The Western Journal | Randy DeSoto | October 25, 2021
Parents in large numbers have decided they are done with public schools over frustrations with COVID-19 mandates and controversial curriculum such as Critical Race Theory.
Many students are flooding into Christian schools or are now being homeschooled.
“We see the Christian schools here in my city really exploding, and some of them have waiting lists. They can’t enroll everybody,” E. Ray Moore, chairman of the Christian Education Initiative, based in Columbia, South Carolina, told The Western Journal.
He added the same is true nationwide based on the Christian school contacts he has, whether in solid blue states like Washington or red ones like Idaho.
The New York Times reported, “In the 2019-20 school year, 3.5 million of the 54 million American schoolchildren attended religious schools, including almost 600,000 in ‘conservative Christian’ schools, according to the latest count by the Education Department.”
Additionally, “The median member school in the Association of Christian Schools International, one of the country’s largest networks of evangelical schools, grew its K-12 enrollment by 12 percent between 2019-20 and 2020-21.”
“The Association of Classical Christian Schools, another conservative network, expanded to educating about 59,200 students this year from an estimated 50,500 in the 2018-19 school year,” according to the Times.
Brian Ray, head of the Oregon-based National Home Education Research Institute, determined there were about 3.7 million homeschooled K-12 students in 2020-2021, up from 2.5 million in the spring of 2019.
Moore says there are multiple reasons for the exit from public schools.
Clearly a desire by parents and kids to have in-person learning amid the coronavirus pandemic was one, as well as mask mandates and other COVID-related policies.
“And then, of course the vaccination, forcing that on children. A lot of people, and I don’t recommend it, might have taken the vaccinations as adults, but they don’t want their children to be vaccinated with an experimental vaccination,” Moore said.
“I was just on a call today with some people in California, and they think it’s just going to be an enormous amount of people leaving out there over it,” he added.
Earlier this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced all K-12 students will be required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine after it has been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Controversial curriculum, such as Critical Race Theory and teaching on gender and sexuality are other factors causing parents to want to pull their kids out of public schools.
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CRT is the “latest egregious thing that’s got people upset,” Moore said.
Florida mom Quisha King, co-chair of Moms for Liberty, made headlines earlier this month when she called for a “mass exodus” from public schools at the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit .
“You do not have the right to indoctrinate our children,” she said regarding public school educators. “They are our children. They were given to us by God, and you do not have the right to teach this nonsense.”
“It is infuriating that they think that they do have the right to take our taxpaying dollars … and teach them garbage,” King continued. “I really think at this point the only thing to do is have a mass exodus from the public school system.”
Newsmax host Eric Bolling, noting King got a standing ovation at the conference, asked her to explain what aspect of the CRT curriculum she finds objectionable.
She summarized CRT teaching as: “If you are white you are an oppressor and if you are black or a minority, you are oppressed.”
“That is highly detrimental to young minds,” King argued. “They won’t have any hope for the future.”
She quoted the Bible verse Proverbs 13:12, which says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”
“Their hearts will be sick, if they are constantly berated with information that says, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing for you. You’re either an oppressor or oppressed,’” King said.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — who grew up in the Jim Crow segregated South — also voiced her opposition to CRT this week on ABC’s “The View,” arguing kids need a hopeful outlook.
“One of the worries that I have about the way we are talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past. I don’t think that’s very productive. Or black people have to feel disempowered by race,” Rice said.
“I would like black kids to be completely empowered, to know that they are beautiful in their blackness, but in order to do that I don’t have to make white kids bad for being white,” she added.
Moore sees the current exit from public schools as a “kairos moment,” from the Greek meaning an opportune time or a special time appointed by God.
“There’s an awakening going on,” he said.
“Growing Christian campus schools and homeschooling is the key for the revival of our families, our churches and our nation.”