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 last 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 long-standing goal for Christian conservatives, who lobbied for this funding.

Keith Castello pauses during a conversation at Coram Deo Academy in Flower Mound, Texas.

(LM Otero / Associated Press)

“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 Assn. 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 classical Christian schools 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.

Expansion fueled by public funds

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 Assn. 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 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.

Roots in Christian nationalism

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.”

Life inside the classroom

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.

Castello was at Covenant Christian Academy for 20 years. While he was headmaster, the academy expanded its campus and grew from 275 students to more than 600. Though he is a product of public schools — good ones, he’s quick to note — he is now a foot soldier in this battle for private education.

When he began his teaching career after seminary, he loved how academics came alive at schools like Covenant: “Every class was grounded on the word of God, it was rooted in truth, it was meant to be transformative in the lives of students.”

But private schools can be financially out of reach for families. It was a struggle for Castello and his wife to afford Covenant for their two sons. He knew most members of his Southern Baptist church could not pay the tuition, now around $20,000, so he helped raise scholarship money and ramped up financial aid.

Now that Texas offers money for private school tuition, he encourages parents to use it.

Pandemic fueled network’s growth

ACCS is an accrediting body and the oldest network of classical Christian schools. Its membership includes about 500 schools, but it has grown by nearly 200 schools since 2019. Goodwin, its president, credits a pandemic-era mistrust of public education, when debates ignited over school closures, books, race, sexuality and gender identity.

Not all ACCS schools accept government money, but many that do now advertise state funding options on their websites.

“What we’re trying to do is take enough of the public school share that we can change the country’s direction with powerful leadership coming out of these classical Christian schools,” Goodwin said in a promotional video.

Wilson can be a provocateur, suggesting homosexuality should be criminalized and criticizing Muslim immigration to the U.S. His Idaho church prefers heads of households, usually men, to vote. He describes his politics as “slightly to the right” of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart.

Castello labels some of Wilson’s statements as “vilely offensive.” He compares Wilson to a family elder, one who deserves respect but also has some reprehensible views.

ACCS is less pugilistic than its founder. It includes socially conservative Christians across denominations and hasn’t adopted Wilson’s more fringe beliefs. Schools agree to a statement of faith, including that same-sex relationships and gender transitions are off-limits, but families may not be aware of Wilson’s teachings or influence. He still advises the ACCS board, though, and his books are required reading in some of its schools.

Stanley writes for the Associated Press.