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Black parents protect children’s privacy through home schooling, research shows
LAWRENCE — Privacy is among the most cherished of American rights. Yet, one of society’s most vulnerable populations — Black children — are denied the benefits of the right to privacy through discriminatory educational practices, and a growing number of Black parents are turning to home education to protect that right, according to new University of Kansas research published in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law.
KU scholars receive national recognition for humanities research
LAWRENCE — Two University of Kansas professors are putting medieval studies in the national spotlight. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds just 7% of the more than 1,000 fellowship applications it receives each year, last month awarded only two of the $60,000 grants to scholars in Kansas, both of them medieval studies faculty members at KU.
Full stories below.
Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Black parents protect children’s privacy through home schooling, research shows
LAWRENCE — Privacy is among the most cherished of American rights. Yet, one of society’s most vulnerable populations — Black children — are denied the benefits of the right to privacy through discriminatory educational practices, and a growing number of Black parents are turning to home education to protect that right, according to a University of Kansas privacy law scholar.
In a landmark 1890 article, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis outlined the right to privacy, in essence, as the right to be left alone. Privacy law and jurisprudence have followed from that inspiration, codifying in law the right for individuals to have privacy in body, property and mind. However, discriminatory practices in U.S. education have continued to deny Black children the right to be let alone and to fully reach their potential without excessive discipline, underrepresentation in gifted and talented programs, placement in the school-to-prison pipeline and more, according to Najarian Peters, associate professor of law, who recently published “The Right to Be and Become: Black Home-educators as Child Privacy Protectors” in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law.
Peters’ research details the growing number of Black parents protecting their children’s privacy by home-schooling their children to shield them from racial preconceptions and provide their children the opportunity to achieve self-actualization.
Peters became aware of the increasing numbers of Black parents home-educating and their reasons for doing so starting in 2018.
“I recognized the connection between privacy law foundations and home educating by hearing these parents talk about why they had to home-educate their children, their motivations and reading social science research about home education, especially Black home education. As I was reading the research, I began to see direct comparisons between what I read and heard from Black parents who are home-educating their children and privacy theory and law. Black parents see home education as a means of protecting and preserving their children’s childhood,” Peters said. “And those motivations are aligned with the purpose of privacy and privacy theory as initially shaped by Warren and Brandeis in their article, ‘The Right to Privacy,’ as well as many privacy studies that followed.”
Peters interviewed families in New Jersey and Georgia, states with some of the most conducive laws to home schooling, about their motivations and experiences. The main motivation the families shared was “racial protection,” or shielding their children from negative distortion/mischaracterization that leads to excessive discipline, unequal punishment and denial of educational opportunities.
“Their motivations matched what the right to privacy, as a social good, is supposed to protect, self-actualization — and in childhood that means finding and becoming yourself at the most vulnerable stage in human development,” Peters said.
Research cited in Peters’ article shows that Black students are criminalized in schools with more police officers present, fewer guidance counselors, enhanced security and other measures. Data has also shown that when Black students attend predominantly white schools, they are subject to more exclusionary discipline and are excluded from gifted and talented educational opportunities. Despite lower representation in the overall student population, Black students receive harsher punishment for the same offenses as white children. Some parents have experienced those disparities in their own educations and chose to withdraw their children from formal education or never enter them as a means of protecting their educational experience.
“When we think about what the research shows happens to many Black students in traditional schooling, regardless of their family’s socioeconomic status, parents’ educational attainment, whether it’s a public, parochial or private school, Black students are consistently overrepresented in negative categories but are underrepresented in the positive categories,” Peters said.
Other research cited by Peters shows that while white students are more often disciplined for objective behaviors such as smoking, writing on walls, skipping class or other observable behaviors, Black students are more often disciplined for subjective reasons such as “being disrespectful,” “loud,” “aggressive” or “insubordinate.”
“The same behaviors in white children are often labeled as a sign of precociousness or a need for the student to be more challenged academically. Those labels are then placed in a student’s educational file and follow them throughout their educational career, in essence prohibiting them from being let alone to achieve,” Peters said.
Home-educators interviewed for the article said that when children are interfered with in such ways at a young age, they learn early on how they are treated differently because of race. That not only affects their academic performance, confidence, self-esteem and achievement mindset, it can deny them of the benefits of childhood.
“Black home-educators are saying, ‘I don’t want my child to be shaped by this, and I don’t want my child to know themselves based on the racialized/anti-Black projections of someone else,’” Peters said. “They’re saying, ‘I want my child to have the benefit of childhood to be and become without that burden,’ and the data shows that they should be concerned.”
Throughout the article, Peters cites educational research not only in unequal discipline, but in theory supporting privacy theory and law as a support for educational achievement. In future research, she hopes to continue examining privacy law and education through a wider socioeconomic lens and exploring how FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, should be enhanced to recognize negative distortions in educational records that are often placed permanently at the discretion of teachers.
“The vast majority of K-12 teachers are not trained in or assessed for racial literacy and bias. Nor are they required to have and maintain a level of competency in these areas prior to and throughout their teaching careers. Yet, they exercise broad discretion to characterize student behavior, ability and achievement, and then codify their observations in student education records,” Peters said. “The data that shows disproportionate negative impact on Black students suggests that there are unidentified deficiencies not so much in the students who are assessed, although in problematic ways, but in teachers and other school actors. In my forthcoming article, ‘The Golem in the Machine: FERPA, Dirty Data, and Digital Distortion in the Education Record,’ I explore some of these issues.
“We know from the data that Black children are more likely to be negatively distorted. The only way we can believe those observations are accurate representations of what is truly happening is to believe that Black children are more badly behaved and less intelligent when compared to white children. The data does not bear that out,” Peters said. “That’s why we see so much rational distrust and skepticism from Black parents who home-educate about the K-12 educational system.”
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
KU scholars receive national recognition for humanities research
LAWRENCE — Two University of Kansas professors are putting medieval studies in the national spotlight. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds just 7% of the more than 1,000 fellowship applications it receives each year, last month awarded only two of the $60,000 grants to scholars in Kansas, both of them medieval studies faculty members at KU.
Misty Schieberle, associate professor of English, will use her grant to write a monograph that revises traditional narratives of English literary history to account for the influence of proto-feminist French author Christine de Pizan, whose poetry prominent male writers relied upon but rarely cited by name.
Anne Hedeman, who is the Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History, won her grant to co-write a wide-ranging study of illuminated manuscripts produced in France during the 14th century.
Schieberle’s book, “Patriarchy, Politics, and Christine de Pizan’s Influence on English Literature, 1400-1478,” uncovers new evidence of de Pizan’s influence on major late medieval authors such as John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve.
Schieberle has been researching Christine de Pizan’s books of advice for aristocrats, which were widely popular in England in both French and English translations, for several years now.
“While doing lots of manuscript research and lots of reading of Middle English authors to situate those works within an English context, some things clicked for me that suggested that Christine’s works were far more influential on some major 15th century writers than modern scholars have realized,” Schieberle said. “I found some episodes in Middle English writing that I believe could only have been influenced by Christine’s works.”
Specifically, Schieberle said, “There are original figures like the goddess of wisdom, Othea, that she invented. Then there are some stylistic choices that she makes and some unique theories of how fortune affects the lives of people that I think resurface in Middle English authors who have read her.”
That includes, Schieberle said, “the major English poet” of the 1400s, Thomas Hoccleve.
Schieberle said Hoccleve translated Christine de Pizan’s “Letter of Cupid,” the god of love, from French into English, “never giving Christine credit for it” and adding certain misogynistic elements to her text.
“Hoccleve and another major poet, John Lydgate, are potentially the most responsible for establishing Chaucer’s reputation, immediately after his death, as the father of English poetry. And at the same time, they are silently drawing on the work of Christine de Pizan.”
Especially since there are no English women secular poets in the Middle Ages, Schieberle said, telling the story of Christine de Pizan’s significant influence reveals that early English literary history is not as exclusively masculine as it initially appears.
Hedeman is excited about the fact that she and her medieval studies program colleague, Schieberle, are the only Kansans to qualify for NEH grants in this most recent round. And she looks forward to working once again with Elizabeth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum, with whom Hedeman collaborated on a major exhibition and catalog, “Imagining the Past in France,” a decade ago.
Hedeman said she and Morrison were invited by the editors of the series A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in France (HMMSF) from Flemish publisher Brepols to write a volume covering the period in which they specialize, the 14th century. The entire series covers the period from the seventh to the 16th century.
“We were excited to write on the 14th century because people have often viewed it, not necessarily in a negative way, but through a limiting frame,” Hedeman said. “The dates of the survey — 1320 to 1380 — that roughly coincide with the dates of the first three Valois kings — Philip VI, John the Good and Charles V. And the 100 Years War between France and England was happening, so people often consider the manuscripts from of this period the standpoint of ‘There was a war and outbreaks of plague, and the economy and patronage declined.’ But, actually, one can look at this time in a positive way. Although the economy and society were disrupted, there was a lot of innovation, and we hope our volume will reveal that the very circumstances of political and societal upheaval in the 14th century drove the book market to be one of the most inventive, impelling new types of books, illumination programs and stylistic experiments.”
Hedeman said she and her co-author have spent the past year narrowing down their list to feature 100-150 manuscripts, making sure to have samples that show the diversity of books and the range of quality of the artists who illuminated them.
“We don’t want to have only the artistic peaks,” Hedeman said. “We want to have some things from the valleys. And we want to discuss different kinds of books. So, for instance, one thing that we have included is a modest almanac. It’s very practical and portable — a little book you could tuck in your belt.
“But we’ll also include big, secular manuscripts that you open up for display, and they’re resplendent, and others ranging from liturgical books made to be used at the altar to privately owned prayer books that are also distinctive.”
They’ll survey religious texts, law books, science, history, classics and new translations of older and contemporary works.
“The book is designed to be an indispensable reference work for scholars and also to offer beginning scholars an overview of the visual culture of a distant time and place and of the material, intellectual and art-historical significance of 14th century books,” Hedeman said.
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