Stealing Away: Black Mothers, Fugitive Exit, and the Making of Otherwise Educational Worlds

Karla Thomas

Black families are exiting formal schooling at unprecedented rates, driven by the racial minefields in educational institutions but also by a conviction that something better is possible. Existing scholarship focuses on the protective exit - departing to replicate conventional education in safer environments, leaving the liberatory exit unexamined - departing to build new educational worlds grounded in Black freedom. This study illuminates the liberatory exit of three Black mothers: a Florida mother who funded her children's Afrocentric microschool education using vouchers from the very system that is surpressing Black centric learning; an Illinois mother who pulled her son from public school and homeschooled him while traveling through their ancestral lands in Africa as a grounding foundation for his education; and a mother who designed a child-centered, experiential, curriculum tailored to each child's learning identity and carried it out predominatly in the real world rather than classrooms. Drawing on the theoretical grounding of Black Fugitivity and Building Otherwise Worlds, this multi-case qualitative study utilizes interviews, participant observation, and analysis of educational artifacts to examine the pedagogical visions and practices animated by these mothers. The study extends Black fugitivity into undertheorized dimensions and interrogates the educational possibilities that emerge from liberatory exits.

About Karla Thomas

Karla R. Thomas is a newly minted PhD graduate of Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy, where she will also be hosted as a NAEd/Spencer Research Fellowship awardee for her postdoctoral fellowship. She completed her PhD in Human Development and Social Policy with certificates in Black Studies and the Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences. Her dissertation, Smuggling Black Truths: BlackCrit Sensemaking and Fugitivity in Service of Black Educational Futures, was also supported by a NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Her research was published in the Peabody Journal of Education in April 2026. Her sustained research focuses on how Black communities ensure their children receive an education that reflects their cultural, political, and historical realities in the face of increasingly regressive education laws. She examines the full spectrum of Black educational resistance, from those who subvert and survive within hostile systems to those who exit entirely to build something new. Her postdoctoral research examines three Black mothers who practiced liberatory exit from formal schooling, constructing educational worlds grounded in Black culture, history, and visions of Black futurity, mapping what liberatory exit makes possible for Black educational self-determination. Dr. Thomas brings nearly two decades of prior work as a global systems implementation leader, equity trainer, and community activist focused on race, education, and organizational change. Originally from the Caribbean, she is raising her children in Chicago, and her positionality as a Black mother navigating these same educational questions animates both her research and her commitments to the communities she studies.