According to The Post & Courier, homeschoolers are encouraging conservative denominations (i.e. Southern Baptists, Free Methodists) to pull their children out of public schools and homeschool them. This is partly due to religious reasons, but also because of concerns over violence and negative behavior patterns that children develop in a public-school setting. The full text of the article is excerpted below…

Homeschoolers Pressing Conservative Denominations to Leave Public Schools

by Michael Gartland

The public school system, he says, is like the Titanic right after it hit the iceberg.

The parents are the passengers, and they're faced with a decision: Get on a life boat or stay on the sinking ship and start bailing water.

For E. Ray Moore Jr., the choice was simple. He would row his family to safety.

His journey began in 1977, when, as a seminary student in Indiana, Moore and his wife decided to home-school their son.

"We kind of stumbled into it," he says. "We didn't discuss it with anyone, we just did it."

Since then, he has become a national figure in the home-schooling movement. For the past three years, he has lobbied religious groups to call for an exodus from the public school system and has made headway with the Free Methodists, the Assemblies of God and the Presbyterian Church in America, all conservative denominations. His most notable success so far has come out of his work with the Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest Protestant denomination.

Moore is not a Baptist, but he visited national conferences in 2004 and 2005 to fight for his cause. Each trip has yielded a small victory. In 2004, the convention considered a resolution that would call for Baptists to consider removing their children from "officially Godless" public schools. The resolution failed, but it attracted media attention and helped build momentum for the movement. In 2005, Moore and other home-schooling advocates pushed through a resolution that called for parents to investigate public schools for pro-homosexual agendas.

By the end of this year's conference, which took place in Greensboro, N.C., this past week, home-schooling advocates had pushed for the convention to begin developing an exit strategy from the public school system. The resolution failed, but a motion calling for a study on Baptist children's issues passed.

Bruce Shortt, sponsor of the resolution, said its failure will not stop him from continuing to press the convention on the issue. He views the upcoming study as a victory.

"This was never an issue before within the Southern Baptist Convention," he says. "Public schools were viewed as a sacred institution. That's breaking down. They can't deny the systematic data, and they're also seeing it in their own communities."

Recent developments at the Southern Baptist Convention reflect not only home-schooling's movement into the mainstream, but also the growing popularity of an aggressive move to do away with public schools.

Number of Homeschoolers Increasing Each Year by 7-12 Percent

Over the past decade, home schooling has transformed itself from what was once regarded as the marginal purview of religious zealots to a system that many universities embrace as exceptional. The number of students now receiving their education at home is estimated to be between 1 million and 2 million, depending on who provides the statistics.

The National Home Education Research Institute says 2.1 million, while the National Center for Education Statistics puts it closer to 900,000. Moore favors the higher number because, as he explains it, many home-school parents are not reporting to the government anymore. He also estimates that the number of home-schoolers is increasing by 7 percent to 12 percent each year.

If the trend continues, as he hopes it will, Moore predicts the public school system will collapse within the next decade.

"If I drop dead tomorrow," he says, "the ship will just keep going."

The disconnect

Denise Cassano is just one more reason home schooling continues to pick up steam in the United States. The Mount Pleasant resident is a mother of six and began home-schooling her children when her eldest son, Anson, came home with a story about his third-grade teacher. The teacher told him that early America was settled for solely economic reasons.

Cassano pressed her son: But what about religious freedom?

The teacher said it had nothing to do with religion, Anson replied. Then he said: The teacher's the expert.

Cassano wasn't so sure.

"One of the books she sent him home with dealt with suicide and adultery," she recalls.

All of this persuaded her to change drastically how her children would experience their education. That transition brought with it sacrifice.

Before deciding to home-school her children, Cassano worked as a pharmacist. Afterward, she no longer contributed that paycheck to the family budget.

"We had to downsize. We had to move into a smaller house," she says. "But you can't equate your child with the money you would have made."

Parents who home-school often talk about the stronger relationships they've built with their children, the bonds that only long hours spent together can form.

Beth Harrell of Johns Island taught English in private and public schools before deciding to home-school, and says it has made her daughter more mature than most kids her age, and also has brought them closer to one another.

"When you are with your children 24-7, they see every weakness you have in your character," Harrell says. "People talk about spending quality time with their kids. You need to have quantity of time as well as quality."

But it isn't for everyone, she says. Harrell thinks home schooling depends on the individual, that some parents are better off sending their kids to school, whether it be private or public. Compared with Moore's views on schooling, hers and Cassano's are moderate.

"We don't look at home schooling as this great movement," Cassano says. "There are many children out there who don't have options. If we eliminate public schools, where do those children go?"

The battle to home-school

Back in 1989, Kathleen Carper felt as if she didn't have much in the way of options for her two daughters.

She and her family had just moved from Mississippi after her husband accepted a job at the University of South Carolina. They were looking for a way to home-school their children.

Logistically, it wasn't easy. Not many parents home-schooled then, and those who did were forced to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get the job done within the prescribed legal bounds.

The inconvenience this caused prompted districts to slap parents and home-schoolers with truancy charges and eventually led to a lawsuit that went to the state Supreme Court.

It also led to the creation of the South Carolina Association of Independent Home Schools.

Following the lawsuit, that organization served as a clearinghouse for all home-schooling parents. Being affiliated with it gave parents the legal right of way to teach their own children, so naturally Carper became a founding member.

She is now the organization's president, and says that plenty has changed since she first became actively involved with the issue 17 years ago.

"Legislators at the time didn't understand home schooling. They had never even heard of home schooling," she says. "There was a statewide support group in place, but everyone had to go through the school district to home-school. … At one point, I had a question for a district official, and she wouldn't talk to me. The higher-ups in the district had told them: Don't give any time to these home-schoolers unless it's after school hours."

That changed when state legislators started getting wind of how well home-school students scored on standardized tests. In 1992, they passed a law that made it much easier for parents to home-school and, as a result, the practice has become much more common in South Carolina.

The fact that the state has one of the lowest performing public school systems in the country hasn't hurt the home-schooler's cause, either.

"We have schools where children just aren't safe," Carper says. "If you don't have the means to pay to send your child to private school, what do you do?"

Politics

For moms such as Carper, home schooling becomes the only option. But only until the children have graduated from the high school level.

Then there are colleges to choose from, and some are turning to schools that are more consistent with the values typically associated with home schooling. Christian, conservative and creationist, to name three.

One school that caters almost exclusively to home-schoolers is Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va. About 85 percent of the student body is made up of home-schoolers, and many go on to prestigious internships in the White House and Congress.

Much of what attracts these students, many of whom are of Ivy League caliber, is values. Jennifer Gruenke teaches core courses in biology and says that unlike many secular liberal arts colleges, Christianity is not ignored at Patrick Henry.

But neither is evolution. And neither is creationism.

"There are some creationists who are anti-intellectual in approach," she says. "I don't believe you have to check your brain at the door to be a creationist."

The fact that creationism is even on the table puts many students at ease. For many, it was a determining factor in their parents' decision to home-school in the first place.

The biggest challenges aren't ideological but practical, Gruenke says. Many lag in science and math, and for most, it takes time to adjust to a classroom environment.

In America, where students lag behind the rest of the world in math and science, people might find this trend distressing, but not Gruenke.

"The students coming in now are the first wave of home-schoolers," she says. "The parents and the system are still trying to figure things out. They're still trying to work the kinks out of the whole home-schooling thing."

For Moore, it's better to work those kinks out than to bother with the public schools.

To encourage people to leave the schools, he started Exodus Mandate in 1998. In the time since its founding, he has tried to reframe the debate on whether Christians should allow their children to go to public school.

"The Christian community will never defeat a postmodernist, humanist culture with most of its children in postmodernist, humanist schools," he says. "You can't put them in a pagan school and be faithful to your Christianity at that point."

He objects to the tolerance of, and what he describes as the embrace of, homosexuality in some public schools. But his critics say that Moore is blowing the issue way out of proportion.

Charles Haynes is the director of education programs at the First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C., and describes Moore's work as a propaganda campaign.

"I'm not trying to paint an overly rosy picture. What Moore's talking about does exist. There are problems," Haynes says. "But a few bad stories have been used to paint the public schools with an anti-Christian brush. And that's wrong. … To poison the well for Christian parents by mischaracterizing the schools, that's an unfair tactic."

Moore, of course, disagrees. He sees what he's doing as absolutely necessary. He has another, somewhat mixed metaphor to explain it.

He describes a war. The liberals have gained the high ground, he says. They are on the mountain. They are in control. The Christian conservatives are in a valley, and it is nighttime.

In Moore's view, this will be the final battle in the culture wars. And it will be fought in the school systems.

"Let's pick up our family, our children and take them to the promised land of home schooling," he says. "We're in the mode now of survival."