Evangelicals Push for Mass Exit at Public Schools

Losing faith in schools
Evangelical Christians push for education at home

By David Crary, Associated Press
September 17, 2006

NEW YORK -- Public schools take a lot of criticism, but a growing, loosely organized movement is now moving from harsh words to action -- with parents taking their children out of public schools and exhorting other families to do the same.

Led mainly by evangelical Christians, the movement depicts public education as hostile to religious faith and claims to be behind a surge in the number of students being schooled at home.

"The courts say no creationism, no prayer in public schools," said Roger Moran, a Winfield, Mo., businessman and member of the Southern Baptist Convention executive committee. "Humanism and evolution can be taught, but everything I believe is disallowed."

Moran, the father of nine home-schooled children, co-sponsored a resolution at the Southern Baptists' annual meeting in June that urged the denomination to endorse a public school pullout. It failed, as did a similar proposal before the conservative Presbyterian Church in America for members to shift their children into home schooling or private Christian schools.

Still, the movement is very much alive, led by such groups as Exodus Mandate and the Alliance for Separation of School and State. One new campaign aims to monitor public schools for what conservatives see as pro-gay curriculum and programs; another initiative seeks to draw an additional 1 million children into home schooling by encouraging parents already experienced at it to mentor families wanting to try it.

"Home-schoolers avoid harmful school environments where God is mocked, where destructive peer influence is the norm, where drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and homosexuality are promoted," says the California-based Considering Home schooling Ministry.

Though the movement's rhetoric strikes public school supporters as extreme, some of its leaders are influential. They include R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who last year said the denomination needed an "exit strategy" from public schools, and the Rev. D. James Kennedy, pastor of 10,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and host of a nationally broadcast religious program.

"The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools has indeed become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act of war," Kennedy said in a recent commentary.

Overall, public schools are in no danger of withering away. The latest federal figures, from 2005, show their total K-12 enrollment at 48.4 million, compared with 6.3 million in private schools -- most of them religious.

However, the National Center for Education Statistics said private school enrollment has grown at a faster rate than public schools since 1989, and it expects that trend to continue through 2014. Moreover, the private school figures don't include the growing ranks of home-schoolers -- there were at least 1.1 million of them in 2003, according to federal figures, and perhaps more than 2 million now, according to home-school advocates.

According to a federal survey, 72 percent of home-schooling parents say one of their primary motivations is to provide stronger moral and religious instruction.

The president of the largest teachers' union, Reg Weaver of the National Education Association, says public school critics use increasingly harsh language, "but they're not as successful as they'd like to pretend."

"The overwhelming majority of our folks," Weaver said of his union members, "are not being pulled off the agenda of great public schools for all children."

Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center, a nonpartisan civil liberties group, said public education leaders should work harder to convince parents they aren't against religion by encouraging nonsectarian teaching about the Bible and the formation of student religious clubs.

"School leaders know they're facing the perception that public education has somehow become hostile to religion," Haynes said. "They understand there's no time to be lost."

Some districts have moved proactively to address parents' concerns, he said, "but many more have put their heads in the sand over this, afraid of controversy or litigation."