Taxpayers are funding private school tuition. It's helping classical Christian schools expand

HURST, Texas -- Keith Castello spends a lot of time praying about available real estate. Driving in his white pickup under a glaring Texas sun, the classical Christian school administrator points out empty office parks, a shopping mall, and an old church -- all locations he is scouting for new Christian schools.

Demand is booming, he says. And part of that demand comes from a new state incentive: taxpayer money for kids who attend Christian schools.

This summer, Texas began rolling out $1 billion in public funding that eligible families can put toward private education expenses. Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country have approved a cascade of similar programs in the past six years, alarming public school advocates.

These programs mean half of school-age children in the United States are now eligible to apply for state money to attend private schools. In the U.S., most private schools are religious. Securing public money for them raises issues over church-state separation but fulfills a longstanding goal for Christian conservatives, who lobbied for this funding.

"I have been praying for 28 years for things that are coming to fruition right now," said Castello, who is launching three classical Christian schools this fall under his Kyrie Christian Academy brand.

Those suburban Texas schools are part of a larger network, the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which has ties to the Trump administration and was founded by Doug Wilson, a conservative Idaho pastor and writer. The schools offer a liberal arts education, with an added emphasis on virtue and a biblical worldview.

The annual ACCS conference in June in Atlanta buzzed with talk of the historic shift in school funding, which bolsters a conservative Christian push to remake the education landscape. Critics worry it will drain public schools, which educate students of all religious backgrounds and political persuasions. When students leave their public school, state money allocated to educate each student goes away too.

Conservatives are banding together to leverage these expanding taxpayer-funded scholarships. Last year, ACCS formed a coalition with some powerful conservative groups, including Turning Point Education and the Heritage Foundation. Their goal is to convert or create 5,000 new classical Christian schools in the next decade with 1.5 million students nationwide.

The aim, according to ACCS President David Goodwin, is to take a share of public funding and educate future leaders through Christian schools. "It sounds like a very ambitious goal, but this money has never been there before," he said.

The Association of Classical Christian Schools calls its campaign the "Battle for the American School." It's a riff on the 2022 bestselling book Goodwin co-wrote with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who sent his children to ACCS schools before joining President Donald Trump's cabinet. Their book, "Battle for the American Mind," extols classical education and critiques the prevailing public school model.

Hegseth remains a booster: The Pentagon recently introduced a form of classical education into government-run schools on military bases.

The ACCS version of classical Christian education is proudly erudite: The Oxford-educated Christian writer C.S. Lewis is a lodestar, and students study the "great books." Its teaching methods draw from ancient and medieval sources with a strong focus on Western Christian history.

The schools have their roots in a radical source. Wilson, the founder of ACCS, is a self-described Christian nationalist who has made headlines for preaching at a Pentagon worship service and advocating for the repeal of women's voting rights. For more than four decades, he has also been a pioneer in classical Christian education.

In 1981, he helped start the Logos School in Moscow, Idaho, one of the first in the modern classical Christian movement. He founded ACCS in 1994.

At the June conference, Wilson told a packed ballroom of 1,000 ACCS leaders they can't opt out of the culture wars.

Education is "the central cultural battle," he argued. He repeated for emphasis the refrain: "Classical Christian education is a hot center of the conflict of our time."

On a Wednesday in August, the school year begins at Covenant Christian Academy, an ACCS school in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs. Well-behaved children in lower grades file into chapel in the cafeteria, all wearing blue oxford shirts, the girls in blue-and-white plaid skirts and dresses. The principal gives a talk on the virtue of prudence.

By the time these students are in fifth grade, they will study Latin, in a building where bulletin boards now feature quotes from Cicero and St. Augustine. In their final year, they will present a senior thesis. Most will go on to college, many at public universities, some at Christian colleges.