The growing legions of Americans turning to homeschooling after two years of on-again, off-again public education includes one group for whom the option is particularly challenging — first-generation immigrants.
According to recent Census Bureau data, about a quarter of homeschoolers in America are Hispanic, and 18.2 percent of Hispanic families homeschool their children. That’s up markedly from even six years ago, when 3.5 percent of Hispanic families were educating their children themselves at home.
First-generation immigrants, many of them with limited educational backgrounds themselves, make up a rapidly growing subset of that demographic.
“A lot of these are what we think of as nontraditional homeschoolers — people from low-income, immigrant backgrounds,” the Pacific Research Institute’s senior director of the center for education, Lance Izumi, says. “It kind of shatters that myth that this is basically only a middle-class or maybe a middle-class, white phenomenon.” Read more…
