When North Carolina mom of three Sharetha Boone Blanchard started homeschooling her sons during the pandemic, it may actually have saved her time.
Her second child, Aisha, finished fifth grade in June 2020. As the health crisis unfolded, Blanchard switched to virtual classes when he started sixth grade. But he has ADHD and can’t focus unless he’s with someone. So Blanchard, who works remotely as a college professor, and her retired mother, Loretta Boone, spent hours each day helping Aisha with her virtual schoolwork.
Blanchard felt the school couldn't accommodate her son, even with the 504 plan. After he fell behind on some assignments, he felt like he had dug himself into a hole he couldn't get out of. The school made him turn in his work, but he only got partial grades, and new assignments kept coming in. Blanchard says the school was reluctant to actually compromise to help him catch up. “It was almost an overly punitive environment,” she recalls.
Since they had spent so much time with him anyway, the family figured homeschooling would give them control over the curriculum and teaching style. So they decided to pull him out. The homeschool curriculum, BookShark, a four-day-a-week, literature-focused package, arrived around Isaiah’s birthday. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, it’s amazing how everything fits together. This is what we’re supposed to do,’” she recalls.
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Blanchard, a professor, says she “trimmed” her schedule, which meant devoting a few hours in the morning to homeschooling her son, then teaching classes online and attending conferences.
It took a lot of energy and time, but it wasn’t more than she was already putting in to “make the system work.” The curriculum also allowed Blanchard to tailor her lessons to Isaiah, allowing him to focus on the subjects he needed extra help with and quickly skim through the ones he didn’t. “And overall, it’s been a really positive experience for him and our family,” says Blanchard, who now works as an associate professor at East Carolina University.
Blanchard is not alone. The growing number of students struggling during the pandemic has led to increased interest in alternatives to public school. Homeschools and microschools, two overlapping categories that are booming right now, are homeschooling. About 5% to 6% of all K-12 students are homeschooled, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Homeschool Hub. Blanchard’s state, North Carolina, has the second-highest rate of homeschooling in the country, according to the Homeschool Hub: about 9%.
The lack of oversight of these alternatives means that curricula and rigor vary widely, and students don’t experience some of the protections of public schools. But recent attention and federal funding have also spurred attempts to tighten regulation. Still, people tend to skim over the nuances when talking about the rise of homeschooling and microschools, Angela Watson, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, told EdSurge in May. But there are actually a number of reasons why parents are drawn to these types of schools. She added that even within states, interest in nonpublic schools can vary, perhaps because of the options available.
For some Black families, she said, the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement have led to a surge in interest. Some families, especially those whose children need learning accommodations, feel like their students are being pushed out, she said.
For some of these families, this type of alternative school appears to be a pressing need.
Dismantling the 'School-to-Prison Pipeline'
Black families are turning to smaller schools for “safety,” says Janelle Wood, founder of the Black Mothers Forum, a network of nine small schools in Arizona, where Arizona is considered friendly to the “school choice” movement.
These families may be drawn to alternative schools for different reasons than conservative white families, she added.
In 2016, Wood and other Black mothers were looking for a place to express their anger and grief over the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. So she called a meeting to discuss how to protect their children from systemic racism. “I’m a pastor,” Wood said, adding that she felt a religious calling “to be a voice for the voiceless.” She elaborates that her platform put her in a position to express the needs of her community.
But soon the group began to notice a “school-to-prison pipeline.” They saw education as the beginning of a chain of events that lead to poor life outcomes. Black students were disciplined so severely that normal behavior was “criminalized” from a young age, Wood says. Around the same time, Wood also noticed that classrooms were overcrowded, making it difficult for teachers to give adequate attention to struggling students, especially those who were experiencing racial tensions. She believes this exacerbated the problem.
The result? These families are not receiving support from the schools, Wood says.
Black Mothers Forum opened the microschool four years ago. Wood argues that keeping the school small and rooted in the community 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. “So the milestones provide a space where they can grow, where they can be recognized and validated as human beings,” she says.
Today, Black Mothers Forum microschools serve about 60 students across nine schools, with each school having between five and 10 students. The less established schools have two adults overseeing classes. The more established schools have one adult, often a former teacher or parent with an advanced degree in education, Wood says, and students and parents play an active role in setting the school’s culture. Nearly all of the students and teachers are black.
In part, Wood sees schools as a response to the ongoing impact of the pandemic. She hopes microschools will allow students to socialize in a less intimidating learning environment than large schools, and will hasten the recovery from the negative effects of school closures. “Some kids need a smaller environment, and microschools seem to be doing that for a lot of them,” Wood says.
At first, she says, many parents were interested in microschools as a way to build the capacity for students to return to public schools. But increasingly, she says, they want to stay in microschools. The network recently expanded to include high school options.
A potential lifeline
For Blanchard, the homeschool experiment has been fruitful: Her son's academic achievement has improved.
Still, when Blanchard’s job became less flexible — in addition to her concerns about how limited interaction with other students might affect Isaiah’s social development — it seemed time to make another change. She says the local homeschool group wasn’t very diverse. They tried private school but found Isaiah struggled there. She says he felt left out because he was singled out for punishment. So now Isaiah is back in public school for ninth grade.
Blanchard says they never found the perfect situation for Isaiah, but the homeschool pilot proved to be a “year of reset.” She and most other homeschooling families she knows were responding to an ecosystem that they felt was not nurturing or supporting their children, she says. His home became a more positive environment, and it helped the family prepare Isaiah for re-entering public school.
Other advocates of alternative education believe that microschools are an opportunity to help public schools by trying new methods of learning (which, if effective, can 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 pressure on public schools. Wood argues that public schools should introduce microschools on their campuses. That way, she says, they can provide support to overworked teachers without losing students. Wood adds that it’s a way to bring more communities into schools.
“If there is someone who actually understands, [the students who are struggling] And it seems like they're the ones working with them, and you watch the difference in these kids. Now, instead of losing kids, they're helping kids,” Wood said.
She says she's looking for a public school to partner with her organization, but so far she hasn't found one.