Founded in 1983 by attorney Michael Farris, a staunchly conservative fundamentalist, the HSLDA got off the ground offering home-schoolers legal representation for an annual fee of $100 per family. Though legal challenges to home-schooling parents are now few, the group still extends the same offer and claims a membership of 250,000 children from 70,000 families. As it nears its 20th anniversary, the HSLDA also boasts significant political clout on national educational issues, even though, say its critics, with less than one-sixth of the estimated home-schooling population in its membership, the HSLDA does not advocate for the majority of parents who teach at home.

Hegener and other critics say they are most upset about the practice of state umbrella groups affiliated with the HSLDA taking control of "inclusive" home-schooling support groups (those without written or unwritten conditions for membership), which provide much of the important how-to and social opportunities home-schoolers need. Even some staunch Christian home-schoolers have defected from HSLDA, reporting that members of the group have gained leadership of nonpartisan support groups and then marginalized members unwilling to sign fundamentalist "statements of faith."

"This move to exclusivity has caused so much heartache among Christians," says Treon Gossen, a devout Christian who, after being forced from an exclusive group, started the inclusive Colorado home-school support group Concerned Parents of Colorado. "I think the biggest home-schooling trend you'll be seeing is more Christians saying, 'Enough is enough.'"

Frustrated home-schoolers have in the past several months decided to fight fire with fire, launching a new national inclusive group called the National Home Education Network, which will focus only on home-schooling issues and resources. And in Texas, which boasts the highest number of home-schooled kids at 150,000, a state home-school lobbying organization will debut in November, representing home-schoolers disenchanted with the HSLDA Texas affiliate, which is headed by Republican National Committeeman Tim Lambert.

While the fight over the heart and soul of home schooling has been a fascinating and sometimes frightening saga for observing home-school insiders, it is, in fact, a development that could affect all parents of school-age children. (Full disclosure: I've home-schooled two daughters for two years, and I belong to the inclusive Austin, Texas, home-schoolers support group.) The success that conservative fundamentalists have had in setting the agenda for all home-schoolers is one they're also working to establish in public schools.

At the time he founded the HSLDA, Farris served as staff lawyer for Concerned Women for America and on the steering committee of Coalition on Revival, a group dominated by reconstructionists, who call for "reconstructing" all areas of public life to reflect a fundamentalist ideal of Christian theocracy, complete with a biblical justice system. (Stoning adulterers would be just one legal penalty for hardcore reconstructionists, though not all believe in literal biblical law.) For the coalition, Farris coauthored with Virginia Armstrong a blueprint for how "America can be turned around and once again function as a Christian nation as it did in earlier years."

These days, Farris is focusing mainly on his role as chairman of the Madison Project, which gave away more than $1 million last year to conservative legislators. He continues to be instrumental in Virginia Republican politics and served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. He's on the board of Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation as well as other political and religious organizations. This fall, as chairman of the HSLDA, he took on the presidency of Patrick Henry College, which markets itself mainly to Christian home-schoolers and opened this fall with 78 students.

Recent Stories