Mimi Rothschild

Mimi Rothschild, an author, educator, and mother of eight, is determined to change the world. Driven by her passion for justice and the Lord’s truth, her multi-faceted professional path has one thread - the creation of new programs that are truly worthy of children. Mimi Rothschild’s passion for children’s rights began at age 10. After watching the bloated bellies of Biafran children on the nightly television news, Rothschild took a coffee can and began her very own door to door campaign to collect change for hungry kids. Within several years, she led one of the nation’s first Walks on Hunger which raised money for hungry children in Tanzania, Biafra and West Virginia. During college, Mimi Rothschild’s next avenue for effecting change was through filmmaking. Her experience on the set working with theologian Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop on their acclaimed film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race? convinced Rothschild of the power of political and social activism. In 1980, Rothschild founded the Rothschild Doll Company whose mission was to create beautiful playthings while providing an economic base to struggling single mothers. The Rothschild Doll Company established opportunities for countless women to learn a trade and earn a living through her sewing factories in Haiti and Jamaica. After giving birth to her first child in 1983, she decided that “public schools were not healthy for children and other living things” to paraphrase an expression used to describe war in the 1960’s. In the 1980’s, while knee deep in pregnancy, breastfeeding and diapers, Mimi Rothschild authored a manuscript of the dangers of public schooling, originally titled, Children at Risk after the government sponsored report called “Nation at Risk.” Both Rothschild’s book as well as the famous 1983 report summarized the status of public schools by saying that “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have well as viewed it as an act of war.” In 1987, in the very office of John Holt, who is best known for his “ Teach Your Own” manifesto on home education and his publication Growing without Schooling, Rothschild co-founded the Massachusetts Home Learning Association which is still serving homeschoolers throughout Massachusetts twenty years later. Using the expertise gained while running an international doll manufacturing company, Mimi Rothschild opened a chain of children’s clothing stores in the early 1990’s. The stores were a great opportunity to employ local homeschoolers and of course, her growing family used the retail outlets as their own intensive lesson in real life business. Her line of clothing and gently-used clothes which were sold in the retail stores in malls; the proceeds were used to send excess inventory to clothe children in rehabilitation centers, children’s hospitals and children in orphanages in Russia and Guatemala. Throughout Mimi Rothschild’s decades of homeschooling, she had never been satisfied with the quality of curriculum materials available and had avidly worked with other homeschoolers to establish co-ops, internships and real life learning experiences. While on bed rest while pregnant with triplets, Rothschild and her then four children decided to assemble a list of all of the very best educational resources on the web for children. To their astonishment, this homeschool project became a series of books published by McGraw Hill! How thrilled her kids must have been when they saw their books on display at the local Borders, in the front window no less! Subsequent to the 1997 Cyberspace for Kids book series, Mimi Rothschild wrote Teen Resources on the Web: A Guide for Librarians, Parents and Teachers and co-wrote Crash Bang Boom: Exploring Literary Devices through Children’s Literature. In the 90s, Rothschild founded the child advocacy group, The National Organization for Children, to honor her beloved son, Andrew who died tragically. Programs for which she fought include the placement of computers in children’s hospitals, the development of an online medical error hotline, and the creation of online resources for parents of children with learning differences. In 2000, along with her husband of 28 years, Howard Mandel, she founded Learning By Grace, Inc. a ministry that provides state of the art online educational services to Christian homeschooling families. The academies managed by Learning By Grace offer innovative online multimedia-rich PreK-12 courses.