Maybe it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep, or I’m grumpy from the record-breaking heat Boston’s about to endure, but I heard a story on NPR this morning that caused me to fire off an angry letter to the editor. It was this:

Larry Abramson’s story today, “School Devoted to Traditional Teaching, Values,” sounded deluded, and borderline delusional. He visited a public school in the heart of an evangelical community, and found, not to my surprise, that the community there has hijacked public funds and created a public school that functions as a church. In Abramson’s story, we hear a teacher promote abstinence, and we hear about students who drank alcohol—normal teenage behavior—being sent away for spiritual retreats. However, we never heard Abramson raise a question about this, or interview an independent advocate for the separation of church and state.

Abramson’s story was instead so fawning, and so full of praise, that he should be embarrassed for its naiveté. Without irony or examination, he used the phase “traditional values”—a phrase that evangelicals use to falsely portray social conservatives as something foundational—as a casual descriptor of the school. And although he mentioned that most students are from the evangelical community, he did not discuss how that community has clearly shaped the social and religious agenda of this school.

Classical Academy would have made for an interesting NPR story—but not because it’s supposedly churning out upstanding citizens. Abramson should have used it as part of an inquiry into how the constitutional and American walls between church and state crumble when evangelicals gain control of government money. These people have no business running a school; the result, a church disguised as a school, speaks for itself.