Commentary: Conservative Christian Education Is Being Born Again Post-Pandemic
Arcadia Christian Academy, which opened in Arizona on Aug. 8, is one of dozens of Christian micro-schools popping up across the country, offering a hybrid in-class and at-home education to keep costs down and the odds of survival up in an increasingly competitive K-12 sector. What’s more, many long-established Christian schools are growing their enrollment after years of stagnation.
The recent post-pandemic rebound in Christian education, prompted by parental anger over public school shutdowns and the expansion of school choice programs, comes after a prolonged period of plunging enrollment and shutdowns since the mid-2000s. Behind that decline were dismay over unaccredited schools and an emphasis on preaching the gospel over teaching rigorous courses, according to interviews with Christian school leaders, parents, and national associations, as well as religious education scholars and consultants.
They tell the story now of a Christian school movement with about 700,000 students in 8,000 schools that’s striving to leave behind its reclusive evangelical roots and reinvent itself for today, with STEM programs, AP classes, and classical “great books” curriculums.
The revamp, demanded by millennial parents and embraced by leaders of accreditation associations, is propelled by a combination of push-and-pull forces.
The push started with COVID. Public schools lost an estimated 1.2 million students during the pandemic. Upset over the long-term closure of classrooms, some parents also objected to what they observed their kids being taught during remote learning at home: Schools with a progressive tilt were teaching that gender is a fluid concept and that America is an inherently racist nation.
Evangelical schools have taken in a fair share of these public school refugees by appealing to the conservative views of parents. In their statements of faith, schools not only stress classic doctrine, such as the Bible as the word of God and the second coming of Jesus Christ. The statements also include the conservative Christian take on hot-button issues, such as it’s a sin to deny one’s biological sex.
“Alarmed that schools are embracing gender neutral ideology?” Arizona’s Dream City Christian School asks parents rhetorically on its homepage.
The pull factor – a major expansion of school choice programs – is now adding to the appeal of Christian schools. In addition to programs in 32 states that mostly provide taxpayer funding for the private education of low-income and special needs kids, eight states recently approved universal laws that make all students eligible for scholarships, regardless of family wealth. At Christian schools, these state-funded scholarships typically cover most if not all tuition, providing a powerful incentive for families that’s boosting enrollment.
But after the growth spurt, scholars and school leaders are asking a big question: Does it have legs or will it soon burn out?
New-wave Christian schooling faces plenty of headwinds. There’s competition for students from well-established Catholic schools, which have a superior academic track record, as well as rapidly expanding charter networks and homeschooling, says David Sikkink, a prominent scholar of religious education at Notre Dame. And there are the old-guard fundamentalist schools that resist accreditation and refuse to accept school-choice funding.
“Are Christian schools going to retain those parents who came at the end of COVID and continue to grow?” says Vance Nichols, head of Alta Loma Christian School in southern California. “That’s the question of the moment.”
In Florida and Arizona, the answer to that question seems to be yes, thanks to new universal choice laws.
By removing income and other restrictions on receiving school choice funding, the universal laws have expanded the eligibility pool nationwide by about 4 million students, bringing the total to more than 13 million, according to the advocacy group EdChoice.
But the sweeping laws have also sharply divided school choice advocates, with prominent players like Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute objecting to ultra-wealthy families getting taxpayer dollars to send their kids to private schools.
Florida was already a wellspring of Christian education, with about 800 schools, when it approved a universal choice program in March. The new law is expected to dramatically boost the number of choice scholarships by as much as 40% to 350,000 students for the 2023-24 school year, says Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, which administers Florida’s five choice scholarship programs.
“A lot of bigger Protestant schools with middle- and upper-middle class students are definitely going to benefit from this expansion in demand for scholarships,” Tuthill says.
To meet demand in states like Arizona, where many Christian schools are full, educators are setting up micro-schools that enroll only about a hundred students. With students learning both in formal classrooms for a few days a week and at home for the rest, these hybrid schools keep operating costs down. To access a steady revenue stream, they are setting tuition below the choice scholarship maximum amount, allowing them to attract students with the enticing offer of a free ride. “Historically, the amount is able to cover all of our tuition costs,” which top out at $5,950, Arcadia Christian says on its website.
The new wave of micro-schools is enabled by entrepreneurial consulting groups like Soaring Education Services, which provides a one-stop shop of educational models and coaching for the Christian startups. The group, which is part of the Christian nonprofit Open Sky Education in Wisconsin, is helping launch seven micro-schools in seven states by 2024, says Jack Preus, Soaring’s national director.
“Demand for Christian schools is high,” Preus says. “Most of the growth in new schools is in micro and hybrid space.”
But traditional Christian schools are starting too. The Minneapolis-based Spreading Hope Network, which focuses on bringing a God-centered and rigorous liberal arts education to low-income urban youth, will have assisted 19 new schools and campuses get started through this year with the goal of opening 100 startups by 2032. Most of these schools are in states with choice programs, making it easier for students from poor families to afford the tuition, says Executive Director Dan Olson.
That’s true at the new campus at Pusch Ridge Christian Academy, serving mostly Latino students on the south side of Tucson. Latino pastors convinced Pusch Ridge to open the new campus after the public school district in 2020 approved a sex education program starting in the 5th grade over the objections of conservative parents, says Jonathon Basurto, principal of the new campus.
With all its low-income students certain to qualify for one or more of Arizona’s choice scholarship programs to cover the $13,000 tuition, the new Pusch Ridge campus has ambitious plans to grow from K-2 today to K-12 in 10 years.
“We are looking at a minimum of 500 students and up to 900,” Basurto says. “We have families driving 45 minutes to come to this Spanish-speaking school because it is Christian.”
Christian Schools in Crisis
The growth in Christian education is a remarkable turnaround for a movement that suffered thousands of school closures in the 15 years before the pandemic. It was a period of “crisis” for the community, says Nichols, the school leader, who wrote his dissertation at the University of Southern California on the rash of failures.
The mid-2000s were the high-water mark for Christian schools. In 2006, the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the largest of many Protestant education associations, counted almost 4,000 schools as members, or about half the U.S. total. Membership plummeted to 2,094 by 2022 amid the shutdowns before increasing by 45 schools this year, says Nichols, who is also an ACSI commissioner overseeing accreditation.
For Christian schools, which tend to enroll several hundred students, it was the biggest decline in their modern history. Nichols’ research shows that poor leadership, particularly by school boards, lackluster academics that didn’t meet the rising expectations of families for a rigorous education, and financial pressures from the Great Recession were major causes of the closures.
Many of the schools that shuttered in the last decade were the old-timers that remained attached to the original separatist ideology of Christian education. This took root in the 1950s when Baptist and other Christian churches began setting up hundreds of schools in response to sweeping changes in public education from Supreme Court orders that ended racial segregation and banned prayer in classrooms, according to studies of the period.
The main priority of these fundamentalist schools has been the…
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