Black Homeschooling Tripled Since 2020 — The Establishment Should Be Terrified

Something happened in the spring of 2020 that the American educational establishment has not yet reckoned with, and the longer it avoids the reckoning, the more devastating the consequences will be — not for the families who made the decision, but for the system they abandoned. When schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and parents, for the first time in most of their lives, sat in the same room as their children during the school day, they saw what was actually being taught. They saw the Zoom classes that consumed forty-five minutes to cover what a competent tutor could teach in ten. They saw the worksheets that asked nothing and expected less. They saw the curriculum. And then they did something that the teachers’ unions and school boards and departments of education did not anticipate and have not yet figured out how to reverse: they decided to do it themselves.

The United States Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, the most comprehensive real-time data collection instrument deployed during the pandemic, recorded a number that should have detonated like a bomb in every education policy office in the country. Between the spring and fall of 2020, the rate of Black households homeschooling their children went from 3.3% to 16.1%. That is not a marginal increase. That is not a rounding error. That is a fivefold multiplication in six months — the fastest demographic shift in American educational history — and it happened not because someone launched a marketing campaign or passed a law or issued a mandate but because Black parents looked at the institution to which they had entrusted their children and concluded, independently, in household after household across the country, that they could do better.

Why They Left

The reasons Black parents chose to remove their children from the public school system are documented in survey after survey, and they are not the reasons that the educational establishment wants to hear. The establishment wants the story to be about pandemic logistics — school closures, childcare difficulties, the temporary disruption of a system that would naturally restore itself once the crisis passed. That story is comforting because it implies that the exodus was circumstantial rather than judgmental. It was not.

The Household Pulse data, along with supplementary research from the National Center for Education Statistics and independent surveys conducted by homeschool advocacy organizations, reveals a consistent pattern of motivations among Black homeschooling families. Safety is one factor: Black parents, like all parents, want their children to be physically safe, and the frequency of violence in some urban schools is a documented reality that school districts prefer not to advertise. Curriculum concerns are another: parents who saw what was being taught during remote learning were dissatisfied not only with the rigor but with the content — too much ideology, too little instruction, too many hours spent on social-emotional learning modules and not enough hours spent on mathematics and reading.

But the most significant motivation, the one that distinguishes the Black homeschooling movement from its white predecessor, is the desire for culturally affirming education that centers achievement rather than victimhood. Black parents are not removing their children from school to shelter them from Black history. They are removing them because the version of Black history taught in most public schools is a narrative of suffering, oppression, and dependence that leaves their children with the impression that Blackness is a condition to be endured rather than an identity to be celebrated through accomplishment. These parents want their children to learn about slavery — and about the fact that free Black men owned businesses in Philadelphia before the Revolution. They want their children to learn about Jim Crow — and about the fact that during Jim Crow, Black Wall Street in Tulsa was the wealthiest Black community in America. They want the full story, the story of agency and achievement and resilience, and the public school system is not telling it.

The irony should not be lost on anyone: the same system that claims to serve Black children is losing them — because Black parents decided to serve their children better. The monopoly is breaking, and the monopolists are the last to understand why.

The Numbers That Terrify the Bureaucracy

Even after schools fully reopened, Black homeschooling rates did not return to pre-pandemic levels. The most recent data available indicates that Black homeschooling rates remain three to five times higher than the 3.3% baseline of 2019. The families who left did not come back. They found something better, and the system they left has no strategy for winning them back because it has not changed the product that drove them away.

The National Home Education Research Institute, the most comprehensive research organization tracking homeschool outcomes, reports data that the public school establishment does not dispute because it cannot: homeschooled students score, on average, 15 to 30 percentile points above public school students on standardized achievement tests. This holds true across racial and ethnic groups. It holds true across income levels. It holds true regardless of the parents’ level of education, though outcomes are modestly better when parents hold college degrees. The data does not say that every homeschooled student outperforms every public school student. It says that the average homeschooled student dramatically outperforms the average public school student, and for Black students specifically — students whose public school average is 15% math proficiency at the eighth-grade level — the improvement is not incremental. It is transformational.

The Networks That Made It Possible

The Black homeschooling movement did not emerge in isolation. It was enabled by a growing infrastructure of organizations, curricula, and communities specifically designed to support Black families in educating their children at home. These organizations receive no federal funding, no union support, and virtually no media coverage, and they are changing Black education more fundamentally than any policy initiative of the last thirty years.

National Black Home Educators, founded by Joyce Burges, is one of the oldest and largest organizations serving Black homeschooling families in the United States. It provides curriculum guidance, standardized testing resources, legislative updates, and community connections to thousands of families across the country. It operates on a budget that a single urban school district would consider a rounding error, and its member families produce academic outcomes that those school districts cannot approach.

Black Families Homeschool and Hip Homeschool Moms are online communities that connect Black homeschooling parents with resources, co-op groups, and support networks. Chocolate Milk Homeschoolers provides faith-based homeschooling resources specifically for Black Christian families. These organizations fill a gap that the institutional education system refuses to acknowledge: Black parents want educational options, and when those options are not provided by the system, they build them from scratch.

The curriculum choices these families make are revelatory. Many Black homeschooling families are choosing classical education models — the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric that was the foundation of Western education for centuries. Others are choosing STEM-intensive curricula that prioritize mathematics and science at levels far beyond what their local public school offers. Organizations like 1776 Unites, founded by Bob Woodson, provide curriculum supplements that teach Black history through the lens of agency, entrepreneurship, and achievement — the history of people who built rather than the history of people who were built upon. These are parents who are not running from education. They are running toward a better version of it.

The Socialization Myth and the Data That Destroys It

The first objection raised against homeschooling, always, without variation, in every conversation with every person who has never tried it, is socialization. “But what about socialization?” they ask, as though the socialization that occurs in an American public school — the bullying, the cliques, the social hierarchy based on athletic ability and physical appearance, the peer pressure toward mediocrity, the documented correlation between school environment and adolescent anxiety and depression — were a product worth preserving.

Richard Medlin of Stetson University has studied the socialization outcomes of homeschooled children across multiple studies spanning decades, and his findings are consistent: homeschooled children demonstrate social skills that are equivalent to or superior to those of conventionally schooled children. They score higher on measures of social maturity. They exhibit lower rates of behavioral problems. They are more likely to participate in community activities, volunteer work, and structured extracurricular programs. The socialization objection is not supported by research. It is supported by assumption — the assumption that a child who spends seven hours a day in a building with thirty age-matched peers is learning social skills, when what they are frequently learning is conformity, conflict, and the social dynamics of a Lord of the Flies experiment moderated by an underpaid adult who has thirty-two children and one set of hands.

Black homeschooling families, in particular, have developed robust socialization models that address the concern directly. Homeschool co-ops — groups of families that come together for shared instruction, field trips, sports, and social activities — are the backbone of the homeschooling social infrastructure. Black homeschool co-ops have proliferated since 2020, with groups forming in every major metropolitan area. These co-ops provide the social interaction that children need while maintaining the academic standards and cultural environment that parents chose homeschooling to achieve. The children in these co-ops are not isolated. They are selectively socialized — which is what every wealthy family in America does when it chooses a private school with a particular culture, except that homeschooling families do it at a fraction of the cost.

The Establishment’s Response

The educational establishment’s response to the Black homeschooling explosion has been predictable and revealing. Rather than asking why families are leaving — rather than examining the product and improving it — the establishment has sought to regulate the exit. In multiple states, legislation has been introduced to increase oversight of homeschooling families, requiring more frequent standardized testing, mandating specific curriculum standards, demanding regular inspections, and in some proposals, requiring that homeschooling parents hold teaching credentials.

The National Education Association — the largest teachers’ union in the country, the same union that has presided over decades of declining outcomes in majority-Black school districts — has adopted an official position calling for stricter regulation of homeschooling. Their stated concern is educational quality. Their actual concern is revenue. Every child who leaves the public school system takes per-pupil funding with them. In a major urban district, that can be $15,000 to $20,000 per student per year. Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of Black children who have left the system since 2020, and the financial threat to the institutional apparatus becomes clear. The unions are not worried about whether these children are learning. The unions are worried about whether these children are being counted.

The teachers’ union does not object to homeschooling because it produces poor outcomes. The data shows it produces superior outcomes. The union objects because it produces those outcomes without the union — and in education, as in every monopoly, the product is less important than the market share.

The Economic Challenge and the Co-op Solution

There is a genuine obstacle that the homeschooling movement must confront honestly, and it is economic. Homeschooling, in its traditional form, requires that one parent be at home during the school day. In a two-parent household where both parents work, this means one parent must either quit their job, reduce their hours, or restructure their work around the school schedule. In a single-parent household, traditional homeschooling is functionally impossible without external support. And the families who most need an alternative to failing public schools — low-income families in underserved communities — are precisely the families that can least afford to sacrifice a second income.

This is a real barrier, and pretending it does not exist would be dishonest. But the Black homeschooling community has developed solutions that are both practical and replicable. Homeschool co-ops, in which groups of families pool resources and share instructional responsibilities, allow parents to divide the teaching load so that no single parent must be home every day. In a co-op of five families, each parent might teach one day per week, freeing the other four days for employment. Some co-ops hire a shared instructor — often a retired teacher or a parent with specialized expertise — and split the cost among participating families. The per-child expense in a well-organized co-op can be as low as $2,000 to $3,000 per year, a fraction of the per-pupil spending in most urban school districts, and the outcomes, as measured by standardized tests, are dramatically superior.

Technology has further reduced the barriers. Online curriculum platforms like Khan Academy, which is free, and programs like Classical Conversations and Veritas Press, which charge modest fees, provide structured educational content that a parent with a high school diploma can facilitate effectively. The parent does not need to be a subject matter expert in calculus or organic chemistry. They need to be a competent facilitator of a curriculum designed by subject matter experts — and that, the data shows, is sufficient to produce outcomes that exceed what the average public school produces with credentialed teachers, administrative staff, and per-pupil spending that exceeds $15,000 annually.

What This Means

The Black homeschooling movement is the most significant educational development in Black America since Brown v. Board of Education, and it is significant for precisely the opposite reason. Brown v. Board was a legal victory that forced the system to include Black children. The homeschooling movement is a voluntary exit — a decision by Black families that the system they fought to enter is no longer serving them, and that rather than waiting for it to improve, they will build something that works.

This is not a rejection of education. It is the most aggressive embrace of education that Black America has seen in a generation. These are parents who are spending their own money, their own time, their own energy to ensure that their children learn — not because the state requires it, not because a union negotiated it, not because a politician promised it, but because they looked at their child and decided that the child’s future was more important than the system’s convenience.

Marva Collins, the legendary Chicago educator who started her own school in 1975 after watching the public school system fail Black children, said it plainly: “I have discovered few learning disabilities. I have discovered many teaching disabilities.” The Black parents who are homeschooling their children have made the same discovery, and rather than writing letters to school boards or attending PTA meetings or waiting for the next bond measure to fund the next reform initiative that will produce the next round of disappointing results, they have done what Collins did. They have taken the work into their own hands.

The educational establishment should be terrified — not because the homeschooling movement threatens the survival of public schools, which will continue to exist and continue to receive funding regardless of how many families leave, but because the movement threatens something more valuable than funding. It threatens the narrative. The narrative that says public education is the only path. The narrative that says parents are not qualified to educate their own children. The narrative that says the credential matters more than the result. The narrative that says the system, despite decades of documented failure in Black communities, is still the best option available.

That narrative is breaking, and it is breaking because Black parents — parents who were told their children could not learn, parents whose children sat in classrooms with zero percent proficiency rates, parents who watched their tax dollars fund a system that produced nothing — decided that enough was enough. They did not march. They did not protest. They did not petition. They did something far more radical and far more effective: they withdrew their children, sat down at the kitchen table, opened a book, and started teaching. And the results, documented and measurable and replicable, are the most powerful indictment of the public school system that has ever been produced — not by a policy paper, not by a court decision, but by Black parents who proved, one child at a time, that the system was never the only option. It was merely the one that no one had the courage to leave.