Black home schoolers push back against racist, unregulated curricula: 'They called slavery immigration'

In 2018, Dr Timberly Baker decided to home school her children after a local school in Arkansas failed to challenge her eldest child. Her daughter, Baker said, is gifted. But despite routinely testing off the charts during standardized exams, the school had no plan on how Baker’s daughter could take more advanced classes.

Still new to home schooling, Baker decided to use a Christian curriculum, solely due to its ready-made lesson plans and promise to produce a school transcript in case her children later enrolled into mainstream schools.

But Baker, a researcher and associate professor of educational leadership at Arkansas State University, found the lesson plans “problematic”, especially with regard to social studies. A lesson about the “triangular trade”, the transatlantic trading system where people were stolen from Africa and shipped to western colonies to be enslaved, proved to be a final straw. The curriculum “mentioned enslaved Africans as one of the products that were being shipped, but as a product, rather than in their humanity as individuals and as people”, Baker recalled.

Baker came up against a common problem facing many parents of color choosing to home school their children: a lack of inclusive, educational material. Even as home schooling becomes more diverse, educational material for families is still mostly conservative, Christian and eurocentric. Major educational companies have been repeatedly condemned for racist and inaccurate material and accused of failing to implement major changes. This isn’t a question of dated curriculum, said Jonah Stewart, interim executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a home schooling advocacy group. “Those curricula are alive and well”.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/17/black-homeschoolers-racist-curricula

There are secular homeschooling programs, but you have to look har for them. Amd I would appredicate NOT being piled an by the anti-homeschooling folks because I realize there are valid reasons FOR it.