A Chalkboard with a map of the continental USA, with pins leading toward Hillsdale associated schools, and a desk with a portrait of Donald Trump, a copy of The 1766 Report, and an apple with a cross carved into it. (Illustration by Ilana Lidagoster/Salon)

In recent years, Hillsdale College, a small private Christian school in Michigan, has quietly become a driving force in America’s ongoing fights around education. A “feeder school” for the Trump administration, Hillsdale led President Trump’s controversial 1776 Commission and serves as a testing ground for the right’s most ambitious ideas: For instance, that diversity erodes national unity, that Vladimir Putin is a populist hero and that conservatives should lure so many children out of public schools that the entire system collapses.

Hillsdale has inconspicuously been building a network of “classical education” charter schools, which use public tax dollars to teach that the U.S. was founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles and that progressivism is fundamentally anti-American. In January, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced plans to partner with Hillsdale to launch as many as 50 such […]

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