School Leader

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.

School board candidates challenge the status quo

In my latest for Commonwealth Educational Opportunities, I argue that the upcoming November election will be the next important chapter of parent empowerment in education. Across Kentucky and across the country conservative candidates are trying to wrest control of local boards of education and challenge the status quo. Read the full article here. 

Kentucky nonpublic school enrollment skyrockets

In the last five years, the number of Kentucky students being educated at home or in private schools has grown by more than 26%, to nearly 100,000 children, representing more than 15% of the state's student body.

In a report tracking these trends for EdChoice Kentucky (where I serve on the board of directors), I analyzed data available from the Kentucky Department of Education. These data show that homeschooling participation in Kentucky has doubled since 2017, to almost 20,000 students. Private school enrollment has grown by 10 percent during the same time.

Last year alone Kentucky saw an 8% surge in nonpublic education participation. Homeschooling grew by 11% in 2021-2022.

Last year's data also show record numbers of students with disabilities and English language learners being educated at home or in private schools. Contrary to the claims of some in the education establishment who assert that our most vulnerable students can only be successfully served in public schools, 25,000 Kentucky children with disabilities are being educated elsewhere. The number of students from immigrant families being served in nonpublic settings quadrupled last year alone. See Table 1 below from the report Ending the Status Quo: Kentucky's Parents Increasily Choose Nonpublic Education Options.

The data reports from the Kentucky Department of Education upon which this analysis are based can be found below:

Download 2018 Declartaion of Participation PNP Homeschool Totals

Download Declaration of Participation Report Summary for FY 2022

Download Copy of FY23 Declaration of Participation Report Summary with change from FY22

These data trends demonstrate a clear demand on the part of Kentucky familes for new education options, and policymakers should respond by making sure every student has access to those options, no matter where they live or their family's income. As I wrote in Ending the Status Quo,

At least since 2018 and in rapidly increasing numbers, Kentucky parents have challenged the status quo that dictates children have no education options other than what the local public school district provides. Massive surges in homeschooling and private education demonstrate there is a clear demand for school choice, and Kentucky’s leaders should respond accordingly.

Related posts:

• Homeschooling surges in Kentucky
• Kentucky General Assembly 2022 education recap
• Fund students, not systems

KY General Assembly 2022 Education Recap

The 2022 Kentucky General Assembly concluded its work last month. The Republican-dominated legislature made record financial investments long desired by the education establishment, but failed to pass all but the most modest bills that would further empower Kentucky parents with more choices and stronger voices in their children’s education.

The budget passed by lawmakers and signed by Governor Beshear invests billions of general fund dollars into Kentucky schools for each of the next two years. That investment includes $130 million to fund full-day kindergarten classrooms (almost all districts already provide full-day kindergarten but pay for half of it from local funds). The budget also includes $274 million in transportation funds, another major expense that local districts have been subsidizing themselves for years. Both of these provisions have been top priorities for educators since at least my own years of service on the Kentucky Board of Education (2016-2019).

The budget also fully funded the Kentucky Teacher Retirement System, allocating more than $2 billion over the biennium, far more than the actuarial amount required by law, and raised the base state education funding allotment to a record level of $4,100 per pupil per year next year and then $4,200 per pupil the following year. Millions and millions of dollars of new funds were approved for career and technical education, gifted and talented programs, early learning, and Family Resource-Youth Service Centers (FRYSC).

The left-leaning education establishment has long (and falsely) painted the Republican majority in the General Assembly as anti-education meanies, and in their typical fashion, I did not see much public gratitude to lawmakers for their lavish beneficence. In fact, some teachers took to social media to lambaste lawmakers for not also mandating a teacher salary increase like they provided for state employees.

These educators are barking up the wrong tree. The many millions of dollars local districts will now save on kindergarten and transportation can certainly be used for salary increases if local boards of education want to use those funds accordingly. A little gratitude seems in order here.

I’ve never objected to overall increases in education spending, though I don’t see any evidence doing so will have any meaningful impact on student learning if those dollars are spent indiscriminately. And I have never favored pouring more money into the system itself without greater accountability to parents through school choice. We ought to be finding ways to fund students, not systems.

Sadly, this year’s General Assembly passed up the opportunity to make significant strides in that direction. HB 305 would have corrected problems in last year’s education opportunity accounts law, but House leaders refused to even place it in committee for a hearing. And while HB 9 started out as a strong bill to restore charter school funding and improve authorization, the version of the bill that was ultimately passed (over Gov. Beshear’s veto of course) is likely the weakest charter school law in the country.

Other policies that would further empower parents and the public met similar mixed results with this general assembly.

SB 1 shifted principal hiring and curriculum decisions away from unaccountable School-Based Decision-Making Councils to the local district superintendent. That is a step in the right direction because at least superintendents are accountable to locally elected boards of education.

But far too often those local boards defer blindly to the recommendations of education bureaucrats or powerful adult interests like teachers’ unions. HB 121, which passed without the Governor’s signature, requires every regular local board of education meeting to include at least 15 minutes of public comment. That’s good, considering that some districts had stopped allowing the public to speak at their meetings when local citizens started voicing concerns about critical race theory (CRT), mask mandates and other topics.

SB 1, through its merger with SB 138, also addressed – in an indirect way – widespread public concern about CRT by improving the state’s social studies standards. Rather than restricting CRT, SB 1 stipulated  certain concepts that should be included in Kentucky social studies classrooms, including a set of important historical documents that previously did not appear in the state’s standards.

Again, this is a step in the right direction, and I think SB 138 avoids some potential unintended consequences of some of the other CRT-related bills. But it will not stop political indoctrination from taking place in Kentucky classrooms. To address that issue – which ultimately must be done at the local level - Kentucky needs to further empower the public to have direct access to the instructional materials being used in classrooms. Transparency provisions like this got no consideration from this General Assembly.

Likewise, lawmakers failed to protect parental rights over their children when it comes to health-related mandates. HB 51 would have given parents the right to opt out of school district mask and vaccine mandates. This bill passed the House but was not heard by the Senate.

What this legislative session suggests is that except for wildly popular (and justified), red-meat conservative issues like requiring Kentucky athletes to play sports according to their biological gender (SB 83), so-call conservative Republicans routinely demur when it comes to standing up for parents and the public against the education establishment.

This is bewildering because kowtowing to these groups will never earn their support when it comes election time. The establishment will always and forever favor Democrat candidates who just parrot their endless calls for more money and less accountability. School choice, educational transparency, nonideological instruction, and freedom from mandates are popular, not just within the Republican base that elects these lawmakers, but among voters in general.

The lessons of the 2022 General Assembly are clear: all the meaningful arguments in Kentucky policy are taking place on the right side of the political divide, and time and again the political establishment is siding with the education establishment. Voters are going to have to exercise a political solution if they want to see more common sense, transparency, choice, and accountability in the state’s education system.

Image: RXUYDC, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons