When longtime Germantown resident Laverne Trusty was growing up in the 1970s, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers was frequently on strike. She recalled how her father, an auto mechanic, kept up his children’s education while they were out of school.
“Dad would change his shift or work at night so that he could get the blackboard out during the daytime and have school,” Trusty said. “It was complete with recess, lunch.”
Trusty went on to have five of her own children, and like her father, found herself acting as their teacher. However, Trusty went even further.
Trusty is a homeschooler, one of a small yet growing number of parents nationwide who provide the majority of their children’s education themselves, in lieu of public or private education administered by professional teachers.
For Trusty, dissatisfaction with the public system, rather than admiration for it, was the key factor in her decision to educate her children herself.
“When I had my own kids, the school system was not the same,” Trusty said. “I wanted a private school or Christian school, but I also wanted to stay at home, and there was no financial way to do both.”
Trusty’s motivations for homeschooling weren’t unusual. According to a 2019 study by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), concerns about public schools’ environments and dissatisfaction with their academics were the top two responses chosen by homeschooling parents as their “most important” motivation.
Besides those primary motivations, however, another enduring set of reasons parents decide to homeschool their children are the parent’s political, philosophical, and religious convictions, which can vary widely, especially across demographics.
For example, while white parents were more likely to cite religious or moral disagreements with public schools in their decisions to homeschool their children, black parents were more likely to identify abuses relating to racism within the public school system as a motivating factor, the Atlantic reported in 2015.
That difference matters in places like Germantown, where African-Americans make up as much as 91 percent of the population, according to data from the U.S. Census.
Although homeschooling was once a predominantly white practice, black families are the fastest-growing category of homeschoolers. As of 2016 they represented 8 percent of roughly 1.7 million homeschooled students across the country, according to the previously mentioned NCES study.
Brenda Littlejohn, a Germantown resident, took her son out of the public system in Kindergarten. She identified worries about the quality of the school as a key reason.
“An incident happened at the school and the principal literally said to me, ‘I would not have my child in a public school.’ And when the principal said that to me I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, what the heck!’”
Littlejohn paid for her son to attend private schools in the neighborhood until he was in the 6th grade, when affording the expense of private tuition became difficult. At that point, she decided to try homeschooling, with help from a state cyber program called Connections Academy.
Littlejohn said that some people she knew were critical of her decision to homeschool her son, due in part to impressions that it provided lower-quality education.
Joseph Murphy, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University who studied homeschooling for his book “Homeschooling in America,” said that that’s a popular concern about homeschooling, but not one he believed was well-supported by research.
“We have no data that homeschooling hurts kids,” Murphy said. “They do as well or better than other students on most measures.”
“I think a lot of kids assume homeschoolers are dumb because we dont get the same education,” said Evangeline Sell, 16, who has been homeschooled by her parents since she was 5 years old. “But in reality we get the same amount of education, if not more, but it may be different.”
Sell’s parents, Joel and Vanessa Sell, homeschooled all her 11 siblings. They founded a group, Mt. Airy Homeschooling Co-op, for Philadelphia homeschoolers like themselves in 2009, which offers classes and social opportunities to homeschooled students, funded and staffed through fees, donations and volunteer hours from parents.
“My dad was a teacher in the Philadelphia School District for 19 years,” Evangeline Sell added. “When my oldest brother was born, and by the time he got to the school age, my parents had seen enough. They wanted better than that.”
Another group, Talking Stick, meets in Germantown’s Awbury Arboretum, and offers similar programs. Katie O’Connor, its founder, said she wanted to address with the group what she saw as a shortage of secular homeschooling spaces.
Groups like Mt. Airy Co-op and Talking Stick are not uncommon, but they’re usually small and informally organized, often advertised primarily through word-of-mouth or on sites like the blog Philadelphia Homeschool. For their members, they can be helpful in aiding with one of the biggest limitations of homeschooling: its cost.
Although there are no inherent fees tied to homeschooling, the time commitment necessary from parents to provide a child with an education usually necessitates a second parent with a high enough income to make up the difference, researcher Murphy said. O’Connor agreed.
“If there’s a single parent, or both parents have to work in order to make enough money to live, it’s not really an option,” O’Connor said.
Still, O’Connor noted that trend isn’t absolute, and said that some such families have homeschooled their children in spite of the challenges.
“They’re not as privileged as they would be if they had the two incomes,” O’Connor acknowledged. “But if they can, they manage.”
For Germantown Info Hub by Miles Wall, Pavlina Cerna, Hannah Love Yoon, Lillian Hightower, Colin Chrestay, and Jozette Williams.