Jenny Turner is a public school mom and a school speech therapist. She lives in West Des Moines.
“Education is Warfare,” blares the homepage for Canon Press curriculum. The founder, Douglas Wilson, echoed that sentiment in his speech at the 2024 conference of its sister organization, the Association of Classical Christian Schools, saying, “We are a cultural munitions factory.”
Wilson co-founded the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 1993, and although he is no longer on the board or staff, he retains a close relationship with the group, regularly giving the keynote at its conferences, writing forwards and guides to many of its curricular materials, and attending one or two board meetings each year.
The Iowa Department of Education lists the group among its “approved independent accrediting agencies” for nonpublic (private) schools. Families with a child enrolled in an accredited private school are eligible to receive funding through an Educational Savings Account, better known as Iowa’s school voucher program.
Wilson is a theologian and pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, as well as a faculty member at New St. Andrews College, which he also founded. He has made a number of highly controversial statements over the years. In 1996, he published Southern Slavery: As It Was with Steve Wilkins, a former board member of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has documented Wilson’s connections to neo-Confederate groups, published some excerpts from that pamphlet:
Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. … There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.
Wilson also has opinions on the place of women. In a YouTube video posted in June 2024, he asserted,
When women were granted the right to vote, the nation had already accepted the lie that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individuals. And so, the matter was framed this way: Men, as individuals, can vote, so why cannot individual women do the same?
We were so muddled, we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families.
He also has thoughts that seem to indicate acceptance of marital rape, saying in one of his books, “Of course a husband is never trespassing in his own garden.”
Additionally, he wrote on his blog in 2018,
We must begin with the assumption that digital condemnation of any man should be out of court. Digital information is highly susceptible to manipulation, and digital information is highly portable. I believe that we should begin the fight to outlaw all such information in court, and we should lead by courteously disbelieving any report made against anyone on the basis of what somebody “found on their computer.”
If it weren’t shocking enough to suggest excluding evidence of child pornography found on someone’s computer, local and national media have reported on alleged sexual abuse in Wilson’s church and associated school.
At this writing, no Iowa school have completed the accreditation process through the Association of Classical Christian Schools. However, three member schools may send their staff to conventions or use the group’s curriculum. Morning Star Academy in Bettendorf, an association member, is accredited by Christian Schools International—another agency approved by the Iowa Department of Education. Morning Star Academy can therefore particiate in the state’s school voucher program.
Adel Classical Academy is also a member but not accredited. Founded in 2022, that school could seek accreditation in the future. Two Rivers Classical Academy in Des Moines states on its website that it “is a member of, and plans to eventually seek accreditation through,” the Association of Classical Christian Schools.
Two Rivers started in 2018. One of the co-founders and current board members is Andrew Karas. His law partners include Republican State Representative Bill Gustoff, elected in Iowa House District 40 in 2022, and former Iowa House Majority Leader Chris Hagenow, who is currently president of Iowans for Tax Relief. Gustoff voted for the school voucher bill as a new state legislator in January 2023. Iowans for Tax Relief was one of the organizations registered for the bill. The school’s mailing address is that of Hagenow, Gustoff, Karas & Ridgeway LLP.
The Association of Classical Christian Schools is approved to accredit schools in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. In Tennessee, there was resistance to allowing the group to play a role in accreditation, due to its connections to Doug Wilson and his views on slavery. I was unable to determine when the association became an approved agency in Iowa, but it was not part of the original bill to allow independent accreditation in 2013. The Iowa Association of Christian Schools, a lobby group representing many private schools, gave then Majority Leader Hagenow a “special thank you” in 2016 for removing a sunset provision from the state law authorizing independent accreditation.
The Association of Classical Christian Schools may also certify teachers in member schools. The group’s website notes that “the Foundation Track at the ACCS annual Repairing the Ruins Conference is helpful for achieving ACCS teacher certification.” Doug Wilson frequently keynotes that conference. State licensure is not required for teachers, and a survey of job postings at accredited schools shows education degrees are much less important than agreement to faith principles.
A book available from Canon Press (founded by Wilson) includes a discussion guide for The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe (see connections to Project 2025 authors here). Wolfe’s book includes the passage,
I use the terms ethnicity and nation almost synonymously, though I use the former to emphasize the particular features that distinguish one people-group from another…nation is used to emphasize the unity of the whole, though no nation (properly speaking) is composed of two or more ethnicities. (page 135)
The Canon Press study guide then asks, “How do human limitations make local communities necessary? Why is it natural for human communities to have their own local distinctives?”
The Association of Classical Christian Schools controls its schools tightly, and has connections to some people and philosophies that I believe most Iowans would find reprehensible.
I strongly object to allowing our tax dollars to be used to send children to schools with accreditation from such a group. They believe education is warfare, and it seems that we—meaning anyone who’s not lockstep with them—are the ones on whom they’re waging war.
Top image: Screenshot from video of Douglas Wilson speaking at the August 2024 Repairing the Ruins Conference.