Public Dollars, Private Faith. The Education Grift: Part II Inside the Dangerous Rise of Josh Calloway

 In Kentucky and across the country, public education is under attack. But the threat isn’t just budget cuts or teacher shortages. It’s a coordinated effort to gut public schools by funneling public dollars into private, often religious, institutions. At the center of this push in Kentucky is Rep. Josh Calloway, a lawmaker who blends far-right ideology with evangelical zeal, all while cloaking his agenda in the language of “parental rights” and “school choice.”

Calloway’s legislative record reads like a blueprint from national dark-money think tanks. He backed House Bill 208, a bill that opens the door for Kentucky tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools. Though marketed as a way to give families more “freedom,” the real agenda is clear: defund and destabilize public education while using the state to prop up a narrow, sectarian vision of schooling.

The Hope Academy Connection: Religious Rehab as Public Policy

One of the clearest windows into Representative Josh Calloway’s worldview is his deep support for institutions like Hope Academy, a faith-based program for “troubled men” that offers gospel-centered life coaching, vocational training, and behavioral rehabilitation.

On its face, the mission sounds noble. Helping at-risk men find purpose and structure. But look closer, and you’ll find an ideological training ground wrapped in the language of healing. Hope Academy’s stated mission isn’t just recovery. It’s conversion. Participants are expected to conform to a rigid religious framework that defines “truth” and “morality” in explicitly evangelical terms, with the Gospel positioned not as guidance, but as a cure-all.

This matters because Calloway isn’t just supportive of this model in a private sense. He wants to build policy around it. He routinely backs legislation that would funnel public resources into religious institutions with little oversight or accountability. These are programs that often blur, if not outright erase, the line between church and state.

Hope Academy is a template for the world Calloway wants to build. Where social problems aren’t solved with evidence-based policy, but with prayer, scripture, and submission to a specific moral code. And it reflects a larger pattern: redirecting public dollars toward private, ideologically-aligned efforts that operate outside the bounds of public transparency and secular law.

When Calloway supports “school choice” or “alternative programming,” this is what he’s talking about. Not expanding opportunity, but creating religious pipelines of influence and indoctrination, funded by taxpayers, serving narrow theological and political goals.

Let’s be clear: Hope Academy has every right to operate as a private ministry. But it has no business serving as a model for public education, social services, or criminal justice reform. And certainly no claim to public funds. The danger comes when people like Josh Calloway try to transform private belief into public mandate, replacing inclusive, accountable institutions with unregulated religious programs that answer only to ideology.

The National Charter School Playbook: Privatize, Ideologize, Defund

Josh Calloway’s support for charter expansion and private “school choice” programs isn’t an isolated Kentucky quirk. It’s part of a well-funded national strategy to undermine public education and replace it with a patchwork of privatized, often religious, alternatives.

At the heart of this playbook is a familiar formula: Defund. Discredit. Divert.

1. Defund public schools through budget cuts, teacher demoralization, and manufactured crises.

2. Discredit public education by stoking moral panic. About “wokeness,” trans kids, critical race theory, or anything that sounds vaguely liberal.

3. Divert public money to charter schools, voucher programs, and private institutions that are often religiously affiliated, politically aligned, and unaccountable to the communities they serve.

It’s the same game plan pushed by organizations like ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, and the DeVos-funded American Federation for Children. These groups don’t just want “education reform”, they want to dismantle the public education system and replace it with privately run, ideologically filtered alternatives. And Calloway is more than happy to play his part.

His rhetoric around “school choice” is a textbook example. It frames privatization as empowerment, but the result is stratification. Where the most vulnerable students are left behind in gutted public schools while taxpayer dollars are siphoned to programs with selective admissions, religious dogma, and little public oversight.

These policies are often sold to rural and working-class communities as a benefit. But the reality is charter networks rarely target low-density or underserved rural areas. Like much of Calloway’s own district. Instead, they strip-mine public resources from already-struggling districts to fund the ideological ambitions of religious conservatives and wealthy donors.

The charter movement, in its current form, isn’t about innovation, it’s about control. Control over curriculum. Control over identity. Control over what students learn, believe, and who they grow up to be. It’s less about better education and more about building a pipeline of compliant minds shaped by a rigid worldview.

In short: Calloway’s charter push isn’t Kentucky-grown. It’s a prepackaged assault on public education, brought to you by out-of-state billionaires and Christian nationalist think tanks. It’s not about helping kids. It’s about breaking the system and replacing it with one that answers to donors, not voters.

Weaponizing the Language of Freedom: How “Choice” Becomes a Smokescreen

If there’s one thing Rep. Josh Calloway and his allies know how to do, it’s wrap authoritarian policies in the language of liberty. “Parental rights.” “Educational freedom.” “School choice.” These phrases sound empowering on the surface, and that’s exactly the point.

But dig even an inch below that surface, and the cracks start to show.

Calloway’s version of “freedom” isn’t about expanding opportunity for every child. It’s about reshaping the education system to serve a narrow set of religious and ideological values, while undermining public accountability and equity. It’s about shifting public dollars to institutions that aren’t answerable to the public at all, but to church elders, boardroom execs, or conservative political operatives.

When Calloway pushes for more “choice,” what he really means is state-funded pathways out of the public system and into religious indoctrination pipelines, like those offered by Hope Academy and similar programs. It’s a cynical repackaging of segregation-era rhetoric dressed up for the culture wars of 2025.

And when he warns about the “indoctrination” happening in public schools, it’s nothing more than projection. Because the goal isn’t a neutral education system. It’s one that reflects a very specific worldview: patriarchal, theocratic, anti-LGBTQ+, and hostile to any understanding of systemic inequality.

In that context, “freedom” is wielded not as a universal right, but as a weapon to delegitimize public institutions, demonize educators, and funnel power away from democratic control. It's the freedom of the few to dominate the many. Not the collective freedom of communities to shape schools that reflect and serve them all.

The real threat to freedom? A system where your child’s education depends on your zip code, your religion, or your ability to navigate an under-regulated voucher scheme designed to benefit insiders.

Calloway wants you to think public schools are the enemy of freedom. But the truth is, they’re one of the last truly democratic spaces we have left, and that’s exactly why they’re under attack