Media mention: Cheryl Fields-Smith featured in NBC short film on home schooling
More African-American families, particularly in the South, are home schooling their children because of the lack of black history in public school curricula, as well as the disproportionate disciplining of black students.
“If you look at what happens in public schools in terms of the curriculum, you could end up thinking that African-American history begins with slavery and ended with Martin Luther King, Jr., and that’s just not the case,” said Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice, in a short film created by NBC.
According to the National Home Education Research Institute, an estimated 220,000 African-American children are home schooled in the U.S., with black home-schooled students outperforming black public-school students by up to 42 percentile points on standardized tests.