pvt parochial xian school

6 22 belated redumbdent disambig

note leo 4 wants publIc tax money for pvt religious schools eg oklaHOMA TEXAS

see charter

B3 VOUCHER

SEE SCOTUS SEP CHURCH STATE

SEE XIAN NAT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parochial_school

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AN 10 26

Federal judge greenlights taxpayer-funded religious Oklahoma charter school

A federal judge’s recent ruling on a religious charter school in Oklahoma could make way for a precedent that is a direct contrast to the separation of church and state — and a new wave of taxpayer-funded religious schools.

Per Friendly Atheist, Western District Judge David L. Russell of Oklahoma recently ruled that the state violated the First Amendment after denying the approval of the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School on the basis of religion.

In his ruling, Russell stated that the court is not expressing “judgment on the wisdom of the State of Oklahoma opening up its coffers to charter schools of disparate philosophical or educational persuasions.”

However, once it does, the court can’t deny a school on account of its “religious character.”

While the ruling, which occurred late last month, doesn’t mean that the charter school is close to opening, it does give way to the school being able to continue the steps of becoming established.

Now, the state Charter School Board has to reconsider Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School’s application when the board next reconvenes.

Attorney General Gentner Drummond previously sued to stop the school from receiving the taxpayer funds, but was ultimately stopped by the Supreme Court.

Additionally, Drummond sued the Charter School board earlier this year due to claims the board “didn’t thoroughly explain all the existing problems with the school’s application,” per the outlet.

Despite the recent ruling by the court to give the taxpayer funds the go-ahead for the school, Drummond’s lawsuit is ongoing.

Following the news of the ruling, many close to the situation voiced their opinions on what it means moving forward.

The ruling “opens the door to a dangerous sea change for our democracy,” the legal team of a [pro-church/state separation] group said via statement. “Forcing taxpayers to fund religious public schools violates state and federal law.”

“Ben Gamla will not only indoctrinate students into a particular religion — it will discriminate against families that don’t share the school’s beliefs. We will continue to fight for all Oklahomans, who deserve public schools that are secular and open to all students,” the attorneys added.

As for Drummond, in a statement on Oct. 1, he addressed the ruling saying, “In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a religious charter school violates the Oklahoma Constitution, state law and the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court left that decision in place last year.”

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RWW

News & Analysis

08/18/2026

Peter Montgomery

Dominionist and MAGA activist Jim Garlow devoted his World Prayer Network call Sunday night to an attack on public education. One of the speakers, Liberty University Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances Rev. Glenn Clary, described how Liberty is planning to take advantage of a provision in the Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” designed to funnel tax dollars into Christian schools.

Hostility toward public education is a defining characteristic of the Christian right political movement, which has fought for years to funnel public education funds into religious schools and the conservative-dominated homeschooling movement.

Televangelist Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University, wrote in 1979, “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

Garlow began Sunday’s broadcast by telling his prayer warriors, “We want to help you understand why you've got to help your children, your nephews, your nieces, and your grandkids get out of the public school.” He described public education as “rotten to the core,” and said 75 to 80 percent of students raised in the church lose their faith when they go to college because they had not been “properly grounded.”

Clary, the Liberty vice president and a former chair of the Alaska GOP, described public schools as “anti-God indoctrination centers.” He claimed that public schools are controlled by the National Education Association, an educators’ union that he said he calls the “National Evil Association,” adding, “And so I just think that we need to get the kids out of these public schools.”

An important background to this story is the history of Liberty’s rise to become a billion-dollar behemoth in among conservative Christian colleges. That wasn’t achieved by founder Falwell, but by his now-discredited son Jerry Jr., who saw early on the potential financial windfall of online education, which allowed Liberty to take tuition dollars—much of it funded by taxpayers indirectly through federal student loans—from a huge number of students that didn’t require a lot of physical infrastructure. Liberty devoted millions to high-pressure call centers to recruit tens of thousands of online students.

Liberty University Online Academy, which Clary was promoting on Garlow’s call, is the university’s online K-12 school. Clary says more than 75,000 students have gone through its program. Clary described his current mission as recruiting pastors to turn their church’s used space during the week into classrooms for students taking (and paying for) Liberty’s online classes. It’s a way, he said, for churches to create Christian schools without having to worry about hiring and managing teachers. Students who graduate from the online high school can get 50 percent off their tuition if they become a residential college student at Liberty.

For pastors who might be asking, “How would I pay for this?” Clary suggested that parents and grandparents can contribute. B

The 2025 legislation set up a scheme that allows any taxpayer to get a dollar-for-dollar reduction in taxes for any contribution up to $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) beginning on Jan.1, 2027. The SGO in turn can use those dollars to provide “scholarships” or vouchers to pay for tuition at a private school. There is no cap on the program, which the National Center for Public Education has noted could direct “tens of billions of dollars annually towards private school education.”

Clary was enthusiastic about what this could mean for money flowing into Christian schools like Liberty's online academy:

So if you and your wife did your taxes and you owe $2,000 and you contributed $1,700 to an SGO, scholarship granting organization, you could take that $1,700 off your tax bill and you would pay $300 to the government and you have directed your tax dollars to a Christian school organization in order for a child to have a Christian education.

Clary said that Liberty is going to “stand up” its own SGO. “Liberty is going to have this and make it available to the students that come to Liberty and any of the pastors that stand up affiliate schools,” he said.

It’s worth noting that earlier this year, Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) introduced the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, legislation that would repeal the SGO tax credit, which is essentially a federal private school voucher program. The bill was co-sponsored by 28 other Democratic senators.

After Clary spoke, Garlow turned to his next guest, Dr. Lisa Dunne, who has a similar contempt for the “anti-Christian” public education system, calling it “anti-faith, anti-family, anti-freedom—a system that hates our God, hates us, and hates our nation.”

We say education is formation and unfortunately, as you heard from Doctor Clary and you heard from Doctor Garlow, we're wasting a lot of time in the in the educational systems today forming children in a non-biblical worldview. I would say we're raising up atheist armies, and I would say that is not an--that's not hyperbolistic, that’s not an exaggeration in any way.

Dunne, who founded a Christian college and network of Christian schools, is pursuing her vision of replacing public education with church-run schools:

We've done the stats in California, and if 75% of our churches in the state of California would open their doors to 250 students, we would shut down the dysfunctional public school system in our state.

Many religious-right activists have adopted part of the worldview taught by Christian Reconstructionists that there is no biblical basis for public education because God assigned that responsibility to the family and church. Dunne made the same claim, citing Kevin Novak, a right-wing attorney who promotes the abolition of the “civil government school system,” which he calls a “tyrannical mechanism that commands our youth to think in anti-Christian terms.” Dunne called Novak a friend and said he is about to start at her Chula Vista Christian University.

And he goes through biblically, he goes through all of the Word and shows that the government, the secular pagan government, has no jurisdiction to educate our children. None. Zero. The mantle of responsibility is on our shoulders as parents. Now we can choose to partner with a trusted agency like our local church, but it is our responsibility. We will stand before the Lord for how we raised or did not raise our children.

While some religious-right activists call for the abandonment of the public school system, others are using political muscle to try to turn public schools into places to proselytize students or use charter school systems to promote taxpayer funded religious indoctrination.

And while anti-public education religious-right voices may have bigger media platforms, it’s also important to recognize that there are many Christian teachers and administrators in public schools, and many pastors and Christian parents who support the mission of public education.

On the Watchlist

Jim Garlow

Jim Garlow is an anti-LGBTQ activist who made a national name for himself by helping to mobilizing churches against marriage equality in California. He has since played a number of roles in the religious-right movement. During the MAGA era he has become an ardent Trump supporter, serving on the faith advisory board for Trump's 2016 campaign. During the turmoil after the 2020 election, Garlow started a series of prayer calls designed to help keep Trump in power. The World Prayer Network calls have continued as venues for religious-right organizing and MAGA propaganda.

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scotus? NEGLECTED SINCE?

an 5 25

GOP 'voucher scheme for the wealthy' would hand $5 billion to religious, private schools

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an 10 25

Nearly all state funding for Missouri school vouchers used for religious schools

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i assume

an 8 25

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon toured two Arkansas schools Tuesday as part of McMahon’s “Returning Education to the States” tour.

They were joined by Arkansas junior U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and state Education Secretary Jacob Oliva on tours of Little Rock’s Don R. Roberts Elementary School and Saline County Career and Technical Campus in Benton.

“I wanted to be in places where I could actually see some of the things that I talked about at work,” McMahon said in Saline County. “Not necessarily everybody has to go to a four-year school. There are places like this that would be sponsored from the tech field, where students can earn dual credits, go right into community college, go right to work in the field. … This is the secret sauce.”

McMahon and Cotton both alluded to the need to rid schools of red tape and bureaucracy. President Donald Trump has said he plans on shuttering the U.S. Department of Education to give states more power over education and wants McMahon to put herself out of her own job — a plan McMahon has supported.

Sanders also touted the expansion of the state’s Educational Freedom Account program to around 50,000 students in Arkansas this year. The program, which is open to all Arkansas students for the first time this fall, provides state funding for allowable education expenses, such as private school tuition.

IFrame Content

While Sanders and McMahon focused on the positive during their two stops, a handful of protestors outside Roberts Elementary held signs criticizing the state’s LEARNS Act and McMahon. The wide-ranging 2023 law made several changes to the state’s K-12 education system, including creating the school voucher program and raising the state’s minimum teacher salary to $50,000

“The parents of [Roberts Elementary] were incredibly upset when the letter was sent home yesterday … that she would be here,” said Courtney Jackson, a mother of two. She said she didn’t want her children to find out she just stood by while public education was under attack.

“The parents of this school do not want her here,” Jackson said.

Alison Metzler, another protesting parent, said she kept her kids home from school Tuesday because she didn’t want them to be used as “political pawns” by Sanders and McMahon.

“Sarah Huckabee and McMahon are actively trying to dismantle public education, and they do not care about public education. This is all for show, and it’s, it’s just disgusting,” Metzler said. “If Sarah Huckabee really stood with public education, her kids would go to public schools. Instead, they go to the private school a mile down the road, and she’s defunding these exact schools.”

Metzler also criticized Sanders and McMahon for visiting the “whitest affluent school in the Little Rock School District, a top school in the state.” She said she loved the school as a parent with a child who attended, but that if Sanders was really committed to public education, she would be visiting struggling schools in other parts of Little Rock.

“[Roberts Elementary] is not a representation of what the whole district is as a whole,” she said.

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

it’s just disgusting

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CONTEXT //

yikes an 7 25

critics of far-right Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters often attack him as a highly performative MAGA troll. Walters' antics include purchasing Donald Trump-themed Bibles for classrooms and promoting the false, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

But Slate's Molly Olmstead, in an article published on July 22, emphasizes that Walters' buffoonish qualities don't make him any less dangerous. And she emphasizes that his plan to screen education applicants for MAGA purity shouldn't be taken lightly.

"This month," Olmstead explains, "Oklahoma's education department announced an innovative new approach to screening aspiring teachers in the state: any applicants from 'woke' states would need to first pass an ideology test created by the right-wing group PragerU. It was an announcement that seemed engineered to draw national news coverage and inflame liberal audiences. Under this plan, teachers from states with 'progressive education policies' would be tested on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism, and 'the fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.'"

Olmstead continues, "The screening is guaranteed to test teachers for a deeply MAGA-inflected understanding of U.S. history, government, and society: PragerU, a right-wing group with a stated mission of countering leftism in education, is already known for its white nationalist-adjacent content for schoolchildren."

IFrame Content

PragerU is the brainchild of Dennis Prager, a far-right talk radio host and Trump supporter.

"Walters' proposals for the school system have included a mandate that all public schools teach the Bible; a plan to collect children's immigration status when they register for public school; and new social studies standards proposals that would have high school students 'identify discrepancies in 2020 election results,'" Olmstead observes. "Each of these announcements solidified Walters' reputation as a relentless attention-seeker, calculating every action from his office to appeal to the power players of the MAGA movement…. These stunts have paid off. Walters has been profiled in outlets all over the country, and he has become the face of the Christian nationalist campaigns into public education."

The MAGA Republican's stunts, Olmstead argues, raise the question: "Is Walters all superficiality, a media-obsessive without the stamina or standing for real, transformative politics? Or is he actually capable of remaking Oklahoma's schools — and signaling what MAGA could bring to schools across the country?"

"In sign of just how bizarre American politics have become in this second Trump era," Olmstead warns, "Walters may be a bit of both. As traditional institutions and procedures buckle under MAGA politics, Walters has proven that with the right national climate, slapdash own-the-lib pronouncements can become serious policy. He's a performer, but he also happens to be a major change-maker…. It may be tempting not to take people like Walters seriously, but he has proven that with enough volume, some gimmicks stick."

*Molly Olmstead's full article for Slate is available at this link (subscription required).

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rww

03/14/2025

Peter Montgomery

The religious-right group Family Research Council promoted an excited letter to supporters Thursday saying that President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education could be a “game-changer” for FRC’s efforts to “bring faith and the Bible back to public schools.”

In her recent book “Money, Lies, and God,” Katherine Stewart wrote about the ways that “privatizers and proselytizers” work together to delegitimize and undermine public education. The right-wing funded Moms for Liberty demonstrates this dual strategy, urging activists to take over public school boards while advocating for “school choice” laws to divert funding away from public schools. FRC President Tony Perkins’ letter showcases such a two-front strategy to push religious indoctrination into public schools and shift more students (and education dollars) into religious schools that are free from public oversight.

Perkins begins by criticizing Supreme Court rulings upholding church-state separation, and moves quickly to Christian nationalists’ favorite target: LGBTQ people: “With God, the Ten Commandments, and biblical truths out of the way, the Left had ample room to push their radical indoctrination plan onto our children.”

Perkins’ letter praises recent actions by state officials to turn public schools into de facto Sunday schools, beginning with a 2024 Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. “Louisiana’s spark became a flame as other states – including Texas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota – have now taken steps to reintroduce biblical teachings back into their schools,” Perkins writes.

But even that is not enough, Perkins continues, calling on every church to start a Christian school in which the Bible “is more than historical context of our nation's founding or a general ethical context -- it is the complete worldview in which reality and life itself are grounded.”

Perkins’ letter comes in the context of Christian nationalist activists urging state legislators to take advantage of right-wing Supreme Court rulings and go “on offense” to dismantle separation of church and state, particularly where schools are involved.

Oklahoma’s Christian nationalist Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters last year ordered public schools in the state to teach the Bible, which may have been an effort to keep him from being upstaged by Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law, which has been promoted as part of “Project Blitz,” a campaign to promote Christian nationalist legislation at the state level. Walters' plan to buy Trump Bibles for classrooms was put on pause by the state supreme court this week.

Trump chose his billionaire backer Linda McMahon to oversee the dismantling of the Department of Education. McMahon has chaired the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA think tank that promotes right-wing education policies as part of its agenda for “restoring a nation under God.” AFPI promotes so-called “school choice” laws that divert funding from public schools to unaccountable religious schools.

“AFPI has specifically taken credit for lobbying for the expansion of this approach in Arizona—over the objection of voters—where it has become an expensive ‘handout to the wealthy’ that has forced cuts in programs that serve needier families,” Right Wing Watch reported in February. “Pro Publica has reported on the lack of accountability in the program; a failing charter school shut down by regulators simply reopened as a private religious school funded by taxpayers.”

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an 225 tex trib

Emboldened by recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings and President Donald Trump’s second term, conservative Christians are rallying behind a series of Texas bills that would further infuse religion into public education and potentially spark legal fights that could upend church-state separations.

Last week, the Texas Senate advanced a bill that would allow public taxpayer money to flow to private, religious schools via vouchers. And on Monday, Sens. Mayes Middleton of Galveston and Phil King of Weatherford filed bills, respectively, that would allow time for prayer in public schools and require classrooms to display the Ten Commandments — both of them priorities for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and co-sponsored by all 20 Republican senators.

The impact could extend beyond Texas. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, those on the religious right see an ally in their decades-long fight to crater the church-state wall and allow more Christianity in classrooms across the country.

“Our schools are not God-free zones,” Middleton said in a statement announcing Senate Bill 11, the school prayer legislation. “We are a state and nation built on ‘In God We Trust.’ … There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in our Constitution, and recent Supreme Court decisions by President Trump’s appointees reaffirmed this.”

Legal experts and religion scholars say those arguments misrepresent history or potentially overestimate the effects of recent high court rulings.

“The Christian Right feels very empowered by this particular moment,” said Mark Chancey, a religion professor at Southern Methodist University who focuses on movements to put Christianity in schools. “They see the present configuration of the U.S. Supreme Court as sympathetic to their efforts.”

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/sXI0TSELvFQRSzr8zEos7JNvoo4=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/3fe9b28556c1d2115474869059d79a99/0624%20Capitol-Austin%20File%20OA%2027.jpg)

A monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Capitol in Austin on June 24, 2024. Credit: Olivia Anderson/The Texas Tribune

The religious right entered this legislative session amid a string of legal and political victories. In just the last few years, state Republicans have required classrooms to hang donated signs that say “In God We Trust”; allowed unlicensed religious chaplains to supplant mental health counselors in public schools; and approved new curriculum materials that teach the Bible and other religious texts alongside grade-school lessons.

Those moves have corresponded with a broader normalization in the GOP of claims that church-state separation is a myth, or that the nation’s founding was ordained by God and its laws and institutions should therefore reflect fundamentalist Christianity. Some lawmakers began the 2025 session with calls for “spiritual warfare” with demonic spirits that they believe seek control of the Capitol.

A new legal landscape

In his statement introducing Senate Bill 10 on the Ten Commandments, King said the legal landscape favored more opportunities for religion in school following the 2022 Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision.

In that landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines that a Washington state school district could not prevent a high school football coach from engaging in prayer with students on the 50-yard line after school games. Justices said the school district’s efforts to discipline the coach and prevent his praying violated his free speech rights and right to freely exercise his religion.

In issuing that opinion, the court outlined that it was moving away from the long relied upon legal test

— called the “Lemon test” — to determine if the government is unconstitutionally allowing the infusion of religion in public spaces.

The more than 50-year-old test has been used by courts to make sure that laws involving religion have primarily non-religious purposes. For example, in the 1980 case Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court relied on the Lemon test — named for a 1971 case — when it struck down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

In the Kennedy decision, justices suggested they were replacing the Lemon test with a consideration of “historical practices and understandings” that is based on an analysis of “original meaning and history.” Legal experts describe the new test as vague and unclear.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/joeZNO6ZS2aiQCgVYcPT_wqf3us=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/b325befd99680ddcd4b266d703c25751/1104%20SCOTUS%20File%20JG%20TT%2008.jpg)

The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington on Nov. 4, 2022. Credit: Jason Garza for The Texas Tribune

Christian conservatives see hope in their path to put religion back in public schools, with the court’s move to sideline the Lemon test. They view the new history-based test as a pathway to reverse long-standing precedents that prohibit school-sponsored prayer or putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Rep. Mike Olcott, R-Aledo, who has proposed his own Ten Commandments bill, said in an email that “after the Kennedy decision, there is no merit in prohibiting expressions of faith or our collective history.”

Under a new history-based test, Matt Krause, a former Texas House member and attorney for the First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal organization, said he thinks a law putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms would survive given their “very conspicuous history” in the U.S. and purported influence on the nation’s laws and government. Among other high-profile cases, First Liberty Institute represented the football coach in the Kennedy case, and Krause has previously testified in favor of putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms in part to prompt a “restoration of faith in America.”

Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro, holds a similar view to Krause. This session, he’s introduced separate bills that would put the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms and allow prayer during the school day. Because of the Kennedy ruling, Spiller said he believes both bills are constitutional — though he wasn’t confident they would have survived prior. A new history-based test would bode well for his Ten Commandments bill, he added, since “most of our laws are based on principles that are contained” within them.

But Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Freedom, which advocates for a strong wall between church and state, said the Constitution and American law are not rooted in Biblical texts.

“There is this zombie myth that all of American law is based on the Ten Commandments,” Tyler said. “But when you look at the U.S. Constitution, there is no mention of God. There is no mention of Christianity. The only mention of religion is to prohibit religious tests for public office.”

Moreover, she takes issue with those arguments, which she said reframe a sacred text as a secular document in order to justify its inclusion in public schools.

“There are so many different translations, and there's just such a rich and diverse depth of the Holy Scripture, she said. “And when the government gets its hands on the Holy Scripture, it standardizes it in ways that really cheapen the mystery and the beauty.”

Religious and legal experts say it isn’t immediately clear exactly how the Supreme Court will apply the history-based test in future cases. There are lingering questions about the specific type of history that would be considered as part of the test.

Chancey, the SMU religion professor, expects those laws, if passed, will prompt lawsuits that could end up in front of the Supreme Court. But he isn’t confident the Ten Commandments bill could survive a test on historical merits.

“There was no time in American history when the Ten Commandments were routinely placed in American public school classrooms,” Chancey said.

School prayer, however, presents a slightly different history. Chancey said while school-endorsed prayer was common in early American history, it was not universal and sometimes divisive.

Steven Collis, director of the First Amendment Center and the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, said he’s also not convinced that the Lemon test has been completely thrown out. It’s possible that some parts of the test could still apply, he added.

The school prayer bill, he said, may address the legal question of whether a school cannot endorse prayer or simply cannot coerce prayer, by directly or indirectly forcing students to partake. The current court appears to be leaning toward the latter, he said, which could mean they’d allow a bill similar to the one proposed to go unchallenged. Prior to Kennedy v. Bremerton and under the old test, however, a similar law likely would have been struck down by lower courts, he said.

In the 1962 case, Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot hold prayers in public schools even if the prayer is not tied to a specific religion and participation is optional. The ruling has since been consistently upheld by subsequent decisions, but conservative groups have pushed for it to be overturned.

Regardless, Collis said parties on both sides of the school prayer and Ten Commandments bills would likely try to get the Supreme Court to “bite off on it.”

Efforts to challenge related bills are already underway. Last November, a federal judge said it was “unconstitutional on its face” for Louisiana to require the Ten Commandments be posted in public school classrooms. In January, a federal circuit court heard an appeal on the case. A decision is pending.

Freedom from religion

The religious right’s legal and legislative pushes have come as America continues to diversify and secularize. At roughly two-thirds of the population, Christians still are by far a majority.

Even so, some Christians have been alarmed by the steady decrease in their share of the population — and the simultaneous rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans. So-called “nones” — short for believing “nothing in particular” — now make up 28% of the U.S. adult population — a 12% jump since 2007 that makes them a larger group than Catholics or Protestants, according to Pew Research.

Religion experts say that trend has been accelerated by broader discontent with organized religion, namely Christianity. Interfaith groups have said as much for years, warning that the push to redefine America as a Christian nation is actually driving people away from religion altogether.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/g0HiYHcR6CVlaGZmYj2Hz2_uV1w=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/3aec7e3283c98f92299b73a39910cbb7/0210%20Religion%20Bills%20LW%20TT%2004.jpg)

Members of atheist and anti-Christian nationalism groups speak with Rep. Jon E. Rosenthal, D-Houston, at his office at the Capitol in Austin on Feb. 10, 2025. Credit: Lorianne Willett/The Texas Tribune

“They are interfering with the right of every American in Texas to practice religion freely, which includes practicing no religion, if that’s what you choose,” said Bee Moorhead, executive director of the interfaith group Texas Impact.

Benjamin Clodfelter counts himself among the 4% of U.S. adults who are atheist — though he has not always been up front about his views. During his 7-year stint in the Army, Clodfelter was a closeted atheist, fearing his disbelief in God would draw unwanted attention and cut off career opportunities.

The U.S. Military is supposed to be secular. But Clodfelter said those rules were openly flouted by his unit leader, who required those in his command to attend prayer breakfasts and, at the same time that he had broad authority over their promotions, told soldiers that “you have to have faith to be a good leader in the Army.”

Ten years after leaving the military, those remarks still stick with him. Clodfelter has since dedicated his life to maintaining a strong church-state wall, serving as a board member for the Atheist Community of Austin and, on Monday, joining about 25 other Texans as they lobbied state lawmakers to preserve those separations.

It’s at times felt like an uphill battle, with increasing hostility crowding out nuanced conversations about religion and government.

“It used to be more of a conversation,” he said. “It was an actual dialogue. And I noticed that there was more thought terminating cliches, where they are just denying the existence of our side. It is both perplexing and really frustrating.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/12/texas-ten-commandments-school-prayer/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

AN 1 25

In his frenetic first week back at the White House, President Donald Trump allowed immigration raids at schools, sidelined federal employees focused on diversity and ended civil rights investigations into book bans.

*This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

But the biggest education story of the week — one that could change public schools forever — broke late Friday afternoon at a building two miles away.

The U.S. Supreme Court, backed by the conservative supermajority Trump secured in his first term, agreed to hear an Oklahoma case over whether the law permits public dollars to flow to an explicitly religious charter school. A decision in favor of the first-of-its kind Catholic school could further entangle the government and religion, dramatically altering the historic balance between church and state.

“The stakes really couldn’t be higher,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. While there are Catholic schools that have converted into secular charters, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School’s “ultimate goal,” according to its website, is “eternal salvation.”

“The issue,” Black said, “is whether a religious entity can operate a charter school that teaches religion as truth.”

Trump supports Christianity in the classroom and has vowed to bring prayer back to public schools. But he’s just the most recognizable face of a larger movement that has been building toward this moment — one that includes governors and state lawmakers, right-leaning think tanks and wealthy donors. Those donors have not only financed campaigns to seat conservative justices, but also helped fund the years of legal work that ultimately landed the school’s application before the high court.

Some evangelicals believe the courts have long misapplied Thomas Jefferson’s famous words about “a wall of separation between church and state.” Dismissed by most constitutional experts, this view holds that Jefferson’s aim was to keep the federal government from interfering with religious freedom — not to protect the government from the church.

The debate over the school will culminate in oral arguments before the Supreme Court in late April.

Governors in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, who advocate for weaving the Bible into classroom instruction, have long awaited such a case. “Denying St. Isidore a charter solely because they’re religious is flat-out unconstitutional,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt posted on X. “This will be one of the most significant decisions of our lifetime.”

But his state’s GOP attorney general disagrees. Gentner Drummond’s office will argue that both state and federal laws clearly require charter schools to be non-sectarian. That view was summed up by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who said reversing the Oklahoma court’s decision “would drive a dagger into the very idea of public education and strike at the heart of our nation’s democratic foundations.”

One justice who won’t be involved in the decision is Trump’s most recent Supreme Court appointee. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from deliberating over whether to hear the case. While the court offered no explanation, Barrett is a longtime friend of Nicole Garnett, the Notre Dame University law professor who advised the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa on the charter application. Garnett, who had no comment on Barrett’s recusal, also sits on the board of the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal organization that has influenced Trump and previous Republican presidents on judicial appointments.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from deciding whether to hear the case. She is a longtime friend of a Notre Dame law professor who advised the Catholic church on the charter application. (Sarah Silbiger-Pool/Getty Images)

But attorneys for the school may not need Barrett’s vote. Four of the other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch — have all voiced support for greater religious freedom. Over a decade ago, Thomas wrote an opinion suggesting states could establish their own Christian denominations. More recently, in 2022, Gorsuch referred to the “so-called” separation of church and state in a case over whether Boston should fly a Christian flag outside City Hall.

While Chief Justice John Roberts takes a more cautious approach to court precedents, he has sided with the conservative majority in all of its most recent church-state cases. Two of them, *Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue* and *Carson v. Makin*, focused on choice programs at religious schools.

Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the state’s charter school board, draws on those cases to conclude that charter schools are inherently private organizations — not “state actors.” By keeping St. Isadore closed, the Alliance argues, Oklahoma is discriminating against religion and denying families more options.

“Oklahoma parents and children are better off with more educational choices, not fewer,” Jim Campbell, the Alliance’s chief legal counsel, said in a statement.

In a brief in support of the charter school, eight GOP-led states said that prohibiting the funding of religious charter schools would compromise their ability to award grants or contracts to other sectarian organizations, like orphanages and groups providing scholarships.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools dismissed that fear and said a charter is not “merely a grant program.”

“The charter school is a state-created public school under Oklahoma law, and its actions are state actions,” the organization wrote in its brief.

Black agreed, saying that the school’s argument “has no grounding in facts or law.”

The court’s decision to take the case left the law professor with an “enormous pit” in his stomach. Black worries the justices don’t fully understand the complexities of public education funding, particularly the differences between charters, vouchers and education savings accounts.

“That leads to either honest errors, misunderstandings or the ability of other people to lead you astray,” he said.

Experts say it’s hard to ignore the strides evangelical Republicans have made at elevating the importance of Christianity in the classroom.

Red states aren’t just passing voucher programs that allow parents to pay tuition at faith-based schools; they’re also incorporating Bible lessons into the curriculum. If the court rules in favor of the school, Preston Green, a University of Connecticut education and law professor, predicts religious organizations would suddenly “clamour” to open faith-based charters.

“We’re on the verge of a new system where religious organizations are going to be among the players” running schools, he said. “How do states deal with that reality?”

In addition to allowing public education funds to support a specific faith, a decision in favor of religious charters could also have a devastating financial impact on traditional districts fighting to prevent enrollment loss, Black said. Oklahoma already offers a tax credit scholarship program for school choice, but it doesn’t always cover the full tuition at a private school. Families who want their child to have a Christian education might be more likely to flock to a religious charter school where the cost is fully covered, he explained.

Robert Franklin, a former member of the state’s charter board, is already thinking about those ramifications. Like public school advocates in other red states, he’s concerned that expanding private school choice will hit rural schools the hardest and leave less funding for traditional schools.

“Oklahoma is a deeply red state,” he said. “I don’t think we have an appetite for raising taxes around here to support schools.”

Franklin has a unique vantage point on the constitutional dispute that began overtwo years ago. He voted against St. Isidore’s contract in 2023 and says he felt “vindicated” last year when the state’s high court struck it down. But he’s less confident the U.S. Supreme Court will rule the same way.

“It’s a tumultuous moment,” he said. “There are a lot of forces pulling the other direction.”

an 1 25

Soon Gov. Kristi Noem could be installed as the next Secretary of Homeland Security. In one of her last official acts as governor, Noem managed to instill some uncertainty in South Dakota’s public education system.

During her budget speech, Noem claimed she wanted to continue to “prioritize education.” Notice that she didn’t say “prioritize public education.” In what was likely her final budget address to the Legislature, Noem proposed an ongoing $4 million expenditure to help families pay for private school tuition and other forms of alternative instruction.

Her largesse toward families seeking to pay for a private school education came during a budget address in which she:

Offered a paltry 1.25% funding increase for the “big three” of health care, public education and state employee salaries.Unveiled $71.9 million in budget reductions and discretionary changes.Included in the budget cuts a $2 million reduction for the Board of Regents and a $3.6 million cut for South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

Noem proposed that the state would pay about $3,000 per student annually for private school tuition or alternative instruction. Private schools, homeschoolers and other forms of alternative instruction operate under a different set of rules. It’s a veritable wild west of schools that can be unaccredited or accredited by someone other than the state. In other words, good luck figuring out how your tax dollars are being spent.

It’s probably possible to figure out how much money the state of South Dakota has invested in public education since statehood. Instead of doing the math, let’s just assume it totals in the billions of dollars. It seems at cross purposes for the state to make that kind of long-term investment in public education only to turn around and start funding its competitors.

Instead of tackling the bigger issues in public education, Noem has revved up the Legislature for a fight over an idea that’s trendy in conservative circles. It’s also an idea that the state can’t afford. Any state budget that proposes tens of millions in cuts isn’t likely to have a spare $4 million. If there is $4 million extra in the state budget, it should be funneled into teacher salaries.

Through neglect and short-sightedness lawmakers and the governor have let teachers’s salaries sink back near the bottom of the barrel nationally. Noem’s proposed 1.25% increase in education funding certainly isn’t going to do much to get South Dakota’s national teacher salary ranking out of the basement.

With its low teacher salary ranking, South Dakota’s universities find themselves training the next generation of teachers for the surrounding states that make a greater attempt to pay teachers what they are worth. When qualified teachers become harder to attract because of South Dakota’s low salaries, school districts will be forced to cut their offerings, hamstringing the very education that Noem says she has gone to such great lengths to “prioritize.”

The last time South Dakota made any progress in this area was in 2016 when Gov. Dennis Daugaard led an effort to raise the state sales tax by half a percent with some of the funds dedicated to raising teachers’ salaries. Since then, lawmakers have cut the state sales tax and mandated a $45,000 minimum salary for public school teachers without offering any extra funding to help schools reach that goal.

Given the state of the budget Noem proposed, lawmakers would do well to put their efforts into protecting public education and finding a funding source that could ensure that the state’s teacher salaries are no longer a national embarrassment.

South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com.

Failing AZ charter school reopens as a private religious school — funded by taxpayers

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Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools

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an 3 24

in August of 2023, Politico reported that right-wing billionaire Leonard Leo is "best known as Donald Trump's White House 'court whisperer," having "played a behind-the-scenes role in the nominations of all three of the former president's Supreme Court justices and promoted them through his multi-billion-dollar network of nonprofits."

Caroline Ciccone, president of the watchdog Accountable.US, told Politico "Leo spent years stacking the court with ideological kindred spirits. Now he's funding a dark web of special interest groups to push an extreme agenda."

According to a Monday, March 18 report published by Rolling Stone, the billionaire — "long averse to media attention" — in a recent podcast interview first reported by Accountable.US "spoke about his $1.6 billion dark money fund, called the Marble Freedom Trust, explaining: 'We’re trying to really institute a lot of legal and social change through philanthropy.'"

The conservative activist, according to Rolling Stone, "also offered his thoughts on how billionaires can help conservatives limit regulations, take over corporate C-suites, reshape America’s education system, and influence our culture," and as a "devout Catholic, additionally discussed his interest in reforming religious institutions."

Speaking "with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of surveillance company Palantir and the University of Austin, a conservative alternative college he started with journalist Bari Weiss," Rolling Stone notes, Leo said, "It’s really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress," urging "the ultra-wealthy to support these litigation efforts."

Referring to the conservative-majority high court, he emphasized, "We have a great Overton window in the next couple of decades to really try to create a free society. And I think we should take full advantage of it."

Additionally, as a proponent of the effort to establish a publicly funded religious school in Oklahoma, Leo also "talked about the need to reform the clergy," during the interview, saying, "This is one that I just started thinking about, there’s the whole issue of clergy, and this is a tough one to crack. This may not be for everybody, but my own perspective is: God made us to know him, to love him, and to serve him. And I think our religious leaders need to center more on that, and less on knowing, loving, and serving ourselves, and whatever personal desires or affections we may have."

Furthermore on the subject of education, the billionaire added, "We need to create talent pipelines for K-12 education and for higher ed, something like you’re doing with the University of Austin, so that we remind people that the purpose of higher ed, for example, is to basically build a citizenry that’s committed to the Constitution as it was originally written."

Rolling Stone reports "Leo explained this means recruiting teachers and working to influence education board races, 'so that we can begin to have some sanity and local education.'"

*Rolling Stone's full report is availableat this link (subscription required)

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tension between est'b clause and

https://archive.org/details/6419432-Amicus-brief-of-Rusty-Bowers-Speaker-of-the

2019

Espinoza v. Montana Dep't of Revenue, No. 18-1195

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espinoza_v._Montana_Department_of_Revenue

Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 591 U.S. _ (2020), was a landmark^[1][2][3][4] United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that a state-based scholarship program that provides public funds to allow students to attend private schools cannot discriminate against religious schools under the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution.^[5]

Background[

Kendra Espinoza, primary plaintiff, on Reason TV in 2020

The state of Montana passed a special income tax credit program in 2015 to help fund non-profit scholarship organizations to help low-income families pay for private schools. For tax payers, they were able to pay up to US$150 into the program and receive a dollar-for-dollar state tax credit to support it. This type of tax-credit scholarship program for private school selection is similar to ones in eighteen other states as of 2019.^[6]

Montana, as with 37 other states, have so-called Blaine amendments in their constitutions which were originally designed to prevent funding Catholic schools in the 19th century.^[7][3] Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said that the continued purpose of these Blaine amendments "serve significant government interests — leaving the support of churches to church members, while also protecting houses of worship against discrimination and interference from the government."^[8]

Montana's constitution bars the uses of "any direct or indirect appropriations or payment" to any religious organizations or schools affiliated with religious organizations, also known as the "no-aid" provision.^[7] The Montana Department of Revenue (DoR) developed the program's rules around the no-aid provision and disallowed religious-affiliated schools from receiving any of the scholarship money, otherwise known as "Rule 1".^[9] Rule 1 was controversial even within the state government, as both state legislators and the attorney general had asserted it was not needed, but the DoR implemented it against their cautions, asserting that the scholarship funds were equivalent to appropriations and thus covered by the no-aid provision.^[9]

Three low-income families who had children attended Stillwater Christian School in Flathead County and would have been eligible for scholarships through the program outside of their school choice filed a lawsuit against the state and sought an injunction against the program, asserting that Rule 1 unnecessary against the no-aid provision and that it discriminated against them due to their religion under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[9] Their lawsuit was supported by the Institute for Justice, a non-profit organization that has fought against state laws that enforce the Blaine amendments in their constitutions.^[1] They obtained the injunction to block the DoR from enforcing the rule in April 2016.^[9] The state began to appeal this ruling, but otherwise continued the program with the ordered injunction, which allowed additional scholarships to be granted for several children attending Stillwater.

The state's appeal to the Montana Supreme Court was decided in December 2018, which ruled in a 5–2 decision that the entire program was unconstitutional because it benefited religious schools.^[10] The Court majority stated that the "[Constitution of Montana] more broadly prohibits 'any' state aid to sectarian schools and draws a more stringent line than that drawn by [the U.S. Constitution]."^[11] Further, the Court found that even with the DoR's Rule 1 in place, the program still could not prevent any type of aid from the program from ending up at a religious school, and thus nullified the entire program.^[10][11]

Supreme Court[

The families petitioned to the United States Supreme Court for review, seeking review of the Montana Supreme Court's decision to terminate the program on the basis of the Religion Clauses or Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in June 2019.^[6]

Oral arguments were heard on January 22, 2020. The Justices focused on whether the Montana Supreme Court's decision to shut down the entire program was discriminatory towards the secular schools, as well as trying to resolve this case with recent decision related to the Free Exercise Clause, such as Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer,^[12] in which the Court previously ruled that blocking public funds to be used by a church to improve playground safety was a violation of the Free Exercise Clause.^[7]

Majority opinion[

The Court issued its decision on June 30, 2020.^[13] The 5–4 decision reversed the Montana Supreme Court's ruling and remanded the case.^[14] Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. Roberts wrote in his opinion that the no-aid provision (Rule 1) in the program violated the Free Exercise clause,^[15] as it "bars religious schools from public benefits solely because of the religious character of the schools" and "also bars parents who wish to send their children to a religious school from those same benefits, again solely because of the religious character of the school."^[16] Roberts also asserted that the Montana Supreme Court was wrong to invalidate the entire program on the basis of the no-aid provision in the state constitution.^[16] Roberts wrote that "A state need not subsidize private education. But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious."^[1] Roberts based part of the majority's opinion on the previous Trinity case where the public funds were used for a non-secular purpose (church playground improvement), while contrasting it from the decision of Locke v. Davey,^[17] where the Court found that preventing the use of public scholarship funds for students entering into theology studies was constitutional.^[18]

Concurrences[

Justice Thomas wrote his own concurrence which was joined by Gorsuch. While he agreed with the judgement, Thomas believed the court should have relied on the Establishment Clause, in which the scholarship program, without Rule 1, would not have established any government-backed support of any specific religion.^[19]

Alito's concurrent discussed the history of the Blaine amendments, including mention of the 1871 political cartoon by Thomas Nast "The American River Ganges".

Justice Alito also concurred. Alito cited the Court's earlier decision in Ramos v. Louisiana,^[20] in which judgement was partially based on the motivation of outdated Jim Crow laws in the nature of jury verdicts. Alito wrote that the no-aid provision in Montana's constitution must be considered the same way: "Montana's no-aid provision was modeled on the failed Blaine Amendment to the Constitution, which was prompted by virulent prejudice against Catholic immigrants. Montana's claim that the provision merely reflects a state interest in preserving public schools ignores that the public-school (or common-school) movement at the time was itself anti-Catholic. It is also not clear that the anti-Catholic animus was scrubbed from the no-aid provision when it was re-adopted at Montana's constitutional convention in 1972."^[19][21]

Justice Gorsuch also wrote a concurrence, emphasizing that the Free Exercise Clause "protects not just the right to be a religious person, holding beliefs inwardly and secretly; it also protects the right to act on those beliefs outwardly and publicly. Our cases have long recognized the importance of protecting religious actions, not just religious status."^[19]

Dissents[

Separate dissents were written by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor, with Justice Elena Kagan joining on both Ginsburg and Breyer's dissents. Ginsburg, in her dissent, acknowledged to Roberts' point that states are not required to subsidize private education and in the case of Montana, their court discontinued the program, which does not affect the Free Exercise Clause. She wrote, "Petitioners may still send their children to a religious school... There simply are no scholarship funds to be had."^[22][23] Sotomayor called the majority's ruling "perverse" in requiring Montana "to reinstate a tax-credit program that the Constitution did not demand in the first place."^[24]

Impact[

The Espinoza decision is seen likely to impact subsequent rules in the 38 states with Blaine amendments.^[7][3][25] At the time of the decision 17 states had scholarship programs similar to Montana's, though some like Florida and Indiana had already found means to allow such funds to be used for selection of religious schools despite no-aid clauses in their constitutions. The Institute for Justice, which represented the parents, plans to use the ruling to challenge programs in Maine and Vermont which do block such funds. U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a proponent of school choice and who has been seeking a federal-level tax-credit program, also praised the decision.^[26]

References

mma 6 22

sTEVE DOOCY(CO-HOST): Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, a brand new book that hits the shelves today. In it, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin discuss how American education has been destroyed and what we can do to restore it. Here's an excerpt. "Make no mistake about it the historical singularity that was America's founding was a result of classical Christian education. Full stop. Our founders did not stumble their way to brilliance of 1776. They were forged in the foundry of the education of their time." And Pete and David join us live right now. And they've got the number one book in the world. Who's who?

PETE HEGSETH (AUTHOR, FOX AND FRIENDS WEEKEND CO-HOST): Pete. David.

DOOCY: Thank you very much. David, it's very nice to meet you. We were talking to Pete about this yesterday. This is part of a master plan that a lot of people don't have any idea has been going on for decades.

DAVID GOODWIN (AUTHOR): Right.

DOOCY: Regarding education in the country.

GOODWIN: Yes. Well, you know, that's when I was doing the research, some of the research through the original book, which The New Republic in the early part of the 20th century. I thought I would find a lot about labor unions and a lot about minimum wage, a lot about, you know, the things that we know that the progressives were talking about at the time. But education was in every issue. And I was wondering, why.

DOOCY: Right. And Pete who would –who drew up this master plan?

HEGSETH: Well, there were a lot of – there wasn't one master architect, John Dewey's the father of the progressive educational system.

DOOCY: But they were like-minded.

HEGSETH: Very like-minded. Almost all atheists. Almost all socialists. Eventually, almost all Marxists.And they had a plan to capture the minds of our youngest kids. And we're not talking about the lunacy of higher education. This is K through 12. They knew the affections of young people. Elementary school students would shape the way they view America, their faith, for the rest of their life. And so they set it out on a course. They didn't know exactly where it would lead, Steve. All of these architects of progressives, but they knew where it wouldn't lead: Not toward Biblical wisdom, not toward appreciation for our founding documents.And people say to David I all the time, How do I not know this history?

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: 100-year history. You know why? Because the progressives write the history. They write the textbooks.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: So, David and I had to dig underneath everything that's hidden to find out the real story of how they captured K through 12.

DOOCY: You know, and David, we've known for a long time that America's colleges, for the most part. are way to the left, very progressive. But I don't think a lot of people realized until the last decade or so when they started looking in America'stextbooks,how far to the left aome are trying to drag K through 12.

GOODWIN: Well, they've had the advantage. When you have the college system, you control the instruments of education all the way down to the kindergarten. Right. Because you train the teachers, you train the administrators, you train the curriculum providers. You're the ones doing the accreditation, the college – at the college level. All of that flows right from the, you know, kind of nodes of control that the progressives had.

DOOCY: And, you know Pete, so many parents got a good look at what their kids were doing during COVID-19. Your first chapter is our COVID 1619 moment.

HEGSETH: It's exactly right. You're at home looking at your kid's curriculum through your laptop, and suddenly there's a new founding date on their screen, 1619 or they're talking about gender pronouns for seven or eight-year-olds.[note no eg] So we start with the problem, and the first step to any recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And we outline that. But the best part of the book, in our opinion is those five chapters at the end that are about the solution. AndDavid runs the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: Classical Christian Dot Org. There are hundreds of wonderful brick-and-mortar schools across the country that are the exact opposite of what our government schools provide right now. There are online options, there arehomeschoolcurriculum options. The insurgency to take our classroom back has begun, and that's the preferred form of ideological warfare of the weak against the small. You do not have to default to progressive public schools, because otherwise, you're going to war with an educational complex that has 40 hours a week to capture your kid's mind. And that's why we call it a battle. It really is for parents and grandparents.