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Evangelicals Pulling
Kids Out
Of Schools
By AP
from 365Gay.com on the Web, September 2, 2006
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New York City -- 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 own 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."
The father of nine homeschooled children, Moran 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 homeschooling 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
homeschooling by encouraging parents already experienced at it to mentor
families wanting to try it.
"Homeschoolers 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 Homeschooling
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 to 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 homeschoolers -- there were at least
1.1 million of them in 2003, according to federal figures, and perhaps more than
2 million now, according to homeschool advocates.
According to a federal survey, 72 percent of homeschooling 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."
Haynes says public school critics have gained an audience with shrewd
Internet-based communication tactics, quickly spreading anecdotes -- real or
exaggerated -- of incidents perceived as anti-religious or too approving of
homosexuality and teen sexual freedom.
For example, word spread among conservatives last year that school officials in
the Dallas suburb of Plano had banned students from wearing red and green
because the colors represented Christmas. The district sent e-mails to
parents denying the "false rumor."
"Parents all over the country get the few bad stories and believe this is what
public schools are all about," Haynes said.
Enrollment at conservative Christian schools is overwhelmingly white, as are the
ranks of homeschoolers, but faith-based disenchantment with public schools
transcends racial boundaries.
Joyce and Eric Burges of Baker, La., founded an association seeking to encourage
more black families to follow them into homeschooling.
"African-American children have been beat up so bad in public schools -- more
parents are looking at the Christian alternative," said Joyce Burges.
Black or white, parents can be financially challenged by a move away from public
schools.
Tim Sierer, headmaster of a Christian academy in Brookhaven, Pa., helped launch
a Web site in March -- DiscoverChristianSchools.com -- to assist parents
considering the switch.
"It's not a decision to take lightly," said Sierer, noting that Christian school
tuitions in his region range up to $10,000.
Some activists say the financial challenges can be overcome with creativity.
Houston lawyer Bruce Shortt, author of "The Harsh Truth About Public Schools,"
says some homeschooling parents are forming co-ops to pool their resources.
Evangelical churches should offer space for such programs, he says, perhaps with
a computer-based component in which students are taught online by accredited
teachers.
"There are many new models evolving for Christian education," said Shortt, who
homeschools his three sons. "We need to create a new school system, not
supported by tax dollars but public in the sense that it's open to anyone."
The head of Christian Educators Association International, which represents
devout teachers in public and private schools, urges parents to reflect
carefully on their choices. "One size does not fit all," says Finn Laursen,
arguing that public, private and at-home education all might be good options.
"Don't just hammer public schools," Laursen said. "Go in there and take them
back."
However, Mohler, the Southern Baptist seminary president, says court rulings and
government mandates have sharply limited the ability of parents and local school
boards to control public education.
It's become a "new normal" for younger parents to consider alternatives, he
said. "It's a very different assumption from their parents' generation."
Yet even as he urges an "exit strategy," Mohler says there will be a cost to
America if the call is widely heeded.
"One of the great missions of the public schools was to bring together children
of divergent backgrounds -- I benefited from that," he said. "There is a
loss in this."
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