The Black Homeschool Explosion: 500% Growth in 5 Years — And the Reasons Will Surprise You

Something extraordinary is happening in Black American education, and it is happening almost entirely outside the view of the people who consider themselves experts on Black American education. It is not happening in school board meetings or legislative chambers or university education departments. It is happening in living rooms, at kitchen tables, in church basements converted into learning spaces, and in online communities with membership rosters that have grown from hundreds to hundreds of thousands in less than five years. Black families are pulling their children out of public schools at a rate that has no precedent in American educational history, and they are not doing it for the reasons that the existing literature on homeschooling would predict. They are not doing it because they are religious conservatives who want to teach creationism. They are not doing it because they are wealthy suburban families pursuing academic enrichment. They are doing it because the schools failed their children first, and they decided — with a pragmatism born of generations of institutional betrayal — to stop waiting for the system to fix itself.

The numbers are staggering. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey documented that Black homeschooling rates jumped from approximately 3.3% of school-age children before the COVID-19 pandemic to over 16% during the pandemic period — a nearly fivefold increase. And here is the detail that the educational establishment has been unable to process: the rates did not return to pre-pandemic levels. While other demographic groups saw significant declines in homeschooling as schools reopened, Black homeschooling rates remained dramatically elevated. The pandemic did not create this movement. It accelerated a departure that had been building for years, driven by a set of grievances that the public school system has proven incapable of addressing.

Not Your Grandmother’s Homeschool

The popular image of homeschooling in America is a white, evangelical, suburban phenomenon — a family with a stay-at-home mother, a single income sufficient to support it, and a motivation rooted primarily in religious conviction. This image was reasonably accurate for the first generation of the modern homeschool movement. It describes virtually nothing about what is happening in Black homeschooling today. The research of Cheryl Fields-Smith at the University of Georgia and Ama Mazama at Temple University — two of the very few scholars who have studied Black homeschooling systematically — reveals a movement with fundamentally different demographics, motivations, and organizational structures.

The motivations are different. For white homeschooling families, religious and moral instruction consistently ranks as the primary motivation in NCES surveys. For Black homeschooling families, the primary motivations are: school discipline disparities — Black students are suspended and expelled at 3.5 times the rate of white students, and the data shows this disparity persists even when controlling for behavior; curriculum deficiency — the near-total absence of substantive Black history, Black intellectual achievement, and Black cultural contribution from standard curricula; school safety concerns — both physical safety and the psychological safety of children in environments where they are consistently marginalized; and the pandemic revelation — the discovery, forced by school closures, that parents were more capable of directing their children’s education than they had been told.

Mazama and Lundy coined a term that captures the essence of this movement: racial protectionism. Black parents are not homeschooling to shelter their children from the world. They are homeschooling to shelter their children from a specific institution — the American public school — that has demonstrated, over decades and across districts, that it cannot or will not educate Black children equitably. The parents surveyed in Mazama’s research described watching their children — curious, bright, engaged children — return from school defeated, diminished, labeled as behavioral problems for the same assertiveness that was praised in white students, subjected to curricula that began Black history with slavery and ended it with Martin Luther King, and disciplined with a severity that the data confirms is applied unequally along racial lines.

“We did not leave the schools. The schools left us. They left us when they suspended my son for ‘defiance’ because he asked a question. They left us when the only Black history in the textbook was three pages on slavery and a paragraph on MLK. We just finally stopped pretending they would come back.”
— Khadijah Ali-Coleman, Black homeschool advocate and researcher

The Single-Parent Question — And the Co-Op Answer

The most common objection to Black homeschooling is economic: How can single-parent households, which constitute a significant portion of Black families, manage homeschooling when the parent must work? It is a legitimate question, and the Black homeschool community has produced a legitimate answer that is, in its structure and philosophy, deeply rooted in Black institutional tradition: the homeschool cooperative.

Black homeschool co-ops operate on a simple principle that Black communities have deployed for centuries in other contexts: shared responsibility. A group of families — typically five to fifteen — pools resources, divides teaching responsibilities based on each parent’s strengths and schedule, and creates a structured learning community that provides both instruction and socialization. A parent who is a nurse teaches science and health. A parent who works in finance teaches mathematics. A parent with flexible morning hours takes the early shifts; a parent who works nights takes the afternoon. The co-op model does not require that any single parent sacrifice all of their income. It requires that a group of parents cooperate, which is — to anyone familiar with the history of Black mutual aid, Black churches, and Black benevolent societies — the most natural organizational form in the world.

Online communities have accelerated this organizing dramatically. The Black Homeschoolers of Atlanta Facebook group has over 8,000 members. The National Black Home Educators network connects families across all fifty states. Homeschool co-ops specifically serving Black families have been established in every major metropolitan area. And the curriculum question — the absence of culturally relevant materials that was one of the primary motivations for leaving public schools — has been answered by a growing ecosystem of Black-created educational content. Programs like the Sankofa Homeschool Community, the African American Unschooling network, and curriculum guides developed by Black educators have filled the gap that public schools refused to address.

The Outcomes Question

Critics of homeschooling — and particularly of Black homeschooling — raise legitimate concerns about academic outcomes, socialization, and oversight. These concerns deserve honest engagement rather than dismissal. The data on homeschool outcomes is complicated by selection effects: families that homeschool are self-selected and may differ from the general population in ways that affect outcomes regardless of educational setting. With that caveat, the available evidence is encouraging. The National Home Education Research Institute has consistently found that homeschooled students, as a group, score 15 to 25 percentile points above public school students on standardized academic assessments. They attend college at comparable or higher rates. Their socialization outcomes — measured by civic engagement, community involvement, and social adjustment — are comparable to or better than those of conventionally schooled students.

The specific data on Black homeschooled students is limited, and this limitation is itself a problem that researchers need to address. But what evidence exists is striking. Mazama’s research found that Black homeschooled children showed significant improvements in self-esteem, racial identity development, and academic engagement compared to their experiences in public school. Multiple case studies have documented Black homeschooled students performing at or above grade level in every measured subject, often after having been labeled as underperforming or behaviorally disordered in their previous school settings. The pattern is consistent enough to warrant a hypothesis that any honest researcher should be willing to test: that the “achievement gap” for at least some Black students is not a gap in student capacity but a gap in institutional willingness to educate those students properly.

The Critiques and the Honest Responses

Socialization is the concern raised most frequently, and it is the one that the homeschool community — Black and otherwise — has the strongest response to. The co-op model, by its nature, provides extensive peer interaction. Homeschool families participate in sports leagues, arts programs, community organizations, and faith communities at rates equal to or higher than conventionally schooled families. The socialization argument assumes that the school building is the only or primary venue for social development, an assumption that does not survive contact with the reality of how children actually develop social skills: through family, community, organized activities, and unstructured play, all of which are available to homeschooled children and some of which are more available because the homeschool schedule provides more time for them.

The oversight concern is more substantive. Homeschool regulations vary dramatically by state, and in states with minimal oversight, there is a real risk that some children may not receive adequate education. This is a policy question that can be addressed through reasonable regulation — periodic assessment requirements, portfolio reviews, access to standardized testing — without eliminating the freedom that makes homeschooling effective. The Black homeschool community has generally been supportive of reasonable accountability measures, in part because the parents in this movement are not anti-education. They are intensely pro-education. They are so pro-education that they removed their children from an institution that was not providing it.

Freedom Schools, Revisited

In the summer of 1964, during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, civil rights workers established “freedom schools” that provided Black students with the education that the segregated public school system refused to offer. The curriculum included Black history, constitutional rights, critical thinking, and the kind of intellectually rigorous engagement that was systematically denied to Black students in Mississippi’s public schools. The freedom schools were born from the same recognition that drives the Black homeschool movement today: when the institution will not educate your children, you build your own institution.

The parallel is not metaphorical. It is structural. Black families in 2026 are making the same calculation that Black families in 1964 made: that the formal educational system is either unable or unwilling to serve their children, and that waiting for the system to reform itself is a luxury that their children’s developmental windows will not accommodate. A child who spends six years in a school that does not teach them to read at grade level cannot get those six years back when the school eventually adopts better practices. The damage is done. The window has closed. And the parents who are choosing homeschooling have decided, with the pragmatism of people who have learned from generations of institutional failure, that they will not sacrifice their children’s futures on the altar of institutional patience.

What This Movement Needs

The Black homeschool movement is real. It is growing. It is producing results. And it needs three things to sustain itself and scale. First, it needs funding parity. In most states, per-pupil education funding follows the student only to public schools and, in some cases, to charter schools. Homeschooling families receive nothing, which means they are effectively paying twice — once through taxes and once through direct educational expenses. Education savings accounts and other mechanisms that allow public funding to follow the student regardless of educational setting would remove the financial barrier that is the single largest obstacle to Black homeschooling expansion.

Second, it needs institutional support infrastructure. The Black homeschool co-op model works, but it works better with access to science labs, athletic facilities, library resources, and specialist instruction that individual families and small co-ops cannot easily provide. Some school districts have created hybrid programs that allow homeschooled students to access specific public school resources. This model should be expanded, because the goal is not to destroy public education. The goal is to ensure that every Black child receives the education they deserve, and for a growing number of families, homeschooling is where that education is being delivered.

Third, it needs research. The academic literature on Black homeschooling is absurdly thin, and the thinness is not accidental. Education researchers, who are overwhelmingly trained in and employed by institutions invested in the public school model, have shown remarkably little curiosity about a phenomenon that represents the fastest-growing educational trend in the Black community. This needs to change, because the movement is going to continue growing whether researchers study it or not, and the families within it deserve the kind of rigorous evidence base that can help them make the best decisions for their children.

Black parents did not start this fight. The schools started it — by suspending Black children for being Black, by teaching curricula that erased Black contributions, by producing outcomes so dismal that no honest person could defend them, and by responding to every critique with the institutional equivalent of a shrug. The parents who are choosing homeschooling have simply decided to finish it. And the five hundred percent growth rate suggests that the rest of the country should start paying attention, because this is not a trend. It is a movement. It has historical precedent, structural logic, growing infrastructure, and the most powerful motivation any educational reform has ever had: parents who love their children more than they fear the judgment of a system that failed them.