Oftentimes politicians or political activists say they want to help public education, but we can see that it doesn’t necessarily work. With the focus on everything but academics in our public schools, parents are actively challenging their school boards to go back to the basics. Go back to focusing on academics.
School administrators and teachers do sometimes have challenges in front of them when it comes to poor parenting. I can certainly sympathize, but you don’t change the model from an institution of education to a social justice experiment. As we can all see, that is a roadmap to illiteracy, and that doesn’t benefit any child.
I’ve made suggestions to improve the academic standards and testing in New Hampshire. There are other remedies that could improve the quality of education that would elevate our public schools. Since there is so much resistance to these ideas (focusing on quality academics) I sometimes wonder, is there anyone left out there who actually wants our public schools to thrive?
There are examples we can look at that show how to improve public schools. These models are oftentimes found in some of our private and religious schools. What do they do that’s so different from our public schools? Why do they have strong academic outcomes among the student population? Why do they have waiting lists for students while our public schools see declining enrollment?
In Nashville, a Charter school is returning to the old traditional style of education –the classical education model. What some may describe as outdated, and not necessarily innovative, shows that a focus on quality academic content, is paying off.
Majority-minority classical school in TN doubled their Math and English Language Arts achievement compared to district public schools.
“Nashville Classical Charter School has a mission to teach the most disadvantaged children with a classical curriculum.”
“…Nashville Classical has a diverse [urban] student body…”
“Nashville Classical posts higher rates of proficiency in ELA (English Language Arts) and math—both as a student body and by race—than district public schools. Compared with other public schools in the area, Nashville Classical more than doubles its students’ proficiency rates in math (64.5% vs. 29.9%) and nearly doubles their proficiency rates in ELA (49.2% vs. 25.9%) (Figure 1). Black students at Nashville Classical also achieve far higher rates of proficiency in ELA and math compared with their counterparts elsewhere in the school district and the state as a whole. The student body itself is majority-minority: 62% are listed as black, and 8% are listed as Hispanic (the Metropolitan Nashville school district is 27% black and 10% Hispanic). Given the results that Nashville Classical produces, [the school’s founder] Friedman’s goal of ‘[making] sure excellence is celebrated, and that excellence doesn’t have a color’ has been achieved.”
One might think that all of the Social Justice Warriors and DEIJ Directors would jump on this data. One would think that they would become the biggest champions for this approach to learning in our public schools. Something tells me, this isn’t their focus. I would eagerly to to help them in New Hampshire work in this, if they ever want to pursue real change in the public schools.
Do they want to continue down the path of social engineering that denies minority children knowledge? Or do they want to make a significant change that educates black and Hispanic children at higher rates? This will give those sometimes marginalized groups of children better access to better colleges and jobs.
I know that some Hillsdale Charter Schools in New Hampshire have recently opened. For parents who are done with all of the social engineering in their local public schools and need a change, Hillsdale Charter Schools may offer you a better alternative.