In the spring of 2018, two Los Angeles mothers, Kawanna Brown and Lisa Johnson, sparked a movement. Frustrated by the racial isolation their children faced in private schools, they dreamed of a community where Black private school kids could connect and families could support each other.
Johnson, having experienced being one of the few Black students in her Atlanta independent school, was dismayed to find little progress decades later for her own children.
“What I realized as a parent, which was different from my parents, was that we spend so much time in school. These are the most important developmental years of your life,” said Johnson, founder and executive director of Private School Village.
“As a parent of two children, who are also in an independent school here in California, they were living the same experience that I lived as a student, many decades ago,” Johnson told Word In Black. “It is this experience of isolation. It is an experience of being the only one or one of a few. It’s an experience of a lot of othering.”
Determined to break this cycle, Johnson and Brown organized a casual park playdate, inviting Black families from various schools across Los Angeles. What started as a simple electronic invite to Black and Brown families as a way to connect turned into a movement.
“We booked this park that had a capacity of only 50 people. I asked four other friends of mine who are in other private schools if I put their name on an Evite, and we sent this thing around, and it went around to 75 people,” Johnson said. “By the time the event rolled around, the RSVP was at 500.”
The overwhelming response marked the birth of Private School Village.
The grassroots effort, formalized as a nonprofit in 2018, goes beyond social gatherings. PSV works to improve the private school experience for Black and Brown families by creating supportive communities and promoting racial literacy, representation and a greater sense of belonging.
PSV encourages parental engagement, works with schools on policies and practices and builds networks intended to help students feel reflected and supported. In 2022, it expanded its work with the launch of Somos PSV, an initiative serving Latino and Hispanic private-school families.
The organization has continued to grow. PSV says it now serves families across more than 90 schools in California, and its Parent Ambassador program has expanded beyond Southern California to Northern California, Philadelphia and Charlotte. Its programs also include grade-level social groups, high school leadership activities and The Village Scholarship, which has provided $398,000 in tuition assistance to 19 students at 12 private schools.
PSV’s work has taken on renewed relevance amid a national discussion about the educational choices Black families make. In September, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about regrets surrounding her decision to send her daughter to an under-resourced public school in Brooklyn and the academic consequences her daughter believes resulted from that experience.
Lisa Johnson and her husband, Andre Johnson, joined that discussion in a recent interview with People, emphasizing that neither public nor private schools offer a perfect answer for Black families. Lisa Johnson said some families make significant financial sacrifices to send their children to private schools, only to encounter different challenges involving identity, culture and belonging.
Private school truths
“What I’ve found in the past five years is people make a lot of assumptions about private school families and kids,” Johnson said.
Like many institutions in the United States, private schools — often called independent schools — were not initially designed for Black students. In the South, private schools were “established, expanded, and supported to preserve the Southern tradition of racial segregation” as federal courts dismantled “separate but equal,” according to the Southern Education Foundation.
White students left public schools in droves for traditional and newly formed private schools, and from 1950 to 1965, private school enrollment grew at unprecedented rates across the nation.
In the 2017-18 school year, Little Red School House, an elite private school in New York City, came under fire after grouping students in two grades partly by race for homeroom, a practice the school said was intended to better support students of color. After criticism from some parents, the school discontinued the policy.
Federal data show that about 4.7 million kindergarten through grade 12 students were enrolled in private schools in fall 2021. Black students represented 9% of private-school enrollment, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
According to the National Association of Independent Schools, during the 2019-20 school year, median private-school tuition was $26,866, and the average financial aid award was $11,500.
Part of the ongoing discussion between private- and public-school supporters involves school vouchers, education savings accounts and other programs that allow families to use public money for private-school tuition or other educational expenses.
Those programs have expanded significantly in recent years. As of January 2026, at least 18 states had private-school-choice programs with universal eligibility, according to the Education Commission of the States.
Vouchers generally direct public money toward private-school tuition, while education savings accounts allow parents to use state-provided funds for approved educational expenses that can include private-school tuition, tutoring, curriculum materials and other services.
The expansion has remained controversial. Supporters say the programs give families greater control over their children’s education, while critics question their effects on public-school funding and whether they disproportionately benefit families whose children already attend private schools.
“In the short term, mostly it’s just going to be a funding giveaway to families that were already sending their kids to private schools,” Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane University who studies education policy, told Vox.
Changing the system
The realization Johnson came to was that instead of trying to change the entire system, she’d work with what she and the parents around her could control: the quality of education, getting students proper mental health resources and increasing parent engagement.
“I was raising my children saying, well, you’re there for the education, and I keep you rooted and grounded in the Black community outside of school,” Johnson said. “But what I realized as a parent, which was different from my parents, was that we spend so much time in school. These are the most important developmental years of your life, when your identity development is most impressionable.”
Johnson said the first step in shifting the private-school experience for Black kids is getting parents together to figure out what their students and environments need. One way Johnson is doing so at her organization is “primarily focusing on racial socialization, increasing racial socialization, racial literacy, representation, and research.”
“I think the American education system is hugely flawed, and in my dream world, we would start over from scratch tomorrow,” Johnson said. “So to me, there’s really no one fit or solution. I believe that the strongest indicators for a child’s success have nothing to do with whether or not they’re in public charter or private. It is parent engagement.”
This story was originally published by Word In Black in 2024. It has been updated throughout for The St. Louis American with the latest available information and data.