Gwen Frisbie-Fulton is a columnist for the News & Observer in North Carolina. She explains in this column why extremist Michelle Morrow is unqualified to be elected as state superintendent of public instruction. What the public knows about her is that she homeschools her children, she has called the public execution of Obama, Biden, Clinton, and other leading Democrats. But there’s more.
After years of being a science nerd, devouring books about space and astrophysics, my son recently became very athletic. This came as a surprise — he comes from a long line of artists and wanderers.
I embraced this new development wholeheartedly and cheered enthusiastically for his team from the sidelines. Next to me, always, was his coach, yelling support until his throat was raw.
A book-smart high school logic teacher, his coach was also learning the sport. He threw himself all in, researching and bringing different hill sprints and threshold runs into their practices. He read, researched and frequently solicited advice from others. The team never became top- tier, but every single runner improved their times and they made it to the regionals. Measured by wins, he might not have been the greatest coach — but he was a very solid leader.
This year, North Carolinians will head to the polls. While elections are inherently about politics, we will also be tasked to determine which candidates are equipped to lead.
To lead, someone must of course be experienced, but he or she also must be curious and open to about the world around them. And that is why I think that my son’s coach — whose politics I disagree with substantially —would be a better, more qualified candidate for superintendent of public instruction than GOP nominee Michelle Morrow.
Experience matters in leadership and Michele Morrow’s experience is extremely limited. While my son’s coach spends nine hours a day at the school, plus another two hours outside it on practice days, Morrow has homeschooled her children. Nonetheless, she has formed rigid opinions about North Carolina’s public schools, calling them “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers” (WRAL).
Morrow not only lacks experience with public education, but she also lives a life very distant from what most students who rely on our schools know. While my son’s coach lives in an apartment complex where, no doubt, many of his students also live, Morrow lives in a wealthy suburb of Raleigh in a house valued at more than twice the average North Carolina home. In contrast to the Morrows, nearly half of all students in North Carolina are considered economically disadvantaged (with family incomes less than 185% of the federal poverty line). Morrow might believe that “the whole plan of the education system from day one has actually been to kind of control the thinking of our young people” (WRAL), but she fails to understand the supportive, stabilizing impact of public schools in children’s lives.
Good leaders are curious. While my son’s coach has a lot of experience with kids and schools, he didn’t have a much experience coaching — which is why he read, researched and sought advice from others. Morrow appears curiously uncurious. Active on the internet, she puts herself in an echo chamber of views, falling victim to conspiracy theories. During the pandemic, she used the QAnon hashtag #WWG1WGA multiple times and she spread disinformation about vaccinations (Fox 8).
Offline, Morrow further surrounds herself with people who will reinforce, not challenge or grow, her understanding of the world. She was photographed at a far-right candidate training session alongside John Fisher, a Proud Boy, and Sloan Rachmuth, an extremist provocateur who famously trolls and harasses her opponents on social media. Morrow served on the board of one of Sloan’s anti-public education projects (Libertas Prep, which appears to have never launched) alongside extremist Emily Rainey, who at one point claimed to have information about the attack on Moore County’s electrical grid. This insular clique mimics one anothers’ anti-diversity, anti-LGBTQIA+, and anti-education stances, just as Morrow parroted insurrectionist talking points while filming herself on her way to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6: “If you’re going to commit treason, if you’re going to participate in fraud in a United States election, we’re coming after you,” she said into her livestream.
If you don’t have experience, and you don’t surround yourself with different ideas and opinions, you must at least have a deep, principled commitment to fight for everyone to be a leader. My son and his coach spar regularly about politics and culture, but he makes sure my kid is always included, respected and heard. On the contrary, Michele Morrow prides herself on her intolerance, calling repeatedly for the “execution” of people she disagrees with (CNN).
She supports banning Islam (HuffPost), though our state has the 10th-largest Muslim population in the country. She has made anti-inclusivity a cornerstone of her campaign, railing against the LGBTQIA+ community, saying “There is no pride in perversion” (Media Matters). Morrow’s ability to lead schools that include many Muslim and LGBTQIA children is, in a word, impossible.
Having opinions doesn’t make you a leader: Experience, curiosity and the desire to work for everyone does.
When fully funded and at their best, North Carolina’s schools are creating our state’s future leaders — and our students need to see what good leadership looks like. The many teachers and coaches who model good leadership to our children day in and day out are not running for office this year; unfortunately Michele Morrow is.
A homeschooling mother with extremist views upset the establishment incumbent for the position of state superintendent of public schools. The incumbent had a 10-1 financial advantage but still lost.
Ultra-conservative challenger Michele Morrow defeated incumbent Catherine Truitt in the Republican primary for state superintendent of public instruction.
With 99% of precincts reporting, Morrow has 52% of the vote to 48% for Truitt, who is the only incumbent Council of State member who lost to a primary challenger. Truitt had entered the Republican primary with a major fundraising lead and the endorsement of many prominent GOP elected officials.
Morrow will face off against former Guilford County Superintendent Mo Green, who has nearly two-thirds of the vote in the Democratic primary…
Truitt, 53, was elected superintendent in 2020. The former classroom teacher has political credentials such as having been senior education adviser to then GOP Gov. Pat McCrory.
Truitt’s endorsements included U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx; state Sens. Phil Berger and Ralph Hise; and state Reps. John Bell, Destin Hall and Jason Saine. Truitt had raised $327,003 compared to $37,764 for Morrow.
But Morrow and her supporters portrayed Truitt has being a liberal, pointing to how she had been supported by U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who is unpopular with many conservative Republicans.
Morrow, 52, is a home-school parent and former missionary who is an activist working with groups such as Liberty First Grassroots and the Pavement Education Project.
Morrow was among the supporters of then President Donald Trump who protested in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but says she did not storm the Capitol Building.
She says her plan is to “Make Academics Great Again” in North Carolina by prioritizing scholastics and safety over Critical Race Theory and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Morrow has accused public schools of indoctrinating students, “teaching children to hate our country” and training students in “transgender theory.”
If elected, Morrow says she will “make sound basic moral instruction priority number one.” Morrow also promises that “you better believe that our teachers will be well versed in the true history of our great nation.”
The Network for Public Education released a report card today grading the states on their support for democratically-governed public schools. Which states rank highest in supporting their public schools? Open the report to find out.
Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Neighborhood public schools remain the first choice of the overwhelming majority of Ameri- can families. Despite their popularity, schools, which are embedded in communities and gov- erned by elected neighbors, have been the target of an unrelenting attack from the extreme right. This has resulted in some state legislatures and governors defunding and castigating public schools while funding alternative models of K-12 education.
This 2024 report, Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools, examines these trends, reporting on each state’s commit- ment to supporting its public schools and the children who attend them.
What We Measure
We measure the extent of privatization in each state and whether charter and voucher laws promote or discourage equity, responsibility, transparency, and accountability. We also rate them on the strength of the guardrails they place on voucher and charter systems to protect students and taxpayers from discrimination, corruption and fraud.
Recognizing that part of the anti-public school strategy is to defund public schools, we rate states on how responsibly they finance their public schools through adequate and equitable funding and by providing living wage salaries for teachers.
As the homeschool movement grows and becomes commercialized and publicly funded, homeschooling laws deserve public scrutiny. Therefore, we rate states on laws that protect children whose families homeschool.
Finally, we include a new expansive category, freedom to teach and learn, which rewards states that reject book bans, and the use of unqualified teachers, intolerance of LGBTQ stu- dents, corporal punishment, and other factors that impinge on teachers’ and students’ rights.
Writing in the Washington Spectator, veteran voucher researcher Josh Cowen reports that 2023 was a good year for some very bad ideas, many supported by prominent rightwingers and Dark Money, whose sources are hidden.
He finds it unsurprising that the voucher movement works closely with book banners and efforts to humiliate LGBT youth.
Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who has studied vouchers since 2005.
He writes:
Over the past 12 months, the decades-long push to divert tax dollars toward religious education has reached new heights. As proclaimed by EdChoice—the advocacy group devoted to school vouchers—2023 has been the year these schemes reached “escape velocity.” In strictly legislative terms, seven states passed new voucher systems, and ten more expanded existing versions. Eleven states now run universal vouchers, which have no meaningful income or other restrictions.
But these numbers change quickly. As late as the last week of November, the Republican governor of Tennessee announced plans to create just such a universal voucher system.
To wit: successful new voucher and related legislation has come almost exclusively in states won by Donald Trump in 2020. And even that Right-ward bent required substantial investment—notably by heiress and former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Koch network—in state legislative campaigns to oust voucher opponents. Instructively, many of those opponents were often GOP legislators representing rural districts with few private schools to benefit.
As a scholar who has studied voucher systems—including through research funded by conservative organizations—I have been watching these developments with growing concern. It can all be difficult to make sense of, so let’s walk through it.
Vouchers Hurt Kids, Defund Public Schools and Prop-Up Church Budgets
First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory lenders in the mortgage sector. These schools are either pop-ups opening to cash in on the new taxpayer subsidy, or financially distressed existing schools desperate for a bailout to stay open. Both types of financially insecure schools often close anyway, creating turnover for children who were once enrolled.
Those results are bad enough, but the real issue today is that they come at a cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments. Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to pass vouchers have had to slow spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.
That’s because most new voucher users were never in the public schools—they are new financial obligations for states. The vast majority of new voucher beneficiaries have been students who were already in private school beforehand. And for many rural students who live far from the nearest private school, vouchers are unrealistic in the first place, meaning that when states cut spending on public education, they weaken the only educational lifeline available to poorer and more remote communities in some places. That’s why even many GOP legislators representing rural districts—conservative in every other way—continue to fight against vouchers.
Vouchers do, however, benefit churches and church schools. Right-wing advocacy groups have been busy mobilizing Catholic school and other religious school parents to save their schools with new voucher funding. In new voucher states, conservatives are openly advocating for churches to startup taxpayer-funded schools. That’s why vouchers eventually become a key source of revenue for those churches, often replacing the need to rely on private donations. It’s also why many existing religious schools raise tuition almost immediately after vouchers pass.
The Right-Wing War on Public Schools
Victories for these voucher bills is nothing short of an ascendent Right-wing war on public education. And the link to religious nationalism energizes much of that attack.
Voucher bills have dovetailed almost perfectly with new victories for other priorities of the Religious Right. Alongside vouchers, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has also increased: 508 new bills in 2023 alone, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. As has a jump in legislation restricting book access in schools and libraries, with more than half of those bans targeting books on topics related to race and racism, or containing at least one LGBTQ+ character.
It is also important to note the longstanding antipathy that Betsy DeVos, the Koch Network, and other long-term voucher backers have toward organized labor—including and especially in this case, teachers’ unions. And that in two states that passed vouchers this year—Iowa and Arkansas—the governors also signed new rollbacks to child labor protections at almost the exact same time as well.
To close the 2022 judicial session, the Supreme Court issued its latest expansion of voucher jurisprudence in Carson v. Makin, holding that states with private school voucher programs may not exclude religious providers from applying tax dollars specifically to religious education. That ruling came just 72 hours before the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson removed reproductive rights from federal constitutional protections.
To hear backers of vouchers, book bans, and policies targeting transgender students in school bathrooms tell it, such efforts represent a new movement toward so-called “parents’ rights” or “education freedom,” as Betsy DeVos describes in her 2022 memoir. But in truth this latest push was a long time coming. DeVos is only one part of the vast network of Right-wing donors, activists, and organizations devoted to conservative political activism.
It was the Bradley Foundation that seeded much of the legal work in the 1990s defending early voucher programs in state and federal courts. Bradley helped to fund the Institute for Justice, a legal group co-founded by a former Clarence Thomas staffer named Clint Bolick after a personal donation from Charles Koch. The lead trial attorney for that work was none other than Kenneth Starr, who was at the time also in the middle of his infamous pursuit of President Bill Clinton.
In late 2023, the Institute for Justice and the voucher-group EdChoice announced a new formal venture, but that partnership is just a spin on an older collaboration, with the Bradley Foundation as the tie that binds. EdChoice itself, when it was called the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, helped fund the data analysis cited by Institute lawyers at no less than the Supreme Court ahead of its first decision approving vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002).
From these vantage points, 2023 was a long time coming indeed.
And heading into 2024, the voucher push and its companion “parents’ rights” bills on schoolbooks and school bathrooms show no sign of weakening.
Prior to his political career, the new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, was an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. That group, which itself has deep ties to Betsy DeVos’s family, has led the legal charge to rollback LBGTQ+ equality initiatives. It was also involved “from the beginning,” as its website crows, in the anti-abortion effort that culminated with Dobbs.
The Heritage Foundation has created a platform called Project 2025, which serves as something of a clearinghouse for what would be the legal framework and policy agenda for a second Trump Administration. Among the advisors and funders of Project 2025 are several organizations linked to Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and others with ties to the Council for National Policy. The Project’s education agenda includes dismantling the U.S. Department of Education—especially its oversight authority on anti-discrimination issues—and jumpstarting federal support for voucher programs.
A dark money group called The Concord Fund has launched an entity called Free to Learn, ostensibly organized around opposition to the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. In reality, these are active players in Republican campaign attacks around a variety of education-related culture war issues. The Concord Fund is closely tied to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief, Council of National Policy member, and architect of the Roe takedown. Through the Leo connection, the Concord Fund was also instrumental in confirming Donald Trump’s judicial nominations from Brett Kavanaugh on downward.
And so while the 2023 “parents’ rights” success has been largely a feature of red state legislatures, the 2022 Carson ruling and the nexus between Leonard Leo, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Institute for Justice itself underscore the importance of the federal judiciary to Right-wing education activism.
Long-term, the goal insofar as school privatization is concerned appears to be nothing short of a Supreme Court ruling that tax-subsidized school vouchers and homeschool options are mandatory in every state that uses public funding (as all do) to support education. The logic would be, as Betsy DeVos herself previewed before leaving office, that public spending on public schools without a religious option is a violation of Free Exercise protections.
Such a ruling, in other words, would complete the destruction of a wall between church and state when it comes to voucher jurisprudence. Earlier Court decisions have found that states may spend tax dollars on school vouchers but, as the Right’s ultimate goal, the Supreme Court would determine that states must.
Closer on the horizon, we can expect to see each of these Right-wing groups acting with new energy as the 2024 campaign season heats up. The president of the Heritage Foundation—himself yet another member of the Council for National Policy—has recently taken over the think tank’s political arm, called Heritage Action. At the start of the year, investigative reporting linked Heritage Action to earlier voter suppression initiatives, signaling potential tactics ahead.
And the money is going to flow—they have all said as much. After Heritage’s merger of its policy and political arms, Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children followed suit by creating the AFC Victory Fund—a new group to spearhead its own campaign activity.
Their plan includes a $10 million base commitment to ramp up heading into 2024. “Coming off our best election cycle ever,” AFC’s announcement declared, “the tectonic plates have shifted decisively in favor of educational freedom, and we’re just getting started.” And, they warned:
“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school choice and freedom in education – you’re a target.”
In that threat lies the reality of the latest voucher push, and of this moment of so-called parents’ rights. None of this is a grassroots uprising. “Education freedom” is a top-down, big-money operation, tied to every other political priority of religious nationalism today.
But coming at the end of this past year’s legislative successes, AFC’s warnings are also a very clear statement of what is yet to come. The push to privatize American education is only just getting started.
Vouchers have turned into a campaign to subsidize the tuition of affluent parents while cutting the funding of public schools. This does not augur well for the health and future of our nation.
The Washington Post identifies a serious problem with home schooling: No one is monitoring the well-being of children. In public schools, teachers and staff are designated reporters of children’s physical health; if they see signs of abuse, they are legally bound to report it to authorities. In home schooling, child abuse may be hidden. Read this horrifying story and bear in mind that some states are paying parents to keep their children home instead of sending them to school.
His family had searched, taping hand-drawn “missing” posters to telephone poles and driving the streets calling out the 11-year-olds name. So had many of his neighbors, their flashlights sweeping over the sidewalks as the winter darkness settled on the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The police were searching, too, and nowthey had returned to the place where Roman had gone missing earlier that day: his family’s rented home in Placerville, Calif. Roman’s stepmother, Lindsay Piper, hesitated when officers showed up at her door the night of Jan. 11, 2020, asking to comb the house again. But she had told them that Roman liked to hide in odd places — even the clothes dryer — and agreed to let them in.
Brock Garvin, Roman’s 15-year-old stepbrother, was sitting in the dimly lit basement when police came downstairs shortly after 10:30 p.m. He ignored them, he said later, watching “Supernatural” on television as three officers began inspecting the black-and-yellow Home Depot storage bins stacked along the back wall.
Brock had no idea what had happened to Roman. But he did know something the police did not: Much of what his mother had said to them that day was a lie.
When she reported Roman’s disappearance, Piper told the police she was home schooling the eight kids in her household. This was technically true. It was also a ruse.
Most schoolshave teachers, principals, guidance counselors — professionals trained to recognize the unexplained bruises or erratic behaviors that may point to an abusive parent. Home education was an easy way to avoid the scrutiny of such people. That was the case for Piper, whose children were learning less from her about math and history than they were about violence, cruelty and neglect.
Left to their own devices while she lay in bed watching TV crime procedurals, and her husband, Jordan, worked long hours as a utility lineman, their days and nights passed in a penumbral blur of video games, microwave dinners and fistfights. Almost nothing resembling education took place,her sons said. But there was a shared project in which she diligently led her children: the torture of their stepbrother, Roman.
Roman had been a loving, extroverted 7-year-old who obsessed over dinosaurs when Piper came into his life, a mama’s boy perpetually in search of a mother as Jordan, his father, cycled from one broken relationship to the next.
On the day he was reported missing, he was a sixth-graderwho weighed only 42 pounds. He had been locked in closets, whipped with extension cords and bound with zip ties, according to police reports and interviews with family members who witnessed his treatment. Unwilling to give him even short breaks from his isolation, Piper kept him in diapers.
The Washington Post reconstructed Piper’s torment of her stepson from hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed law enforcement records, as well as interviews with two of her four biological children, other relatives, friends of the family, neighbors and police officers.
Piper, 41, who is in prison, did not respond to two letters requesting comment for this story. Her former public defender did not return calls or emails. Jordan Piper, 38, also in prison, declined a request to comment through his attorney.
Little research exists on the links between home schooling and child abuse. The few studies conducted in recent years have not shown that home-schooled children are at significantly greater risk of mistreatment than those who attend public, private or charter schools.
But the research also suggests that when abuse does occur in home-school families, it can escalate into especially severe forms — and that some parents exploit lax home education laws to avoid contact with social service agencies.
In 2014, a group of pediatricians published a study of more than two dozen tortured children treated at medical centers in Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, Utah and Washington. Among the 17 victims old enough to attend school, eight were home-schooled.
After a home-schooling mother killed her autistic teenager, government analysts in Connecticut gathered data from six school districts over three years. Their report, released in 2018 by the state’s Office of the Child Advocate, found that 138 of the 380 students withdrawn from public schools for home education during that period lived in households with at least one prior complaint of suspected abuse or neglect.
Child-welfare advocates have long pushed fora minimal level of oversight for home-schooled students — calls that have grown more urgent as home schooling has exploded, becoming the country’s fastest growing form of education.But home-school parents, arguing that serious episodes of abuse are rare, have fiercely resisted. And nowhere have their efforts been more successful than in the state where Roman and his siblings spent most of their lives: Michigan.
Michigan is one of 11 states in which parents are not even required to tell anyone they are home schooling, let alone demonstrate they are teaching their children anything. Its lack of regulation, the result of a 1993 state Supreme Court decision still celebrated by home-school advocates, has repeatedly concealed the actions of abusive parents like Piper.
“She told people we were home-schooled, but we weren’t,” Carson Garvin, one of Roman’s stepbrothers, now 16, later wrote in a victim impact statement. “Now I can see it wasn’t for us that she made this decision. It was to protect herself from the school counselors and staff. I believe that if we had went to school that someone would have had a feeling that something was off and that she would have been reported at some point.”
Despite what Piper told the police, Roman had never really liked hiding. The truth was that he had been hidden. And home schooling is what allowed her to hide him.
As Brock Garvin sat in the basement watching TV on the night of Roman’s disappearance, listening to the police officers banter as they opened the Tough Storage Tote bins, he was in a fog. He had been up all night playing “Dark Souls” on his Xbox, and was upset that he hadn’t been allowed to sleep for most of the day, as he usually did.
He was also jarred by the entrance of unknown grown-ups into the house. The family had moved to California from Michigan just a few months earlier. Long isolated, they were now strangers to everyone around them.
But Brock wasn’t worried about Roman. If his stepbrother had run away, whatever he found could hardly be worse than what he had escaped.
Then the lid on one last bin snapped open, and the officers’ laughter stopped.
Even in his benumbed state Brock felt something strange pass through the room, as if the air pressure had suddenly dropped. It was quiet for a moment, then the police began pulling on latex gloves.
‘I’ll behave’
Romanloved beingalive. It was a strange thing to say about an infant, but that was Jennifer Morasco’s first impression of the sunny 5-month-old boy who would become her stepson when she married Jordan Piper in 2010.
“He’d be teething, but he wouldn’t cry,” recalled Morasco, now 41. “He was just so happy to be in existence, and loved being around people and doing stuff with everyone.”
Roman’s mother, Rochelle Lopez, was a soldier who deployed to Iraq when he was 14 months old. After returning, she struggled with heart problems, anxiety and addiction to pain medication, according to police records. Lopez, who died in 2021 at age 34, fought with Jordan in court for years over custody of Roman.
But none of that seemed to weigh on the boy that Morasco largely raised until he was about 4 years old. Morasco still remembers the lyrics to “Life is a Highway,” a song from Roman’s favorite movie, “Cars,” that he sang over and over. Another favorite was “Rainbow Connection,” the banjo-accompanied Muppet ode to life’s unfulfilled promises.
“He thought he was Kermit the Frog, essentially,” Morasco said.
Even after Morasco left Jordan Piper, she kept in touch with Roman, calling every year on his birthday. But in 2016, Jordan wasn’t picking up his phone, so she tried sending a Facebook message to Roman’s new stepmom, asking her to tell him “he is loved all the way to the moon and back.”
Lindsay Piper reacted harshly, warning Morasco not to contact her again and boasting that Roman “has excelled in ways I can’t begin to explain.”
Piper herself had barely graduated high school, according to her sister, Chanel Campbell. Her interest was never in academics; it was in babies. It wasn’t an unusual fixation for a young girl, but there was something off-kilter about the intensity that Lindsay brought to her aspirations of motherhood, her sister said.
“She carried a baby doll around with her until she was, like, 12,” said Campbell, who was raised with her sister in and around Flint. “She just had this fascination with baby dolls and dressing them up and changing them and putting them in diapers.” This treatment extended to the family’s miniature schnauzer, which Lindsay forced into footed pajamas.
By the time she married Jordan Piper, Lindsay had four children of her own. Their father, Marcus Garvin, was an infantryman in the Army and Army National Guard. He returned from his service in Iraq to years of marital turmoil with Lindsay, who eventually gained full custody of their children. After marrying Jordan, she became the parent of a fifth: her stepson, Roman.
In Piper’s frequent Facebook posts, they were a happily blended family, all beaming smiles and matching flannel shirts. But Campbell knew this image was no more real than the dolls her sister had once carried around. At family gatherings, Piper’s children tended to run wild, and she responded in disturbing ways: pinching them, or biting them on their forearms. When Campbell protested, she said, her sister would storm off.
Reached by phone, Piper’s mother, the guardian of Carson’s twin brother, initially said she would consider speaking to The Post but did not respond to subsequent calls or text messages. Piper’s eldest daughter, now 21, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Shortly after her marriage to Jordan, Piper started to complain about her boys’ experience at their elementary school.
“She said, ‘I’m just going to home-school them. I’m tired of the teachers singling them out. I’m tired of everyone picking on them,’” Campbell recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘You’re definitely right. We’ve got a problem here. But home schooling isn’t going to be the answer to it.’”
Between late 2016 and the summer of 2017, Piper withdrew the children from school, Brock and Carson said. With the exception of a few brief interludes when they were sent back for days or weeks, they would not regularly attend school again for the next five years.
At first, they sporadically logged on to an online learning program, Brock and Carson recalled. Then any pretense of education was dropped.
Piper spent the day watching “Criminal Minds” and “Law & Order,” her sons said, and in the evenings, when Jordan returned from work, the couple would sit around drinking Jack Daniels.
By this time, the family had moved to Gaines, a tiny town amid soybean fields about 20 miles southwest of Flint. At midday, the sound of children at recess echoed past their house from the elementary school three blocks away. But for Piper’s kids, the high-pitched laughter and shouting might as well have come from another planet.
“My world got very, very small,” recalled Brock, who was then 12. “I wouldn’t see the sun or moon. I would just be in my room 24/7.” He at least had his Xbox; Carson had his twin brother. Roman had nothing and nobody, because the things thatmade him human were methodically stripped away.
It happened slowly, his stepbrothers said. Early on, when the boys scuffled, Piper blamed Roman, the one to whom she had not given birth, punishing him with lengthy timeouts. Then she began locking the door to his room. Then she began covering his window with a blanket.
“He would sit in the dark on his bed all day. And she would have us, like, scratch on the walls and make creepy noises so he’d think there’s demons trying to kill him,” said Brock, who expressed deep regret about participating. “He’d sit there and scream, like, ‘Stop it, please’ or ‘I’ll behave’ … that was his life.”
Soon there was no disciplinary pretext for the harm inflicted on Roman, Carson and Brock said. It was simply what the family did. Piper ordered her sons to join in when she whipped him with phone charger cords. Roman began trying to escape, so she tied him down. She took away his clothes. Most of her kids were overweight, but Roman was put on something worse than a starvation diet.
“She would feed him oatmeal with huge amounts of salt in it,” Carson said. “He puked it up, so he wouldn’t have to keep eating it. And she would make him eat his puke.”
Campbell suspected there was something badly wrong inside her sister’s house. She said that after seeing bruises on Roman’s face at a Christmas get-together in 2016, she called child protective services.
She made two follow-up calls, she said, but could never determine whether any action was taken. Police later said they found no records of CPS investigations into Piper’s treatment of Roman. A spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees such investigations — declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of child-welfare cases.
Roman kept appearing in Piper’s Facebook photos, increasingly wraithlike beside his grinning siblings.
“He was just lifeless, just sad. You could just see it in his face, aside from the puffy eyes and the bruising on his forehead,” Campbell said. “The love had been sucked out of him.”
It seemed unimaginable that a child could fall so completely through the safety net because a parent like Piper decided to home-school. But in Michigan, it had happened before.
‘A shield for child abuse’
About two years before Roman was withdrawn from school, an eviction crew entered Mitchelle Blair’s Detroit apartment on March 24, 2015. The 35-year-old mother of four wasn’t home, so they began removing her furniture. But their work came to an abrupt halt when they opened a deep freezer in the living room: inside were the bodies of two children.
Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry — estimated to have been ages 13 and 9 when their mother killed them — had been pulled out of Detroit public schools with their siblings two years earlier. During Blair’s conviction and sentencing to life in prison for first-degree murder, it emerged that she had burned her children with scalding water and beaten them with wooden planks.
She also claimed to be home-schooling them.
Stephanie Chang, then a freshman Democratic state representative whose district included the site of the murders, was horrified by the case. She was also alarmed by what she perceived as a yawning gap in the state’s child protection system.
It wasn’t just Stoni and Stephen. Seven years earlier, there had been Calista Springer, a home-schooled 16-year-old who died in a house fire in Centreville, Mich., unable to free herself from a choke chain her parents used to tie her to her bed. Marsha and Anthony Springer were convicted of torture and child abuse and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.
Chang understood such cases didn’t represent most children’s home-schooling experiences. But she also believed abusive parents were taking advantage of Michigan’s absence of any notification or monitoring requirements for home educators, with devastating consequences.
“There are so many amazing home-school parents who I have so much respect for. But when people use home schooling as a shield for child abuse, that’s not acceptable,” said Chang, now a state senator. “That lack of a notification requirement creates an environment where parents can basically just do whatever they want.”
It is a concern that extends beyond Michigan, and that pediatricians share with politicians….
A month after Mitchelle Blair’s children were discovered dead in Detroit, Chang introduced a bill requiring that parents notify their local school district of a decision to home-school and that home-schooled children meet at least twice a year with a mandated child abuse reporter, such as a teacher, doctor or psychologist.
“It’s such a common-sense thing, in my view,” Chang said.
The state board of education in Michigan endorsed the legislation. But the possibility of any oversight infuriated home-schoolers, and they organized to defeat Chang’s modest proposal.
The story goes on to explain that Roman died of salt poisoning. He was 11, but weighed the same as a six-year-old.
When the older boys were returned to their biological father in Michigan, who had not seen them for years, he insisted on sending them to public school.
His parents were arrested and jailed in California for second degree murder. The mother has been sentenced to a term of 15 years to life. Roman’s father awaits sentencing.
In the face of such horrifying stories, it is incomprehensible that state officials do not pass laws to regulate home schooling: first, to check in the health of the children, and second, to determine whether they are learning anything. A parent with several children, like the one in this story, could collect almost $60,000 a year from the state in Florida or in other states where vouchers go to unregulated home schooling parents.
John Oliver is a brilliant, intelligent comedian who is known for his sharp commentaries on current events. From 2006 to 2013, he was a writer for Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.
The Washington Post published an article asserting that home schooling is the fastest growing sector on American education. I’m leery of the dramatic statistics, however, because a small number can grow by 70% and still be a small number. In the example on the article page, the D.C. home-schooling numbers are offered: “Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in home-school enrollment since the 2017-18 school year. There were 88,626 students enrolled districtwide in the 2021-22 school year.” But the number of home-schoolers declined from 1,126 in 21-22 to 977 in 22-23. That’s a very small percentage of students enrolled in the District. It would have been interesting to post the number in privately-managed charter schools (far larger than those home schooled) and the number who use vouchers.
My home district in Brooklyn enrolls nearly 20,000 students. The number of home schoolers grew by a whopping 216% since 2017. Sounds impressive, no? From 89 to 281. In the last year, the number of homeschooled students grew by 11. A little more than 1% of the students in this urban district are homeschooled. Not so impressive.
You will have to open the link to see the data in the article because I was unable to copy the numbers. Most are in the opening, not behind a paywall.
For what it’s worth, I oppose home schooling. I believe it is important for students to be taught by a well-qualified teacher. Few parents are equipped to teach the full range of school subjects. I believe there is value in learning alongside students from different backgrounds and being exposed to different points of view. In this country, people have the right to home school, but I think they should entrust their children to professionals. They should get medical care from doctors. They should seek legal advice from lawyers. They should fly in airplanes with certified pilots.
The article in The Washington Post begins:
Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions….
The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousandsof children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt…
The Post acknowledged how hard it is to get accurate data. “In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.”
But it did collect data for 32 states and D.C.
Examination of the data reveals:
In states with comparable enrollment figures,the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography anddemographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.
Despite claims that thehome-schooling boom is a resultof failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increaseswere similar regardless of school performance.
Because they do not cover every state, the figures cannot provide a total count of the country’s home-schooled children.The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling’s dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate.
Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are nowbetween 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States,depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.
By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
Over the past three years, American interest in home schooling has soared. In this series, The Washington Post explores how that rise is transforming the nation’s educational landscape — and the lives of hundreds of thousands of children who now learn at home rather than at a traditional school.
Many parents say home education empowers them to withdraw from schools that fail their children or to provide instruction that better reflects their personal values. But there is little to no regulation of home schooling in much of the country, with no guarantees that kids are learning skills and subjects to prepare them for adulthood — or, for that matter, learning anything at all.
Home-schooled children have attended Ivy League schools and won national spelling bees. They have also been the victims of child abuse and severe neglect. Some are taught using the classics of ancient Greece, others with Nazi propaganda. What all share is the near-absolute control their parents wield over the ideas they encounter.
“This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.
“The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,” Malkus said. “They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”
In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four — Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota — home schooling has continued to expand.
Celebrated by home education advocates, the rise has also led critics of weak regulation to sound alarms. Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.
Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.
“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”
If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla.
The Gulf Coast county of 1.5 million — including Tampa and its orbit of palmetto-studded suburbs — is famous as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Its vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling.
There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County’s school district, the biggest total in The Post’s home-schooling database. The county’s home-schoolers outnumber the entire public enrollment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74 percent since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrollment grew 3.4 percent, to 224,538 students.
Just as remarkable is the infrastructure that has grown up to support home-schoolers.
Their instructionstill happened at home much of the time when Corey McKeown began teaching her kids 14 years ago in Carrollwood, a Tampa suburb. Once or twice a week, parent-run co-ops offered a chance to mingle with what was still a smallcommunity of home educators.
Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.
The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.
“Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”
Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.
Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.
“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and she is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice.
“I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”
Some of home schooling’s immediate costs to society will soon be more directly measurable in Florida. Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), following the lead of policymakers in other conservative states, expanded the state’s educational voucher program. Children who learn at home are now eligible if their parents submit instructional plans and they take an annual standardized test.
As a result, families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to home-school: up to $8,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding.
In Germany, one’s religion was very important. The Bishop in every district decided which religion every parishioner must practice. Religion was at the core of conflicts, even wars. Your religion was your identity. This photograph portrays the facade of the Prince-Bishop’s palace in Passau.
Passau has a complex relationship with religion. Written into its constitution is a strong commitment to separation of church and state. But, based on an agreement dated 1924, the state is required to pay the salaries of bishops today; children can attend religious schools, so long as they abide by national standards of teaching and learning. Home schooling is not permitted
The Houston Chronicle published a blistering editorial about the power of three billionaires who control Republican politics in Texas and threaten American democracy—not only in Texas. The three are adherents of Christian nationalism and dedicated funders of school vouchers. Their dream is to abolish public schools and enroll every student in a Christian school or home-schooled. They funded State Attorney General KennPaxton’s impeachment defense, and they are now funding Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign for vouchers.
The editorial board wrote:
Since its founding in the early 1880s, the little town of Cisco, 45 miles east of Abilene, hasbeen in the news twice. In 1919, Conrad Hilton paid $40,000 for the Mobley Hotel in downtown Cisco, which eventually gained fame as the first in a worldwide chain of Hilton hotels. Eight years later, two days before Christmas 1927, Santa Claus and three of his helpers robbed the First National Bank of Cisco.
National notoriety will again fall on Cisco if Texas voters — Republican, Democrat and independent — don’t get engaged with their democracy sometime soon. The little town is home to the Wilks brothers, Dan and Farris, oil and fracking billionaires who, by playing Santa Claus to Republican officeholders receptive to far-right extremists, are on a mission to transform Texas into a Christian nationalist state. Their efforts, in conjunction with an even more influential West Texas oil billionaire, Tim Dunn of Midland, was on insidious display during the recent impeachment trial of the most corrupt state attorney general in America.
Ken Paxton skated, not necessarily because he was innocent of the charges that 121 House members, including 60 Republicans, brought against him. He’s back on the job and baying for RINO blood because most Republicans in the Texas Senate are either in thrall to the West Texas triumvirate or they tremble in terror at the prospect of being “primaried” by a Wilks-and-Dunn-anointed challenger. All 19 Republican senators and at least half of the Republican House members have taken money from the West Texas billionaires or their affiliated PACs and organizations.
The biggest recipient by far in this state is none other than Paxton himself. It’s likely that the Wilks and Dunn trio paid for his $4 million impeachment defense, which included the time and effort of very expensive Houston lawyers, Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the judge during the impeachment trial, also is beholden to the West Texans. Their Defend Texas Liberty PAC donated $1 million to the lite guv, while loaning him another $2 million. The PAC largesse came shortly before Patrick began presiding over Paxton’s trial, a trial that ended with a fiery Patrick speech denouncing the impeachment process.
In addition to being fossil-fuel billionaires, both Dunn and Farris Wilks are Christian nationalist evangelists — Dunn as a lay preacher for the Midland Bible Church, Wilks as a preacher for a Cisco congregation founded by his father called the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day Church. Dan Wilks and his wife oversee the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, a group funded with a portion of the $3.2 billion the brothers made when they sold the majority stake of their Cisco-based oil field trucking company, Frac Tech Services.
From the pulpit to the campaign pockets of politicians, the West Texans are on what they see as a God-imbued mission to transform Texas and beyond. Over the past 20 years, they’ve contributed nearly $100 million to think tanks, nonprofits, fundraising committees, websites and Texas candidates who support their crusade.
In their preaching and practice, climate change is merely God’s will; homosexuality is an evil on par with incest, bestiality and pedophilia; abortion is murder, unlawful with no exceptions; gun owners enjoy a God-given right to carry their weapons in public without permits or training; only Christians have the God-given right to hold leadership positions in government (which, as Texas Monthly reported, left former House Speaker Joe Strauss, who is Jewish, beyond the pale). Also, oil and gas is a gift from God to be used with gratitude. (They don’t mention God’s gift of sunlight and wind.)
Kel Seliger, a longtime GOP state senator from Amarillo, ran afoul of the triumvirate in recent years. Reasonable, affable and conservative, Seliger is no longer in the Legislature. “It’s a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” he told CNN last year. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it.”
What those “really, really wealthy people” want these days is to destroy Texas public education, a hotbed, as they tell it, of critical race theory and other elements of what one Dunn-and-Wilks-backed group calls “Marxist and sexual indoctrination,” all funded by “far-Left elites for decades.” (That would be the Texas taxpayer.) [Bold-face added by DR, here and below.]
Their strategy, as Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, told Chron.com, is to recruit a generation of Wilks and Dunn-funded mouthpieces in state and local positions to push the narrative that public schools are harmful to students and their parents. Once public education is weakened beyond repair, they offer private religious schools as “a better way.”
With an insidious, well-funded effort, our home-grown theocrats will make sure that Gov. Greg Abbott has all the financial ammunition he needs in the next few weeks for his last-ditch, special-session effort to persuade lawmakers to use taxpayer money in the form of vouchers for private, often Christian-based schooling. Abbott calls it “school choice.” Rural lawmakers, who’ve fought the plan for years, know it’s school suicide.
The West Texans “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” former state Sen. Bob Deuell, a northeast Texas Republican, told CNN. Deuell, a physician, got crossways with the West Texans when he supported a bill that updated the state’s end-of-life procedures. Dan Wilks, falsely claiming that the legislation would “strengthen Texas’s death panels,” backed tea party activist Bob Hall, who defeated Deuell in 2014. Hall was one of Paxton’s most outspoken supporters during the impeachment trial.
Texas is a big state, but the West Texans have Christian nationalist ambitions beyond our borders. They are reliable supporters of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and, of course, former President Donald Trump, who decried Paxton’s “shameful impeachment.” In an expansive, post-impeachment mood these days, Paxton seems to be pondering a larger field of dreams for himself. He told Tucker Carlson last week he may challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. “His time is done,” Paxton told a radio talk-show host.
If Trump wins the presidential election next year, the disgraced Texas AG would be a prime candidate to head the U.S. Justice Department. (His paramour, the woman he brought from San Antonio to Austin, could be installed in a Georgetown townhouse, only a short Uber ride away from Justice.) He (they) would be right at home in a Trumpian Washington, where, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney said to The Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
The party’s presidential nominee in 2012 has said he worries about the survival of America’s democratic experiment.
Whether it survives depends in large part on what happens here in Texas, where the national far right comes for funding and ideas. Decades of one-party rule have contributed to voter apathy and made our state a fertile testing ground for extreme policies. It’s telling, for example, that the AG was reelected last year with the support of about 13 percent of the populace (4 million votes out of a population of nearly 30 million). Paxton and other Dunn and Wilks dependents only have to listen to their West Texan Santa Claus trio, not to the people of Texas.
On a Friday morning in Cisco nearly a century ago, a little girl was among the first to notice that the Santa who stepped out of a stolen Buick and into the lobby of the First National Bank was a fake (and a dangerous one, at that). In Texas these days, maybe we’ve grown jaded. Perhaps it will be young voters of all political persuasions who will take the lead in calling out — and rejecting — the dangerous extremists in our midst. Perhaps taking heart from the brave Republicans who dared impeach an errant AG, they’ll elect representatives of the people, not altar boys and girls on call for Christian nationalists.
The message Michael Farris had come to deliver was a simple one: The time to act was now.
For decades, Farris — a conservative Christian lawyer who is the most influential leader of the modern home-schooling movement — had toiled at the margins of American politics. His arguments about the harms of public education and the divinely endowed rights of parents had left many unconvinced.
Now, speaking on a confidentialconference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to “take down the education system as we know it today,” Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said.
The solution: lawsuits alleging that schools’ teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or home schooling.
“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”
“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”
The 50-minute recording, whose details Farris did not dispute in a series of interviews with The Post, is a remarkable demonstration of how the ideology he has long championed has moved from the partisan fringe to the center of the nation’s bitter debates over public education.
A deeply religious evangelical from Washington state, Farris began his career facing off with social workers over the rights of home-schoolers and representing Christian parents who objected to “Rumpelstiltskin” being read in class.
In recent years, he has reached the pinnacle of the conservative legal establishment. From 2017 to 2022, he was the president and chief executive of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a powerhouse Christian legal groupthat helped draft and defend the restrictive Mississippi abortion law that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ADF and its allieshave filed a flurry of state and federal lawsuits over the past two years alleging that public schools are violating parental and religious rights.
Yet it is outside the courtroom that Farris’s influence has arguably been most profound. No single figure has been moreinstrumental in transforming the parental rights cause from an obscure concern of Christian home-schoolers into a GOP rallying cry.
When former president Donald Trump called for a federal parental bill of rights in a 2023 campaign video, saying secular public school instruction had become a “new religion,” he was invoking arguments Farris first made 40 years ago. The executive order targeting school mask mandates that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed on his first day in office cited a 2013 state law guaranteeing “fundamental” parental rights that Farris helped write.
In Florida, ahome-schooling mom introduced Farris’s ideas to a state lawmaker, setting in motion the passage of the state’s Parents’ Bill of Rights in 2021. The law, repeatedly touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the presidential campaign trail, laid the groundwork for the state’s controversial Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed by its critics the “don’t say gay” bill.
“He is our hero,” Patti Sullivan, the home-schooler involved in Florida’s 2021 law, said of Farris. “He is the father of the modern movement in parental rights.”
Fundamental parental rights measures have been proposed or enacted this year in more than two dozen other states, according to a Post analysis using the legislation-tracking database Quorum, and in March, a federal parents’ bill of rights passed the Republican-controlled House.
Farris has not been personally involved in pushing the most recent bills, which have been fueled by anger over covid-19 mask mandates and how schools are handling Black history, sexual orientation and gender identity. Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the right-wing groupMoms for Liberty, which has become a powerful force in the parental rights movement since its launch less than three years ago, said it would be a mistake to overemphasize the impact of conservative Christian home-schoolers on the battles now playing out across the country.
Justice said she has met Farris but that the arguments he was making in the 1980s haven’t strongly influenced her organization, whose members have pushed to remove some books with LGBTQ+ themes from schools and to restrict what teachers can say about race and gender.
“It’s 2023,” she said. “There are a lot of things that people thought 40 years ago.”
Yet to those who have followed Farris’s career, the adoption of his arguments by so many families unconnected to home schooling is a measure of his success. In the eyes of his critics, he has masterfully imported an extreme religious agenda into the heart of the nation’s politics through the seemingly unobjectionable language of parents’ rights. Some argue that it has always been the goal of the most radical Christian home-schoolers not merely to opt out of the public schools but to transform them, either by diverting their funding or allowing religion back into the classroom.
“Everyone should be aware of Michael Farris and his influence on the Christian right,” said R.L. Stollar, a children’s rights advocate who was home-schooled and has long warned of the conservative home-schooling movement’s political goals. “To Farris’s credit, he is really good at what he does. He is really good at taking these more extreme positions and presenting them as if they are something that would just be based on common sense.”
The story continues in extensive detail about Farris’s battles to win acceptance and public funding for home schooling.
He tried but failed to criminalize gay sex. His biggest victories have been in his demands to expand home schooling. He and his wife have 10 children. They enrolled her in a public school, bur removed her after two months. They put her in a Christian school but withdrew her after concluding she was being influenced by other 6-year-olds.
Farris wrote that public schools are “a godless monstrosity.”
And he wrote that by their very nature, public schools indoctrinate:
“Inculcation of values is inherently a religious act,” he said. “What the public schools are doing is indoctrinating your children in religion, no matter what.”
My view: public schools unite us as a nation, a people, and a democracy. While there are some highly-educated people like Michael Farris who homeschool their children, many uneducated people are following their lead and their children will be indoctrinated into their religion and be poorly educated.
Diane Ravitch's blog 