School Leader

On Differentiation, Direct Instruction, and More: A Decade Later

Recently I was contacted by a teacher who had come across a now-decade old blog post I wrote about education author Mike Schmoker and his (hostile) take on differentiated instruction. I argued that, as much as I admired Schmoker's work, I thought he was making a bit of a straw man argument against differentiation. This teacher was curious if I had any more recent thoughts on this topic because his school had recently been through a long spell of exploring "personalized learning" and I got the impression that they weren't entirely satisfied because now they were studying Schmoker's (still classic) book Focus, which argues against bells and whistles and for a much more standardized (perhaps traditional) approach to instruction. Here's my response: 

Great to hear from you and I'm glad folks in the trenches are continuing to wrestle with these important issues.

 

I must admit that I have not followed Schmoker's work in recent years, or Tomlinson's for that matter. My gut instinct is still that their ideas really are in creative tension rather than opposition, but to the extent that they do represent different emphases, my money is still very much with Schmoker. 

 

And I'm more confident than I was in 2012 that you can't do it all. Schools must prioritize their "focus" and choose what to emphasize. I'm increasingly convinced that the focus for most schools needs to be on creating a strong, coherent, content-rich curriculum and then ensuring fidelity to that curriculum through administrative oversight and support. Then there must be a relentless focus on effective instruction to deliver that curriculum. Only when those pieces are in place can schools begin to meaningfully work on assessment (which they should). 

 

However, I'm much less confident than I used to be that schools can formatively assess short-term student learning in ways that can validly inform a lot of personalized instructional follow up. My thinking on this has been strongly informed by the work of England-based educator David Didau and his book What If Everything You Thought You Knew About Education Was Wrong? (See my review of his book here). Within that review, also see my references to books by Daisy Christodoulou and E.D. Hirsch, which seem to speak strongly to this topic of what should be our highest education priorities.

Bottom line: I think most talk of differentiation (and especially personalized learning) is a distraction for many schools, which have far greater fish to fry in terms of curriculum and instruction. Differentiation has never been practical for most classrooms and may not even be that beneficial. Education, like all human endeavors, involves limited resources of time, talent, and materials. We need to invest in the strategies that have the biggest impact for the vast majority of students. 

 

In most cases, that's likely to involve direct instruction of rich content by content-expert teachers.

 

Then I shared with him a couple of Twitter/X threads I have posted in recent months that even better summarize my current thinking, which I've reproduced below. The first is from August 18:

 

Earlier this week I quoted an article arguing that classrooms should feature more “lecture” and less “facilitation” on the part of teachers. The article (or the quote at least) provoked a big reaction, both positive and negative. It should go without saying that lecture, done poorly, is ineffective, and that more “student-centered” activities can sometimes work quite well for some students. But a general shift in emphasis toward more teacher-led classrooms is in order for two reasons.

 

The first is philosophical: much of the vacuous mess that makes up “contemporary” instructional strategies is the dross of assumptions about learning, the purpose of education, and of human nature left by Dewey & the “Progressives,” assumptions that can and should be challenged. The second is pragmatic: we should give primacy to instructional strategies that work best for most students when deployed by most teachers in most classrooms. That’s going to often be teacher-led learning centered on a rich, rigorous, established curriculum.

 

Of course there is room and need for variety in terms what this looks like in practice. But we need to throw out many if not most of the assumptions in which most teachers of the last generation have been trained.

 

Dear teacher, you are NOT a “guide on the side.” You better be a content expert ready to impart a comprehensive body of knowledge, skills, and cultural values that is not a personal assemblage of your favorite subjects and ideologies. You are a public servant forming children according to the knowledge and virtues that represent your state and local community’s vision for a life of adult flourishing. That requires you to be firmly in charge of the learning in your classroom. And yes, often it will mean a well-crafted lecture, demonstration, or modeled example is the centerpiece of most lessons. Don’t be shy about that and don’t ever apologize. Be the “sage on the stage.” Your students deserve it.

 

A few days later, I followed up with this thread:

 

More on why we need teachers to intentionally think of themselves as “sage” rather than “guide.” Relevant question: when *should* the teacher be a guide? 

 

There’s definitely a point in the learning journey when the sage becomes a guide. This happens at the highest levels of student learning after the mastery of a large body of knowledge and the practice of skill under the careful tutelage of the master. Examples: when I work w/ a doc student on their dissertation, when a HS composition teacher edits a student thesis, when a teacher steps aside so that well-read students can do Socratic seminar, and when the master electrician watches his apprentice wire a house for real people.

 

The problem is that we’ve been led to believe these are normal, everyday learning experiences that would apply to all students of all developmental levels rather than the culmination of months and years of didactic learning from the direct instruction of an expert. 

 

The ancients understood this when they organized the Trivium - the ascending ladder of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. First comes content knowledge, then understanding and skill for organizing that knowledge, and finally the skill to express it to others, including in novel ways. Contemporary education lost sight of this learning structure and pressures students and teachers to skip directly to application and synthesis without the hard work of mastering the underlying basics, or to jump around willy-nilly as if novice-level students were already masters. Therefore a thoughtful shift toward a more traditional (pre-Progressive) understanding of knowledge, learning, human nature, and the purpose of education itself, seems in order.

 

Looking at what I wrote 11 years ago compared with my more recent thoughts, I can see how my own understanding about high-quality instruction has matured while still revolving around a core set of principles, the chief of which is that schools can't do it all, and must prioritize their efforts on tried and true strategies that work for most students. It's a bit discouraging to think of how little progress most schools have made in this regard, but when I also consider the (re)emergence of classical education over this same time period and the recent achievements of many reformers around content knowledge, curriculum improvement, and science-based reading instruction, I'm encouraged for the future. 

 

Somebody email me in another 10 years and let's see where we're at.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aqueducts, Improvement Science, and Leadership

In February this year I became director of the Educational Leadership doctoral program at Western Kentucky University, which forms practicing and aspiring leaders in K-12 schools, higher education, and related fields. One of my immediate goals was to redesign the WKU Ed.D. around the principles and processes of "Improvement Science." 

As a member of the Carnegie Project on the Educational Doctorate (CPED), WKU had been piloting a highly applied capstone project called the "dissertation-in-practice" based on continuous improvement protocols that have been heavily promoted by the Carnegie Foundation. Like other CPED institutions, WKU was interested in distinguishing its EdD as a practitioner doctorate, as rigorous as a traditional PhD but designed for a different purpose: forming "scholar-practitioners" who will continue to serve as leaders in educational organizations, equipped with a set of research skills to facilitate more rapid organizational improvement. 

With the incoming Fall 2023 cohort, we have made "Improvement Science Leadership" the theme of the entire program going forward. With the tools of improvement science, WKU doctoral students will identify a problem of practice within their organization and deploy a set of research-based interventions to address it.

Much of the language of improvement science is rooted in the management theories and change processes championed by W. Edwards Deming and other 20th century figures associated with business and manufacturing industries. In recent decades, these processes have been increasingly applied to health care and education organizations as well. Perhaps the best known feature of improvement science is the PDSA (plan-do-study-act) cycle: the practitioner seeks to define and understand a practice problem and hypothesize an improvement strategy (plan), deploy the intervention (do), analyze the results (study), and then plan a new cycle of interventions based on lessons learned (act).

This semester I am teaching a brand new course to this incoming doctoral cohort called Introduction to Improvement Science. The "cover photo" I chose for this course features the impressive Pont du Gard aqueduct in Southern France. Many of the images in the slides for the first class session also include pictures of Pont du Gard and details of similar Roman aqueducts.

The choice of the aqueduct as the guiding image for a course on improvement science is not (just) a reflection of my love for things old and beautiful. While improvement science is often presented as a product of 20th century management ideas and techniques, the principles and practices of improvement are not new and over emphasizing the social science aspects of leadership and organizational change often reflects the prejudice of "presentism," which, among other things, fails to give our ancestors credit for their immense knowledge, skill, and wisdom.

The ancient Romans and their subjects faced a significant problem of practice: how to get sufficient water supplies to their growing population centers in a hot Mediterranean climate. Their "intervention" was genius: use the natural force of gravity to channel water from the nearby mountains to where it was needed. Pont du Gard may have carried as much as 8.8 million gallons of water per day along a route of more than 30 miles. That this structure was not just useful but also beautiful should be noted, because such things should go together.

Also note, however, that this feat of engineering-art didn't just happen by accident, but through leadership, which is also the focus of this EdD program. And here we speak not just of the emperor who likely gave the initial order for the construction of Pont du Gard (Caesar Augustus, ruler of the realm, whose name you might recognize from the second chapter of St. Luke's gospel), but his son-in-law Marcus Vipsannius Agrippa, who oversaw the work a generation later, and the countless, unnamed architects, engineers, foremen, and masons who designed and built the structure, compelling excellence from themselves and others, through a process we would likely recognize today as "plan-do-study-act" (PDSA).

No work of collective human excellence is achieved without leadership, and here I speak not of the pseudo-social science of modern "leadership" theory, but the classical understanding that leaders are those who articulate a grand vision of excellence and, through their virtuous example, compel a desire for excellence in others. 

My aspiration for the WKU Ed.D. program is that it serve to form scholar-practitioners who can lead similar works of excellence in the organizations they serve. Here my thinking is influenced, in part, by Yuval Levin's 2020 book, A Time to Build.

Levin argues that faith in the institutions of modern society has declined because institutions (family, schools, government, the professions, once-respected industries) have abandoned their formative function. Human beings do not naturally seek excellence, and therefore we need institutions - including and especially education and professional training - to form us accordingly. Levin calls on institutions to reclaim that formative purpose.

Professional doctoral programs - especially those who seek to form leaders - should be the first to embrace this purpose. Therefore, my vision and mission for the WKU Ed.D. program is as follows:

• Our vision: The WKU Educational Leadership doctoral program aspires to improve education outcomes in Kentucky and beyond.
• Our mission: To achieve our vision, the WKU Educational Leadership doctoral program will form scholar practitioners who compel excellence in educational organizations by developing virtue and skill in the art and science of improvement.

Understood this way, the components of the WKU Ed.D. program might also roughly parallel the classic Greek ideals of the "three transcendentals:" the True (improving the human condition in discernible ways - improvement "science"), the Good (leadership that compels improvement toward the ideal of excellence), and the Beautiful (an aesthetic dimension of this process that creates experiences that are awe-inspiring and pleasing to our perceptions).

There is still much to work out in my thinking about all this, but the above represents a tentative first attempt to articulate my own goals for the WKU Ed.D. program. I look forward to working with stakeholders to further refine our mission according to this classic understanding of leadership using the tools of organizational improvement.

May the image of Pont du Gard remind us of all the useful, beautiful, excellent things leaders can do.

*Image above by Dimitris Kilymis

CRT prevents real progress on closing achievement gaps

This essay was originally published on the website The Chalkboard Review on April 26, 2021. Sometime in 2022 the website was purchased by new owners who, without notifying me, removed all of my published essays. Given that the website operator has failed to respond to my inquiries about this removal, I can only conclude that my essays were deleted because of the philosophical or policy content. Therefore I am reposting these essays here.

How widespread is critical race theory in America’s K-12 classrooms? In an essay for National Review, teacher Daniel Buck argues that while most teachers don’t personally espouse the extreme racialist views of critical theory, the universities where they are trained certainly do. It’s inevitable that the pernicious aspects of critical race theory (CRT), which assume that every difference of student outcome is explained by bias and oppression, will influence what gets taught to our children, and how.

              Daniel’s essay prompted a vigorous Twitter exchange among prominent education policy wonks. Thomas B. Fordham President Michael Petrilli called for more research on how widespread CRT really is in K-12 schools, while American Enterprise Institute education scholar Max Eden insists that states should ban the use of CRT in schools outright because of its sweeping and totalizing claims.

              I share Daniel Buck’s feeling that most ordinary classroom teachers are not antifa sympathizers or devotees of Marxist pedagogy. I also agree with him that these views are much more common in university settings, including education programs. But the core assumptions of CRT have come to dominate the professional discourse and thinking about equity issues at both university and K-12 levels, so much so that individual educators are increasingly afraid to push back against those assumptions and just silently endure CRT indoctrination.

This is bound to eventually have an effect on classroom practice and actually makes it harder to address real equity issues in our schools. When you assume, as CRT does, that all outcomes are the result of bias and oppression, you silence discussion of all other explanations and solutions.

For example, research from education advocacy group TNTP, billed as “The Opportunity Myth,” shows that students of color and students from low-income backgrounds regularly receive classroom assignments that are below grade-level expectations. In fact, the Opportunity Myth study found that in 4 out of ten classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment (compared to only 12% of majority white classrooms that never received a grade-level assignment).

Does racism play a role in this abysmal display of low expectations? Perhaps. The biased belief that students of color are incapable of completing rigorous assignments almost certainly does. But a fair number of minority teachers and administrators would also have to be guilty of this assumption.

Is white privilege at work in this pattern? Perhaps – to the extent that white students are getting the benefit of the doubt that they are capable of high achievement and therefore teachers are challenging them with more rigorous work. So racial prejudice may indeed make a difference in student outcomes. But what do we do about that? And does that explain everything about these differences?

CRT advocates would say we have to expose these implicit biases in educators, shame white teachers for having these views (presumably the minority teachers with low expectations for students of color also hold those views because of some mysterious pattern of white supremacy), and insist that students receive more “culturally responsive” instruction, like the CRT-approved but historically inaccurate pablum of the 1619 project, or ethno-mathematics, since concepts like finding the right answer in a math class is an alleged reflection of “whiteness.”

Instead of imposing ineffective, CRT-inspired equity trainings or ridiculous, ideologically-driven curriculum on students, what if we just showed educators the research on low expectations and then trained them in understanding what high-quality, rigorous instructional resources look like and how to use them? For all students. From my own personal experience when I’ve confronted teachers and administrators with the Opportunity Myth research, they immediately recognize the pattern from their own schools, especially the tendency to use the past performance of struggling students to justify giving them low-quality assignments. And they immediately want to help their schools do better.

Similarly, we know that students of color and students from low-income backgrounds are likely to be taught by the least experienced, weakest teachers, a pattern that almost certainly contributes to achievement gaps. Again, is it more valuable to train teachers in implicit bias, or to simply insist that every student be taught by a skilled teacher using effective instructional methods?

Of course, there are also other factors that contribute to disparities in student learning outcomes. As black educator Ian Rowe regularly points out, the disintegration of the family has an untold impact on student achievement and educators are committing malpractice for failing to champion traditional family structures as a means of improving student performance in all racial groups. But these are the kinds of important education variables that CRT forbids us to discuss.

The gaps in student learning based on race are real and troubling. And racial bias on the part of the educators may play a role. But indoctrinating teachers and students in critical race theory won’t help, mainly because CRT advocates are far more interested in promoting their extremist, racialist ideology than actually solving problems.

Fortunately, most teachers and school administrators really do care about their students and doing better by them. They know achievement gaps exist and that closing them is at least partly within their control, even – and especially - if they reject the totalizing assumptions of critical race theory. And they know that becoming more effective in their teaching practice is the most powerful way to get there.

Living Not By Lies in Education

This essay was originally published on the website The Chalkboard Review on March 19, 2021. Sometime in 2022 the website was purchased by new owners who, without notifying me, removed all of my published essays. Given that the website operator has failed to respond to my inquiries about this removal, I can only conclude that my essays were deleted because of the philosophical or policy content. Therefore I am reposting these essays here.

Rod Dreher’s latest book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, warns of a “soft totalitarianism” slowly creeping into American culture. Unbeknownst to many, K-12 schools are actually the front lines for this effort to impose a radical ideology on society by making young people cheerleaders for the totalizing worldview of critical theory, or at least to make them too afraid to speak up against it.

              Dreher channels the famous Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in calling everyone, but especially people of faith, to prepare for this coming totalitarianism and resist it by committing to “live not by lies.” While Dreher discusses the K-12 education system only indirectly, teachers are well aware of how “woke” ideology is transforming what can be taught and even spoken in classrooms. Now is the time for the lessons of Live Not by Lies to be explored in the context of K-12 teaching and learning.

              I don’t intend this article to be a full review of Live Not by Lies. Others have done that already (I recommend this review by classical educators Ty Fischer and Joe Gerber). Rather, after briefly summarizing Dreher’s thesis, I’d like to offer some reflections on what it might mean to “live not by lies” as an educator, or as a student or parent of a student in K-12 schools.

              For those unfamiliar with Rod Dreher’s writing, their first reaction to his suggestion that totalitarianism is right around the corner is probably to scoff and declare, “That can’t happen here.” Anticipating this reaction, Dreher draws from numerous interviews with survivors of former Soviet bloc countries who see what is happening in American and recognize a pattern. They see how every apparatus of government, culture, and commerce is slowly being adapted to serve a specific ideology: a pseudo-religious political progressivism that demands total allegiance or, at least, silent acquiescence.

              This ideology is driven largely by critical theory, a set of assumptions about society and human persons that suggests one’s identity group defines their power status. Critical theory rejects objective truth and claims there are only subjective, personal “narratives,” all of which serve to reinforce one’s role as victim or oppressor. Critical theory is totalizing, trampling over moral ambiguities and declaring each person good or bad, every idea as noble or evil, depending on the extent to which the idea conforms with critical theory’s own assumptions.

              While these ideas were once known only among the far fringes of the political Left, they have become the operative philosophy of most American universities, and Dreher argues that this pseudo religion now occupies center stage in our political debates. Corporate America has embraced progressive ideology as well, with big technology companies routinely censoring users whose opinions deviate from approved points of view.

              It is in this way that Dreher says the coming totalitarianism is “soft.” Unlike the “hard” tyranny of the former Soviet or Nazi regimes, it is unlikely that dissenters in America and Europe will be hauled away to gulags any time soon. But they won’t have to be, as the combination of state, media, and social pressure will drive anyone who questions the new orthodoxy to silence and submission. Fear of losing one’s job, being punished at school, being pilloried in the media, or denied access to both social and fiscal capital (as is already the case in China) will ensure that resistance is futile.

              Dreher is writing primarily to a Christian audience. People with traditional religious beliefs are likely to be key targets of soft totalitarianism because their commitment to the idea of objective truth, allegiance to a power bigger than the state, and heterodox views on marriage, the family, gender, and a host of other topics puts them outside of the “progressive” mainstream.

              But Dreher’s warning is relevant for anyone who cares about intellectual freedom, open and honest debate, and respect for diverse opinions – all key values of what was once considered a classical “liberal” worldview. And Live Not by Lies is an especially important book for those who care about K-12 education and its role in shaping culture. Anyone who is in even casually observing primary and secondary education can see the growing presence of soft totalitarianism, often dressed in the noble-sounding garb of “anti-racism” and the war over what gets taught – and how – in our schools.

              Let me be clear: there are long-standing racial disparities in education that should be of grave concern to everyone. Achievement gaps and lopsided student discipline data based on race are genuine problems that deserve serious, collective investigation. The lack of diversity among the teaching force probably aggravates these problems in ways we’ve not yet begun to understand.

              But as I wrote last year for the Imaginative Conservative, the presence of these inequalities does not mean they are explained wholly by racism and oppression. Certainly, bias on the part of educators or within the society at large may be a contributing factor. But only an ideological fanatic could conclude that eliminating racism (a worthy but entirely unrealistic goal) would solve all of these problems.

              Sadly, though, that is exactly how so much of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” activities carried out in schools are being conducted. “Anti-racism” training and discussion groups are being mandated for school faculty, often using books like Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist as manuals. These books and associated training sessions promote the idea that victim and oppressor status is written into the skin color of every person, including children themselves. The great creed of the American civil rights movement, that no person should be judged or limited by their skin color, has been completely replaced with its exact opposite, and attached to a political agenda that demands not equality of opportunity, but an actual equality of outcomes that requires a revolutionary reordering of society and a rejection of the core principles of Western Civilization.

              Teachers who would object to these programs face the serious risk of being labeled a racist themselves. But this is precisely where Live Not by Lies serves as an inspiring prescription as well as diagnosis of what is happening in American schools.

              Dreher tells the stories of numerous dissidents who survived communist totalitarianism by refusing to give inner or outer submission to the lies their overlords insisted everyone live by (the title, Live Not by Lies, is taken from a 1974 letter by Solzhenitsyn). This was dangerous business, of course, as resisting could lead to imprisonment, or worse. But sometimes even small, prudent acts of resistance could serve as the inspiration to others.

              Teachers and students should refuse to take part in any “diversity,” “equity,” or “anti-racist” initiatives that treat the assumptions of critical theory as truth, rather than simply as one perspective on a complex set of issues. When they are able, educators, parents, and students should challenge these initiatives openly, exposing their underlying ideology for the extremist, anti-American, anti-liberal agenda that it is. School communities should be made aware of the presence of these programs and demand their school boards provide fair and reasonable oversight.

              At the same time, educators must model strategies for taking racial inequalities in education seriously. We can ask ourselves hard, demanding questions about our own internal biases and practices that may have a disparate effect on different groups of students without succumbing to the totalizing assumptions of critical theory. We stand to actually generate far more effective long-term strategies for addressing disparities in this way.

              Educators, parents, and students must also refuse to live by the curricular lies that are increasingly being told within our schools. Leftist, critical-theory propaganda like the 1619 Project are problematic, not because they tell the “other side” or “rest” of the story of American history, but because they promote outright falsehoods about the American people and their founding. It is simply not true, as the 1619 Project and other efforts at revisionist history hold, that the preservation of slavery was the central reason for the American Revolution. It is ridiculous, but also false, to suggest that math and science – that even finding the correct answer - reflects “white supremacy.” And yet these are the kinds of lies that are being told more and more often in K-12 schools. Again, educators must expose and resist these ideologically-driven curricular ideas and programs whenever they arise. We must insist that the way we teach history, in particular, is both factually accurate and refuse the false dichotomy that understanding and appreciating the past precludes being both critical and patriotic.

Finally, educators, parents, and students must insist their K-12 schools be centers of intellectual diversity and freedom. Universities, which used to play this role, have already by and large submitted to the soft totalitarianism of woke ideology. K-12 schools, which are supposed to be locally controlled and reflect the values of the communities they serve, may be the last bastion for defending the classical liberal ideas of free speech and freedom of conscience.

Refusing to live by lies in today’s education environment is no small thing. For teachers and administrators, it might even involve risking one’s career, and certainly brings the risk of being ostracized and mistreated by colleagues, supervisors, and sometimes even students and parents. But this risk illustrates exactly why all of us who value open debate and intellectual diversity must commit to challenging every policy, program, and ideology that would impose any kind of soft totalitarianism in our schools. Teachers, students, and parents who object to what is happening in schools need to know they are not alone.

America’s Founders understood that democracy – not understood necessarily as majority rule but as a system that limits the power of central authorities over every group regardless of its number – was dependent upon a well-educated citizenry. That democracy is under threat like never before, and K-12 schools are increasingly its battleground. Let’s make sure they remain places that are safe for dissent and intellectual debate.

The cultural contradictions of American education

This essay was originally published on the website The Chalkboard Review on February 19, 2021. Sometime in 2022 the website was purchased by new owners who, without notifying me, removed all of my published essays. Given that the website operator has failed to respond to my inquiries about this removal, I can only conclude that my essays were deleted because of the philosophical or policy content. Therefore I am reposting these essays here.

In the Winter 2021 issue of National Affairs, Manhattan Institute fellow Kay S. Hymowitz explores what she calls “The Cultural Contradictions of American Education.” This contradiction is driven largely by middle class parents who have a fixation both on celebrating children’s individuality and on training students with the values, skills, and dispositions they need for employability and effective socialization.

Hymowitz accurately identifies these two goals as being in paradoxical tension. You cannot easily affirm a child’s right to “be themselves” and simultaneously tell them to curb their impulses for the benefit for others. Thus, we have an American education system in a perpetual identity crisis. Parents, teachers, and students are unclear as to the core purpose of education, and students from working class families wind up being the most perpetually underserved.

  Hymowitz, who has written extensively about the impact of changes in family life, traces the origins of this contradiction back to uniquely American patterns of childrearing, starting in infancy. Citing various ethnographic studies, she contrasts parenting techniques in France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Japan, and China, all of which emphasize training the child’s naturally selfish impulses toward manners, structures, routines, and social norms, with the middle-class American tendency to overemphasize each child’s uniqueness. The impact on schools is evident even to a casual observer.

“American education institutions—led by professionals, many of who are parents themselves—inescapably reflect those same cultural norms,” Hymowitz writes. “One example is the dogma that classrooms need low teacher-student ratios,” perceived as allowing for richer, individualized student-teacher interaction. Besides a wealth of research data suggesting that smaller classes do not actually yield substantive and lasting improvements in student learning, Hymowitz notes how this American attitude contrasts dramatically with those of educators in other cultures who worry that small classes do not give children adequate opportunities to learn to function in large groups.

The middle-class American fixation on the individuality of the child doesn’t just differ from other cultures, though. It also often differs from those of working-class Americans who may practice a much more traditional model of authoritative parenting and expect schools to train up their kids to work hard even when life isn’t entertaining, learn a well-established body of knowledge, and follow the rules.

But American education, from the so-called progressive ideas of John Dewey forward, has clearly been arranged to reflect middle class cultural values. Hymowitz points out how a plethora of educational theories and practices have all but defined our collective philosophy of schooling in this country, from the “whole language” (now repackaged as “balanced literacy”) approaches to reading instruction that suggest students can just absorb the rules of language through exposure to books, to the most-viewed TED Talk of all time, the late Sir Ken Robinson’s diatribe against schools’ tendency to “kill kids’ creativity,” to our current preoccupation with various forms of technology-driven personalized learning.

Meanwhile, says Hymowitz, parents – and many educators – also want schools to “instill in every study a set of distinctly middle-class values—accountability, diligence, civility, and self-control—that are often in direct tension with students’ autonomy and individuality.” Not only does the contradiction mean that many students are often not receiving the content-rich, teacher-directed instruction they need to be successful, but schools also typically approach the development of virtue in their students as an afterthought or with a haphazard mishmash of “soft skills” training.

None of this works out particularly well for the children of working-class families, Hymowitz argues. A century of what she calls “self-centered pedagogies” has failed to put a dent in income-based achievement gaps. Meanwhile, educators, college admissions counselors, and employers routinely lament how unprepared even upper-income students are for life after high school.

Hymowitz notes that all of this further aggravates the social fragmentation of American society. Affluent families supplement what is lacking in the curriculum or character education offered in their child’s school through summer camps, museum trips, and other activities that provide content knowledge in history, science, and the arts that many schools no longer teach in early grades. Students from lower-income families typically lack these luxuries at home and need to get more of it from school. Likewise, these students often benefit little from the occasional dose of middle-class “soft skills:”

Sure, [working-class] parents want their children to have good manners and to listen to their teachers. But in all likelihood those lessons have been delivered bluntly, with a hint of “life-is-tough” severity, and without concern for the child’s self-expression. Adults have likely not prodded those children to “use their words” or express their feelings, or asked them questions about what they thought about a story or what they noticed during a walk to the grocery store. They’re lacking the “cultural literacy” – to recall E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s invaluable term—to thrive in the contemporary progress classroom.

              This cultural contradiction in American education – and its devastating consequences for less-privileged students – is familiar to me as a former teacher and principal and in my current role as a professor of education administration working in and around K-12 schools.

              I believe that most teachers and principals greatly desire to help their students grow into effective citizens and contributing members of society, but I know of few traditional public schools that have an intentional, self-aware sense of mission about growing students in virtue. Formal character education, where it exists, takes a backseat to vocational preparation – making sure students turn out to be good workers and better test takers – and usually takes the form of some vaguely-defined leadership skill development.

              Social studies, science, and arts education in the early grades have nearly vanished while schools over-emphasize math and ill-conceived “reading comprehension” strategies. Education professors and school administrators make teachers feel embarrassed for using direct instruction methods, even though research suggests whole-class, teacher-led learning consistently works better for students from less affluent backgrounds. Deweyan progressivism, while perhaps not as universally dominant as many conservatives sometimes fear or suggest, nevertheless shapes the classroom experience in far too many schools.

              Hymowitz’s essay calls to mind sociologist Charles Murray’s 2012 book-length study, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Comparing demographic changes between working-class and affluent white families over a half-century, Murray found upper-class whites trumpeting the kind of me-first hyper-individualism that Hymowitz describes so vividly in America’s schools, while still insisting their own children learn discipline, commitment, and other essential social skills and virtues. Meanwhile, working class families have nearly disintegrated thanks to male under-employment, divorce and delayed marriage, drug abuse, and out-of-wedlock child birth. Elite whites refuse to acknowledge that they themselves still tend to live according to traditional values while insisting that judging others is the worst possible social sin and the goal of life is to just be happy. Their kids then mostly do okay, while working-class kids pay a terrible price.

              Our schools reflect the same contradiction, promoting content-light, student-centered pedagogies in spite of which affluent kids still manage to succeed. These same schools then fail to acknowledge that virtue is the ultimate goal of the entire educational endeavor – virtue that ultimately puts others before self, virtue that seeks to form and conform our lives to what Aristotle called the true, the good, and the beautiful.

              I believe it is time for American education to confront and seek to resolve its cultural contradiction. First, local boards of education, school councils, parents, teachers, and administrators should intentionally and self-consciously champion a clear purpose for their schools: that is, forming students in virtue, to which all other purposes, from career preparation to mastery of academic knowledge and skill, is ultimately directed.

Will this provoke pitched battles as competing interest groups struggle to define whose virtues and what methods for forming students in such virtues will prevail? Of course. But as Hymowitz’s essay points out, our schools are already molded in the assumptions and values of affluent, white, ideological progressivism. It’s time to challenge those assumptions.

              Then schools need to recommit to a content-heavy, literature-driven curriculum from the early grades onward. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., cited by Hymowitz, paves the way here with his decades-long promotion of cultural literacy, expressed in his numerous books including, most recently, How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation provides free curricular resources for schools that want to strengthen the content, especially in elementary schools.

              Finally, parents and educators need to rethink the hyper-individualist pedagogical assumptions that dominate instructional approaches in our schools. A good start here is the work of England-based educator David Didau. His book What if Everything you Knew About Education Was Wrong takes a deep dive into educational psychology to challenge many current education practices. As I described in my 2017 review of his book, Didau argues for a traditional model of instruction whereby the teacher as content-area expert explains new material, models new skill and application of knowledge, and carefully directs students through scaffolded levels of practice until independence is achieved. A good teacher is indeed the “sage on the stage” and students stand to benefit accordingly.

              Resolving the cultural contradictions of American education will not be easy. In fact, doing so will be controversial and difficult. But as Hymowitz describes, our schools are adrift and conflicted in their sense of purpose, and in many cases failing to adequately educate our students academically or in virtue. The classical idea of “liberty” is not the freedom to do whatever we please, but rather having both the knowledge and the wisdom to freely choose the good, the true, and the beautiful. This more noble kind of individualism is what our children, and our world, is hungry for, and what our schools should, in collaboration with families and community, try to foster.

The privilege of serving doctoral students

Earlier this week, my friend, mentor, and supervisor, Dr. Marguerita DeSander, director of the School of Leadership and Professional Studies, announced my appointment as new director of the Educational Leadership Doctoral program (EdD) at Western Kentucky University. I consider this a tremendous honor and look forward to serving WKU and the larger education community in this new role. Great things are coming for the EdD program in the near future!

Working with doctoral students has been one of the most gratifying aspects of my professorial career. In my soon-to-be 13 years of service at WKU, I have had the privilege of teaching six different doctoral courses and serving on the dissertation committees of 22 students who have successfully completed the program, including 10 for which I was chair or co-chair. My many wonderful experiences with these students motivated my calling to this new role as director of the program.

I want to extend my sincere thanks to the many great scholars who have previously served as director or interim director, including program co-founder Jay Fiene, Chris Wagner, Tony Norman, Lester Archer, Nicholas Brake, and Aaron Hughey. Dr. Margie DeSander has been a steady guiding force since the EdD program became a part of what was then the Department of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research in 2019 (now part of the School of Leadership and Professional Studies). All of these leaders and a host of dedicated faculty and staff members have helped forge an outstanding doctoral program that boasts distinguished graduates who currently serve as school district superintendents, principals, higher education administrators, and leaders in various businesses and nonprofit organizations.

Through our recent affiliation with the Carnegie Project on the Educational Doctorate, WKU is blazing new trails to distinguish the EdD as a distinct terminal degree for scholar practitioners working in education organizations. The curriculum for recent cohorts of P-12 education leaders has been organized around Improvement Science, which helps leaders identify vexing problems of practice in their real organizational contexts, deploy a cycle of interventions to impact the problem, assess the results, and plan for the future. These improvement science cycles of inquiry are captured in a dissertation in practice, a new form of doctoral capstone with far-ranging implications for practitioners and scholars alike. 

My first priority as director of the EdD program will be leading faculty and stakeholders in a full review of our course requirements and curriculum in light of the Improvement Science model. We want to make sure that course experiences are optimized to develop doctoral graduates' knowledge and skills in Improvement Science techniques, especially in P-12 education contexts. Special consideration will be given to our non-P-12 organizational leadership students and the utility of using Improvement Science in their varying contexts.

Admissions and advising processes will also be reviewed and updated as needed to make sure every student has the necessary support to be successful in the program. Renewed marketing and recruitment efforts will support our work to establish partnerships with key stakeholder organizations to ensure that the program not only grows, but flourishes and has a bigger impact on the constituencies our students serve. Our model for such initiatives is our ongoing partnership with the Kentucky Association of School Administrators to support cohorts of practicing and aspiring P-12 education leaders to earn their doctorate. We will seek similar partnerships with organizations in P-12 and other fields, and will organize an external advisory council to assist with outreach and provide input on continuous program improvement.

As many of you know, my own academic background is in the humanities, specifically history, philosophy, and religious studies. Leadership development is not simply a matter of acquiring a body of content knowledge or technical skills, although both are essential for effective leaders. Rather, leadership studies, like education in general, is about forming individuals in virtue, wisdom, and self-control, both for their own personal flourishing and for the benefit of the communities in which they serve. Disciplines within the humanities are especially well suited to exploring the questions and concepts that help form leaders in this way, and I look forward to bringing that perspective to our collective work on the overall design of the program and specifically to the leadership curriculum.

Please spread the word and help us recruit the next cohort of outstanding doctoral candidates. And please reach out to me with your questions and especially your ideas for how we can take a great doctoral program to the next level of excellence. 

Climb with us! Go Tops!

Do school principals need university training?

This essay was originally published on the website The Chalkboard Review on January 20, 2021. Sometime in 2022 the website was purchased by new owners who, without notifying me, removed all of my published essays. Given that the website operator has failed to respond to my inquiries about this removal, I can only conclude that my essays were deleted because of the philosophical or policy content. Therefore I am reposting these essays here.

The editors of Chalkboard Review recently prompted a thoughtful online discussion in a Tweet suggesting that, “Being a principal shouldn’t require a separate & unique master’s degree. Any master’s in education should more than qualify you to obtain a public license.”

As a professor of education administration who trains aspiring principals through advanced, university-based credentialing programs, I have some perspective on this topic. Unlike many of my colleagues in higher education, I actually agree that there is nothing special about earning a master’s degree that makes a principal – or even a teacher – more effective. If that training can be delivered with equal quality in a different environment – say in a district-based professional development program – the market should certainly be open to them.

But even though I welcome that kind of competition, I still believe universities have a uniquely valuable role to play in teacher and principal professional development – if they can arise to the challenge. If not, we can and should be replaced by better, more affordable, and more personalized alternatives.

In 2018, my own state of Kentucky dropped its long-standing requirement that teachers earn a master’s degree by their tenth year of service to maintain their license. Kentucky was one of the few states that still maintained such a requirement, and the change was greeted with derision by many educators who erroneously thought the move represented a “devaluing” of teachers and their training. The change was almost certainly going to have a negative, if small, impact on my university, which offers a number of graduate education programs at the master’s level and which has always benefitted financially from this regulation.

But I publicly supported the change to drop the master’s requirement, mainly because multiple research studies across several states have repeatedly demonstrated there is no measurable relationship between teachers earning an advanced degree and their impact on student learning. As I argued at the time:

High quality master's degree programs can be a good source of professional development, can help teachers add new credentials and certification areas, and can serve as a useful mechanism for networking with other educators. Research suggests (unsurprisingly) that teachers who earn advanced degrees are more likely to stay in the teaching profession, which is a net positive in that it places limits on costly teacher turnover. And, teachers can earn substantially more money in doing so, even after they pay off the cost of their degree. These are all good reasons for teachers to think about earning a master's degree. But they are insufficient to justify requiring every teacher to do so in a one-size-fits-all state mandate.

            Like in most states, Kentucky school districts continue to offer salary incentives for educators to earn advanced degrees, largely for the reasons just discussed. But this still begs the question as to whether such credentials (which may or may not be “degrees” in the traditional sense) should only be provided by universities, and whether such a requirement is needed for school principals.

            Some Twitter comments on this topic suggested an MBA or any other master’s degree should suffice for principal training, and on this count, I respectfully disagree. While the principal program where I teach does cover material on leadership theory, strategic planning, and other topics that would overlap with an MBA, we also address a range of technical topics that are largely unique to the role of school principals, including various aspects of school law, finance, student and adult pedagogy, facilities management, special education administration, etc.

            My own program has recently been through a thorough redesign, as we were one of seven universities across the USA identified for support by the Wallace Foundation to rethink principal training for the 21^st century. Our new program features a mix of online and face-to-face learning, a cohort model, district-based mentors for every principal candidate, and a greatly expanded focus on clinical experiences that give aspiring administrators access to the kinds of real leadership challenges they will face on the job. Most courses are co-taught by a university faculty member and a practicing school principal, superintendent, or district administrator who can contextualize every topic we discuss based on his/her daily experiences in the role.

            If we can keep the price reasonable (a huge challenge), I would put our principal training program up against any competitor, whether offered by another university or a school district, cooperative, or other outside agency. Could such a competitor offer a principal training program of similar quality? Yes, I think that is possible and they should be welcome to do so where there is a demand. Such alternatives might well be more affordable and flexible for their participants, given the enormous bureaucratic constraints and massive overhead costs associated with university programs. And I would say the same for initial teacher training programs as well.

            Nevertheless, I think two uniquely valuable things will be lost from the education landscape if universities no longer play a role in teacher and principal training. First, university professors are ideally better positioned to ground educators’ training in meaningful theory and research. Theory often gets dismissed in the field of practice as being irrelevant or too idealistic, but that is only because it has been presented to them poorly, or as disconnected from the real problems educators face every day. Education scholars who are actively engaged in conducting applied research rooted in the context of their local schools have a gift to offer their practitioner colleagues. My own collaborative work on developing instructional coaching models to help school principals deepen their self-reflection and effectiveness aspires to be this kind of scholarship.

            But universities have a second potential gift to offer aspiring teachers and school principals. Because they have a certain organizational distance and independence from the schools and district they serve, professors are better positioned to offer a critical perspective on the field of practice, helping their students think in innovative ways and challenge the status quo. Trainers who are themselves employees of the same districts or cooperatives as their clients may lack the capacity or the desire to question current education fads or long-standing, taken-for-granted assumptions that make up the very fiber of school and district culture. And the sad history of perpetually stagnant student achievement makes clear that fresh and innovative policies and practices are sorely needed in K-12 education.

            Of course, I am describing an ideal university, where professors are deeply connected to the field of practice, pursue meaningful scholarship, and are themselves innovative thinkers. Sadly, we know that is not the case in many universities, where faculty may no longer conduct substantive research (if they ever did) or care about partnerships with schools and districts and sometimes actually reinforce the education establishment’s rigidly-unchanging and frequently self-serving status quo.

            But this is the role university educator preparation programs might still play (and sometimes do), and the uniquely valuable contribution they can provide, if they are ready for the challenge. The odds are long, as higher education is possibly more recalcitrant and change resistant than even K-12 schools. And if they fail to make themselves more relevant, affordable, flexible, and ground-breaking, university programs deserve to be replaced by higher-quality competitors. But for the sake of future generations of educators who can benefit from what they might still offer, I hope it is not too late.

Kentucky's National School Choice Week Celebration 2023

I was honored to speak at Kentucky's 2023 National School Choice Week event in Frankfort this last Tuesday, January 24. This year we held a press conference highlighting the current status of school choice efforts in Kentucky. I was joined on the stage by EdChoice Kentucky President Andrew Vandiver and Mindy Crawford, director of the Providence School, a private, faith-based school serving students with special needs. You can read coverage of the event from Kentucky Today here.

Kentucky families were dealt a blow last month when the Kentucky Supreme Court, in a decision that contradicted the legal reasoning of numerous state courts and even the US Supreme Court, unanimously struck down the new Education Opportunities Account law. As Mr. Vandiver pointed out in his remarks at our press conference, every neighboring state around Kentucky now has at least one or more school choice policy programs that help give low- and middle-income families or families with special needs children additional education options.

However, the fight for education options will go on in Kentucky and advocates are motivated like never before. Below is the full text of my remarks:

I’m so pleased to be here today to celebrate National School Choice Week. Of course I am not speaking to you today on behalf of my employer, but I am here as a career educator of 25 years.

Education is my life’s passion, and I’ve been blessed to work in and visit so many schools over the two and half decades I’ve served students and their families as a teacher, principal, district administrator, and professor. Many of those schools have been outstanding, but one of the things I’ve learned, both as an educator and especially as the dad of my own school-aged children, is that no school, no matter how good, can be a perfect fit for every child. That’s why I believe every family, no matter their income or zip code, should have access to the same kinds of excellent school choice options, both public and private, that my own family enjoys. It's time for Kentucky to finally get with the program and join the many other states that are funding students, not systems.

And I’m not alone in feeling this way. Polling data has shown again and again that Kentucky families want more education options. Not only do they want more options, they are also exercising their choices whenever they can.

In a research report I conducted for EdChoice Kentucky last August, I reviewed public school enrollment data over a five-year period, from 2018 to 2022. What we found is that the number of Kentucky families choosing to homeschool or send their children to nonpublic schools has skyrocketed. Across Kentucky, the number of children being educated in nonpublic school settings has risen by more than 20,000, a percentage increase of 26 percent, to an all-time high of almost 100,000 students. Last school year alone, Kentucky nonpublic school participation increased by more than 8 percent.

When you consider that some undetermined number of families are also choosing to send their kids to a public school outside of their own district boundaries, these numbers make clear that there is a strong demand for school choice. But unfortunately far too many families are unable to exercise such options.

Many of my good friends in the education establishment are afraid to give families choices because they worry it will hurt public schools. But that has not been the case in states that have embraced educational choice.

As an example, Florida has one of the most robust school choice policy environments in the country, with more than one and a half million students - almost half of the state's entire student population - choosing to attend a school other than their assigned public school option. Far from harming public schools, Florida enjoys higher levels of public school student achievement than Kentucky. In fact, Florida’s public school students outpace Kentucky’s public school students academically across every demographic.

Just last weekend I was blessed to visit Cristo Rey Salesian High School in Tampa Florida, which serves 200 students – and more every day – all from low-income families who otherwise could never access the kind of robust, faith-based, college preparatory program offered by Cristo Rey – except for Florida’s school choice policies.

Kentucky’s students deserve the same opportunities as students in Florida and the many other states that provide some form of education choice. Kentucky is an outlier in systematically denying low and middle income children education options enjoyed by every affluent family.

But not for long. The demand is clear and Kentucky will not give up the fight to make sure every student and every family is empowered to find the learning environment that best meets their needs. Like so many other states, Kentucky will break down those establishment barriers and find a way to fund students, not systems. The day is coming and I relish being a part of the fight and the inevitable victory for education freedom.

From Socialist Teacher to Conservative Professor

This essay was originally published on the website The Chalkboard Review on December 8, 2020. Sometime in 2022 the website was purchased by new owners who, without notifying me, removed all of my published essays. Given that the website operator has failed to respond to my inquiries about this removal, I can only conclude that my essays were deleted because of the philosophical or policy content. Therefore I am reposting these essays here.

Geographically, I have not traveled far as an educator. While I have lived away for a period of years, the university where I now serve as professor of education administration is the in the same town where I began my career as a social studies teacher at a nearby middle school 24 years ago. I live just 25 miles from where I grew up, the son of an elementary school teacher who never anticipated his own career as an educator.

Philosophically, though, my journeys have been broad, from socialist to libertarian to conservative. My core values have, by and large, never changed, but my understanding of how to effectively enact those values, especially in public policy and particularly in education, have shifted considerably. In a time when teachers unions and other forces within the education establishment try to pretend educators are monolithic in their (progressive to leftist radical) political views, it is more important than ever to tell our personal stories of dissent against the myth that teachers all share common views of school choice, pension reform, accountability, or even the purpose of education itself.

My parents were hard-working Baptists. There were socially conservative but between my factory worker father’s New Deal, labor-focused life experience and my schoolteacher mother’s Civil Rights era progressivism, by high school I had inherited a pretty ferocious left-leaning view of the world that made me decidedly liberal for our little Southern town. It was all deeply imbued with the Christian Social Gospel, a concern for justice and fairness for “the least of these, my brothers.”

When I started reading political theory in late high school, I discovered a strain of socialism that portended to be “democratic” and I was soon a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Contemporary socialist star Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez was in diapers at that point in time. Outside a small circle of left-wing political nerds, no one knew who Burlington mayor turned congressman Bernie Sanders was, but I did. I was reading Dissent, Mother Jones, and In These Times, organizing student groups to protest the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, writing screeds that I tried to pare down as op-eds for the college newspaper, and wondering how I could make a living as a professional agitator with a degree in philosophy and religious studies.

After a year of graduate school studying religious ethics, I was looking for a way to be more “in the trenches” serving “the people” while also devoting time to writing and activism, and that’s when I first considered becoming a teacher. A few semesters later I had turned a minor in history into a certificate and was teaching middle school.

The year was 1996. A well-read libertarian friend was poking holes in my socialist worldview and I started picking up copies of Reason and Liberty magazine. The charismatic and well-spoken Harry Browne was the Libertarian Party candidate for president that year and he deeply impressed me. But the most important factor in me giving up socialism was becoming a public school teacher.

I was in a great school, but even as a first-year teacher, I immediately saw the enormous waste and inefficiencies of the system. I saw how many children were being poorly served, despite the best efforts of many teachers, because a government monopoly inevitably tends toward one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately leave untold numbers of kids behind. I saw how unprepared I was a teacher for what my students really needed, how weak and inconsistent the curriculum was across classrooms, and, sadly, I saw incompetence on the part of some portion of my colleagues that was routinely ignored by school leaders and defended by their unions or professional associations.

I loved my job, but I could see that the public school system was deeply flawed, and its flaws mirrored virtually all of the bureaucratic, top-down, impersonal structures of socialism that were supposed to bring about equality of outcomes and peace on earth but never did, and in fact had historically wrought misery.

Over the next decade or so I drifted from right-libertarianism to left-libertarianism and back depending on which party held political power and what the major issues of the day were. I loved the clean, logical consistency of libertarianism even though I knew well there wasn’t a single place in history where such a system could be found in practice. But the realities weren’t that important because I was childless and busy building a career and had little time for practical politics anyway. My plans to be a professional rabble rouser quickly gave way to a new trajectory. I moved rapidly from teaching into school administration, eventually landing in a district-level role, earning a PhD along the way.

My views began to shift again when I started a family and became a professor at the college where I had earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree. I want to avoid over-generalizing because there is still much I admire in libertarianism, but it is a philosophy that tends to assume humans are totally free and unencumbered individuals just sort of floating in space until they voluntarily choose to associate with others for mutual benefit, or until someone else’s will is imposed on them, which always involves violence and something akin to slavery.

I did not find that view of the human person or of society particularly helpful as a parent. My children and I are bound together by love, yes, but also of necessity and nature. We don’t choose our families, and families are the most basic and necessary structures of human society.

Atomized individuals can’t effectively raise kids. Strong, intact families matter, something I had already observed in my own students. Whether their own families attend or not, healthy kids need lots of people in their community to regularly attend churches that actually press them to become better human beings and not just feel good about themselves (what sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” the de fact religion of most American Christians). Successful families also need strong neighborhoods, vibrant communities of voluntary associations like sports leagues, church youth groups, and civic organizations that engage people in service to and with their neighbors.

All of these “intermediate institutions,” as the great conservative sociologist Robert Nisbett called them, have experienced enormous decay over the generations in ways directly related to the hyper-individualist, Progressive-driven, endless expansion of government on the one hand and the classically liberal/libertarian, all-mighty free market on the other, aided and abetting by a militantly secular (and later I would discover, Marxist) shift in Western culture itself.

I saw all of this first hand as a parent and as an educator. It didn’t happen overnight, but one day I woke up and knew I was a conservative in the sense that Russell Kirk understood the word. Tradition and values matter in preserving a civilization worth handing on to our children.

Kirk saw conservativism as an attitude and disposition more than a political program. But the conservative worldview has real policy implications, and I saw those more clearly than ever in education. From the professional protection and distance of a tenured university professorship, I began pursuing education policy work, especially around the issue of school choice. These efforts led to my involvement as a policy advisor and supporting scholar for state-level education reform groups, and eventually to an appointment on the state board of education.

The education establishment in my state, desperate to maintain its monopoly, has ferociously fought back against any effort to expand education choice for families yearning to give their children a different option. Thus far school choice supporters have lost more battles than we’ve won, but every day momentum builds, especially as parents have become more aware of how their children are doing in school during COVID and how every kid has unique needs not just any school can meet.

But conservatives have more to contribute to education policy than just school choice. The excellent collection of essays issued earlier this year, How to Education an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools, makes clear that conservatives should care not just how education is delivered, but about its actual content.

In my own experience, far too many schools, whether public, private, or charter - and far too many educators, including conservatives - have implicitly or explicitly adopted the attitude that education is all about vocational preparation: how we sort kids toward careers and train them in work habits that will make them productive contributors to the economy.

Certainly, this is an important goal for our schools, but it neglects the much older purpose of education, and one that is deeply connected to the cultivation of culture and the protection of our civilizational heritage. The first goal of schooling is to help families and communities cultivate virtuous citizens. The classical sense of liberty is to be free enough of selfishness that one can actually choose the good, the true, and the beautiful. And this should once again be the self-conscious goal of schools.

Along these lines, I have increasing turned my attention toward the dearth of meaningful instruction in social studies, science, and the arts, especially in early grades, and how standards and curricula in those subjects can be improved for all schools. I have argued that schools should not be shy about training students to be critical patriots, capable of loving their country even as they recognize and understand her many flaws. The battle for school choice definitely goes on, but there’s a battle to be fought for higher quality learning in all schools, no matter who they serve.

With such a journey from socialist to libertarian to conservative, is there a chance my views will change yet again in the future? I certainly hope I continue learning new things, appreciating new perspectives, and growing in wisdom.

What seems clear to me is that for the most part, my values have not changed in all these years, but only the means by which I think we best get there. I maintain the same commitment to equality of opportunity as I did as a loud, young, socialist teacher, but now with a much greater appreciation for the role that robust institutions of family, church, local communities, civic organizations, and other structures of civil society play in accomplishing those goals – and a deep concern to guard them for the future generations.

Meanwhile my intellectual past gives me a common language with – and a great deal of understanding and compassion for – those who occupy the political and philosophical spaces I used to tread. Though we may differ about tactics, I still believe the vast majority of educators share the same goals for what our schools should accomplish, and so there is much work to be done through constructive disagreement, and I still welcome that conversation.

Restoring the purposes of Catholic education

I've recently joined the team at Missio Dei, a network publication of Catholic writers dedicated to evangelization through the written word. My first two essays were on theological themes. The first was on the Christian conception of love (caritas) and the second explored the resurrection of the dead and why this is such an important Catholic teaching. But my last two essays have turned back toward my core area of expertise: education.

As a former Catholic school teacher and principal, and now as a Catholic parent, I'm keenly interested in the quality and integrity of Catholic education. In Restoring the "Catholic" in Catholic Schools I argue that while Catholic schools have seen a recent surge in enrollment, we should expect this to last. The learning in many Catholic schools is increasingly similar to their secular, government-run schools. Catholic schools need to rediscover their core reason for existence, and orient their work toward three purposes, and in the proper order. Read the whole thing here.

As a follow up, my most recent essay is geared toward Catholic parents, who should understand themselves to be the primary teachers of their children. Parents are even more responsible that teachers for seeing that  children grow up immersed in the core purposes of Catholic education and embed those principles in the everyday life of the family. I offer a 7-part roadmap for Catholic parenting.

My hope is to build on both of these essays with tools geared toward Catholic educators and parents for further discussion, reflection, prayer, and planning.