Often underserved by traditional schools, Black families are banding together to educate their children, sometimes with an unexpected funding source: the Koch family and other conservative donors.

By Casey Parks @ NewYorker.com, June 14 for June 21 print issue

[....] Black families have only recently turned to homeschooling in significant numbers. The Census Bureau found that, by October, 2020, the nationwide proportion of homeschoolers—parents who had withdrawn their children from public or private schools and taken full control of their education—had risen to more than eleven per cent, from five per cent at the start of the pandemic. For Black families, the growth has been sharper. Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent.

Few researchers have studied Black homeschoolers, but in 2009 Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Mary Frances Early College of Education, published a study of two dozen such families in and around Atlanta. Some parents were middle class or wealthy, and wanted more challenging curricula for their children. Others hadn’t attended college and earned less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; one family lived in a housing project.

Most of the parents told Fields-Smith that the decision had been wrenching. Winning access to public education was one of the central victories of the civil-rights movement. Several parents had relatives who saw homeschooling as “a slap in the face” to the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Others worried about harming their neighbors’ children, because public schools rely on per-pupil funding from state governments. (In 2020, around seventy per cent of Detroit public-school revenues came from per-student allocations by the state.)

Still, the parents said that they felt as if they’d had no choice [....]

In accepting the grant, Bernita became part of a decades-long political debate. The National Parents Union paid for the grant with money from Vela Education Fund, which is backed by the Walton Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute. These groups advocate “school choice”—rerouting money and families away from traditional public schools through such means as charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, and vouchers, which allow public-education dollars to be put toward private-school tuition.

Sarah Reckhow, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University and the author of “Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics,” told me that the Waltons “have been consistently a key funder of the charter-school movement." [....]