The school is divided into five communities, each with its own assistant principal, school counselor and secretary. In 1983, in Wichita, Kansas, about 50 families were educating their children at home, mostly for religious or other personal reasons. But today, with the legality of home schooling established by the U.S. courts in recent years, more and more traditional public school families are embracing home schooling. As the home school movement expands, research shows most home-schooled children score well on standardized tests, are well adjusted and succeed in college. In early days in colonial America, religious movements who came to the continent seeking freedom from religious oppression established schools for their members.
Religious schools continue to flourish nearly four centuries later.
For example, besides the Christian and Jewish institutions that have been in existence for a century or more, the number of full-time Islamic schools operating in the United States has grown, over the past decade, from 49 to around 200, most of them covering grades kindergarten through eighth. These days, Detroit, Michigan, which has had a sizable Muslim population since the 1920's, boasts nine full-time private Islamic schools. Although the financial resources of the schools vary greatly, each teaches a basic curriculum recommended by the state in addition to courses in Islamic studies and Arabic. Rural School Succeeds by Adopting Tough Standards and Accountability Pleasant Grove Elementary, a public one-school district in a rural area near Sacramento, California, was struggling with declining enrollments about six years ago. At that time the school board hired Jeff Holland, a principal who aggressively pursued the state's emphasis on tough standards and accountability.