults report getting less than the recommended seven or more hours of sleep each night. Lack of sleep can lead to mistakes at work and is the cause of many on-the-job injuries each year. On the health front, the CDC says that not getting enough sleep is linked with type 2 diabetes, obesity, depression, and heart disease.

Not only is heart disease the leading cause of death for Americans, but Black Americans are also more vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure, according to Annapoorna Kini, a professor of medicine and cardiology at the  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai . Among Black Americans over the age of 20, 63% of men and 77% of women are overweight or obese, and, in general, Black people in the U.S. are more likely than white Americans to suffer from diabetes.

Han says there still needs to be a more significant conversation about how work affects people of color, particularly Black people and minority workers who disproportionately hold shift jobs. According to data from McKinsey, roughly  74% of Black workers do not have a college degree , which has historically limited the work available to them.

Beyond that, Han identifies a problem in how the U.S. thinks about and approaches work. She says that employees believe that by working longer hours, their bosses will view them as high achievers and reward them with more money or upward mobility. But that mentality can have a long-term impact on their health over the years, Han says.

“The big picture is that when we’re under pressure to serve the 24/7 economy, this is the long-term health consequence we suffer,” she says. “Companies have a large role to play in changing the kind of culture we have around work. We need to help take care of people because [workers] are the ones who make up the economy.”

Trey Williams [email protected]

Today’s edition was curated by Ruth Umoh. Join her in NYC on April 25 for a DEI roundtable hosted by FleishmanHillard to discuss what lies ahead for the industry. Space is limited. Sign up here .

What’s Trending

Star spangled bridge . Civil rights groups are pushing to rename the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore to that of the first Black Marylander to be elected to the House of Representatives. Key, “The Star-Spangled Banner” author, was a slave owner.  NBCNews

Fitting in.  Hispanic and Latino professionals make up just 10% of managers and 5% of executives within corporate America, and many say they feel pressure to assimilate to get ahead at work.  CNN

Deaths of despair . Alcohol, drug, and suicide-related deaths among Black Americans recently overtook the rate among whites, highlighting socioeconomic disparities and a lack of access to mental health resources and addiction treatment.   USA Today

Say my name . Researchers with East Asian or African names are less likely to be identified in news articles, according to an examination of more than 200,000   science news stories from 288 U.S. media outlets. Quantitative Science Studies

The Big Think

Beyoncé’s latest album, Cowboy Carter , is topping the charts. But it's also sparked a backlash from critics who feel the singer-songwriter isn't country enough for the genre, write Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield for Time . It's yet another instance, they say, of country gatekeeping and a longheld belief that cowboys and country western music equate to whiteness. 

“Historically, the American West, especially along the southwest border, was a racially diverse, multilingual, and sexually flexible space. Both enslaved and free Black people were central to the cattle industry that was a crucial part of the economy during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.”

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