Education

As politicians, pundits, and teachers' unions continue to clamor for spending more money on a failing public education system, the public itself should become more educated about schools outside the educational monolith that are thriving on a fraction of the cost of the typical school. In particular, many charter schools around the nation are proving daily that providing a good education for children does not require a lot of money or even a great deal of originality. Case in point, the charter high school of which I am principal has ranked as the number-one public high school in Colorado two years in a row. More telling, whereas most schools spend a month or more preparing for the standardized tests on which this ranking is based, with the teachers complaining the whole time about having to "teach to the test," my school takes no time to prepare for them, and most of the students find them insultingly easy. Since our school operates on 70% of the revenue of the other schools in the district (with the district spending $8200 per student vs. our $5900), money does not explain our success. Nor does any of the so-called innovative "pedagogy" being offered by the nation's education schools since we ignore everything taught in those corrupt institutions. Rather, our success owes to the principles of teaching and learning known for over two millennia in the West albeit ignored by the "progressive" followers of John Dewey. Education is not rocket science. Good schools are created with great books, knowledgeable teachers, curious and hard-working students, and supportive parents. Since these principles have been largely forgotten in public education, perhaps some remediation is in order.

Great books are not dumbed-down textbooks with lots of colors, pictures, and "learning tools," the biblio-equivalent of MTV. Nor are they textbooks from which teams of politically correct censors have expunged every word or fact that might cause offense to anyone looking to be offended or into which they have imported questionable political agendas. Great books are the classics. The classics offer to young people the best that has been thought and said on the human condition and the natural world. They invite young people to know and to seek truth and beauty. Great books train the mind and ennoble the soul. They are more engaging and, for that matter, more amusing than the pabulum served up to students these days under the guise of being "age appropriate." Students will labor to read Aesop and Mother Goose and other children's stories in the early years; Sherlock Holmes and Treasure Island and even some Shakespeare in the middle years; Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, more Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Conrad in high school; they will labor to read such difficult books simply because these books offer the real stuff of life. The classics do not stop with literature. Beginning in the upper elementary grades, for instance, students at my school read original sources in history so they will come to understand the virtues and vices - courage and cowardice, justice and injustice, prudence and stupidity, love, hate, and fear - of the men and women who made history, the same virtues and vices operative in human life today. Frederick Douglass's Narrative will reveal those virtues and vices to fifth-graders; eleventh-graders can easily study the conduct and aims of man through Hobbes, Locke, and The Federalist.

To teach such demanding books, good schools need engaging and knowledgeable teachers. I did not say certified teachers. Teaching licensure is one of the biggest hoaxes ever imposed on the American people, certainly the biggest hoax in education. Almost every college professor of an academic discipline will tell you that the weakest students in his classes are the education majors. Yet these unqualified "educators" are the future teachers of our children. Over the years I have received hundreds of job applications from certified teachers whose college transcripts reveal the real story: straight A's in ed classes and C's, D's, and F's in the subjects they purported to teach. I have met teachers "certified in social studies 7-12" who did not know the difference between Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. I have talked to "reading specialists" who could not tell me that the letter "a" makes at least four sounds, not two. Every kindergartener in my school is able to recite the four sounds of "a" (as in apple, ape, father, talk; some would argue the slight "e" sound in care is a fifth). The teaching-licensure monopoly has put the minds of the nation's youth in the hands of the most uncurious, most un-intellectual, and most unlearned people in America. Students who come to my school from a typical public school say that their former teachers hardly know the material without "the book" (no doubt the "teachers' edition") in front of them and that a considerable amount of class time is given to busy work or even to political proselytizing. Unfortunately, in several states even charter schools must hire certified teachers because teachers' unions have strong-armed the state legislatures.

Fortunately, charter schools in Colorado are not required to hire certified teachers, provided they have a waiver from the state. Occasionally, I hire a certified teacher because that person is a good teacher in spite of, not because of, his ed-school experience. Most of the time, however, I hire graduates from the most demanding liberal-arts colleges in the country who have never set foot in an education school. An honor's degree from the University of Chicago or St. John's or Colorado College is certification enough. Far from being absent-minded eggheads who cannot "relate to children," as the education establishment would have us believe, knowledgeable teachers are the only ones who can captivate and engage their students because they are the ones who live and breathe the subjects they teach. Admittedly, some teachers are more dynamic than others; but that dynamism is a function of character and personality rather than any of the gimmicks imparted in ed schools. Principals can and should make the ability to relate to children a chief criterion in hiring. Whenever the education establishment determines that it should be the only criterion, however, then classrooms will be led by people who are at best camp counselors rather than by experts in difficult fields of learning.

Once a school has great books and knowledgeable teachers, it needs students. Those students must really be students. As I tell the students at my school, all of whom must take Latin, the word student comes from the Latin studium, meaning zeal, eagerness, application. By definition, a student is someone who wants to learn and is willing to work hard to learn. Contrary to popular opinion (whose design is to explain away the success of charter schools) not all students who go to a charter or even a private school are "elite." My school has students who are rich and poor, exceptionally bright and quite marginal in abilities. What unites them are two things: they do not want to be bored in a regular public school, and they are willing to work hard. Most young people, when taken seriously, want to learn, regardless of how bored and disengaged they have been in their previous schools. And yet adolescents are natural anarchists and will run over their teachers when the adults are not in control, which is precisely what happens in public schools. Therefore, every student must be held accountable for his actions and not be allowed to disrupt the class. Furthermore, those students who do just want to mess around and do no work should not pass. Period. This great country began with the injunction of Captain John Smith, "Him that will not work shall not eat." At Ridgeview, the slogan is, "Him that does not work shall not pass." Social promotion is neither fair to the students who do their work nor an effective way to instill a work ethic in those who do not. Furthermore, students will only work hard for grades that are real. Grade inflation must be resisted at all costs. Whenever students are taken seriously and held accountable, through both discipline and grades, a culture of learning takes root in a school and students experience positive peer pressure. True students, the ones who want to learn, become the vast majority, not the two or three "geeks" who sit at the front of the class as in regular public schools.

The administration and faculty, besides holding the students accountable, should further instill a spirit of learning by honoring students who demonstrate high academic achievement and worthy character. "Emulation," or friendly rivalry in the pursuit of excellence, had been the driving incentive for students to do their work from ancient times through the twentieth century, that is, until the progressives and later the hyper-egalitarian "self-esteem" crowd attacked public honors as being dangerously hierarchical. The fear of harming students' self esteem has become so entrenched in most public schools that faculties have resorted to showering honors on practically everyone through grade inflation or, more often, avoiding public recognition altogether. At Ridgeview, we embrace the traditional idea of honors and emulation. After the grades come out every quarter there is an honor assembly in which a single student of the quarter is recognized and all the students who make the honor roll and high honor roll stand as their names are called out. At the end of the year, the whole school participates in awards assemblies in which the best student in each subject is recognized and given as a prize a book in that subject. The self-esteem of the students is not crushed. Most of the students who do not make the honor roll resolve to do so in the future. When they finally do so, they beam with a genuine sense of accomplishment. Moreover, the character of our students is such that they applaud the award winners and recognize those honors as entirely just. There is a standing joke at the school that we are going to print a satire on the traditional "My child is an honor student" bumper stickers, which students see through as a total hoax. It would read, "Your child would make F's at Ridgeview." That is not quite true. "Your child" might very well make A's at Ridgeview. The only difference is, he would have to work hard to do so.

The final component of reformed schools is the supportive parent. Without parents who ensure that students - particularly the younger ones - do their homework, who back up the school's disciplinary measures, and who take a genuine interest in what their children are learning, the effects of great books, knowledgeable teachers, and a peer group of hardworking students are too often undone. Before parents can even get to the point of being supportive parents at a charter school, however, they must understand something more fundamental: that they have a choice in education. The prevailing culture has for too long taught us to believe, with clear evidence to the contrary, that as long as we live in a middle-class suburb, our children are going to get a good education from their neighborhood schools. To break out of this groupthink, inculcated by the education establishment's formidable propaganda machine (the only thing that works well in most public school districts in this nation), requires not only a good deal of information about what really goes on in public schools but also quite a bit of courage. It takes courage to stand up to your neighbors' arch question: "Why would you not send your children to the school down the street? We have good schools here in (fill in the blank), Colorado." Translation: "If our public schools are good enough for us, what makes you think your kids deserve better?" Demanding a better education for your kids is often tantamount to treason in the eyes of your neighbors and friends, principally because it raises the question of why they are not demanding a better education for their own children. At the same time, the number-one reason new students come to our school, for which there is a substantial waiting list, is not our advertising, or convenience (the school district, contrary to state law, will not allow us to purchase bus services), or anything that I might have written or said, or even the school's many awards being covered in the newspaper. The number-one reason that brings new families into the school is word-of-mouth, whether that word comes from the parents or the students themselves. A growing number of parents these days, even in affluent suburbs, suspect that something is terribly wrong with the education bureaucracy and are looking for new opportunities. All they need is a word of encouragement from one or two discerning parents whose children have had success in a better school. That word of encouragement often comes in the form of the highest praise parents have given to Ridgeview over the years: "This is the education I wish I could have had."

What are the results of this culture of learning, beyond even impressive standardized test scores? Recently, I observed a discussion in a freshman Western civilization class. The fact that such a class exists is in itself telling, since the idea that young people should learn from things Western and civilized has fallen out of fashion. The students were not reading from a textbook, rather from Thucydides, perhaps the greatest historian in the annals of the West and an author today's college students read, if at all, with difficulty. Specifically, this class was on the plague in Athens. Fifteen-year-olds were, with very little prompting from the teacher, discussing the reasons people might act lawfully when times are good and turn to savagery in the midst of a catastrophe, as happened during the Athenian plague. Over the course of the discussion, the students probed topics such as the rule of law, true excellence, a sense of shame, freedom. In short, these teenagers were learning from one of the great authors of the Western tradition the fundamentals of civilization. Such conversations are standard fare at my school, not just in high school, but also in the middle school and even in the elementary grades. Of how many high schools today could the same be said? Of how many colleges? An instructor in the honors program at the university in town, who has sat in on and occasionally taught a class or two in the school, has said that our students far surpass his own.

Across the nation, students are becoming less and less prepared for university. The Colorado Commission on Higher Education recently reported that in Colorado nearly one-third of freshmen entering university are not prepared for higher learning, and that number is going up. Based upon my own experience teaching at the university level, that percentage is a conservative figure. Remediation in college has become a billion-dollar growth industry. The time and money invested in preparing for college entrance exams is largely the result of schools not doing their jobs. I am happy to say that based on five graduating classes, the students who graduate from Ridgeview are ready for college. Indeed, they are ready for life. Unfortunately, a number of our graduates say that their freshman year in college ends up being "a step down" from their experience in high school. Their fellow classmates are not nearly as prepared as they are and very often not nearly as interested in learning. I should like to repeat that the students in my school are not Überstudenten. They are simply teenagers who at some point make a commitment to a serious school and whose minds are well trained by that school. Because schools have come to expect so little of young people, such a student has become a rare phenomenon. That rarity cannot be good for the nation.

By getting back to the basics of great books, truly qualified teachers, hard-working students, and supportive parents select charter schools around the nation are proving that today's young people are as bright and capable of learning as young people were in the past. These charter schools normally operate on two-thirds of the budget of a regular public school. Widespread public action to further encourage the founding of such schools would be enough to revamp and rejuvenate true public education in this country. Should public officials not finally stop listening to the claptrap of teachers unions and be willing to move public investment from schools that don't work to schools that do? Wouldn't any sensible investor fire a broker who told him to keep his money in losing stocks year after year and ignore companies that yield higher profits, robust dividends, and climbing stock prices? To remain the leader of the free world, this nation must finally take stock in schools that work.

Terrence O. Moore, a former Marine and history professor, is principal of Ridgeview Classical Schools in Fort Collins, Colorado. He also teaches moral philosophy, a course required for graduation, and political philosophy. Ridgeview has been recognized by the U. S. Department of Education and is named one of the 53 top charter schools in the nation by the Center for Education Reform. Ridgeview's high school is currently ranked number one in Colorado on the annual state School Accountability Report for the second year in a row.