Liberal Parents Join Evangelicals in Home-Schooling Their Kids Thanks to Culture

Linda reached her breaking point when all the books were removed from her daughter’s elementary school library. Ashley got there when her twins were taught in sixth grade that Manifest Destiny referred to Native Americans who’d decided to move away from their homelands. For Jessica, it happened after the passage of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, often described as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Kate made the decision when she and her husband learned that teachers were being discouraged from using the word “slavery” in units about US history. For Emily, it was when she found out her trans son wouldn’t be able to use the boys’ bathroom.

None of these mothers had ever imagined they’d home-school their children, but then their local public schools became unrecognizable to them. (Some of the people in this story requested we use pseudonyms or only their first names, for fear of repercussions.) Conservative state governments have been engaging in an educational culture war, pushing curricula further to the right than at any other time in recent history. The clear leader has been Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has led an overhaul of the education system, shaping it to his ideological vision: placing restrictions on many books and pedagogical matters such as the teaching of race and gender; banning mask mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic; forcing trans and nonbinary students to use bathrooms corresponding to their biological sex; requiring parental signature for a teacher to use a nickname or different pronouns for a student; and arming school staff in response to shootings. His administration’s policies have weaponized the conservative home-schooling community’s values and language—using phrases such as “family choice,” a “parental bill of rights” and “indoctrination” (to refer to teaching about historical wrongs perpetrated by White people)—pushing liberal families out.