Home schooling among black families on the rise.

According to estimates from the National Home Educators Research Institute, in 2003 blacks made up almost 5 percent of home-schoolers, up from 1 percent in 1999. In four years, the number of home-schooled Children doubled, from 850,000 to 1.7 million, while the number of black home-schooled children increased five-fold. Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), corroborates the increase, stating, "About ten years ago, we started seeing more and more black families showing up at conferences and it's been steadily increasing since then."

Joyce Burges, co-founder of the National Black Home Educators Resource Association (NBHER), who home-schooled her five children, said that increasingly, black families are getting fed up with the public school system and are turning to home schooling as an alternative. A 2002 survey conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies revealed that while only 14.3 percent of the general population considered public education "poor," almost twice that many blacks--25.4 percent--thought public education was poor.

Burges' organization isn't the only support group available for black home-schoolers. In addition to the wide variety of curricula and materials available to all home-schoolers, many states and regions now offer their own support groups to black home-schoolers, and groups, such as the online Black Homeschoolers' Network, reach out to black home-schoolers nationwide.

In a June 2003 interview with the HSLDA, Gilbert Wilkerson, founder of Network of Black Homeschoolers, stated that the primary goal for starting his organization was to bring black people out of the mentality that they have to settle for government programs. "Why are we waiting around for somebody else, like the government and others, to give us a hand for something we can do ourselves? I know we can do better," he says.