Homeschooling is an increasingly common schooling option for middle-class black families yet is often overlooked in research on race and education. Drawing on interviews with 67 middle-class black and white mothers living in one northeastern metropolitan area—half of whom homeschool, while the other half enroll their children in conventional school—the author examines how race influences mothers’ decisions to homeschool or conventional school. The findings show that mothers’ schooling explanations reflect their experiences as shaped by the racial hierarchy constituted in schools. Black mothers respond to a push out of conventional schools on the basis of their children’s experiences of racial discrimination. In contrast, white mothers respond to a pull out of conventional schools to individualize their children’s academic programs. Building on racialized organizations and critical race theory, these findings elucidate how the formal structure of schools is racialized in ways that constrain black mothers’ agency, while enabling the agency of white mothers to activate school choice. The findings underscore how homeschooling, often assumed to be race neutral, is racialized in ways that reproduce inequalities under school choice and appears to redress discrimination in schools.

中文翻译：

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推还是拉？黑人和白人母亲（子女）为其子女上学的决定中学校选择的种族化

对于中产阶级黑人家庭来说，自学是一种越来越普遍的教育选择，但在种族和教育研究中却常常被忽视。通过对居住在东北大都市地区的67位中产阶级黑人和白人母亲的访谈（其中一半为家庭学校，另一半为孩子上常规学校），作者调查了种族如何影响母亲对家庭学校或常规学校的决定。研究结果表明，母亲对学校的解释反映了他们的经历，这是由学校中种族等级制度所塑造的。黑人母亲根据孩子的种族歧视经验，对退出传统学校做出了回应。相反，白人母亲对退出传统学校做出反应，以个性化其子女的学术课程。这些发现基于种族化的组织和批判种族理论，阐明了学校的正式结构是如何通过限制黑人母亲的代理权而种族化的，同时使白人母亲的代理人能够激活学校的选择。这些发现强调了通常被认为是种族中立的家庭教育如何通过种族重现的方式在学校选择下重现不平等现象，并似乎可以纠正学校中的歧视。