Tanya Sotelo is Latina and raising her family in a community east of Los Angeles. She and her husband began home schooling their autistic son Fox, 8, this year in part because they began worrying about what would happen when the boy shed his “cuteness and smallness.” When Fox grew to be taller, would administrators perceive him as a threat when he is in the midst of a breakdown?

Her fears are rooted in data: Black and Latino children and special education students are overrepresented in suspensions, expulsions and school arrests for reasons some attribute to racial bias…

Cheryl Fields-Smith, an education professor at University of Georgia who has conducted the most significant research on Black home schooling families, said she worries about what traditional schooling — including the dearth of Black history — does to the psyche of a Black child.

She said the recent efforts to tamp down on how teachers talk about race — including passing laws that ban the teaching of “critical race theory” — concerns her. “Cultivating a positive self identity for children of all races … means that we have to tell the truth about our history. It worries me that somebody is worried about that and they want to stop that,” Fields-Smith said. “Right now, we have to home-school because the way schools are, most of them — it’s tearing our children apart.”