When Sheretha Boone Blanchard, a North Carolina mother of three, started homeschooling her son during the pandemic, it may have actually saved her time.
Blanchard’s second son, Isaiah, finished fifth grade in June 2020. As the health crisis continued, Blanchard switched to online classes when Isaiah entered sixth grade. However, Isaiah has ADHD and can’t concentrate unless someone is nearby, Blanchard said. So Blanchard, who worked remotely as a university professor, and his mother, Loretta Boone, who is retired, spent a lot of time each day helping Isaiah complete his online class assignments.
Blanchard said her son 504 PlanWhen some assignments fell behind, he felt like he’d dug a hole he couldn’t get out of. Though the school let him turn them in, he only got partial credit, all the while new assignments kept coming in. The school wasn’t willing to compromise to help him catch up, Blanchard says. “It was almost an overly punitive environment,” she recalls.
Because the family spent so much time with their son, they figured homeschooling would give them control over the curriculum and instruction, so they decided to pull him out of school. The homeschool curriculum, a four-day-a-week, literature-focused package from BookShark, arrived near Isaiah’s birthday. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, it’s all working so well. This is the way we should do it,'” she recalls.
As a professor, Blanchard said she has “triaged” her schedule, meaning she homeschools her son for a few hours in the morning, then holds online lectures and meetings later in the day.
It took energy and time, but no more than she was already putting in “trying to make the system work.” The curriculum allowed Blanchard to tailor her lessons to Isaiah, focusing on the subjects he needed extra support in and skipping through the others. “And it was just a really positive experience overall for him and for us as a family,” says Blanchard, who now works as an associate professor at East Carolina University.
Blanchard is not alone. As the number of struggling students has grown during the pandemic, interest in alternatives to public schools has increased. Homeschooling and microschools, two overlapping categories, are now booming. About 5% to 6% of K-12 students are homeschooled, according to the report. Johns Hopkins University Homeschool Huba collection of research and resources about homeschooling. Blanchard’s state, North Carolina, has the second-highest percentage of homeschooled students in the country, about 9 percent. According to Homeschool Hub.
of Lack of supervision These alternatives have vastly different curricula and rigor, and mean students don’t have the same protections as public schools. But with recent attention and federal funding, Attempts to strengthen regulationsStill, people tend to ignore the nuance a little when talking about the rise of homeschooling and microschooling, Angela Watson, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, told EdSurge in May. But the reality is, there are a wide variety of reasons parents are drawn to these types of schools. Even within states, the level of interest in nonpublic schools can vary, perhaps because of the options available, she added.
She said interest has spiked among some Black families because of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, especially those with children who need help learning, who feel like those students are being pushed out.
For some of these families, the need for these types of alternative schools seems urgent.
Dismantling the “school-to-prison pipeline”
Black families are turning to microschools for “safety,” said Janelle Wood, founder of Black Mothers Forum, a network of nine microschools in Arizona. Considered friendly To the “school choice” movement.
These families are probably Conservative white familyshe added.
In 2016, Wood and other Black mothers were looking for a platform to express their anger and grief over the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, among others, so she convened a meeting to discuss ways to protect children from systemic racism. “I’m a pastor,” Wood said, adding that she felt a religious calling to “be a voice for the voiceless.” Her platform, she elaborated, positions her to articulate the needs of her community.
But the group soon began to focus on the “school-to-prison pipeline.” They identified education as the beginning of a chain of events that leads to poor life outcomes. In education, Wood says, black students are disproportionately disciplined and “criminalized” for normal behavior from an early age. Around the same time, Wood also noticed that classrooms were too crowded with students, preventing teachers from giving enough attention to students who were particularly struggling with racial differences, which he believes exacerbates the problem.
As a result, these families feel less supported by their schools, Wood said.
Black Mothers Forum opened the microschool four years ago, and Wood argues that keeping the school small and local allows for deeper relationships between teachers and students. That means when students make mistakes or misbehave and need correction, they know it’s coming from a place of support, Wood says. “So Milestones provides a space for students to grow and be recognized as human beings,” she says.
Today, Black Mothers Forum microschools educate about 60 students across nine schools, with classes ranging from five to 10 students. In the less-retained schools, two adults oversee the classes. In the more-retained schools, one adult oversees, such as a former teacher or a parent with an advanced education-related degree, and students and parents play an active role in shaping the school culture, Wood said. Nearly all of the students and teachers are Black.
Wood sees schools as an answer to the ongoing impacts of the pandemic. To her, microschools allow students to socialize in a less intimidating learning environment than larger schools, and she hopes they will speed up recovery from the negative effects of school closures. “Some kids just need a smaller environment, and microschools seem to be doing that for a lot of those kids,” Wood said.
Initially, many parents were interested in microschools as a way to better equip their children to return to public school, she says, but she argues they are increasingly interested in staying in microschools, and recently the network expanded to include high school options.
A potential lifeline
For Blanchard, the homeschooling experiment has been beneficial: Her son’s academic performance has improved.
Still, with Blanchard’s job giving her less flexibility, and worries about how limited interaction with other students would affect Isaiah’s social development, it felt time for another change. Local homeschool groups weren’t very diverse, she says. They tried private schools, but Isaiah struggled there; he felt left out, singled out for punishment, she says. So now Isaiah is back in public school, starting ninth grade.
Though Blanchard didn’t find the perfect environment for Isaiah, she says her homeschooling experiment became a “year of reset.” Blanchard and most other homeschooling families she knows rebel against environments they feel aren’t nurturing or supportive of their children, she says. His home proved to be a more positive environment, one that helped the family thrive and prepare Isaiah to re-enter public school.
Other advocates of educational alternatives see microschools as an opportunity to support public schools by testing new methods of learning that, if successful, can then be reintroduced into public schools, or in some cases, by providing community support.
For Wood of the Black Mothers Forum, microschools could be a way to ease the burden on public schools. Public schools, he argues, should implement microschools on their campuses, which he says would avoid losing students and provide support for overworked teachers. It’s a way to bring the community more into the schools, he adds.
“To someone who truly understands [the students who are struggling] And it’s like the people who work with them and watch the changes in their kids. Now you’re helping kids instead of losing them,” Wood said.
She said she has been looking for a public school to partner with her organization but has not found one so far.
