The ABCs of home-schooling: African-Americans join the circle of parents who choose to teach their children at home

LIKE most parents, Beatrice Woods-Cooper and her 6-year-old son Chii start every school day bright and early. Unlike parents who send their children off to school each morning to learn reading, writing and arithmetic from a standardized classroom teacher, Chii's school is also his home--and his mother doubles as his teacher.

Cooper has turned her elegant Chicago home into a school featuring a room with pint-sized comfy furniture, brightly colored walls and bookcases filled with tantalizing reads. "He does have his structure," says Cooper, who also runs a day care center from home in the afternoons. She home-schools her son from 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. As teacher-mom, she says that she has been able to make observations about Chii that might have gone unnoticed or been misinterpreted by teachers in a traditional classroom.

"My son was reading from top to bottom [instead of from left to right]," says Cooper, who has a degree in biology and was on her way to medical school before she and her husband discovered that she was pregnant. "I've been learning through my research that people who read that way are very creative. It's my job to support him in his creativity. I get to understand and connect with him on a deeper level."

Cooper also noticed something else about her son as he grew older--the way he was treated by different races. One day she took Chii along to court to pay a parking ticket when she witnessed a White police officer yell at him. "That was when I realized that I had a Black man," recalls Cooper, who says that the behavior was representative of how some races and authority figures react to Black males. "It's my job to love and nurture him and give him what I can right now."

As for Chii, the local school system found that he tested above-average for his age group. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 1.1 million students were home-schooled in the United States in 2003. Approximately 85,000 children were African-American, the fastest-growing segment of home-schoolers. Among the reasons parents give for teaching their children at home include overcrowded classrooms, school violence, religious beliefs and low academic achievement in public and private schools.

Although home-schooling is becoming more and more popular in the African-American community, the concept is not without controversy. There are parents, educators and various other experts who say traditional schooling is best for a number of reasons, but primarily because it allows children the opportunity to constantly interact with their peers and teachers, and gain necessary sociological skills.

Even so, some parents still believe home-schooling is better. In the book Morning by Morning: How We Home-Schooled our African-American Sons to the Ivy League, Paula Penn-Nabrit shares the experiences that she and her husband, C. Madison Nabrit, had while they home-schooled their three sons. According to Paula Nabrit, there were many factors involved in the decision to take their sons, twins Damon and Charles, who were 11 at the time, and Evan, then 9, out of what she calls "a good, reputable private school."

The Ohio-based couple was told by their sons' teachers that Damon needed to be on Ritalin for hyperactivity and that Charles, his twin brother, was too arrogant. They were also told that their youngest son, Evan, had a learning disability. Another incident, recounts Nabrit, was when one of her sons did a family tree for school and included in his project information about their father's uncle, James Nabrit, who along with Thurgood Marshall had argued (and won) the historic Brown v. Board of Education case. His teacher assumed that Nabrit's son had fabricated the information.

"That brought it to a head" says Paula Nabrit, who graduated from Wellesley College and whose husband graduated from Dartmouth. "It was inconceivable to them that a Black family would even be intact enough to go to college." The couple, both of whom worked from home at the time, took on the responsibility to home-school their sons.

"We asked ourselves what kind of environment we could create that validated and nurtured them holistically," she says. The curriculum they decided on consisted of mathematics, global literature, science and arts. The couple called on Black male students from Ohio State University to tutor the boys in math and science. "We essentially eliminated the need for the White woman teacher and created an environment where they were taught mostly by adult versions of themselves," says Nabrit.

And, she recalls, "It got ugly sometimes. The kids hated to be home-schooled." They didn't have summers off. There was no cable TV or electronic games. What was allowed was deadline leniency with papers and flexibility with classroom time, even allowing food and water to be available during learning. "There were times when we had to say from time to time, 'Let's bag this and go fishing.'"