In a class by themselves

Crisis, The, Jul/Aug 2003 by Fletcher, Michael

books

In a Class by Themselves

Morning by Morning: How We Homeschooled Our African American Sons to the Ivy League

By Paula Penn-Nabrit

(Villard Books, $24.95)

Paula Penn-Nabrit and her husband, Charles, were confronted with a gnawing dilemma when they moved to Westerville, Ohio, a comfortable suburb outside Columbus.

Should they roll the dice and send their three boys to a public school? Or should they send them to an expensive private school, where a top-shelf education is more of a sure thing, but African American students are few and Black staff is virtually non-existent?

The Nabrits, a highly educated couple who run a management consultant firm from their home, chose an expensive, all-boys country day school in Columbus. In her new book, Penn-Nabrit describes the place as brimming with "moderate Democrats and compassionate conservatives, and, of course, a lot of Anglophiles."

The boys were expelled from the school two years later, ostensibly because of their parents' late tuition payments. But the Nabrits suspect the real reason was that they had pushed too hard for racial diversity on the school's mostly White teaching staff.

The expulsion forced the Nabrits into a radical decision: to educate their children at home. So in 1991, when their twins, Charles and Damon, were 11 and their youngest son, Evan, was 9, they began an educational journey guided by faith. At the start, they had no idea what they were doing and had little support from friends and family who openly wondered how the Nabrit children would adjust socially without going to school.

By the time the Nabrits were done, two of their sons were students at Princeton University and the other was attending Amherst College.

Once the almost exclusive preserve of White Christian conservatives, home schooling is now an alternative that attracts an increasing number of African Americans. There are approximately 52 million K-12 students enrolled in U.S. public and private schools. According to the National Home Education Research Institute, 1.7 million to 2.1 million students were home schooled in 2002-2003. An estimated 5 percent of that population is Black.

Morning by Morning should serve as a useful primer - or cautionary tale - for any Black family considering home schooling. The memoir recounts the wrenching emotions that accompanied the transition to home schooling. (Not only did friends and family raise eyebrows, the Nabrit children fought it every step of the way.)

Moving to home schooling was a particularly difficult decision for the Nabrits, a deeply religious family with a rich educational legacy. The Nabrit boys were preceded by three generations of college graduates, which is an unusual achievement for any American family and a particular source of family pride. Also, Charles Nabrit's uncle, James Nabrit, was a noted civil rights lawyer who served as co-counsel with Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that ended state-sanctioned public school segregation.

Needless to say, the Nabrits faced strong family pressure to follow the prescribed route to a good education - and that did not include home schooling.

Morning by Morning is filled with dense passages, and perhaps too many asides about the family's history. Penn-Nabrit is at her best when she focuses on the nuts-and-bolts of what she and her husband did to ensure a top-flight education for their children.

The book provides a long list of practical tips that should be a useful resource to anyone considering home schooling. Most parents home school their children with the help of store-bought curricula and support groups in their communities. But while the Nabrits taught some subjects, they also scoured local colleges to find Black men who were working toward graduate degrees to teach their sons science, math and foreign languages. They found fencing classes at the local recreation department. They tapped the myriad programs at libraries, museums and the local science center. The boys learned life lessons as they kept a garden with their father, and school continued year-round.

All of this helped land the Nabrit boys in top colleges, where they faced new challenges. No longer were classes built around them, and now time mattered when it came to completing assignments. These changes caused them to struggle, and resulted in one of the boys dropping out of Princeton to work in the family business.

Still, there is much to learn about the power of parental involvement in children's education from the Nabrits' home schooling experience. And these lessons are valuable to all parents who believe young people are mostly educated at home, regardless of where they attend school.

Michael Fletcher is a national education reporter at The Washington Post.