A homemade education

Meet the new faces of home schooling. Venus Taylor put aside plans to use her master's degree in risk and prevention from Harvard University's School of Education to teach her two children at home.

Cheri Robartes, a single working mom, juggles teaching piano with immersing her two teens in a vigorous music and academic education.

Audrey Ward home-schools three of her four children after an unimpressive experience her daughter had in parochial school.

These families aren't conservative Christians or counterculture hippies -- the groups long associated with educating outside the school system. They're part of an influx of mainstream families who in the past 10 years have decided that their homes provide a better alternative to a litany of educational ills. They rail against what they consider overcrowded schools staffed with underqualified teachers who turn their children into expert test takers but not much else. A private-school education is beyond their economic reach, but they can provide the semblance of one at home.

Taylor, Ward, and Robartes also represent the African-American, Latino, and ethnically mixed families who are new explorers in an arena that was once predominantly white. Five decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregated classrooms, students of color are leaving them for reasons of race and ethnicity.

"In public school," says Taylor, 35, a petite woman who like her children wears her hair in dreadlocks, "I would have teachers with low expectations of my kids. Or they would be, like, one of the few in the honors classes, and most of the kids that looked like them would be in the lower track. I don't like what that tells them about blackness." Robartes, 47, simply relishes raising her half-white, half-Dominican children in a nurturing environment. "We can be who we are," says Robartes, a Dorchester resident who met her Dominican ex-husband during a stint in the Peace Corps. "We don't have to be thinking about race all the time."

A growing trend

No one really knows how many children are home-schooled in this country. Statistics shift depending on whom you ask. The US Department of Education first estimated these numbers in 1999 and found 850,000 students nationally. But Tammy Rosenblatt, founder and director of the Family Resource Center in Salem, which provides home-schoolers with educational support, believes the number is closer to 2 million. The Boston public school system has 108 students registered to home-school this school year.

Information about the race and ethnicity of home-schoolers is even harder to find. In the federal survey, the "black, Hispanic, and other" categories represented a quarter of the home-schooled population. People in the home-school community say the numbers are rising. As they rise, so do books, support groups, and websites addressing the needs of these new home-schoolers.

Families can read "Morning by Morning: How We Home-Schooled Our African-American Sons to the Ivy League," which traces the journey of Wellesley College grad Paula Penn-Nabrit's three sons to Princeton University and Amherst College. Mocha Moms (mochamoms.org) unites "stay-at-home mothers of color," while the National African-American Homeschoolers Alliance (naaha.com) is one of many sites listing support groups in various states.

These resources offer integral connections to families who find themselves the only black, brown, or yellow faces in their home-schooling communities or who feel uncomfortable participating in mainstream groups. "I talk to families who say they're really not warmly welcomed in the larger, predominantly white home-school organizations," says Jennifer James, who launched the 450-member NAAHA a year ago. "They join the larger groups, then the [white] children don't want to play with their kids."

That doesn't happen everywhere. Taylor speaks glowingly of Homeschooling Together, the Arlington/Belmont group she sought out when her family lived in Cambridge. Its members share Taylor and her husband Hycel's views on not immunizing and of following a vegan diet. They were less in tune with the Taylors' concerns about college.

"They don't think college is necessary," Venus Taylor says. "As an African-American it's hard to live in that leniency because I feel that whole thing: that we have to be twice as good to get half as far. I want to talk to people about that struggle. How do I strike a balance between allowing my kids to explore subjects based on their interest or wanting them to be the most prepared college students because they already have a couple of strikes against them?"

The family's interest in home schooling took hold after Jasmine, now 9, entered preschool six years ago. The girl has fond memories of playing with pretend blocks during that period, but, she says, "I didn't like having a whole lot of time without my mom." Soon Jasmine was telling her parents she didn't want to go to school. It didn't surprise her father.

"I could tell she was getting really bored," says Hycel Taylor, 39. "I could tell the attention [a teacher] was going to give was not the attention that [Jasmine] was going to get from Venus."

The Taylors are "unschoolers." That means Venus Taylor follows the intellectual curiosity of Buddy, 6, and Jasmine rather than a curriculum set by others. The idea is to make learning a pleasure, not a chore. "Since they get to choose, they don't feel put upon," she says. "They don't hate it. They don't resist."

On a recent morning in their Dorchester home, Jasmine, who loves math, announces she wants to do her "homework" and pulls out the "Test Prep" book that teaches her how to take standardized tests. Buddy's question "Does choir start with a K?" will turn into an impromptu spelling lesson at the kitchen table. School also means playing Presto Change-O, a Monopoly-style board game that helps kids learn how to make change. On this day, Taylor uses the game to teach her children how to count up, something Taylor didn't learn until she was 16, "which is not good," she says. As they play, it becomes clear how much patience and stamina is required to home-school well.

Buddy rolls the dice and stops on a space. He must spend 45 cents out of $1. "OK," he says gamely, "let's add up to $1." Taylor asks him how much change he needs to make 50 cents. Buddy yells out, "Five!" How much more to make a dollar? For torturous seconds that turn into minutes, Buddy's lips work silently as he thinks through and finally solves the problem. Later Jasmine gets frustrated but soon figures out how to count up from 40 cents to $5. Although the game consists of more than an hour of arduous thinking, the children beg to play it again.

Making learning fun

Ward, 35, didn't see that joy of learning when her daughter entered sixth grade at a Hyde Park parochial school. The teacher was new, and the students walked all over him, says Ward. "It was wild. It was chaos." Two grades later, her daughter, Ashley, 15, asked to be home-schooled just like her 9-year-old twin brothers, Trevor and Gabriel. Now Ashley volunteers at the Museum of Science and studies biology, geometry, and algebra from textbooks. (Ward's fourth child, Ryan, 13, attends Boston Latin Academy in Roxbury.)

The only subject for which Ward refuses to use a textbook is history. "It seems to be taught from a white Anglo-Saxon perspective," complains Ward, whose parents are from Uruguay. The version of history she teaches is not a Eurocentric one that begins with Christopher Columbus's discovering America. She uses literature and timelines to give her children a broader worldview.

Home schooling is all about freedom. You get a visual sense of the possibilities glancing at the weekly schedule hanging in the Robartes's kitchen. Tony, 14, takes soccer on Sundays, cultural anthropology at Harvard extension school on Mondays, French and Spanish classes with his sister on Wednesdays, and music classes Saturdays. Marta, 15, juggles ballet Tuesday to Friday, violin Tuesdays, American literature at the extension school Thursdays, and orchestra Saturdays. Mornings, Tony, a finalist in next month's prestigious Sphinx Competition for black and Latino string players, practices cello; Marta, the violin.

Robartes turned to home schooling after noticing how sad her daughter looked attending kindergarten. Marta simply remembers being enclosed in a classroom with bars on the window: "It was really like being in prison," she says. At home, school was a mellow affair. Robartes left books about science, math, and English around the house, hoping her children would read them. "They taught themselves when they were ready," says Robartes, "and they did it fast and beautifully, and it was fun to watch."

These days, algebra and SAT prep books stuff the kitchen bookcase. The teens took the PSAT late last year. Marta scored in the 66th percentile, her mother proudly divulges. There are difficulties as well. The extension school is Marta and Tony's first traditional class; they've never written essays for a class. Marta is having trouble writing one about slave narratives by mulatto women, so Robartes is paying a graduate student to tutor her.

"It's very, very different," says Tony, who plans to apply to Walnut Hill, a Natick prep school that puts equal emphasis on arts and academics. "Having set times to do things. If you're late, then the grade goes down. At home you can adjust. If you're late, that's OK."

"Sometimes," Robartes responds -- dispelling any notion that home schooling equals leniency.

That perception is one reason home schooling can be controversial, particularly in the African-American community. "Our ancestors fought so hard to get into the better school systems that some people have issues with the ones of us who can pull our kids out," says Venus Taylor. "It's almost like not voting."

Words of disapproval often come from her husband's family in Chicago, which took advantage of integration. Hycel Taylor's father has a doctorate in theology; his mother, a master's in education. His sister's child attends an expensive prep school.

But the Taylors have more confidence in themselves than they ever would in a school.

"We have put ourselves in the position of ultimate responsibility," Venus Taylor says. "We're going to rise to the challenge. I would not let myself fail my kids."