The number of independent fundamentalist Protestant schools and students has been increasing rapidly in the last few decades. Research in Kentucky and Wisconsin on administrators and parents in these Christian schools indicates the reasons why such schools are started and why families send their children to them. Administrators start Christian schools primarily for religious reasons--to promote their students' religious salvation and moral development and to offer alternatives to the public schools'"secular humanism"--and only secondarily for educational reasons. Parents send their children to fundamentalist schools both because of church membership and religion and because of dissatisfaction with public schools' academic quality, discipline problems, and violence. Parents continue patronizing Christian schools because they are satisfied with the quality of education, they can afford the tuition, and their children like the schools' small size and the commitment of the teachers. Two further reasons underlying the growth of fundamentalist Protestant schools are the philosophical disagreement between public and Christian schools over the nature of human beings and the current disintegration of the consensus on common American values. (RW)