America’s Educational Crisis

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By Frank Vernuccio
Originally posted in the New York Analysis of Policy & Government newsletterOne of the most fundamental requirements for the future success of the United States is the development of a well-educated generation, competitive with global peers. This is not happening. Our failing school system is producing students who are disturbingly deficient in both science and language skills, as well as being ignorant of their own nation’s history and structure.

(By Original seal by the U.S. Army Heraldry Directorate (Extracted from PDF file here.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

The federal government has been steadily increasing its role in education, states have been spending more, and the results have not been beneficial. The Wall Street Journal notes that the U.S. rates a dismal 27th place in education among developed nations. The U.S. Department of Education reports that:

Today, the United States has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the world. Among students who do complete high school and go on to college, nearly half require remedial courses, and nearly half never graduate.

Money Isn’t the ProblemIt’s certainly not for lack of financial support.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics  “Current expenditures per student enrolled in the fall in public elementary and secondary schools were 5 percent higher in 2013–14 than in 2003–04 ($11,222 and $10,641 respectively, both in constant 2015–16 dollars). A CBS report found that:

The United States spends more than other developed nations on its students’ education each year … Despite the  spending, U.S. students still trail their rivals on international tests … When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system—more than any other nation covered in the report … As a share of its economy, the United States spent more than the average country in the survey. In 2010, the United States spent 7.3 percent of its gross domestic product on education, compared with the 6.3 percent average of other OECD countries … The United States routinely trails its rival countries in performances on international exams despite being among the heaviest spenders on education … U.S. fourth-graders are 11th in the world in math in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a separate measure of nations against each other. U.S. eighth-graders ranked ninth in math, according to those 2011 results. The Program for International Student Assessment measurement found the United States ranked 31st in math literacy among 15-year-old students and below the international average. The same 2009 tests found the United States ranked 23rd in science among the same students.

Schools Get Failing GradesThe Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. Education Reform and National Security reported these grim statistics in 2012:

• More than 25 percent of students fail to graduate from high school in four years; for African-American and Hispanic students, this number is approaching 40 percent.
• In civics, only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
• Although the United States is a nation of immigrants, roughly eight in ten Americans speak only English and a decreasing number of schools are teaching foreign languages.
• A recent report by ACT, the not-for-profit testing organization, found that only 22 percent of U.S. high school students met “college ready” standards in all of their core subjects; these figures are even lower for African-American and Hispanic students.
• The College Board reported that even among college-bound seniors, only 43 percent met college-ready standards, meaning that more college students need to take remedial courses.
  

Cevin Soling, writing in The Daily Beast reported:

The [high school] curriculum has precious few courses that provide skills that are meaningful in the job market … 1 in 3 high school graduates lacks basic math skills … two studies by the Department of Education show that only 15% of American adults can perform complex and challenging literacy activities and those proficient are much more likely to credit home learning for their skills.

Part of the problem facing our education system has been the plague of left-oriented politicization of education. Just as history and civics have been ignored by a progressive school establishment that is uncomfortable with America’s culture of individual rights, science education has suffered from the displacement of much traditional course matter with politically-motivated “sustainability” instruction. Writing in Science Education, Noah Weeth Feinstein and  Kathryn L. Kirchgasler worried that:

… there may … be risks involved in incorporating sustainability into science education. What concerns us, in particular, is the possibility that science education will advance an oversimplified idea of sustainability that diminishes its social and ethical dimensions, exaggerating the role of technology and the importance of technical expertise at the expense of non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines and nontechnical expertise. Rather than supporting a generation of students to engage with science in realistic and productive … this approach might lead students to systematically misinterpret and underestimate the challenges that confront their local, regional, and global communities.

Thomas Jefferson, 3d President of the United States (Rembrandt Peale [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

While much attention has been paid to public education’s failings in science and literacy, not enough has been said about its disastrous record in a subject that constituted one of the key reasons why public education was instituted in the first place:  teaching students about their own nation’s history, and how its government works. Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s most profound early supporter of education, was clear on why he believed it was so important:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

As the New York Analysis of Policy & Government recently reported:

A Nations Report Card study found that only 18% of eighth grade students are proficient in U.S. history. Similarly, a worrisome 2014 survey of 1,416 adults recently conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy  Center found that:

• While little more than a third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, just as many (35 percent) could not name a single one;
• Just over a quarter of Americans (27 percent) know it takes a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto; and
• One in five Americans (21 percent) incorrectly thinks that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is sent back to Congress for reconsideration.
  

In 2014, Capitol Times.com quoted a statement by Arizona state legislator Steve Montenegro, a Republican, that “Civics and Social Studies and History are being boxed out of the classroom.”  He notes that “96% of a sample group of high schoolers in Arizona and Oklahoma failed to pass a basic test on citizenship issues.

A 2013 Pew study found:

Overall, 66% say either that the education system in this country needs to be completely rebuilt (21%) or that it requires major changes (45%); only 31% think the system works pretty well and requires only minor changes … The public has long seen room for improvement in the way education works in this country. At least six-in-ten have said the education system needed an overhaul when the question was asked in 2005, 2006, and 2011. And dissatisfaction is widely shared:  majorities of all major demographic groups say the education system needs to be revamped … However, there is no difference in opinion between parents of children under age 18 and those without children under the age of 18, and about two-thirds of Republicans (65%), Democrats (67%), and independents (67%) agree that the education system needs at least major changes. College graduates (75%) are more likely than those with no college experience (60%) to say the education system needs major changes or to be completely rebuilt. However, there is a modest difference of opinion among college graduates:  68% of those with a post-graduate degree say the education system needs at least major changes compared with 79% of those with no more than a college degree.

Why do our superbly financed public schools fail? Former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein, writing in the Atlantic magazine answers this key question:

If the forces behind reform seem scattered and weak, those defending the status quo—the unions, the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the vendors—are well organized and well financed … The school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of the adult stakeholders quite well, both politically and financially.
Let’s start with the politicians. From their point of view, the school system can be enormously helpful, providing patronage hires, school-placement opportunities for connected constituents, the means to get favored community and business programs adopted and funded, and politically advantageous ties to schools and parents in their communities … politicians can reap enormous political support from the unions representing school employees. The two national unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—together have some 4.7 million members, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars in national, state, and local dues, much of which is funneled to political causes. Teachers unions consistently rank among the top spenders on politics.
Moreover, millions of union members turn out when summoned, going door-to-door, staffing phone banks, attending rallies, and the like. Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups, and elected officials, and the unions know how to deploy them well … Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly put it, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”

Albert Shanker (in 1965), President of the United Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1985 and President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997 (By New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Albertin, Walter, photographer; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 06:06, 15 June 2010 (UTC) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

Klein goes on to illustrate how, due to union pressure, firing a teacher for bad or even illegal conduct is almost impossible, and how pension benefits dramatically higher than the average American receives is bankrupting school systems.The federal government’s growing role in education has exacerbated the already serious problems. As the author of the Declaration of Independence explained:

But if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by … [any] general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience …”

The Daily Signal notes that:

While Jefferson supported the idea of public education, he would not have placed schools under government supervision. Instead, he argued for the placement of ‘each school at once under the care of those most interested in its conduct.’ He would put parents in charge … Taxpayers would provide the resources for public education; the community would arrange the schooling.

SOLUTIONSWhile the problems facing American schools are serious, the solutions need not be painful. In 2015, The New York Analysis of Policy & Government recommended:

• End “mission creep.” Increasingly, schools are tasked with ever increasing responsibilities to feed and babysit their students. Neither should be the prime purpose of educational institutions. The focus should be, as exclusively as possible, on learning.
• Spend dollars on actual instruction, not on patronage or community relations positions, non-pedagogical staff or non-pedagogical activities. For far too long, the needs of the students have played second fiddle to those of unions, community organizers, and politicians.
• Emphasize the basics and stop spending dollars and time on educational fads. Students who can’t read well or perform basic math will not succeed. Students who don’t know the basic facts of American history and civics will not have the tools to be intelligent citizens. The latest version of “new math” and other fads almost always fail to accomplish anything.
• Take Washington bureaucrats out of the picture. The federal government has failed to improve academic achievement, but it has wasted taxpayer dollars and distracted local schools from their primary tasks.
• Take truly troubled students out of the mainstream and place them into special programs where their needs can be met.
• Provide facts, not opinions, in lessons. More and more, opinions are replacing actual facts and traditional values in such subjects as history, social studies, civics, and even reading.
  

Lawrence J. Fedewa, writing in the Washington Times, examined the terrible statistics resulting from America’s failing education system and warned that :

It is clear that failing schools lead to failing societies. According to these data, our turn is coming if not already here. Our schools need a lot of fixing if America is to retain its standard

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Education
Kill the Department of Ed.? It’s been done
How an 1860s experiment was torpedoed by an argument as old as America.

By KEVIN KOSAR 09/23/2015 05:25 AM EDT

When Washington’s education bureaucracy comes under political attack, it’s common to pin responsibility for its existence on Jimmy Carter. He signed legislation to establish the Department of Education in 1979, and critics note that this imposed a new department on a country that had gotten along quite well without one for more than 200 years.
But that’s not quite true. It wasn’t Jimmy Carter who launched the first Department of Education: it was Andrew Johnson, and the year was 1867. The department was small, ambitious and astonishingly short-lived. Congress abolished it and demoted its reformist chief just a year later.
The Reconstruction Era was different in many ways, and the department got caught in the toxic racial politics of the day. But at a deeper level the demolition of the original DOE was not a random act of political pique. In fact, the department fell victim to an argument that had started long before Johnson and which we’re still having today: What’s the federal government’s role in our schools? Should it be meddling at all?
America has never been able to answer this question decisively. As a result, our national politics have been especially rancorous when it comes to education. Small policy matters tend to blow up into great philosophical disputes on the nature of government; national bipartisan reforms quickly become political flash points. The issues that inspired the first Education Department didn’t go away, but more than a century would pass before another president would try the same thing.
As Congress tries to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law this fall, and presidential candidates turn broad-based ideas like accountability and Common Core into highly politicized stump issues, it may seem education is just another punching bag for 2015’s partisan warriors. It’s not. These arguments were all simmering in the America of the 1860s. The story of the first DOE helps show why they’ve been so hard to escape.
EDUCATION WAS CENTRAL to the American story from the start. For the most part, the Founders were pro-education. “[N]othing is of more importance for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue,” said Benjamin Franklin. The young nation’s experiment in democratic self-government depended on citizens with the sense to direct their own affairs and to select good leaders. Widespread education “is favorable to liberty,” said Benjamin Rush. “Without learning, men become savages or barbarians, and where learning is confined to a few people, we always find monarchy, aristocracy and slavery.”
But that didn’t mean the founders were pro-federal education. Churches and towns had been running schools since the earliest European settlers landed in North America. At a time in world history when public education was a rarity, some American settlements actually required it. Massachusetts’ Old Deluder Satan Act of 1642, for example, directed “every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to 50 households, shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general.” (The remarkable name of the act was a reference to education’s power to counter the devil, who wants humans illiterate and unable to read God’s directions in the Bible.)
Though American leaders wanted a nation of virtuous, informed citizens, almost nobody saw educating them as the federal government’s job. The Constitution didn’t authorize the federal government to make schools policy. It is not among the enumerated powers in Article I section 8, and the 10th Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution to the states and the people. For most of the nation’s history, Congress intervened in education only in specific, narrow ways justified by an explicit constitutional provision. The various acts to settle the West almost inevitably required land to be set aside for public schools; Congress had also authorized schools when it chartered the District of Columbia’s government in 1804. (While U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson also was the president of the D.C. school board). The federal government later funded and set up schools on American Indian reservations.
In the early 19th century, the nation’s first major education-reform movement took off. These “common school” reformers sought to professionalize education, which struck them as too often ad hoc and shoddy. They advocated schooling for all children via government school systems with university-educated schoolmen at the top and teachers trained in the latest pedagogical methods. Children would be improved by learning to read, write and perform basic math; and their character would be bettered by moral instruction. The nation as a whole would benefit through the spread of upright, hygienic youth prepared to find work (boys) and run orderly households (girls).
When he arrived in D.C. in 1867, Henry Barnard was the nation’s most famous living education reformer. (Horace Mann, the movement’s iconic figure, had died eight years earlier.) Barnard was a wunderkind who graduated Yale with academic honors at age 20; he was appointed schoolmaster of an academy, then served in the Connecticut Legislature. His bill to establish a state school board became law in 1838, and he was seated on it. That same year, he traveled to Washington to ask what national schooling statistics were available. “Not many” was the response. He persuaded the Census Office to include questions on education. He did all this before age 30, and went on to lead the nascent Rhode Island school system, start a teachers training school and publish the American Journal of Education.

He was an obvious choice for first commissioner of the Department of Education. The idea was the brainchild of Rep. James Garfield, R-Ohio, and other congressmen from northern states who, in the wake of the Civil War, were distressed by widespread illiteracy and the sorry state of many schools.
President Andrew Johnson signed the Department of Education Act in 1867 reluctantly, after he had been assured it was harmless. It was a meek agency. Congress authorized it to have just four employees – besides Commissioner Barnard, there were three clerks – and limited its powers to “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the United States.” The DOE also was to publish useful information on the “organization and operation” of school systems and “promote the case of education throughout the country.”
Even with these limits, many in Congress hated the Department. They saw its existence as an unconstitutional power grab and worried that its data-gathering authority gave Washington a new and dangerous kind of leverage. Rep. Andrew Rogers (D-N.J.) declared: “I am content, sir, to leave this matter of education where our fathers left it, where the history of our country left it, to the schools systems of the different towns, cities and states…[This legislation] proposes to collect such statistics which will give a controlling power over the schools systems of the states.”
Federal education policy also was a proxy for race politics, which added further fuel. Rep. Garfield and other ardent abolitionists had fought for the department. The Freedmen’s Bureau (established in 1865) had paid northern, Christian missionaries to start schools for blacks in the South. Confederate states, as a condition of readmission to the Union, had to rewrite their constitutions to provide schooling for children, both white and black. The Department of Education would do its part in Reconstruction by tracking the progress to enroll newly emancipated students and increase their literacy rates, and advocating for better schools, all of which struck some in Congress as threatening.

In 1868, Barnard delivered the first of what would be annual reports to Congress. It had been a busy year. He published a dozen circulars on teacher training, school architecture, education taxes and more. The commissioner requested additional funds. He needed another clerk and he wanted more books and studies that described the school reforms undertaken in Europe. Barnard also wanted the department to publish state education data in cases where state governments lacked funds to do so.
Instead of backing his ideas, Congress rebuked him. The Department of Education was demoted to an office in the Department of the Interior. To add insult to injury, it also cut Barnard’s salary 25 percent. He got no protection from Johnson, who was generally unsupportive of Reconstruction.
On March 15, 1870, Henry Barnard resigned as the U.S. commissioner of education. He left Washington and returned to Hartford, Conn., to live out his final 30 years doing what he loved most – studying schooling and advocating for its improvement and expansion to all children. A brief experiment in Washington-driven education reform was over.

UNTIL THE 1960S, Congress tended to stay within its old constitutional bounds on education issues, jumping them only when the nation imagined it was facing a crisis. The 1917 Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act was passed due to anxieties over widespread illiteracy, especially among the waves of immigrants who might otherwise be susceptible to the incipient anarchist and communist movements. After the next world war, “as a matter of national security,” Congress passed the 1946 School Lunch Act “to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children.” The national panic over the Soviet launch of Sputnik, putting the Russians ahead in the space race, inspired Congress to hustle the 1958 National Defense Education Act to the desk of an ambivalent President Dwight Eisenhower. It bolstered high school scientific and foreign-language curricula to build more brainpower to fight the Cold War.  
But in the 1960s, the federal role in schooling expanded dramatically. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed to ameliorate poverty and the destructive effects of segregation. It was the largest education law to date, and its Title I spread federal dollars to nearly every school district in America with low-income students. The ESEA was omnibus legislation. It paid for projectors and technology for classrooms, training and new administrative systems for state education agencies. It even authorized the commissioner to build education-research centers, a power Barnard would have loved to have. Section 604 of the law, of course, forbade “federal control of education.”
The Department of Education itself didn’t return until the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter claimed the country needed a full-fledged Cabinet department to make federal education programs more efficient and accountable. As in Reconstruction, much of Congress disagreed, and 200 House members voted against the legislation. Critics suggested this was little more than a political payback; Carter was the first presidential candidate endorsed by the National Education Association. Abolishing the department became a plank in Republican presidential platforms for the next 20 years.
Today, federal funds are less than 10 percent of elementary and secondary education spending. Localities and states pay the rest. But while federal funding is modest, Washington’s sway is not. Title 20, the corpus of federal education laws, runs more than 1,000 pages. The Department of Education spends $70 billion each year and issues reams of regulations and policy guidance, spelling out in exacting detail what states, localities and schools must do to keep the federal funds flowing. With that leverage, federal education policy has metastasized. The anxiety voiced by Rep. Rogers in 1867 was not unfounded.
No Child Left Behind, signed in 2002, is a case in point. NCLB was a significant retooling of Lyndon Johnson’s landmark education law. The original ESEA, in 1965, was 32 pages long; NCLB is 670 pages. Its reforms to Title I aimed to remedy the stubborn black-white, rich-poor achievement gap by toughening the conditions of aid to require states to adopt stronger education standards, test students more frequently and demonstrate all children were making “adequate yearly progress.” Schools that failed at these goals would be reorganized, and their students could be freed to attend other public schools. The new requirements had bite, and complaints about “punishing teachers,” “too much testing” and the subsequent rise of Common Core standards erupted from both left and right, with palpable anger about Washington intruding far too much into local schooling.
The pendulum tends to swing back over time, as the congressional education debates of the past decade have centered on how to reduce federal control of schooling without giving up the goal of educational equity. The Senate overwhelmingly passed a reauthorization of the education law in July, which dials back the federal demands. The House has passed its own bill that reduces the conditions of aid further or, in the words of Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.), “helps provide American families the education system they deserve, not the one Washington wants.”
Perhaps the two chambers will reconcile their differences this autumn and gain President Barack Obama’s signature. If they do, a detente in education policy will set in for a time. But when the argument over education policy restarts, the fight over what business Washington has in the American classroom – an argument Henry Barnard and Andrew Johnson would recognize very well – will start anew.
Kevin R. Kosar is the director of the governance project at the R Street Institute and the creator of the Federal Education Policy History website. He is the author of Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education.

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What are we thinking! – Part 1: Education matters
written by Guest Contributor Mark Shepard April 19, 2020

Schools are closed, children are home and parents are confronted with how best to help their children continue their education at home, where parents are more clearly seeing and evaluating the ideas that are shaping their child’s thinking and worldview.   Indeed, every schooling option is a form of discipleship (training to think from a particular perspective) and everyday disciples are being made.  What type of disciple is your child’s school aiming to produce?

Ideas that not many decades ago were well understood to be destructive are now accepted, if not embraced, by huge percentages of Americans.  And make no mistake; much of this shift ties to the curriculum forced upon the vast majority of American children through the public school system.

That curriculum is not an accident.   It is the design of John Dewey and others who set up a teaching college at Columbia University, which has become a model for most teaching colleges in our nation.   The core objective has been to shift America away from its free-market model to one of centralized state-control, with the misguided belief that a world controlled by a few “gifted” people would deliver a safer and better life than a world where people are free to interact, create and exchange goods and ideas according to their needs, desires and dreams.   In their elitist zeal, the history of corruption and carnage from concentrating power in the hands of a few was disregarded.

Their ideal world, which is from Marxist ideology, requires a world where the citizens’ greatest allegiance is to the state. So, like all Marxist experiments, their methods are aimed at eliminating from society the more natural allegiances: bonds to family, religion and property (physical as well as labor and creative works).

Our nation’s shift away from free-markets and toward state-controlled markets is very much connected to the worldview taught in public school curriculum.  Some surveys suggest that about half of America’s young adults are quite open to socialism.   None of this is an accident.   People become what they learn.

For decades vain efforts have tried to reform public education.  However, it is impossible to make something good out of something that is fundamentally flawed.  To pretend a school system can teach without impressing a worldview into the minds of its students is utter nonsense.   Education is always teaching from some set of ideas.

We have had state-controlled public education for so long it is hard to imagine an alternative; however, as with any monopoly-type entity it invites corruption and indeed has been used to redirect the American mindset.   The concerns that produced the First Amendment, prohibiting government from pushing a particular religion, apply equally to education.   A government with the power to direct the thinking of the population is dangerous.   Americans have spilled massive amounts of blood and resources in wars against nations where monopoly state-controlled education steered cultures toward horrific ends.

A free-market system of education, which diversifies power and naturally delivers according to the needs and desires of the population it serves, is a much safer option.  Thankfully there are numerous education models in practice today, delivering results far better for the children than the “free” public system.   So while small at this point, the framework for a free-market system is well established.   

Of course the public system is not free at all.   Mammoth taxes fund its per-student cost that is almost always higher than most free-market options.   But a far greater cost is the long term effect on a child of a poor education based upon a fraudulent set of ideas, which is the case at all public schools.   Even teachers that understand the fraudulent core of the curriculum can do little when he or she is bound by law to impress that curriculum into the minds of students.  What a huge loss of a person’s life to have spent their formative years learning from a paradigm that is counter to the realities of life!

Add to that the impact from peers, with parents having little to no control over who their child interacts with at public schools and on essentially unsupervised bus rides to and from school.  Consolidating public schools makes the peer problems worse.  Bigger is not better.

The utter failure of the state-controlled monopoly-minded school model has, even with its “free” price tag, spawned many free-market options.   Part 2 of this article explores free-market thinking for educating with a transparent and intentional perspective.

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What are we thinking! – Part 2: An example of free-market thinking in education

Part 1 exposed many of the problems with the state-controlled public education system in our nation today and proposed moving to a free-market education system.  Understanding that every education model is built from a core set of ideas and will produce students that think consistently with that particular paradigm, the key question is: From what perspective do you want your child to think?

Regardless of the perspective, the considerations are largely the same.  What does the paradigm say about education?   What methodologies and curriculum will best help the student develop a thinking that is consistent with that paradigm?   These are real objectives of any education model.  People are very moldable, most especially when young.  Our view of life is shaped by the ideas our minds are focused on, whether that focus is by desire or by force.

I have chosen to consider a free-market education model from a Christian perspective as that is the worldview I embrace.  Additionally, the Christian worldview was widely embraced and thus very influential at the birth of our nation.   With a free-market approach to education, curriculum naturally reflected the perspective that parents wanted instilled in their children, and so Biblical teachings greatly informed the cultural thinking.  Human incompatibility with great power was well understood as was the value and uniqueness of each person.  

Drawing upon Biblical teachings, the framers implemented a government with several layers of checks and balances with powers resting at the smallest governing body possible starting with the individual, to the family, church, community, state and finally a federal government with powers limited to those expressly enumerated in its constitution.   The Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, embraced the uniquely Judeo-Christian worldview concept of created human equality, and thus rejected the caste mentality that has plagued the world throughout human history.  Attaining that goal, which is so contrary to our fallen human nature and was even beyond Jefferson’s natural thinking, is truly a never ending battle.  But the idea of an American citizen being free to chart life according to his or her own aspirations and abilities, with no restrictions based on social status, is very much a founding concept that connects solidly to a Christian worldview.

The Bible, being the primary written source on the Christian perspective, nowhere suggests that education be under the jurisdiction of the state, but rather it expressly states that the training up of children (education or discipleship) is the responsibility of the child’s parents and the church.

In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus initiated His Church with the expressed purpose to make disciples by discipling in Godly ways.  That is not a concept built out of a single passage, but rather it is a theme throughout the Bible.   Yet estimates are that 85% of churchgoing parents send their children to literally be discipled in schools with a curriculum based on secular humanism along with destructive teachings on sexuality that come from cultural Marxism.   

Christians in the church are so quick to point out sin in our culture and to fight for religious liberty.  But could it be that the sin in our culture and the challenges to religious liberty are the outcome of sin within the church in America?   Surely the church has largely turned away from its most basic calling to make disciples, most especially when it comes to the very children in the church.  Why would we not expect our culture to shift toward carnal behavior when the majority of churchgoing Christians send their children to be discipled in carnal thinking?  That disconnect is massive!

Indeed, the consequences of putting children under contrary instruction are very serious.  Jesus expressed in Matthew 18:6-7 (NASB), “… whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”  How can true followers of a set of ideas habitually have a very contrary set of ideas impressed into the minds of their children?

While it is very common to focus on the “how” of this task, which can certainly feel overwhelming, we must first set our mind on what we are called to do.   Once our thinking is aligned with Jesus’s call to disciple and most especially disciple the children in our home and in our church, then we can consider the “how” in light of the greatness of our God, the uniqueness of each child, the resources and abilities in the home and the available resources, talents and gifts in our particular church.   The options vary greatly in cost, education focus, parental interaction, possible outreach, etc.

Over the past few decades many people have been working tirelessly to create better options and their efforts have truly prepared our nation for a time such as now when, because of the COVID-19 virus, parents are forced to be more engaged in the direction of their children’s education.   Just over a year ago several of these people and their organizations joined together to create the Christian Education Initiative (CEI) at https://christedu.org/.  

With CEI, those actively working for free-market education solutions built on a Christian worldview can get to know and support one-another and collaborate with their various strengths to help create more and better opportunities for children to have a Christian education.   CEI embraces a free-market system, where parents have the strongest voice.  CEI is new and growing, so there are still many great resources that are not yet connected in with CEI.

CEI is a resource for parents, churches, Christian schools and Christian teaching colleges that embrace that the calling of the church is to make disciples and most especially disciples of the children in the church.  Because education is discipleship.

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What are we thinking! – Part 3: Putting ideas into action
By Mark Shepard, Planting Seeds to Renew America
Contact Mark: 4organicEducation@gmail.com

By Mark Shepard, Planting Seeds to Renew America

Contact Mark: 4organicEducation@gmail.com

Part 1 of this article made a case that every education option impresses a set of ideas into students. A free-market education model is the only option that allows parents to give their children an education consistent with the parents’ worldview. A free-market model can, and generally does, deliver a safer, better quality, more appropriate education at a lower cost than a monopoly-type state-controlled education model.

Part 2 of this article explored applying free-market thinking to education. A Christian worldview was used in that example. Part 3 is an extension of Part 2, and as such is focused on creating solutions largely from a Christian perspective. It puts action to Jesus’ core calling to Christians in Matthew 28:19-20 and Acts 1:8, because education is discipleship.

Parents:

• There are many options. Search them; study the curriculum and teaching methodology with the goal of finding an education environment that will instill strong Biblical thinking in your child, while giving a format that fits well with your family. Collaborating with friends on this venture will be encouraging and helpful for both you and your friends.
  

• If you are part of a local church that does not strive toward ensuring every child in your church has an opportunity to be educated (discipled) in Godly ways, encourage a change in priorities; if that fails, join a different church. A Biblical church, by definition, will not ignore the core calling of the church. Correct thinking does not come by chance, it requires intentional discipleship and that is the core calling of the local church.
  

• Remember that whoever pays for the education ultimately controls the education. Your children’s education is worth being a top priority in your home. There is no second chance.
  

Pastors and church leaders:

• Where are the shepherds who are to protect the sheep (even the least of these) when the vast majority of churched children are sent to have false ideas impressed upon them five days a week? Who will stand up against the resulting confusion from children being told to believe two very opposing sets of ideas? Who will encourage churchgoing parents to educate their children in a manner consistent with the Biblical worldview taught and preached from the pulpit? Who will lead the church as a whole to help make that possible?
  

• Where are the pastors that truly stand up against a dualistic mindset that limits Biblical thinking to a couple hours a week within the four walls of the church building, and perhaps a little personal daily time for seasoning? Is not the Biblical worldview an all-encompassing comprehensive worldview that does indeed speak to all aspects of life? If not, it is not a worldview.
  

Church family:

• Working together creatively, as a single body with a single purpose, help find ways for every child in your local church family to have an opportunity for a Christian-based education. Christians aren’t to be islands that simply join together once or twice a week. We are called to do life together. Do not limit yourself or God.
  

For some churches, homeschooling might fit every family. Others will find the best option to be a co-op type school, where several families work together and make use of the church building. And then other churches will open or be part of opening a more traditional school that, while more expensive to operate, can reach well beyond the needs in a single church.

A mix of all of these options could deliver great results while also being more affordable for parents and more sustainable for traditional schools. Younger students would be educated at home or in co-op arrangements that are more intimate and then go on to a traditional school setting, which has more offerings, for their high school years. This mixed model creates a natural feeder program for the traditional school, reduces the higher-level cost to just four years for each student, makes Christian education available to far more families, and makes great use of existing church buildings that are generally empty during weekdays. It is a win-win-win-win!

The main point is to organically find what best fits your church. One size does not fit all.

• Resist the fortress model of simply protecting your children from competing ideas and forces, but rather understand the ideas that confront and confuse our culture. Open your doors to families who are not part of your church so they have options besides the confusion created by the ideas pushed through the public school system. Help shift your local church from simply being another social venue to being a strong and trusted pillar of your community.
  

Existing Christian Schools:

• Are you truly developing strong biblical thinkers? Are your teachers equipped to accomplish that task?
  

• Have you tested your graduates’ worldview using a worldview test, such as the PEERS test from Nehemiah Institute, to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum and learning methods you use?
  

• Are you familiar with Renew a Nation’s Biblical Worldview Training Bootcamp for Teachers?
  

Christian Teaching Colleges:

• Are you training teachers to educate students to truly think biblically in all subjects?
  

• Many teachers from Christian teaching colleges seek public school jobs simply to pay for their education debt. Are you able to lessen the financial burden for graduates based upon the graduate teaching in a Christian school for a number of years? Teachers in Christian schools are very much missionaries, answering a calling.
  

Resources:

Over the past few decades many people have been working tirelessly to create better options and their efforts have truly prepared our nation for a time such as now when, because of the COVID-19 virus, parents are forced to be more engaged in the direction of their children’s education. Just over a year ago several of these people and their organizations joined together to create the Christian Education Initiative (CEI) at https://christedu.org/.

With CEI, those actively working for free-market education solutions built on a Christian worldview can get to know and support one-another and collaborate with their various strengths to help create more and better opportunities for children to have a Christian education. CEI embraces a free-market system, where parents have the strongest voice. CEI is new and growing, so there are still many great resources that are not yet connected in with CEI.

CEI is a resource for parents, churches, Christian schools and Christian teaching colleges that embrace that the calling of the church is to make disciples and most especially disciples of the children in the church. Because education is discipleship.

万得福

An Ivy League professor says we need to end homeschooling, because parents who homeschool their children are “authoritarian.”

In an article in Harvard Magazine‘s latest issue, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, blasts homeschooling as “dangerous” and appealing to those who seek “authoritarian control over their kids.”

The article by Erin O’Donnell is part of the lead-up to a Harvard summit on homeschooling scheduled for June.


O’Donnell’s article and interview with Bartholet have garnered a good deal of attention, some say unduly. It is an important window into a mindset perhaps more common at our nation’s elite institutions than many would like to believe.

In the interview, Bartholet says that parents of homeschooled children tend to be “extreme religious ideologues” who don’t believe in science, keep women subservient, and believe in white supremacy.


Bartholet is doing little more than perpetuating a malicious and lazy stereotype.


As Mike McShane, the director of national research at the nonprofit EdChoice, writes:
In 2019, the National Center for Education Statistics published results from a survey of homeschoolers who found that the number one reason for homeschooling was not ‘a desire to provide religious instruction’ (that came in third) or even ‘a desire to provide moral instruction’ (that came in seventh), but rather ‘a concern about school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure.’ Number two was ‘dissatisfaction with the academic instruction at other schools.’
It’s true that many homeschooling families tend to be religious, but this absurd and, frankly, bigoted view of who they are reveals exactly what Bartholet wants when she calls for ending homeschooling.


What Bartholet clearly worries about is that homeschooling undermines Tolerance, with a capital “T.”


Her mindset is that public schools are a vital component of the state to carry out vast, progressive social engineering. If even a small minority of young people don’t accept the left’s views on say, sexuality, transgenderism, religion, or American history, according to this way of thinking, then they need to be indoctrinated to embrace these views.


The public schools, at least in the way Bartholet portrays them, are simply a tool to “veto” any potentially troubling beliefs of parents.


For an example of a homeschool family, she points to the 2018 memoir “Educated” by Tara Westover, who wrote about how she was raised and abused by Idaho survivalists who never sent her to school.


Extrapolating this single experience to indict homeschooling is ridiculous, especially given the ample evidence of abuse and other terrible things taking place in public schools.


And given the ridiculous caricature by which Bartholet defines the majority of homeschool families, that means she finds a whole lot of Americans in need of a reeducation.


In the interview, Bartholet says that children should “grow up exposed to … democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination, and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.”


If that’s the case, then children are better off being homeschooled or in private schools.


According to research by Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, “members of the very group for which public schooling is believed to be most essential for inculcating political tolerance (i.e., those who are more strongly committed to a particular worldview and value system) actually exhibit at least as much or more tolerance when they are exposed to less public schooling.”


Cheng defines tolerance as “the willingness to extend civil liberties to people who hold views with which one disagrees.”


Of course, this doesn’t seem to be what Bartholet would define as tolerance.
It’s ironic that she labels homeschooling families as “authoritarian,” since her mindset is far closer to what is common in authoritarian regimes that treat citizens like wards to be indoctrinated and aggressively stamp out all dissent.


This is a corruption of what education should look like in a free society.


Society has an interest in the education of young people. After all, as Thomas Jefferson and many other Founders insisted, an educated citizenry is essential to maintaining a republic.


If a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is to make informed decisions, widespread knowledge and instruction in basic civics—among many other things—is essential. An education in the moral and practical components of citizenship is essential to maintaining and perpetuating our free institutions.


As an aside on that count, our vast system of public schooling—still the primary way by which young Americans get a K-12 education—clearly is not fulfilling this need.


A 2018 study by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that only 1 in 3 Americans actually can pass the U.S. citizenship test, which asks only basic questions about our history and how our government works. The study found that young people do particularly poorly in civics knowledge.


We certainly have a great need, as Americans, to reverse this worrying trend of declining civics knowledge.


However, believing that the community has a role in creating its next generation of citizens does not necessarily include thinking that parents and families should be cut out of decision-making in that equation, or that children “belong” to the community and the state.


What Harvard’s Bartholet argues in the interview is that the state, backed by progressive college faculty such as herself, of course, has an exclusive right to educate young Americans.


Perhaps this is why so many parents look to homeschooling, private schooling, and various school choice programs as a way to escape a public K-12 system that some left-wing social engineers clearly see as their personal fiefdom.