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I’m Tom Joscelyn, president of the Civil Defense Institute, which publishes this newsletter. I served as a senior professional staff member on the House January 6 committee, and I was one of the principal authors of the committee’s final report.
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Overview
Heritage has advocated for school choice and directing public funds to private education, while also promoting a network of private schools affiliated with the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS).
More than 300 schools in Heritage’s online directory are affiliated with ACCS. ACCS was co-founded by Douglas Wilson, whose views on Christian theocracy, women’s voting rights, LGBTQ people and the Confederacy have drawn extensive public scrutiny.
Heritage’s leadership has direct ties to ACCS. Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, has spoken at an ACCS event, hosted its president on his online show, and publicly praised institutions associated with Wilson, while claiming ACCS’s work “is the key to saving Western civilization.”
KEVIN ROBERTS, the president of the Heritage Foundation, believes America’s K-12 school system is in the middle of a “revolution.” And he may be right. For decades, the Heritage Foundation has argued that the Department of Education should be shuttered. Today, that goal is closer to becoming a reality than ever before, as mass layoffs and drastic program cuts have hollowed out the department. Heritage has also led the way in advocating for universal school choice policies in states across the country. Such policies, long favored by conservatives, allow parents to use public funds for their children’s private schooling. Dozens of states have adopted school choice legislation, creating a boom in private education enrollment.
But Roberts’s “revolution” comes with a catch. As Heritage has worked to upend public K-12 schooling, it has also promoted a network of private schools co-founded by Douglas Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist.
Since 2024, Heritage’s website has directed parents to nearly 900 “classical schools,” which Roberts and others argue are superior to America’s public schools. In 2025, Heritage launched an online search tool to help parents and lawmakers locate nearby schools.
Civil Defense examined Heritage’s data and found that more than 300 of the schools are affiliated with the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), including Wilson’s own Logos School in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson co-founded Logos in 1981. Wilson also co-founded the ACCS in 1994 to accredit like-minded schools. Dozens of these same schools are now eligible to receive public funding thanks to the success of school choice legislation campaigns.
Wilson’s “extremist views” have been widely reported. He argues that America should become a theocracy and wants to repeal women’s right to vote, installing a system of household voting in its place. This is part of the patriarchal authority he advocates for the home. Wilson has described himself as a “paleo-Confederate,” arguing “the South was right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the [Civil] [W]ar.” Wilson claims to disavow racism but has been more critical of abolitionists than of slaveholders. He has used slurs to describe LGBTQ individuals and believes homosexuality should be criminalized.
Below, readers can find a more detailed explanation of how Heritage has promoted ACCS-affiliated schools to parents, lawmakers and others. Prominent examples of the controversies surrounding some of these schools are also examined. For instance, one mother described the ACCS-accredited school her children attended as a “scholastic cult.” That same school is listed on Heritage’s website, as are all the other K-12 schools referenced in this investigative report.
Although ACCS has rhetorically distanced itself from Wilson in the past, claiming he has “no formal authority,” Civil Defense found that he still holds significant ideological sway within the organization — at a minimum. For example, Wilson has served as a featured speaker at ACCS’s annual conference each year. “Our work in ACCS is a crucial front in our modern culture war,” Wilson declared during the 2024 ACCS event.
Finally, Civil Defense assessed Kevin Roberts’s own views and relationship with ACCS. Roberts has praised Wilson’s Christ Church and other institutions as “[p]reserving our way of life.” He took part in a Canon Press production that argued “institutions must be hammered to the right.” Wilson founded Canon Press, sits on its board, regularly records videos for its YouTube channel and was featured in the same video as Roberts that Canon Press published.
Roberts has spoken at ACCS’s annual conference, telling those in attendance that their work was “the key to saving Western civilization.” ACCS’s president, David Goodwin, has also appeared on Roberts’s online show. Goodwin explained that his goal is “to pull” education “back to what it was in the Middle Ages.” Roberts didn’t disagree. Instead, Roberts explained that he believes “universal school choice” policies will create additional “opportunities” for classical schools, like those affiliated with ACCS, within the public school “system.”
Indeed, such opportunities are part of Heritage’s “revolution” in K-12 schooling.
How Heritage Promotes ACCS Schools to Parents and Lawmakers
In April 2025, Heritage released a searchable “classical schools database” to “inform parents, teachers, school leaders, lawmakers, and citizens interested in the revival of classical liberal arts education.” Roberts is listed as one of the chief contributors to the project. The search page, which remains online, touts the “renaissance” of such schools, claiming they are “among the fastest-growing—and most promising—developments in K–12 education today.” Heritage’s search tool provides parents with an easy way to locate a school in their area.
Civil Defense has examined Heritage’s database, which was last updated in September 2025, and cross-referenced its entries with the more than 500 member and accredited schools listed on the ACCS’s website. ACCS’s database also displays schools “transitioning to classical” education as well as startups. And some schools belong to ACCS while also being accredited or members of other associations.
As of July 2026, 325 of the 895 schools in Heritage’s database are affiliated with ACCS. Wilson’s Logos School is one of them. As can be seen on the map below, these schools are located throughout the country.
Heritage’s search page includes a passing reference to ACCS as one of the “nine largest classical school associations,” but does not mention Wilson or his role in inspiring the association that accounts for more than one-third of the schools in its data. Heritage’s flagship online publication, the Daily Signal, also marketed the database upon its release as a “guide” that “allows parents to search by state, city, county, and ZIP code for their ideal school.” But the Daily Signal also failed to mention Wilson.
Heritage’s searchable database was a follow-up to an earlier report promoting the supposed benefits of private classical schools as opposed to public schools. That report, published by the foundation in August 2024, was written by Rachel Alexander Cambre, then a visiting fellow at Heritage’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies and the Center for Education Policy.
“American parents are recognizing the gravity of” the “crisis” in education, Cambre wrote, but “their response has been impressive.” Over “the past four years, droves of American parents have withheld or withdrawn their children from the public school system—and state legislatures have noticed.” State lawmakers had responded to this “parental demand” with new “education choice programs,” Cambre wrote.
Cambre presented her paper as an “inquiry” into the “model of education” employed at “classical liberal arts schools” around the country. She explained that “[m]embership in two of the largest classical school associations—the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) and the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE)—has doubled and tripled, respectively, over the past 10 years.”
While touting the growth of these associations, however, Cambre’s report provided no details about the ACCS’s origins or relationship with Wilson, despite her inclusion of a brief section on the religious instruction offered at the schools. Nor did she discuss Wilson’s well-documented extremist views. Instead, Cambre briefly mentioned Wilson in a footnote, describing him as one of the “contemporary thinkers inspired by” British novelist Dorothy Sayers’s work on classical education.
Cambre’s paper included an appendix of more than 880 K-12 schools that served as the basis for Heritage’s online search tool published the following year.
Reported Controversies at ACCS Schools in Heritage’s Database
In March of this year, CNN’s Pamela Brown profiled an ACCS school and its associated church, which belongs to Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a nationwide network of religious establishments. That school, the Koinonia Classical Christian School, is one of the 325 ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database.
“Each morning at this school, they even pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, not the American flag,” Brown explained. “And at the core of what they teach their children is a belief central to CREC.”
Brown asked: “So do you teach the kids here this is a Christian nation, this was founded as a Christian nation?”
“Absolutely. Yes,” Jeff Ripple, the pastor of Christ Fellowship Church (a CREC church) and history teacher at the school, replied. Caleb and Erin Ripple, the headmaster and headmistress of the school, respectively, also agreed with Brown that the school’s mission is to “make this a Christian nation.”
The school teaches a “strict and literal biblical worldview,” Brown told the audience. Evolution is taught to students, Caleb Ripple explained, but merely as “what some people believe, laughably.”
Brown asked David Goodwin, the president of ACCS, if it can be a “sin” for parents to place their children in public schools. “Yeah, I think it is because in most areas, the education is coming from the state,” Goodwin said. “And that was not what God intended from the beginning. They don’t raise children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.”
Brown also asked Goodwin if ultimately he wanted to see the “dismantling of the Department of Education, and ultimately getting rid of public schools.” Goodwin replied: “Yes.”
Koinonia is just one of hundreds of ACCS-affiliated schools around the country today. In the mid-1990s, Wilson helped spawn a revolution in classical Christian education, using his own Logos School as a model for other schools.
Controversies surrounding Wilson and the Logos School
Wilson himself has long been criticized for how he and his community in Moscow, Idaho have handled allegations of abuse. In 2015, for instance, Rod Dreher of the American Conservative criticized the way the Moscow “community handled the sexual abuse of minors” and Wilson for having “knowingly married a young woman to a convicted pedophile.” (emphasis in original)
Wilson responded to Dreher’s post, and other related accusations, on his blog. According to CNN’s Brown, Wilson “decries abuse and says his teachings should never be used to excuse it.”
In September 2021, Sarah Stankorb of VICE News published a piece alleging that Wilson’s Christ Church had a “culture of abuse and social control.” VICE “interviewed 12 former and current church members and Logos students, and reviewed court and medical documents, church correspondence, and business filings.” Former members of Wilson’s community (known as “ex-kirkers”) described “a punitive community in which women are told they must defer to church leaders and cannot say ‘no’ to their husbands, men are taught to strictly control their homes, and those who speak out can be isolated and harassed.”
One former Logos student interviewed by VICE alleged that a male teacher “would feel up” female students in the hallways and that another had been “accused of sexual abuse with a student.” Another former student told VICE that she was “spanked with a wooden paddle in 6th grade, once by a female administrator, once by a male principal,” which “haunted her dreams.” In all, VICE reported that at least 27 victims had alleged “some sort of abuse (spiritual, physical, emotional, sexual) from within the church or its schools.”
Logos is among the 325 ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database. Other schools in the database have been the subject of controversy as well.
Opposition to LGBTQ rights
Consistent with Wilson’s teachings, the ACCS is hostile to LGBTQ rights. In January 2020, Goodwin released a study of alumni that was intended to demonstrate the supposed benefits of a classical Christian education.
“[Alumni] respect the authority within the church, and are more likely to believe the Bible is infallible, and much less likely to believe it has errors with regard to science and history,” the study reads. “They are less likely to accept gay marriage.”
A table in the study summarized “7 Life Outcome Profiles,” offering parents a “dashboard for those considering the importance and impact of school.” Under a subheading, “Traditional & Conservative,” the table indicates that ACCS alumni are more willing to believe there are “no errors in Bible,” and “more likely to know LGBT but less likely to accept LGBT lifestyle.”
Separately, at least two ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database have reportedly expelled students for being gay.
“[Alumni] respect the authority within the church, and are more likely to believe the Bible is infallible, and much less likely to believe it has errors with regard to science and history. They are less likely to accept gay marriage.”
—David Goodwin
Goodwin’s study of alumni was intended to demonstrate the supposed benefits of a classical Christian education.
In October 2020, Tony Jeffrey, the headmaster of Covenant Christian Academy in Colleyville, Texas, expelled a high school senior, Devin Bryant, after the student came out as gay. Bryant had attended the school since pre-kindergarten. “We believe the Bible to be the infallible, inerrant word of God that has the final say in all matters of faith and practice,” Jeffrey said in a statement. “The expression of human sexuality is appropriate only within the boundaries of a marital relationship between one man and one woman.”
Months later, in May 2021, it was reported that the Whitefield Academy in Kansas City, Missouri, had asked faculty to expel students who came out as gay.
White Nationalism
In late 2022, Thomas Achord, the headmaster of Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was fired after he was outed as the author of an anonymous Twitter account that included multiple antisemitic and racist posts. According to the Daily Beast, Achord explained that he wanted to use the “classical Christian education” school to train white nationalists, as he sought to provide “resources for white-advocates to take back the West for white peoples.” At the time, Achord cohosted the Ars Politica podcast alongside Stephen Wolfe, the author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” a book published by Canon Press.
Alleged abuse by faculty members and administrators
In August 2025, the Ormond Beach Police Department announced that it had opened an investigation into allegations of abuse dating back to the early 2000s involving the Riverbend Academy and the Riverbend Community Church. The “Elders” of the church released a statement saying they “were not aware of these things and are brokenhearted to learn about egregious sin in [our] church’s past.” They wrote that they “condemn abuse” and “stand against any actions to cover up or conceal sin.” According to a police report posted by Roys Report, a Christian media outlet, the authorities “determined that several sex offenses did occur within our jurisdiction.” However, the police found that they were “unable to criminally prosecute as the statute of limitations has expired.”
Civil Defense found other allegations of abuse levied at the staff of ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database. Since 2023, at least three former teachers or administrators at ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database have been charged with child sexual exploitation or child solicitation. One of them, a former teacher, pleaded guilty to attempting to entice a minor to record a sexual abuse video and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
A “scholastic cult” in which some fathers allegedly “orchestrate courtship” between their graduated daughters and teachers
In July, The Spokesman-Review re-published an investigation into The Oaks Classical Christian Academy in Spokane Valley, Washington. The investigation, which was conducted and first published by FāVS News, was based on interviews with former students, a parent and a former teacher. Oaks was accredited by the ACCS in 2007 but is not accredited by the state of Washington.
Jill Wright, the mother of two former Oaks students, described it as a “scholastic cult” with a “rigid” curriculum and an “off theology.” Wilson’s ongoing influence over the curriculum was apparent early on, Wright explained. She “watched her sons suffer years of what she now calls emotional and spiritual harm” at the school, with her eldest son “eventually suffer[ing] a physical and mental health crisis.” The Wrights “moved their sons into public schools to finish their education.”
Rev. Carter Smith-Stepper, who taught history at Oaks from 2015 to 2018, told FāVS News that fathers would sometimes “orchestrate courtship” between their graduated daughters and teachers. Smith-Stepper described the marriages between former students and teachers to be “an ick.” He said the school reinforced gender roles, including through Civil War reenactments in which women were not allowed to be generals. The school also taught a “both-sides” view of slavery and portrayed the antebellum South as a “Christian civilization.” (His description of the school’s curriculum is consistent with Wilson’s own writings on the Civil War.)
While the school markets itself as offering a “classical education,” Smith-Stepper said, people should not “believe what’s on the label” because it’s really an “ideology…orbiting the culture war from a Christian right perspective.”
Smith-Stepper added: “A fundamentalist is still a fundamentalist.”
Doug Wilson’s Relationship with ACCS
Wilson clearly still holds ideological sway within ACCS. “Our work in ACCS is a crucial front in our modern culture war,” Wilson told the audience attending ACCS’s annual “Repairing the Ruins” conference in 2024. Just “as you cannot fight a naval war without ships, or conduct tank warfare without tanks,” Wilson continued, “so it is impossible to have a culture war if we are missing a culture.” Wilson added: “The ACCS is therefore in [sic] the front lines of a most necessary rearmament. We are a cultural munitions factory and the situation is dire...”
“Repairing the Ruins” is an annual event hosted by ACCS, which it describes as the “largest national conference on classical Christian education (CCE) with around 80 vendors and over 1000 educators in attendance.” ACCS has promoted Wilson’s leading role at the conference each of the last six years. (See, for example, ACCS’s promotional material for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.) At the 2023 conference, Wilson was introduced as a “founding board member” of ACCS. Wilson served as a “featured keynote” speaker at the most recent conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, in late June. The ACCS website also references Wilson’s work as inspiration for the growing classical Christian school movement.
Wilson’s Logos School promotes its leadership role in the ACCS network. For instance, a parent/teacher handbook for the 2021-2022 school year explains that Wilson’s 1990 book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, “produced so much interest in the classical approach” that “several Logos staff members helped form the Association of Classical and Christian Schools (ACCS).” Logos is “[o]ne of the first schools to be accredited by ACCS” and “is a charter member” of the organization. In addition, Logos “annually sells many of its administrative and curriculum materials to these schools and other people around the United States, as well as having its staff train other teachers and administrators.”
The Logos School’s website also notes its role in founding ACCS, as well as its charter membership and accreditation by the organization. A profile produced by the school lists ACCS as its only accreditation.
In early July, Wilson’s Logos School held an “intensive” teacher training program “for those seeking to acquire and improve their skills as classical Christian educators, administrators, and board members.” It has been conducting such training since 1995, and the instructors are “Logos teachers, administrators, and board members.” The training “is officially endorsed by ACCS (the Association of Classical Christian Schools),” the Logos website reads.
Heritage’s Relationship with ACCS
According to its website, the ACCS “joined forces” with Turning Point Education (an arm of Turning Point USA), the Heritage Foundation “and several other groups” at the beginning of 2025. Their alliance is unsurprising.
Roberts and Goodwin, ACCS’s president, were both appointed to a committee in Oklahoma charged with overhauling the state’s social studies curriculum. Both men are also listed as signatories on a statement declaring that education is “inherently political” and “classical education is at odds with modern education politically.”
In his 2024 book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” Roberts rails against “many of America’s institutions,” calling for them to be “burned.” He specifically cites “[e]very Ivy League college,” the Department of Education, “80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education,” and the Loudoun County Public School System (in Virginia), among others, as the types of institutions he believes should be demolished.
In contrast, Roberts praises Wilson’s institutions in Moscow, Idaho as replacements for America’s mainstream education system. Roberts writes that Wilson’s Christ Church, New Saint Andrews College and Canon Press are among the “new institutions” that “have begun to form their own flourishing ecosystem” and are “[p]reserving our way of life.”
“Attending to America’s future often means starting families, planting churches, and founding communities of our own, just like in Moscow,” Roberts writes.
In September 2023, ACCS president Goodwin was one of the panelists who spoke at a Heritage Foundation conference titled, “How Classical Education Can Preserve Our American Freedoms.” Goodwin co-authored a book with Pete Hegseth (then a Fox News host and currently the secretary of defense) the previous year. In their book, “Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting A Century of Miseducation,” Goodwin and Hegseth argue that “cultural Marxists…control every strong point, every choke point, and every inch of high ground in the realm of American education, and by extension, American culture.” They recommend that those who agree with them become insurgents against the educational establishment. “Our only option is insurgency,” Chapter 11 of the book (which was authored mainly by Hegseth) reads. “Our only chance is to become educational insurgents in our own country.”
“You represent the last best hope for the West…”
—Kevin Roberts
At an ACCS conference in 2024
Goodwin has employed similar language elsewhere. For instance, he has explained that he came to believe “insurgency was the right answer” because “basically insurgencies operate underground and they undermine the power structure of the progressives, but they do so in subtle, quiet ways.”
In June 2024, Roberts spoke at ACCS’s “Repairing the Ruins” conference, praising the educators in attendance while reiterating his call for “utterly eliminating” the Department of Education. (As mentioned above, Wilson spoke at the same conference.)
“I’m here this week because I believe that the work that you’re doing in addition to its obvious other benefits is the key to saving Western civilization,” Roberts told the ACCS educators and others in attendance. “You represent the last best hope for the West,” Roberts continued. “That’s right, not just America but all of Western civilization.”
Weeks later, in July 2024, Roberts hosted Goodwin on an episode of his own online show titled “The Classical Education Revolution.” Roberts introduced Goodwin as a “good friend in the movement,” “an all-around great American” and “one of the leaders of the classical education movement in the country.”
At no point in their conversation did Roberts disagree with Goodwin’s ideological worldview, even as the ACCS head said he wanted “to pull” education “back to what it was in the Middle Ages.”
Roberts explained Heritage’s school strategy at length. Unlike other “politically conservative policy organizations,” Roberts said, Heritage has been focused “on the content of the education” in addition to “getting the proper delivery mechanism, which is universal school choice.” Roberts said that “once we started having success in the center right movement on universal school choice, in the states, we came to the realization, well, there have to be schools where you actually” want people to use their “education savings accounts,” on schools that are “worthy of that kind of investment by the public.” This “led us here [at] Heritage…to be full-throated supporters of classical education,” Roberts said.
Roberts asked Goodwin if he thought “classical education” as the ACCS “understands it” could be “fully realized within the public school system.” Goodwin demurred, saying he did not “know about the public school system” because the “two worlds” are “inherently in conflict.” But Roberts argued that “universal school choice,” which Heritage and its allies have worked “to muscle through” in states across the country, will create “opportunities” in the coming years “in ways that we can’t even fathom.” Roberts believes that “classical schools,” like those belonging to ACCS, will operate “within that [public school] system.”
“What do we do about the separation of church and state, which of course is completely misunderstood, at least in its origins in the United States?” Roberts asked, indicating that Goodwin knew what he meant. “I don’t know how we sort through that,” Roberts said, adding that he was optimistic.
Goodwin credited Roberts and Heritage with the explosive growth of private schools like those affiliated with ACCS, saying the surge was caused in “no small part to your work in school choice.” This has resulted in “hundreds of new schools right now,” Goodwin claimed, adding it has led to so many that “it’s straining our system to be able to bring them up to speed.” Goodwin said that they are “working on ways of scaling that are…effective,” and that they were trying to “deliver a product” that was “better than anything that has been out there in the last 100 years.”
“I think we can do that with classical Christian education,” Goodwin said.
“I’m convinced of it,” Roberts replied.
Toward the end of their discussion, Goodwin promoted ACCS’s website as a place where people could locate schools “nearby.” As explained above, more than 300 of the schools listed on ACCS’s website are included in Heritage’s data.
Goodwin also explained that there were “six, seven major curriculum providers,” which have formed “a cottage industry,” which now has “its own system.” Roberts underscored Goodwin’s point, saying it’s “a very tight-knit network with overlapping social circles and once you enter it you make the best friends you’ll ever have.”
Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.