Why Home School?

Home schooling is on the rise in the black community, and it's no wonder. Blacks in particular are often stuck in the worst-performing public schools in America. New York's mayor recently admitted that his city has schools where only 5% of students read at grade level and where only 20% meet a minimum standard in math.

But what about the more affluent families in the suburbs who have access to better public schools and are more able to attend Catholic schools?

Why is home schooling a trend among these Catholic families? There are three contributing factors.

Catholic schools are expensive, and multi-child discounts are rare.Often it's larger Catholic families who home school — and it isn't always by choice. The math is simple. The more children a family has, the more expensive schooling is. Where Catholic schools used to be able to offer multi-child discounts, dwindling donations and rising costs have made that increasingly difficult. This is especially true at independent Catholic academies. Now, large Catholic families often simply can't afford Catholic schools. The irony is not lost on them (nor, often, on the schools themselves): A Catholic school education is often out of reach for precisely those families who are most likely to be attuned to Church teaching and concerned with living their faith.

Parents fear a poisonous moral climate.Sending children off to school has always tugged at parents' natural protectiveness, and the world has always been a place of moral challenges. But the moral climate has gotten far worse for children at a far younger age than in memory. The pop-culture marketing machine pushes atrocious role models on very young children, reaching into the schools through libraries, students and “educational” Web sites. For example, one of the top Web sites for kids, Nickelodeon, features a recommended music list that includes the sex-drenched songs of Britney Spears, angry rapper boy Lil Bow Wow, Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera, who is notorious for a recent nude video. For parents, the line between being overprotective and exercising common sense has become very difficult to discern.

Academic excellence is often more possible at home. For parents who have the inclination and the natural gifts to teach, the student-teacher ratio in the largest Catholic family is better than most schools'. Parents can tailor their teaching to individual students much better, and by getting involved in specialized home schooling groups they can allow their children to pursue a particular interests much more easily than they could were the child attending a traditional school.

Parents who send their children to school have many good reasons. They point out that home-schooled children are deprived contact with the differing opinions and beliefs that they will face when they leave school behind. This can make them insular and leave their faith untested. Also, they say, if the families most committed to their faith take themselves out of the schools, how will the school environment ever improve?

Two very good points. Ultimately, many home-schooling families would send their children to school if they were able to and if the school had a strong moral environment.

Alongside the home-schooling movement are signs of renewal in Catholic schools. Parish schools are already proven to be top-notch academically and above-average in discipline. Now, many dioceses are shoring up the faith content of their schools as well, using the Catechism of the Catholic Church as a standard for religious instruction texts. In addition, many new independent Catholic schools are being built, often by concerned parents.

Ultimately, new interest in better schooling — at home or in new schools, by families of all kinds — is a sign of hope for the future of education. Like anyone else, educators have to adapt to the needs and desires of their customers. The more parents demand, the better schools will become.