Recently George W. Bush mixed home schooling with presidential politics in a letter to a Texas home-schooler -- now circulating widely on national home-school e-mail listservs -- in which he enthusiastically praises home schooling and vows to fight for legislation that would allow families to set aside $5,000 tax-free annually to pay for the educational expenses of teaching at home.

Contrary to stubborn stereotypes, Bush is not preaching to the converted in targeting voters who home-school. An exhaustive look at home schooling released this year by former Department of Education home-school researcher Patricia Lines exploded the stereotype that most home-schoolers are conservative fundamentalists seeking to isolate themselves from blasphemous school systems.

These days, she says, the plurality of home-schooling parents say they're motivated to teach at home by reasons familiar to most of us: They want to bypass the inflexible bureaucratic aspects of school and tailor learning to students in a way that teachers in classrooms simply cannot. And they are more diverse than ever before, reflecting a wide range of ethnicities, incomes and approaches to learning. (In a Florida state survey, only one-third of home-schoolers said they teach at home for religious reasons.)

Yet this new diversity of home-schoolers has brought to a righteous boil a battle that has simmered for years in the home-schooling community. Despite significant changes in the size and political leanings of the home-schooling movement, a coalition of organizations has dominated since the early '80s the public face and political advocacy of those who teach at home.

The lead group in what is known as "the four pillars of home schooling" is the Home School Legal Defense Association, an organization run by politically active fundamentalist conservatives who not only maintain a tight grip on the public debate of home-schooling issues but, with a research institute, a lobbying organization and a new home-schooling "college" under their direction, have extended the reach of the HSLDA to issues affecting public schools.

The remaining three "pillars" are: Sue Welch, publisher of the leading conservative Christian home-schooling magazine, the Teaching Home, which prints in each issue contacts and workshops for each HSLDA state affiliate; Brian Ray, president of the HSLDA-subsidized National Home Education Research Institute; and Gregg Farris, who for years has organized conservative Christian home-school conferences and workshops and remains on the board of the HSLDA-affiliated National Center for Home Education.

The pervasive influence that the "pillars" have on home schooling makes less conservative home-schoolers furious, especially in light of HSLDA's tendency to champion as benignly "pro-parent" causes that are pointedly conservative. The HSLDA is on the record, for instance, as vociferously in favor of corporal punishment and gun ownership and against gay rights and the United Nations.

The group's pervasive political focus leads some critics to charge that in addition to acting as a home-school advocacy group, the HSLDA is actively pursuing the goals of the religious right. Says Mark Hegener, co-founder of Home Education Magazine, the HSLDA is "part of a socially conservative constituency network using home schooling as a way to further its political goals."

Adds Chip Berlet, analyst at Political Research Associates and longtime observer of the Christian right: "HSLDA shares the same goal with many other groups that want to make schools -- whether public classrooms or home-based ones -- a lot more conservative and fundamentalist Christian." The efforts of HSLDA and similarly motivated organizations, says Berlet, are major players behind recent efforts to mandate creationist curriculum and attack environmental education, sex education and multicultural classroom material.

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