Pushed or Pulled Out? The Racialization of School Choice in Black and White Mothers’ (Home) Schooling Decisions for Their Children

Abstract

Homeschooling is an increasingly common schooling option for middle-class black families yet is often overlooked in research on race and education. Drawing on interviews with 67 middle-class black and white mothers living in one northeastern metropolitan area—half of whom homeschool, while the other half enroll their children in conventional school—the author examines how race influences mothers’ decisions to homeschool or conventional school. The findings show that mothers’ schooling explanations reflect their experiences as shaped by the racial hierarchy constituted in schools. Black mothers respond to a push out of conventional schools on the basis of their children’s experiences of racial discrimination. In contrast, white mothers respond to a pull out of conventional schools to individualize their children’s academic programs. Building on racialized organizations and critical race theory, these findings elucidate how the formal structure of schools is racialized in ways that constrain black mothers’ agency, while enabling the agency of white mothers to activate school choice. The findings underscore how homeschooling, often assumed to be race neutral, is racialized in ways that reproduce inequalities under school choice and appears to redress discrimination in schools.

Keywords

color-blind racism segregation school choice homeschool

Race is embedded in the policy and rhetoric around school choice, which emphasize empowering parents to shop around the educational marketplace for the schooling options that provide the “best fit” for the unique needs of students and families (Berends 2015; Patillo 2015). These options include public, charter, private, and home schooling. Although the U.S. secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, justifies expanding school choice as an equalizing strategy, scholars have found that these policies tend to exacerbate race and class segregation in schools. Students of color, particularly black students and lower income students, are isolated in underfunded schools (Frankenberg 2008), while white students across class lines primarily remain in well-funded schools (Bankston and Caldas 2000; Billingham and Hunt 2016; Sikkink and Emerson 2008). Left unanswered is how homeschooling families exist within this racial schooling context.

I began this study with an interest in examining the experience of homeschooling families for what it can tell us about race and racism in conventional schools.¹ The study contributes to Tanya Golash-Boza’s (2016) call to “draw from existing theory to show how race and racism work on the ground” (p. 139). Through interviews with 67 black and white middle-class mothers living in a primarily white northeastern metropolitan area, I address the following questions: (1) What are the schooling strategies of black and white mothers who homeschool? (2) How do these strategies compare with those of their conventional schooling counterparts? and (3) How does race factor into these decisions?

Racialized organizations scholarship posits that race and racism operate not only through racialized institutions and individual biases. Rather, organizations, such as schools, are also constitutive of race (Ray 2019). Critical race scholarship elucidates how race and racism operate in parents’ child-rearing and schooling decisions. For example, research shows that black parents draw from the racial injustices they, and their children, experience to frame their parenting (Barnes 2016; Dow 2016, 2019), while many white parents engage a color-blind approach that avoids directly speaking of race but involves racialized understandings of schools (Bonilla-Silva 2018; Hagerman 2018; Underhill 2018; Woody 2018). Although this scholarship suggests that race operates among those who opt out of the racialized organization of schools to homeschool, we do not yet know how these families’ decisions are influenced by race. My research takes up this omission.

I find that mothers’ explanations for homeschooling or conventional schooling reflect their experience as shaped by the racial hierarchy constituted in schools. Under school choice, these mothers explain shopping around for the schools that will “best fit” their children. Black mothers respond to a push out of conventional schools on the basis of their children’s experiences of racial discrimination. In contrast, white mothers respond to a pull toward catering to their children’s academic or behavioral needs. I argue that these findings elucidate how the formal structure of schools is racialized in ways that constrain black mothers’ agency, while enabling the agency of white mothers to activate school choice.

Theoretical Background

Schools as Racialized Organizations

Organizations operate in ways that reproduce race-based processes (Ray 2019; Wooten and Couloute 2016). This occurs through social relations and institutional practices (Omi and Winant 1994). Victor Ray’s (2019) work merges race and organizational scholarship to provide a framework for understanding how organizations are racialized through racial schemas that become durable structures and linked to resources. This involves understanding racial organizations as influencing individuals in the following ways: “(1) enhance or diminish the agency of racial groups; (2) racialized organizations legitimate the unequal distribution of resources; (3) Whiteness is a credential; and (4) decoupling is racialized” (p. 27). For example, following Brown v. Board of Education, when segregation was no longer legal, schemas of segregation remained intact through tracking and white flight (Ray 2019). In this example, whiteness is a credential that gives whites access to resourced schools, while denying the same access to blacks, and the commitment to equitable access to schools is lost (Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009; Ray 2019). I extend Ray’s framework to examine contemporary examples of school segregation through school choice by investigating how parents respond to the racialized organization of schools through their schooling decisions.

Although few studies currently apply racialized organizations scholarship to schooling, two areas of inquiry within race scholarship do examine race and racism in schools. The first considers racialization in school-based social interactions. These studies highlight the relationship between racialized institutional practices and racial ideologies that are mutually reinforcing within the context of individual schools. For example, scholars have uncovered the racial dynamics within schools’ tracking systems and teacher-student interactions (Downey and Pribesh 2004; Ferguson 2000; Ginwright 2002; Lewis and Diamond 2015; Morris and Perry 2017; Oakes 1985). Lewis and Diamond (2015) found that tracking within schools maintains a racial hierarchy that not only segregates classrooms but also justifies this segregation through using racial schemas.

A second prominent line of scholarship examining race and racism in schools considers relationships between schools and families. For example, studies with the black middle class find that these families tend to be very aware of the role of race in their children’s schooling (Barnes 2016; Dow 2019; Lacy 2004; Williams et al. 2017). Black parents with children entering kindergarten are particularly concerned with the racial composition of the school and the racial perspectives and practices of teachers (Williams et al. 2017). When it comes to school choice, black middle-class families often explain confronting two options: highly resourced majority-white schools or low-resourced majority-black schools (Ginwright 2002; Shapiro 2017). Although the former offer more material resources to their children—improved facilities, newer textbooks, expanded curriculum—this choice can come with the burden of having their children be among the only black children in the classroom. In contrast, majority-black schools are less desirable for lacking the material resources that majority-white and middle-class schools hold, yet they can offer racial solidarity (NCES 2018a).

Parents’ schooling decisions are largely shaped by their social networks, which tend to be racially homogenous. For example, Sikkink and Emerson (2008) found that because of racial segregation, black middle-class parents tend to have information about schools that can be used to assess school quality in more nuanced ways. In contrast, white middle-class parents tend to use race as a proxy for school quality. These parents often assume that larger numbers of black students correlate with lower resourced schools, and those with the economic resources to do so “deliberately purchase homes in the best school district they can afford” (Kimelberg 2014:207). These decisions are based on opinions and information gained through friend and family networks. White parents explain decisions that are guided by their intent to provide the best education for their children; yet regardless of a school’s academic performance, higher racial minority composition of school districts, particularly black students, negatively influences the number of students with more resources who attend the schools in those districts (Bankston and Caldas 2000; Billingham and Hunt 2016; Dougherty et al. 2009; Emerson, Chai, and Yancey 2001). Antiblack racism surfaces even among white parents who hold more egalitarian views, through associations of majority-black schools with lower test scores, greater security risks, and buildings in need of repair (Billingham and Hunt 2016; Jimenez and Horowitz 2013; Ochoa 2013). This scholarship offers important explanations for how parents’ schooling choices are shaped by race and racism.

Critical race scholarship identifies how the racial hierarchy plays out in white parents’ schooling decisions. Some white parents engage color-blind approaches to child-rearing and schooling that minimize the significance of race, despite living in a highly racialized world (Bonilla-Silva 2018; Hagerman 2018; Underhill 2018; Woody 2018). This approach leads their white children to see racial injustice as a thing of the past. Other white parents engage color-conscious approaches through enrolling their children in racially diverse schools and talking to their children about contemporary racial injustices (Hagerman 2018). Underhill (2018) argued that exposure practices such as living in diverse neighborhoods, attending diverse schools, and playing in diverse parks still reflect whiteness because these parents have the privilege to pick and choose which racially diverse settings to immerse their children in. This exposure allows white parents to demonstrate their “progressive-ness” while furthering their white children’s social status and reinforcing the race and class hierarchy.

Homeschools and Race

Survey data show that homeschooling continues to increase and diversify. From 1999 to 2016, students being homeschooled constituted 1.7 percent to 3.3 percent of the school-age population (NCES 2017). The percentage of students of color who were homeschooled among all students of color during this period increased from 1.2 percent to 2.6 percent (NCES 2017). The number of white students who were homeschooled, out of all white students, also increased from 2 percent to 3.7 percent (NCES 2017). Clearly, a growing number of families, including those of color, are deciding that home is their school of choice. Yet homeschooling studies have not focused primarily, on race and studies that do theorize race focus exclusively on black families (Fields-Smith and Kisura 2013; Mazama and Lundy 2012).

Although popular belief assumes that homeschoolers are white Christian fundamentalists or politically progressive countercultural types, research of homeschoolers suggests more variation (Lois 2012; Stevens 2001). An NCES (2017) national survey revealed that just one sixth (16 percent) of families reported moral or religious reasons as the primary motive for homeschooling, while concern with schools’ environments is the most commonly reported reason for homeschooling (34 percent). White families report concern with school safety and negative peer pressure as the most common reason to homeschool (34 percent) (Collom 2005; NCES 2017). Most families do rely on middle-class resources to homeschool, yet there is some variation here as well (Collom 2005; NCES 2018b). For example, roughly 11 percent of homeschooling families in 2016 reported annual household incomes below the poverty level of $20,000, while the majority of homeschooling families (54 percent) reported annual household incomes above the poverty level but below $75,000. Just over one third of homeschooling families (35 percent) reported annual household incomes above $75,000 (NCES 2018b). Homeschoolers are found to hold higher education levels than the national average (33 percent), with 45 percent of adults holding at least a bachelor’s degree (NCES 2018b; Ryan and Bauman 2016). Existing research has not explored how race shapes the schooling decisions of homeschooling families and how this compares with other conventional schooling families living in the same region.

Method

My study draws from in-depth interview data with 96 black and white homeschooling and conventional schooling mothers. Traditional methods for locating respondents are not possible when comparing homeschoolers with other schooling families in the same region. Unlike other forms of schooling, homeschool reporting varies by state and school district, making it challenging to locate and study homeschoolers (HSLDA 2015). I began by contacting 18 homeschooling groups within one northeastern metropolitan region, using respondent-driven sampling strategies. I contacted each homeschooling group via e-mail, asking organizers to spread the word about my study through the group’s list server and social media sites. I found locating black homeschoolers in the region to be more challenging than locating whites, in part because they were less networked with other homeschoolers than white respondents. Thus, I also contacted national black homeschooling groups, as well as cultural and religious organizations in the region, to help locate additional northeastern black homeschooling respondents.

To locate conventional schooling families, I also used respondent-driven sampling strategies by asking homeschooling respondents for contacts of conventional schooling families they knew who lived in their area and with whom they could put me in touch. Because social networks tend to be homogenous by race and social class, this sampling strategy allowed me to control for class and region, making school type and race the variables of focus. This led to interviews with 17 black homeschooling mothers, 15 black conventional schooling mothers, 21 white homeschooling mothers, and 14 white conventional schooling mothers, as well as an additional 29 interviews with homeschoolers from outside the Northeast or who identified their families as interracial. For the purposes of this study, I hold region constant by focusing on the 67 respondents living in the Northeast.

I began conducting interviews in 2014 and continued through 2016. Similar to other schooling studies, I measure social class by considering household income and the education and occupation of each respondent and their partner (Lareau 2011). I define respondents as middle class when they hold at least a bachelor’s degree and their partners and/or they work in jobs that require at least a college degree (Damaske 2011; Lareau 2011), such as schoolteacher, lawyer, and college professor. I define upper-middle-class respondents as those meeting the middle-class criteria and also earning an annual household income above $200,000 per year (Damaske 2011). Although not examined in this study, gender also shapes respondents’ schooling choices. This first became evident when mothers, not fathers except in one case, volunteered to be interviewed. In addition, mothers recount being the ones primarily responsible for the daily oversight of children and, in the case of homeschoolers, their schooling.

In-depth interviews allowed me to assess the beliefs and deeper meanings respondents hold about their schooling decisions. Rather than observing families’ practices or analyzing survey or text data available on school choice opinions and policies, talking with mothers confronting these choices offered depth in understanding the meaning they make of their decisions (Weiss 1994). Although most study participants were privileged by class status, experiences of marginalization due to race and gender were common in women’s narratives.

Throughout the research, I reflected on how race and other characteristics shaped the interview process (Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi 2008; Collins 1986; Hesse-Biber 2007). As a white class-advantaged woman, who was both homeschooled and public-schooled, I was able to develop rapport with mothers across school type. I found my outsider status by race and parental status most salient. Several black respondents appeared skeptical of my intentions, while others used my status as an opportunity to educate me on experiences of racial marginalization. Similar to the experiences of other race scholars, many white respondents appeared uncomfortable talking about race, avoiding my questions about how race shaped their schooling decisions (Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi 2008). In addition, my status as childless presented challenges for building rapport. Many respondents assumed that because I was not a mother, I would not understand their experiences. Yet some respondents framed their responses to my questions about mothering as advice, providing more depth than they might have otherwise because they knew that I had no experience raising children. These factors proved important in my interactions with respondents, whether to probe because of assumed understanding or to build rapport because of our different experiences.

I audio-recorded, transcribed, and then coded and analyzed all interviews using the qualitative research software NVivo. I used an iterative approach to assess the data, with interest in theoretical expectations while remaining open to meanings that emerged from the data (Charmaz 2014). I wrote descriptive and analytic memos throughout the research process. This led to the development of my initial coding scheme, which through multiple rounds of coding led to the development of salient themes (Saldaña 2009).

Most respondents are partnered and middle-class (see Table 1). Of the black respondents, 25 of 32 are partnered, and 33 of 35 white respondents are partnered. Across groups, levels of education are high, although there is variation by school type. All homeschooling respondents have at least a college degree, while this is the case for 14 of 29 conventional schooling respondents. Only 3 of the 38 homeschoolers were in the paid labor force full-time, while 18 worked part-time and 17 were not in the labor force at all. Of the three homeschoolers who worked full-time, two were widowed (one black mother and one white mother). The third respondent is a black mother who works as a professor, while her husband works as a schoolteacher. The flexibility and autonomy that come with professional careers, such as college professor, allow this mother to juggle homeschooling, care, and paid work, while relying on caregiving from her husband and extended kin. Most respondents fall within the middle two household income brackets (more than $30,000 and less than $200,000), with four black and five white respondents falling above or below this range. Although not the focus of this study, religiosity varied significantly across those respondents who identified as religious (n = 46), with most attending weekly worship, while a few homeschooling families also use religious curricula and engage in daily service or prayer.

Table 1.

Respondent Demographics.

	Black Homeschooling(n = 17)	White Homeschooling (n = 21)	Black Conventional Schooling (n = 15)	White Conventional Schooling (n = 14)
Marital status
Partnered	94% (16)	90% (19)	60% (9)	100% (14)
Single/divorced	6% (1)	10% (2)	40% (6)	0 (0)
Religion
Christian	88% (15)	55% (14)	86% (13)	29% (4)
Secular	12% (2)	45% (7)	14% (2)	71% (10)
Education
High school or higher	0% (0)	0% (0)	73% (11)	29% (4)
College or higher	100% (17)	100% (21)	27% (4)	71% (10)
Employment
Unemployed	47% (8)	38% (9)	27% (4)	28% (4)
Part-time work	47% (8)	48% (10)	20% (3)	36% (5)
Full-time work	6% (1)	14% (2)	53% (8)	36% (5)
Partner education
High school or higher	56% (9)	21% (4)	67% (6)	14% (2)
College or higher	43% (7)	79% (15)	33% (3)	86% (12)
Partner employment
Unemployed/retired	0% (0)	11% (2)	0% (0)	0% (0)
Part-time work	0% (0)	0% (0)	0% (0)	0% (0)
Full-time work	100% (16)	89% (17)	100% (9)	100% (14)
Household income
<$30,000	6% (1)	10% (2)	13% (2)	0% (0)
$30,000–$74,999	41% (7)	33% (7)	47% (7)	14% (2)
$75,000–$200,000	47% (8)	43% (9)	40% (6)	86% (12)
>$200,000	6% (1)	14% (3)	0% (0)	0% (0)
Social class
Working class	18% (3)	19% (4)	60% (9)	29% (4)
Middle class	76% (13)	71% (15)	40% (6)	71% (10)
Upper middle class	6% (1)	10% (2)	0% (0)	0% (0)

The study region covers seven counties that fall within one northeastern metropolitan area (Source 2016).² Within their county of residence, a family can choose from several public schools depending on the school district’s size. Most districts serve a single city or town, although some small towns join together to form regional school districts. There are more than 200 school districts within the area of study. Beyond within-district school choice, there are several statewide programs that allow families to choose schools outside the districts where they reside. For example, charter schools within the region operate independent of local school districts; applications are accepted from any student, with enrollment based on a lottery system as well as preference given to those living closer to the schools and those who already have siblings enrolled. In addition, a well-established school choice program that serves minority students living within the city limits busses these students to suburban schools. However, enrollment in this program is limited, and there is a long waiting list. Additional options include private schools and homeschools. Within the metropolitan area where study respondents were recruited, 75 percent of the population are non-Hispanic white, 9 percent are Hispanic, 8 percent are African American, and 7 percent are Asian (Source 2016).

Findings

“You’re Really Targeting My Kid”: Why Black Mothers Decide to Homeschool

Lynnette explains being pushed out of the public school after a negative interaction her son had with his teacher:

I put him in public school, ’cause that was what was closest to us . . . [but] he was having a hard time with some of the teachers . . . he’s seven but he looks like he’s ten and they [teachers] acted like they were afraid of him. He’s never acted out violently, but they made it sound like he was going to . . . I just didn’t want to have to keep going to the principal’s office. . . . I’m like “You’re really targeting my kid for no reason because he’s the second biggest kid in the school.” [My son] begged me to pull him out and I did.

Lynnette’s decision to remove her son from the conventional school is in response to the teacher’s discriminatory treatment of her child. After engaging the concerted cultivation strategy of intervening in the institution on her son’s behalf without seeing results (Lareau 2011), Lynette decided to avoid conventional schools all together by homeschooling. Scholars have well documented the prevalence of the controlling image of black students, particularly black boys, as violent and potential criminals (Dow 2016; Ferguson 2000; Ispa-Landa 2013; Morris and Perry 2016). For example, Ann Ferguson’s (2000) study showed how institutional discrimination continues to act as a barrier for black boys’ success in conventional schools. In contrast to this research, Lynette draws on her class resources to use her sense of entitlement as a middle-class parent to advocate on her child’s behalf. Unlike the middle-class parents in Lareau’s (2011) study, however, Lynette describes no effective response from the school regarding the discriminatory treatment of her child. This pushed Lynette to avoid such discriminatory organizations by bringing her son home for school.

Like Lynnette, Sharon also explains being pushed out of the conventional school after an incident when the school administration framed her six-year-old son as a terrorist:

My son had a bad experience; once he brought in a match from my matches at home. He was saying “I wanted to bring in my match because I wanted to show my classmates and talk to them about it.” He was suspended. They had him in the principal’s office. He was crying . . . they ostracized him. This is a good little boy. They made me feel like he was a terrorist and so after that experience . . . he said, “I don’t want to go to school next year mom” and I said “OK.”

Despite having mostly positive interactions with the teachers and principal until this point, Sharon explains that this situation pushed her to protect her son from further discrimination in school by bringing him home. Homeschooling seemed possible given her flexible work schedule as a professor. She also draws from the support of her husband and extended kin—her own mother and sister—for childcare. Sharon’s narrative builds on the “strategic mothering” accounts that Barnes’s (2016) research with black professional women uncovered. Barnes found that black mothers navigate racial stereotypes and inequalities by privileging marital stability and the nuclear family as a survival strategy in a society that devalues blackness. Sharon and other black homeschooling respondents engage a similar “strategic” narrative, by navigating racial stereotypes and inequalities through privileging support from family. These narratives elucidate a different strategy than Barnes uncovers, however, by focusing on family stability through schooling, what I call “black strategic schooling.” This captures the class-resourced strategies these black mothers use to protect their children from the racial inequalities they face in conventional schools by prioritizing the strength of the family through schooling at home.

Hilda also describes her child’s being pushed out of the conventional school to avoid racial discrimination. She began homeschooling two decades prior when her youngest son was in high school. She describes her son’s experience in the public school as what led to her decision:

In my family, since slavery, the men have done really poorly . . . it’s almost like a curse in my family. I thought with my son, I’m going to do everything I can to keep him on the straight and narrow. Then when he wanted to go to public school, he went downhill; he’s doing very well now, but that was my reason to homeschool.

Hilda explains that the public school’s lack of institutional support for her son’s learning is what led her to homeschool. Unlike Lynette and Sharon, Hilda lives in a majority-black and low-income neighborhood. Research supports Hilda’s account by showing how institutional discrimination continues to act as a barrier for black students’ success, particularly boys, in conventional schools (Ferguson 2000; Ispa-Landa 2013). Yet Hilda’s account shows a different side to this story by finding that in response to discriminatory treatment that pushes black children out of conventional schools, some black middle-class mothers, such as Hilda, may decide to educate their children at home.

For Hilda, although living in a majority-black neighborhood comes with fewer resources in school, it also may be a means for building solidarity with their black counterparts (Lacy 2004; Patillo 2015; Shapiro 2017). Racial discrimination in the housing market also likely influences respondents’ residential and schooling decisions (Massey and Denton 1988). The widening racial wealth gap presumably shapes black respondents’ ability to mobilize their agency under school choice. Although I did not ask respondents about their wealth, national data from 2013 show a median net wealth of white families of $142,000 compared with $11,000 for African American families (Shapiro 2017). This gap suggests that the middle-class black mothers I interviewed, who hold equivalent household incomes as their white counterparts, likely have much less wealth because of historic and contemporary patterns of institutional racism (Shapiro 2017). This may be one explanation for why some middle-class blacks, like Hilda, find staying in their low-income black neighborhoods and homeschooling to be more feasible than moving to wealthier neighborhoods with higher ranked schools. In addition, as Lynette and Sharon disclose, better resourced schools do not prevent black students from being pushed out because of discriminatory practices.

Although many black mothers explain decisions to homeschool in response to negative incidents in conventional schools, this was not a pattern only among black respondents with sons. Black daughters were also described as targets of discrimination in conventional schools. For example, Juanita decided to remove her daughter from the public school after a negative encounter:

When she moved to the school she was doing well. . . . I remember the teachers saying that she was at the top of her class. . . . [But] there was an issue where she was assaulted by a student. . . . I got a lawyer because [the school] wasn’t handling it and it kept being an issue . . . they weren’t keeping [the student] away from her . . . things just continued to get worse . . . it was to the point that I was so nervous about my kid being in school. . . . I just had to take her out.

Despite Juanita’s multiple interventions in the school on her daughter’s behalf, the school administration did not effectively handle the assault so that her daughter would feel safe in the school. Juanita explains, “My daughter being black [in a white school] . . . played an important role” in the school’s failure to handle the situation. Despite the financial hardship Juanita faced as a single mother, this experience pushed her to remove her daughter from the primarily white school to homeschool. Juanita, Lynette, Sharon, and Hilda explain schooling decisions that are motivated by incidents of racial discrimination in conventional schools. They are forced to consider race in their operationalizing of school “choice” because their children are targets of racial discrimination. These findings address Ray’s (2019) call for researchers to focus on how organizations, in this case schools, “react to changes in the policies of the racial state in ways that enhance or diminish racial group agency” (p. 47). These mothers’ narratives highlight how school choice policies diminish the agency of black families, because rather than having a full range of choices, these mothers are pushed out of schools because of the schools’ failure to address discriminatory practices. These mothers are left to address the organizations’ discriminatory practices on their own by removing their children from the schools (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Schooling Strategies.

	Mothers’ Interpretation of School	Mothers’ Strategic Response to School	Result
Black student pathway	“Trouble” child	Blend in and avoid racism	Pushed out
White student pathway	“Regular” child	Stand out and individualize learning	Pulled out

“If I Have to Go over Your Heads, I Will”: Why Black Mothers Decide to Conventional School

Many black conventional schooling respondents report similar discriminatory incidents as influential in their schooling decisions. For example, Dejah, who works full-time, as does her husband, explains how she came to intervene in the school on her daughter’s behalf:

[My daughter] never had a fight in school until this time. A girl said . . . something negative about my daughter. . . . My daughter lunged past the teacher to get to the girl . . . because [my daughter] is taller girl, and she didn’t look like any of the other girls in her accelerated class what-so-ever; she is the only black girl . . . all the other ones are Caucasian . . . that’s when the principal told me that the teacher does not feel safe around her; this is a white teacher. I said, “What do you mean, [not] feel safe . . . if I have to go over your heads I will.”

Despite Dejah’s intervention, she was so unsatisfied with the school’s response that she used school choice to transfer her daughter to a different school in the city. Although much research has examined the targeting of black boys in schools, other research finds that black girls are also more likely than white girls to be labeled as disruptive and to face punishment (Ispa-Landa 2013; Morris and Perry 2016). Dejah’s story highlights a similar pattern yet also tracks the outcome of this discriminatory treatment as pushing black girls, like her daughter, out of the school. Central to Dejah’s story is the role of school choice in encouraging class advantaged families to shop around the educational marketplace for the “best fitting” school. The result here is that school choice allows school administrators and teachers to avoid having to address discriminatory practices toward black children, because black mothers such as Dejah, with the resources to mobilize school choice, respond by transferring to different schools (see Table 2).

Like Dejah, Amelia decided to transfer her children to a different school after being dissatisfied with the teachers. Amelia describes her school choice this way:

I wasn’t happy with the [private school] teachers, the way they treated the students. If I was paying money, they should have some respect. That’s why we pulled them out . . . the public schools [here are] just as good so we ended up pulling them out, figuring it [would] be cost-effective. . . . [Private school teachers] were . . . very rude and [were] yelling at my son for no reason. . . . [My children] slowly adjusted into the [public] school. . . . I’ve gone to all the parent-teacher meetings. The teachers are involved . . . if they know the mother is involved, then they will go out of their way to help the students.

For Amelia, it is partly because she was unsatisfied and paying for her children to attend the private school that pushed her to transfer her children to the public school. In addition, she described her kids being “the only [students of color] in the class” at the private school, whereas the public school is “very diverse,” with 67 percent students of color (11 percent black, 32 percent Asian, 24 percent Latinx) (Source 2016). Amelia describes the teachers at the public school as better than the private school teachers, as long as she demonstrates her involvement in her children’s education. Her story demonstrates the extensive work involved in black middle-class mothers’ efforts to manage their children’s schooling, where racial discrimination ends up being the subtext of these decisions.

Scholarship examining the financial security black middle-class families hold shows that these families often rely on the strength of the family as a way to foster black identity in an antiblack society (Barnes 2016; Dow 2016, 2019). For example, Dow (2016) found that, in contrast to their white counterparts who tend to outsource childcare to paid providers, black middle-class mothers rely on extended kin as a tactic for avoiding racial discrimination and cultivating strong relationships. These mothers may also privilege marital stability over work stability as a survival strategy for themselves and their black communities (Barnes 2016). Amelia and other conventional schooling respondents’ stories extend this research by demonstrating that these tactics also operate in black middle-class families’ navigation of school choice. Black mothers explain responding to discriminatory experiences from conventional schools by drawing on their class resources to handle the incidents on their own by homeschooling or transferring their children to different conventional schools. The result for these respondents is that dealing with the racial discrimination these children experience in schools becomes the burden of individual black mothers and their families, who use their class resources to place their children in different academic settings. Black middle-class mothers focus on fostering self-reliance and black identity within their families in response to their being pushed out of the racialized organization of schools.

“Traditional Education Doesn’t Work for My Kid”: Why White Mothers Decide to Homeschool

Maureen explains her decision to homeschool on the basis of the way her daughter’s anxiety manifested in conventional school:

Traditional education doesn’t work for my kid. . . she felt there was a lot of pressure [at school]. . . . If you tell her something once sternly, she really thinks you yelled at her, so to have a teacher yell at the students was just overwhelming. I knew she was miserable. She would come home [from school] in tears. She was really anxious about the homework. She would walk in the door and be . . . a bundle of worries. It was awful to see. She wasn’t herself. She was just so unhappy.

Maureen explains how she came to the decision to homeschool her 13-year-old daughter, despite her satisfaction with the academic rigor of the charter school she had attended. It was the academic pressure combined with her daughter’s anxiety that finally led Maureen to decide to start educating her daughter at home. Maureen’s account highlights a sentiment that many of the white mothers I spoke with raised regarding the schooling choices they make for their children. In contrast to black mothers who explain being pushed out of conventional school by racial discrimination, white mothers such as Maureen consistently explain being pulled to prioritize their children’s individual learning or behavioral needs. In the case of Maureen, homeschooling is seen as accommodating her daughter’s anxiety, making her daughter “a lot more happy” and “a lot less stressed.”

Victoria also explains her decision to homeschool as a pull to prioritize what is best for her daughter and their family:

I clearly want the best for my daughter by way of her education and I truly feel as though I’m giving her that [by homeschooling]. . . . As mothers [we] want nothing but the best for our children. . . . I know many women who send their children to daycare, preschool and that’s fine if that’s what works.

Victoria explains that her position as the mother allows her to sort out what is best for her daughter. She feels that she is doing that by homeschooling, while explaining that other families may use the same explanation to send their kids to conventional school. Here mothers such as Victoria are silent on race. Unlike black mothers, white homeschoolers such as Maureen and Victoria explain prioritizing the individual learning and behavioral needs of their children without considering how their racial identity influences their choice. They do not have to worry that their children will be targeted as among the only black students in the classroom. Nor do they have to navigate their children’s being racially stereotyped as disruptive or violent. These accounts reflect color-blind racism by engaging the frame of abstract liberalism, in which whites focus on individual choice in their explanations and are able to avoid recognizing how their choices help maintain racial oppression (Bonilla-Silva 2018; Hagerman 2018). These narratives differ by focusing specifically on the schooling decisions of whites who opt out of conventional schools to homeschool. Their narratives demonstrate this abstract liberalism in being able to avoid thinking about how their choices contribute to racial segregation and inequalities in schooling.

Michelle explains her decision to homeschool her 10-year-old daughter:

We wound up feeling sometimes very frustrated that [private school] wasn’t always following the child . . . and in our case, our daughter [is] not a round peg to fit into a round hole . . . she’s exceptionally gifted and so by the end of third grade it just felt like so much energy that I might as well do this thing myself.

Michelle emphasizes her daughter’s individual learning style—academic exceptionalism—as what ultimately led her to homeschool. After several months intervening in the school on her daughter’s behalf, she decided to pull her child out of the conventional school to homeschool. She uses the metaphor of her daughter’s not being a “round peg” to fit into the “round hole” of school to capture her decision to make school fit her child, not the other way around. This contrasts with the push black mothers describe, seeking schools that will not target their children as among the few black children in the classroom. Black mothers’ narratives suggest that schools are racialized in ways that constrain middle-class black mothers’ agency under school choice. For Michelle, she describes schooling strategies that pull her out of conventional school to cater to her daughter’s individual academic needs, a comparatively less urgent concern. Michelle’s story underscores how her agency is activated through school choice, suggesting that the schooling decisions of those who opt out are also influenced by the racialization of schools as organizations (Ray 2019).

Like Maureen and Victoria, Michelle’s initial explanation of her decision to homeschool seems silent on race, yet she and other white mothers talk about race in other ways. As she explains her decision in more depth, Michelle notes an aspect of the private school that she especially liked was the racial and ethnic diversity: “one of the things at the [school] that we did like was the mix of ethnicities because you would find Indian and Asian families who were also super on board with the [school’s] philosophy.” Michelle describes being disappointed that her daughter now experiences primarily white academic settings, because the organized homeschooling groups in the area are primarily white. Yet it was the pull toward catering to her daughter’s individual learning needs, not the whiteness of the academic setting, that Michelle describes as the motivating factor in her decision; the whiter academic setting is an unintended consequence of prioritizing individual learning over exposure to diversity. Michelle’s explanation is reflective of other studies that show that white parents’ schooling decisions perpetuate a racial hierarchy that associates academic excellence with white and Asian American students (Billingham and Hunt 2016; Dougherty et al. 2009; Jimenez and Horowitz 2013; Ochoa 2013). By examining the demographic context of white respondents’ schooling decisions, I find that their choices, whether to homeschool or conventional school, consistently place white children in majority white academic settings.

Emily also emphasizes a pull toward individual learning for her daughter as what led her out of conventional schooling and into homeschooling. She explains opting out of the local public school from the beginning: “That’s one thing that’s cool about homeschooling is that you learn that there is no one size fits all . . . people are organic beings and as such . . . every child deserves a special education . . . so that’s where the schools fail.” Like Michelle, Emily emphasizes that catering to her individual child is what she prioritized in her decision to homeschool. She also suggests that this choice led to a primarily white academic setting. Yet Emily also describes seeking diversity through nonacademic settings, in this case, through her church: “I’m a Christian and my thought is whoever shows up in your life that’s your neighbor, so whoever is around the kids associate with them. [It’s a] very multicultural [church]. We have people from different races, different religions.” Emily and most other white respondents explain their schooling decisions as a pull out of conventional school to prioritize the individual learning needs of their children in ways that lead to relatively white academic settings. Yet they also express the value of exposing their children to racial diversity through nonacademic activities.

Engaging in this color-blind racism frame of abstract liberalism (Bonilla-Silva 2016) shows how white privilege allows mothers to focus on individual choice in their explanation and avoid recognizing how their choices help maintain racial oppression. Yet instead of avoidance entirely, some white mothers use this frame at certain points yet at other points also engage what Hagerman (2018) referred to as “color-conscious” strategies. White mothers recognize the whiteness of their children’s schooling as an unintended consequence of their choice. By seeking racially diverse nonacademic settings such as the “multicultural church” Emily describes, white mothers explain choices through strategies that are not entirely color-blind but rather strategic in their consideration of race, or what I refer to as “white strategic schooling.” This contrasts with the “strategic schooling” black mothers reflect, in which schooling decisions are in response to a push out of schools due to incidents of racial discrimination. Both groups’ schooling explanations show how race shapes their decisions. The differences between groups reflect the relationality of racial categories in a society in which race is a central axis of social relations (Omi and Winant 1994). Black mothers reflect how their thinking is shaped by experiencing racial marginalization, being forced to consider race in their school “choice” because their children are targets of racial discrimination. Their agency under school choice is constrained, while white mothers’ agency is activated through school choice by being able to pick and choose when to consider race within the context of schooling (Ray 2019). They emphasize racial diversity when it benefits their children while minimizing the significance of race in their schooling decisions.

“Everybody Just Wants What’s Best for Their Kid”: Why White Mothers Decide to Conventional School

Janet explains her decision to send her two daughters to the public school:

I think everybody just wants what’s best for their kid and it’s hard to find out what fits. We have friends in town, two of their kids are in private school and two of their kids are in public school; they are just figuring out what’s the best fit for their kids.

Janet explains schooling decisions as motivated by a pull toward catering to the individual learning or behavioral needs of a child. Similar to the white homeschooling respondents, what is left unsaid (but came up later in the interview) is how this decision also leads to whiter academic settings. Janet and her family moved from one town to another for its schools. She explains valuing racial diversity, yet the whiter school context of their current school corresponds with higher academic standards:

[It’s] very different here. . . . [In Greenville] their classrooms kind of looked like the United Nations, which I really liked. . . . Here in Redding it’s primarily Caucasian, middle to upper middle-class. In Greenville, we were probably the most educated . . . her friends struggled economically as well. (See note 2)

Like white homeschooling mothers, Janet is “strategic” in when to prioritize diversity. In low-stakes environments such as extracurricular activities, she seeks diversity, but when it comes to academics, Janet decides that it is too important to her children’s future to risk lower quality schools. Her understanding of education quality conflicts with the value she places on diverse race and socioeconomic classrooms.

Another example comes from Wendy, a public schooling mother of two sons:

The public schools are great in terms of academics. . . . It’s mostly white with probably ten percent Asian . . . and then ninety percent white. A very small minority are black or Hispanic. We joined the Y for a long time because my major was international relations when I was in school and I’ve always felt compelled to give them a taste of other cultures. They do get some of the Asian cultures in school, but it’s important for me because of the demographics to provide them more of a non-white bread feel.

White respondents across school type reflect a similar sentiment as Wendy. Although satisfied with the academics of their children’s schooling, the lack of racial diversity concerns white respondents. To compensate for the mostly white academic setting, unlike Janet, but similar to the white homeschoolers described earlier, Wendy reports seeking racially diverse nonacademic settings for their children. Again, this reflects aspects of the color-blind strategy of abstract liberalism being used through school choice. Wendy also compensates for the white academic context through engaging strategically in “color consciousness” to explain her decision to enroll her sons in the sports program at the local YMCA. This places her children around primarily Latinx kids from the neighboring town (SDESE 2016; see note 2). Existing research has found that white middle-class families may seek racially diverse settings, such as parks, to expose their children to black and brown kids as a way to teach their children about race within a highly segregated society (Underhill 2018). Yet when it comes to academics, which is seen as high stakes in shaping children’s future success, the white mothers in this study engage this “white strategic schooling” to mobilize school choice through color-blind narratives that place their children in primarily white academic settings. This strategy reflects the privilege of whiteness in being able to pick and choose when to consider race. They emphasize racial diversity when it benefits their child while minimizing the significance of race in their schooling decisions (see Table 2).³

Conclusions

I argue that homeschooling is racialized in ways that reproduce inequalities in schools under school choice. Homeschooling mothers explain unequal access to school choice; black mothers describe their children’s being pushed out of conventional schools under school choice because of discriminatory practices that are not addressed by school administrations, while white mothers describe pulling their children out of conventional schools to provide a more individualized learning experience. For black mothers, it is the combination of their class resources and their marginal position within the racial hierarchy that shapes their operationalizing of school choice, a decision I call “black strategic schooling.” Black conventional schoolers share similar experiences yet decide instead to transfer their children to different conventional schools.

In contrast, white mothers explain a pull out of conventional school and into homeschooling to better accommodate their children’s individual learning or behavioral needs. They describe the white academic setting in which they find their child as an unintended consequence of prioritizing the pull toward individual learning for their children. This leads some mothers to seek racial diversity in nonacademic settings, decisions I call “white strategic schooling.” These decisions reflect the privilege of whiteness, as mothers are able to pick and choose when and where to consider race. These white mothers are enabled concomitantly by white privilege and schools as racialized organizations to reap the benefits of school choice, as originally intended by the policy. Black families are not granted this benefit and instead deploy school choice options to seek refuge from discrimination.

My study has two major implications. First, the findings show how the racialized organization of schools extends into the lives of those who opt out by homeschooling, under the institutional apparatus of school choice. Ray (2019) posited that racialized organizations “help launder racial domination by obscuring or legitimating unequal processes” (p. 35). I find this argument at play for homeschoolers under school choice. In particular, mothers’ narratives reflect two components of the theory: (1) enabling or limiting the agency of racial groups and (2) enabling whiteness as a credential. The very context that constrains the agency of black mothers by pushing black children out of schools because of their experiences of racial discrimination and lack of response from school administrators is what enables white mothers to activate their agency through a pull out of conventional school and toward homeschooling to cultivate individual learning (see Table 2). Thus, whiteness serves as a credential within the context of the racialized organization of schools (Ray 2019), while demarcating black students. The schooling decisions of these black and white homeschooling mothers underscore the social processes that contribute to the persistence of segregated schools. Although beyond the scope of these data, the findings suggest that despite schools’ tendency to market themselves formally as committed to racial equity, these sorts of commitments fall flat in practice because schools appear to maintain discriminatory practices against black students (Ray 2019). Future research might investigate how schools market themselves as equitable organizations and how these values translate (or not) in practice.

The second major implication of these findings is in underscoring how race and racism operate through homeschooling under school choice. Recent critical race scholarship elucidates how the racial hierarchy plays out in parents’ child-rearing and nonhomeschooling decisions. For example, research shows that black parents draw from the racial injustices they and their children have experienced to frame their parenting (Barnes 2016; Dow 2016, 2019), while many white parents engage a color-blind approach that does not speak about race directly but involves racialized understandings of neighborhoods and schools (Bonilla-Silva 2018; Hagerman 2018; Underhill 2018; Woody 2018). My findings extend this critical race scholarship to show that school choice appears to exacerbate how race operates among homeschoolers. Indeed, black mothers turn to the strength of the nuclear and extended family by homeschooling in response to racial discrimination experienced in the organization of schools. This extends the strategic mothering Barnes (2016) found among middle-class black mothers’ child-rearing to show that this reliance on family is also a strategy for black middle-class mothers who decide to homeschool.

By contrast, unlike Hagerman (2016, 2018) who found that some white families engage color-blind, while others engage color-conscious, child-rearing approaches, I find among white homeschoolers that both frames surface simultaneously; white homeschooling mothers engage a sort of partial white flight, using color-blind explanations for their decisions to enroll their children in white academic settings, while using color-conscious explanations for their decisions to seek racially diverse nonacademic activities. The privilege of whiteness is in being able to pick and choose when to consider racial diversity as the priority. These findings show how homeschooling, often assumed to be race neutral, is racialized in ways that reproduce inequalities under school choice and actually appears to prevent the redress of racial discrimination in schools.

These findings suggest that as school choice expansion continues, homeschooling may be an increasingly common selection for class-advantaged families across racial groups. This forecasts a continuation of school segregation, as I find some class-resourced black families are opting out to avoid schools that are ineffective with integration. Although many strategies have been implemented since Brown v. Board of Education to address schooling segregation, forced integration programs have proved controversial in terms of the benefits for students (Ispa-Landa 2013; Patillo 2015). Without effective integration programs under school choice, homeschooling may continue to become a popular response to dissatisfaction with schools, further contributing to segregation. Centering homeschooling families in this study of race in schooling has provided a new lens for understanding school segregation that has not previously been included in race and education scholarship or in studies of homeschoolers. Future research should continue this project of documenting how race shapes parents’ schooling decisions with the inclusion of homeschoolers. More national and racial comparative research on school choice with homeschoolers is also needed to better understand how race operates within the racialized organization of schools.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Sharla Alegria, Beth Berry, Dan Chambliss, Celeste Curington, Steve Ellingson, Naomi Gerstel, Matthew Grace, Miliann Kang, Jaime Kucinskas, Gisele Litalian, Jennifer Lundquist, Elisa Martinez, Sarah Miller, Joya Misra, Juyeon Park, Maureen Perry-Jenkins, Cassaundra Rodriguez, Aline Sayer, Tim Sacco, Mary Scherer, Chris Smith, Abby Templer-Rodriguez, Ryan Turner, and Jon Wynn. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to the women who volunteered to participate in this study, without whom this research would not have been possible.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: A $1,000 Graduate Student Dissertation Grant from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst helped support transcription costs for my research in 2016. A $10,000 Dissertation Fellowship Award from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Center for Research on Families supported my writing on this project during 2016.

Notes

Author Biography

Mahala Dyer Stewart is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Hamilton College. Her research examines how families experience and navigate race and gender inequalities in their everyday lives.

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