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Saturday, January 7, 2006
Black parents take education reins
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jordan Hermitt doesn’t sit squarely in her seat.
She likes to fold one leg back, sit on it, then lean forward. Off go the shoes. Such tendencies, Mom admits, can be annoying in the classroom.
Some Gwinnett public school educators suggested a remedy: Put the 9-year-old on Ritalin.
No way, said Andrea and Leslie Hermitt of Lawrenceville.
“It was either home schooling or Ritalin,” Andrea Hermitt told me.
Initially, home schooling was embraced mostly by Christian whites ticked off with public schools and unable to afford private ones. They still make up the majority of the nation’s 1.1 million home schoolers, but nowadays, blacks are a fast-growing segment.
Some black parents are disappointed and disillusioned with public schools — their quality, Eurocentric curriculum, academic inequities and racism, be it real or imagined.
“They are fed up and believe they can better ensure their children have positive educational futures,” said Jennifer James, director of the National African-American Homeschoolers Alliance in Chapel Hill, N.C.”I can say that the numbers, without a doubt, are increasing.”
Gwinnett County school records show 3,049 home schoolers are registered this year. Even though almost every student statistic known to a local, state or federal educational bureaucrat is broken out by race, not so in home schooling. The district doesn’t break those numbers down racially. Ditto for the state education department, which places the total home school population around 40,000. Nationwide, there are about 110,000 black home schoolers, though James and others say that figure is too low.
Cynthia James of Lilburn volunteers at the Georgia Home Educators Association in Fayette County.She takes calls from black parents all the time.
“And it’s not just from Gwinnett,” she told me.
It’s good to see black parents take control of their children’s schooling and realize that traditional teaching methods may not be the best way. Nor are they the only way.
Before she committed to home schooling, Hermitt read about 30 books and took a fact-finding trip to California.Jordan and Jackson, her 11-year-old son, also take classes at the Master’s Academy of Fine Arts, a home school program in Duluth.
Jackson has skipped a grade. This summer, Jordan scored in the 90th percentile on a standardized test.
“I was brave enough to do something different with my children,” Hermitt said.
It appears to be working.
