By Casey Parks, The New Yorker, June 14, 2021
When Victoria Bradley was in fifth grade, she started asking her mother, Bernita, to homeschool her. Bernita wasn’t sure where the idea came from—they never saw homeschooling on TV. But something always seemed to be going wrong at school for Victoria. In second grade, a teacher lost track of her during parent pickup, and she wandered off school grounds. Bernita went to see the principal, intent on getting the teacher fired. The principal asked if she would consider taking an AmeriCorps position at the school. Bernita cut back her hours at the hair salon she owned and started doing community outreach, assisting teachers and hosting parent meetings.
In 2011, Bernita moved her family—which also included her older son, Carlos—to Detroit’s East English neighborhood, where she bought a three-story, yellow brick house for twelve thousand dollars. Victoria, then in fourth grade, transferred to Brenda Scott Academy, where two girls began bullying her. One wrote “I’m fat” in black pen on the back of Victoria’s shirt. On another occasion, one of the girls spit at Victoria. She screamed at them, and was suspended. (That year, administrators suspended three hundred and forty Black students, or forty-two per cent of the school’s Black population, and another sixteen Black girls were arrested there.)
Victoria moved to a top-rated charter school, where she lasted only a few months—she said that an administrator picked on certain Black students. By fifth grade, Victoria had attended five schools, and she was tired of being the new kid. She brought up homeschooling when she was reprimanded for having blue braids, and again in eighth grade, after some boys dared each other to try picking her up as she sat at her desk. Homeschooling, she said, would allow her to learn at her own pace, without anyone making fun of her. Bernita was sympathetic, but she told Victoria that she couldn’t teach her. She was a single mom, and she’d never completed her college degree.
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