Author Topic: MSNBC column claims homeschooling is racist, part of ‘extreme’ ‘evangelical war’  (Read 276 times)

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Offline SVPete

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MSNBC column claims homeschooling is racist, part of ‘extreme’ ‘evangelical war’ to ‘dismantle’ public schools

https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbc-column-claims-homeschooling-racist-part-extreme-evangelical-war-dismantle-public-schools

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In an MSNBC opinion column Friday, columnist Anthea Butler warned about homeschooling being a "project" of evangelicals’ "war against public schools," one that also has "inidious" racist roots.

Butler began her piece by mentioning actor Kirk Cameron’s documentary "The Homeschool Awakening" and how it shows that staunch conservatives are planning to launch an assault against public schools.

"’Public education has become public enemy No. 1,’ the actor Kirk Cameron opines in a promotion for ‘The Homeschool Awakening,’ his documentary scheduled to hit theaters in June," she stated, adding, "as Cameron’s quote indicates, this latest project of conservative evangelical education is another salvo in the ongoing evangelical war against public schools."

"It should come as no surprise that evangelicals, fundamentalists and other religious conservatives have fought against public education since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education," Butler continued, framing this far-right, Christian "war" against public schools in a racial light.

Where is LIEden's Ministry of Truth?

So, for context, my wife and I homeschooled our children, "K-12". We started and for 4 years co-led a homeschool support group, volunteered at local and statewide conventions, and I was active on several homeschooling discussion sites. I'm not fishing for a pat on the back, just pointing out the contexts in which I became acquainted with and/or came into contact with thousands of homeschooling families. Even with that limited experience (thousands out of hundreds of thousand is a very low percentage), I can say from experience:

* While Evangelical Christians might still be a majority of homeschoolers, a significant percentage of homeschoolers are liberal Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc., and many are atheists/agnostics;

* While whites are probably in the majority among homeschoolers, gazing around the exhibit hall of any homeschooling convention I've attended sufficed to see many east and south Asian, black, and (darker-skinned) Hispanic attendees. Did I mention that these conventions were put on by a Christian statewide organization?

* Our local support group grew to >100 families really fast (it scared us, since finding places to meet and providing contexts in which supportive interaction could happen became interesting. For our fourth year we subdivided the group into several home groups, each with its own leaders, with oversight and things like the newsletter provided by the leadership of the whole group. Among the home group leaders were some non-whites, selected and asked to volunteer because of their qualifications, like all the group leaders.

* My wife and I, for several years, created, maintained, and distributed a homeschooling resources publication. After doing so for a few years, we started hearing that people requesting R4 Private School Affidavits from our county Office of Education received, along with their R4s, photocopies of a previous year's resource directory. We contacted the relevant Office of Education person, and found that she did this because she was more interested in children being educated than who did it. After that we provided each year's new edition until she retired a few years later. That was our "war against public schools", LOL, working with the Santa Clara County Office of Education!

Sorry for the verbosity, but concocting stupid false accusations is easy, as Anthea Butler demonstrated. Giving evidence that disproves the stupid false accusations is not brief.
If, as anti-Covid-vaxxers claim, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/robert-f-kennedy-jr-said-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-deadliest-vaccine-ever-made-thats-not-true/ , https://gospelnewsnetwork.org/2021/11/23/covid-shots-are-the-deadliest-vaccines-in-medical-history/ , The Vaccine is deadly, where in the US have Pfizer and Moderna hidden the millions of bodies of those who died of "vaccine injury"? Is reality a Big Pharma Shill?

Millions now living should have died. Anti-Covid-Vaxxer ghouls hardest hit.

Offline FlaGator

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I have noticed that ever since Obama was elected the definition of "a lie" changed from "a statement that is not based on facts" to "a truth that is inconvenient for the liberal party".
"My enemy's enemy is the enemy I kill last."
Klingon Proverb.

Offline enslaved1

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https://time.com/6151375/black-families-homeschooling/

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Homeschooling increased nationwide after the pandemic disrupted in-person learning; among households with school-age children, the percentage who reported homeschooling them rose from 5.4% in April 2020 to 11.1% in October 2020, the last week for which those figures are available, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. The increase was most significant among Black families, about 3.3% of whom were homeschooling in spring 2020. By fall 2020, 16.1% were homeschooling, according to the survey. And as that population has grown, so have the curriculum resources and support groups.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/13/1061787233/more-black-families-are-homeschooling-their-children-citing-the-pandemic-and-rac

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It's a common perception that white, evangelical families are the most likely to homeschool their children. But a growing number of Black families have started teaching their kids at home — especially during the pandemic. The Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey found that in April 2020, 3% of Black households homeschooled their children, and by October 2020 it was up to 16%.

Those numbers may not be completely accurate, the Bureau noted, because a lot of children were learning at home in 2020. So part way through the survey period, the homeschooling question was expdanded to clarify that homeschoolers did not include children enrolled in public or private school. Even so, the numbers signal a significant increase.

Joyce Burges, founder of National Black Home Educators, said that since 2020, thousands of families have joined her organization.

"I think you're going to see more and more parents, Black parents, homeschooling their children like never before," Burges said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-families-are-choosing-home-school-children-fall-rcna1869

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Brian Ray, a doctor of science education who founded the National Home Education Research Institute, said that over the past 15 years more Black parents have decided to home-school. In fact, according to an analysis by the organization in 2015, Black children made up just 1 percent of home-schoolers across the country in the late 1990s. By 2010, the proportion of Black families home-schooling their children nearly doubled, to 1.9 percent. According to a survey by the Census Bureau, 3.3 percent of Black families were home-schooling their children in spring 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, but the figure jumped to 16.1 percent of Black children in the fall of 2020.

Try again, race-baiters.  Really funny that NBC reported something different than MSNBC.  Like the left hand doesn't know what the other left hand is doing. 

What some of these families may be teaching at home may be subject to debate, but that is a separate topic.  We know there are fringe nutjobs across the political spectrum that keep their kids out of public schools, I'm sure that covers the racial spectrum too. 
Romans 6:17-18 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

Offline SVPete

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MSNBC Claims Homeschooling Is Driven By “Insidious Racism,” But the Facts Show Otherwise

https://fee.org/articles/msnbc-claims-homeschooling-is-driven-by-insidious-racism-but-the-facts-show-otherwise/

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Butler, a professor of religious and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, asserts that homeschooling originated out of the work of Christian fundamentalist Rousas Rushdoony in the 1960s, but she neglects to mention that the rise of the modern homeschooling movement was broad and bipartisan, capturing both the political left and right who were equally dissatisfied with public schooling and other American institutions at the time.

I guess Butler doesn't know about John Holt, who has been especially influential, since the 1970s and even after death, in secular homeschooling circles. Nor Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore, who were Seventh Day Adventists - not exactly mainstream Fundies/Evangelicals. Does Butler even know who Gregg Harris is, who is Evangelical, but had worked some with the Moores, not Rushdoony. I'm not saying Rushdoony didn't exist, nor denying that he taught his followers (people Libs and Progs ignorantly call "Dominionists", an adjective that Christian Reconstructionists don't use to describe themselves, but was coined by an outsider who disagreed with them) they should homeschool. What I am saying is that in the scope of homeschooling as a whole, his influence was, at most, minor. If 1000 Evangelical/Fundamentalist homeschoolers were asked if they had heard of Rousas Rushdoony, I would be surprised if 100 said they had.

FWIW, our main early influences in deciding to homeschool and how we began were the Moores and Gregg Harris. This was in the mid 1980s, and I do not remember whether I had even heard of Rousas Rushdoony at that time.

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... She gives a nod to the US Census Bureau data showing that the independent homeschooling rate more than doubled in 2020 to 11.1 percent of the US K-12 school-age population. “Some of that increase may be attributed to Black parents and other diverse groups who are now finding homeschooling as an attractive alternative,” writes Butler.

According to the Census Bureau, the number of black homeschoolers increased fivefold between spring and fall of 2020, from 3.3 percent to 16.1 percent. Black children were overrepresented in the homeschooling population compared to the overall K-12 public school population.

Obviously, the context for this data is Covid shutdowns, and some parents - white and black - may revert to PSs. But I suspect that many will not. IOW, Covid was the final straw in a long considered decision.

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Indeed, the most recent federal data on why parents choose homeschooling reveal that “concern about the environment of other schools, including safety, drugs, and negative peer pressure,” is the top motivator. Only 16 percent of homeschooling parents in the nationally representative sample chose a “desire to provide religious instruction” as their top motivator. Of course, even if religious instruction was the top motivator of today’s homeschooling families, that wouldn’t be a reason to criticize homeschooling or call those doing it racist.

Identifying people's (ir)religious views by their top reason for homeschooling can be misleading. Our family is Evangelical Christian, but in the mid 1980s our first concern was academics. We already were seeing to it that our children received religious instruction in our home and at our church, So religious instruction in our school wasn't exactly groundbreaking. It was more like, "Of course we will."
If, as anti-Covid-vaxxers claim, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/robert-f-kennedy-jr-said-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-deadliest-vaccine-ever-made-thats-not-true/ , https://gospelnewsnetwork.org/2021/11/23/covid-shots-are-the-deadliest-vaccines-in-medical-history/ , The Vaccine is deadly, where in the US have Pfizer and Moderna hidden the millions of bodies of those who died of "vaccine injury"? Is reality a Big Pharma Shill?

Millions now living should have died. Anti-Covid-Vaxxer ghouls hardest hit.