Fact Check: Homeschooled Black Children Score Much Better On Standardized Tests. Photo Credit: miniseries / istock
Black children that are homeschooled score significantly higher than their public school counterparts on standardized tests, a study shows.
“Black homeschool students score 23-42 percentile points above Black public school students across all standardized tests,” Classic Learning Test CEO Jeremy Tate tweeted on Dec. 4. “No wonder homeschooling among Black families has grown faster than any other demographic, 4X in less than 2 years!”
Tate was citing data published on the National Home Education Research Institute’s (NHERI) website. However, the data he referenced was actually published in 2015 by researcher and NHERI founder Dr. Brian Ray in the Journal of School Choice in a study entitled “African American Homeschool Parents’ Motivations for Homeschooling and Their Black Children’s Academic Achievement.”
“The home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests. (The public school average is the 50th percentile; scores range from 1 to 99.) A 2015 study found Black homeschool students to be scoring 23 to 42 percentile points above Black public school students,” Ray’s study shows.
With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, more and more Black families have decided to homeschool their children. A Census Bureau survey shows the number of Black children being homeschooled jumped from 3.3 percent in Spring of 2020 to 16.1 percent in the fall of 2020.
Ray’s research – which compared the standardized tests of 140 Black families that homeschooled to more than 1,200 public school students – also showed Black children who were homeschooled scored higher than their public school peers in reading, math and language.
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Many Black parents complained their children were being left behind by the public school system during the quarantine. “I just began to see some telltale signs that things weren’t working to our advantage and started to see some discrepancies, some inequities,” Angela Valentine of Chicago told NBC News of her decision to homeschool her 12-year-old son Dorian.”
“We later found out that he was called the N-word,” Valentine said after noting Dorian’s grades had slipped and he’d started being treated as an outcast by his predominately white peer group.
Others cited reasons like racism and the ability to teach a more culturally-driven curriculum as reasons for the shift.
Joyce Burges is the CEO of National Black Home Educators (NBHE). She told NBC her organization specializes in bringing Black culture into the educational experience. “We are bringing a Black experience,” Burges said, noting Black history and culture “should have never been left out.”
“It should have never been invisible, but an older gentleman told me a long time ago, he said, ‘Joyce, the story’s going to be told according to the people who write the story, and Black Americans — we are writing this story … so this is the spirit of how we write our curriculum for families, and it’s a beautiful thing.”
Homeschooling educational consultant LaNissir James echoed her sentiment in an interview with The New Yorker.
“We are not seeing ourselves in textbooks,” James 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.”
Photo Credit: miniseries / istock
