With DeVos' school choice model, everyone gets the education they want

Washington Examiner OPINION

With DeVos" school choice model, everyone gets the education they want

by Elliot Kaufman | Feb 2, 2017, 7:00 PM Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Email this article Share on LinkedIn Print this article

Spurred by President Trump"s selection of Betsy DeVos to lead the Education Department, the New York Times informed its readers that the Christian Right desires"extreme measures." (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Spurred by President Trump"s selection of Betsy DeVos to lead the Education Department, the New York Times informed its readers that the Christian Right desires"extreme measures." With Trump on their side,"gutting public education will be just the beginning." Politico warned of"an advocate of private Christian education helming the largest public-education agency in the country."

There is no denying the truth: A living, breathing Christian will likely hold a position of power in the federal government, and school choice will help her"advance God"s Kingdom," as she once told a Christian audience more than a decade ago.

What gets lost in the hysteria, however, is that these secular critics have come close to identifying the most important reason to support school choice: Charter schools, voucher programs, and scholarship tax credits empower not just Christians, but all parents to educate their children in accordance with their own values, whatever they may be. Parents with legitimate disagreements on the purpose of education can all win by sending their children to schools of their own preference.

This is necessary because, as the Cato Institute"s Jason Bedrick explains, public schools are not truly"public" or"common." While technically welcoming of any student whose parents can afford to live in its district, no public school is"intended to serve Orthodox Jews or others like them who have a different vision of education." With one system of public education for all, the government cannot help but cater to the educational views of some parents, typically those with political power, while eschewing others" desires. Even though everyone pays, public education is not designed for everyone.

School choice ends this zero-sum game. It indeed helps Christians afford Christian education, confirming the commentariat"s fears. But choice also empowers all sorts of parents, secular or religious, who couldn"t otherwise afford a school that emphasizes, for example, the Montessori approach, computer programming, the"three Rs," the arts, open-concept learning, or anything else.

At its core, school choice is an egalitarian means of resolving disputes about the purpose of education. It allows for different children to be educated according to different understandings.

By aligning incentives properly, better educational results are achievable. With choice, schools must compete for the favor of parents spending their own money on their own children. No longer held hostage to their local school districts, middle- and low-income parents can hold their children"s schools accountable just like wealthier parents. It"s no wonder that multiple meta-analyses of random-assignment studies have shown that school choice programs improve their students" reading and math scores.

Many worry, however, about the effect of school choice on public schools, or on national cohesion. After all, might school choice divide and weaken where public schools unite and strengthen?

Answering this question exposes the many myths of the public school.

First, there are endless numbers of local disputes over school curricula, moral values, reading material, religion, and sexuality at public schools. Unity is elusive, and taxpayer-funded public education forces many parents to pay for schools that teach values they abhor. Consequently, schools often avoid teaching about important topics of history and science to avoid upsetting diverse parent bodies.

Second, it"s popular to imagine public schools as the bedrock of our democracy. They are widely believed to impart salutary values of toleration and cooperation. But by using geography to sort students into different school districts, public schools more often segregate groups into different schools, reinforcing racial and socioeconomic divisions. Minorities are hurt, and the poor suffer worst of all.

Accordingly, a meta-analysis of the impact of school choice on civic values, including political tolerance, overwhelmingly shows the effect of school choice on civic values is"in almost all cases … either positive or nil." Public, private, and parochial schools can all serve as effective laboratories of democracy, shaping tolerant and engaged citizens.

If we were united, perhaps we could craft one system of truly public education that welcomed all students and imparted shared values. But in a diverse, divided country, the best we can do is to empower all parents to pursue their vision of the good in their children"s education.

Let Christians"advance the Kingdom of God." If you disagree, you will be free to advance your own kingdom. Thanks to school choice, you"ll be able to afford it, too.

Elliot Kaufman is managing editor of the student-run Stanford Review newspaper at Stanford University.

Dobson urges Christians to flee public schools

Sunday, April 2, 2017 | Michael F. Haverluck (OneNewsNow.com)

Renowned pro-family advocate Dr. James Dobson is imploring Christian parents across the United States to pull their children from public schools and protect them from the progressive anti-Christian teaching by homeschooling them and putting in church-run schools.

The founder and president of Family Talk says he is “shocked” by the declining values held by the generation of young American adult voters (18 to 34-year-olds) – Millennials who have been promoting the immoral agenda they have learned over years and decades past … one that works to erode the Christian faith of today"s youth, according to a WND report.

When recently speaking with Exodus Mandate Director E. Ray Moore, Dobson discussed the topic of homeschooling, which was just a trace movement in the tens of thousands back in the 1970s when he founded Focus on the Family. But now, the homeschool movement has grown to more than 2 million children – with some estimates, such as one given by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) indicating that the number could be as high as 4 million.

Answering God"s calling

The evangelical Christian leader told Moore – whose organization"s mission is to motivate Christian parents to homeschool their children or enroll them in church-run Christian schools – that he realized the biblical call for parents to teach from home after he began his Christian ministry as a teacher and psychologist a few decades ago.

“When he was introduced to the idea – that the biblical mandate for parents to ‘train up a child in the way he should go" was no more or less than a call for Christian parents to instruct their own children – or have them in church schools that would teach morality – it immediately struck a chord,” WND"s Bob Unruh reported.

Dobson stressed that this bit of wisdom for parents from Proverbs 22:6 lit a new flame in him for homeschooling.

“It was like putting a match to gasoline [for me],” the conservative activist told Moore in a recent series of Family Talk broadcasts. “I got it. I saw it.”

In their conversation, Moore indicated that Dobson was partially responsible for the uptick in homeschooling that began in the 1980s.

Millennial mayhem

Since then, Dobson says schools have gotten much worse in indoctrinating children in a godless, anti-Christian agenda disguised in progressive curricula found in public education.

Those children who have been subjected to Leftist propaganda in schools in decades past are today"s Millennials – the group of voters that Moore says would have put 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the White House … if it were not for older generations tipping the ballot scales for her Republican rival, Donald Trump.

Moore pointed to research conducted by Dan Smith of the Nehemiah Institute to make his case, which indicated that Clinton would have received 504 Electoral College votes to Trump"s 23 if only Millennials voted last November – meaning the president would have won just five states.

Dobson found it hard to believe the extreme Leftist bent of today"s Millennials, as demonstrated in the 2016 election.

“That shocked me,” the influential Christian shared, taking into consideration Clinton"s numerous scandals and extremist platform on abortion and LGBT.

He then alerted Christians that Leftists are winning over the next young generation of Americans.

“They [have] been propagandized and given a philosophy that – in many cases – is contrary to Scripture and what we believe,” Dobson told Moore.

It is argued that Christians are losing their foothold in society because they have given their youth over to Leftists in the education system who aggressively undermine the teachings of the Bible in the name of “tolerance,” “science,” and so-called “multiculturalism.”

“[I]t"s because, largely, of the anti-Christian influences of public schools, attended by many impressionable and unprepared Christian children for six hours a day, 180 days a year for 12 or 13 formative years,” Unruh noted. “They"re exposed to LGBT teachings, evolution, a revisionist form of American history, Islam and worse.”

Dobson recently blasted Disney and its latest cinematic rendition of Beauty and the Beast for promoting the same LGBT agenda taught in the public schools.

“I know that this isn"t the culturally acceptable thing to say – I know I will be labeled a ‘bigot" by the true bigots of the mainstream media for believing in the Bible"s definition of marriage – but we are way past cowering under the pressure of LGBTQ advocates,” Dobson proclaimed in a “Culture Watch” warning he issued on his site last month. “As a father, a counselor and a Christian, I will stand by what I believe – for the sake of our families and our children.”

Teaching God"s way

Insisting that Christians cannot discount what the Bible says about instruction, Moore maintains that parents must assume their roles as being primarily responsible for the education of their children.

“There"s a scriptural pattern,” the retired military chaplain, who served as a lieutenant colonel. “The Bible"s clear the Scripture assigns the education of children to the family with assistance from the church – not the government.”

Despite the common contention that many parents make – that they are sending their young children into public schools to be God"s light – Moore has reservations about prematurely sending youngsters into the frontlines to engage in spiritual warfare on public school campuses – where they are extremely outnumbered by the enemy, which has recruited countless godless teachers, administrators and students.

“[V]ery young children are not equipped,” insisted Moore, who also serves as the president of Frontline Ministries.

He went on to urge Christians to take advantage of the break Christians got through the November election – one that has caused the Democrats" Leftist agenda to lose some momentum.

“If we don"t change the way we do education, we"ll lose the country,” Moore impressed. “I"m 73, and those coming behind us do not agree with their own parents.”

Looking at the progressive tide that swept American education during the Obama administration, Moore says that the battle is still on for the hearts and souls of America"s youth inside the schoolhouse gate.

“We believe you can make a case with data that the main reason the culture and the next generation are turning away from traditional values – from the Gospel, from Christianity – is primarily because of the indoctrination of the public-school system,” Moore expressed.

Christians buying in to a lie …

Moore is concerned that many evangelical parents have gullibly jumped on board with public schools and share the belief that the system is working to educate and develop America"s children for the better good of the nation.

“... State-controlled children"s ‘education" … is there anything more warmly regarded by the typical American?” he sarcastically pondered in a piece he published on Exodus Mandate last month. “Right outta the Communist Manifesto, yet adored and defended by most professing conservatives in America. Built plainly upon the satanic approach to the pursuit of knowledge, yet adored and defended by most professing Christians in America.”

Moore contended that Christians should be looking in the mirror when pointing the finger of blame for their children following a wayward path in their spiritual walk.

“I know … I know … it"s Common Core! … Nuh-uh. It"s not the Democrats, the liberals, or even Common Core… It"s the Christians, ” he insisted. “We are, as always, the greatest enablers of the enemy. We are the most compliant tools in Satan"s quest to mold the minds and worldviews of our own children.”

He explained that Christians are often found defending the schools more than their own faith.

“America seems to be happily plunging itself and its children into the tyranny of Statism – primarily because professing Christians have proudly led the way,” Moore continued. “Rather than lead the culture in repentance and tearing down the enemy stronghold that is the satanic, State-controlled children"s ‘education" system, it is professing Christians who are among the most vocal and ardent defenders of this child-eating, culture-corrupting abomination.”

The Christian expert on education points out that believers have grown too comfortable with the school system introducing anti-Christian teachings to their children day in and day out in the classroom – doing little to nothing to counteract the attack on their children"s faith by teachers and their curriculum.

“While there"s little left to wonder as to why unbelievers would buy into and strive to prop up the satanic lies at the foundation of the system feeding on the minds and souls of our young, what of the professing Church?” he pondered. “What of professing Christians? Why are we so into the satanic spin on the pursuit of knowledge?”

Moore maintains that Christians have rolled out the red carpet for public schools to undermine their children"s faith without realizing the detrimental spiritual effect such an influence has on students.

“The answers to that question are rooted in understanding that the professing Christian subculture in America has been radically reshaped through many decades of multigenerational rebellion against God – often in the name of patriotism, love, and even Christianity itself,” he added.” This open rebellion has been going on for so long that it is now invisible to the vast majority of professing Christians in America. It is the new normal of American culture because it first became the new normal of the professing Christian American subculture.”

Moore exhorted Christians to acknowledge the enemy and engage in the battle on behalf of their children before the war for their souls is lost. He encourages parents to take the education of their children into their own hands … and under God"s influence.

“We can"t even begin to slay this dragon if we won"t face it head-on,” Moore stressed. “We can"t find the answers if we won"t ask the questions. And we can"t credibly claim to be true disciples of Christ if we will not seriously strive to learn and obey all that He has commanded … including His many detailed pronouncements on the subject of children"s education – it"s all on us.”

He ended by calling Christians to take action and not sit idly by as the enemy works through the Leftist propaganda in the schools to claim their children.

“The minds and souls of our children, grandchildren and generations to come thereafter are hanging in the balance,” Moore concluded. “Now what are we going to do about it?”

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Why We Educate At Home, a discussion of the Classical Education Method

The Smithsonian Institution’s recipe for genius and leadership:

(1) children should spend a great deal of time with loving, educationally minded parents;

(2) children should be allowed a lot of free exploration; and

(3) children should have little to no association with peers outside of family and relatives. --H. McCurdy

My husband and I have no qualms about our style of parenting, which is so tied up in home education. He grew up beside his father in a greenhouse. Our first apartment at 500 sq ft, had 31 houseplants in it. He now works as a landscape designer. So we understand this analogy: Children are like little plants. You take the seed and put it in a little cup of the best topsoil. You give it lots of light. You gently sprinkle it with drops of water so the delicate leaves aren"t broken. When it gets a decent root system, you transplant it to a bigger pot. You protect it from the wind and the hottest sun. You bring it in when there"s a freeze. You don"t put it out where the dog will trample it or a deer will eat the buds. When its well-established, and the season is right, you can transplant it finally to its place outside your home. Then it will do well on its own in the downpours and coldest winters.

So we plan to raise our children, protecting them and ensuring they are firmly established before they go out into the world. It is our hope that they do much better at surviving their relationships and careers with such a secure beginning. Our family follows the Classical Education model. I use the book, "The Well-Trained Mind" as the base for our curriculum. The basic premise of the classical method is the breakdown of education into three sections which each build on each other. First is the Grammar stage, generally 1st-4th grades, in which a child"s curiosity is encouraged by just stuffing them full of images and facts. The next stage is the Logic stage, generally 5th- 8th grades, where an adolescent begins to find the answers to the how and why of what they learned in the Grammar stage. Last is the Rhetoric stage, in which 9th -12th graders learn how to coherently express what they have learned. In Classical Education, all learning follows history as its base and the other subjects work around it. In addition, a student goes over the same material three times in his education (cycling through the material once in each stage). An example of this is our reading material. Ideally, it should be exciting to entrance and interest the first grader, in-depth for the questioning fifth grader, and even more interesting and in depth for the ninth grader. In our home, I buy books on a fifth grade level to read to our first grader, and when we cycle back to the same material in the fifth grade, they read it for themselves, and in ninth grade they read source material. For example, I read The Trojan War and the 12 Labors of Hercules to my first grader. All of my children were enthralled. There were no pictures except those that streamed through their imaginations. Then, when we return to ancient history in the fifth grade, she will curl up on the couch and read about Hercules on her own. This time she"ll learn that mom edited out the reason why he was assigned the 12 tasks: he killed his wife and children in a drunken rage. Then, when she returns again to the ancients in the ninth grade, she won"t be intimidated by reading Homer"s Illiad itself in the poetic original version. What"s to be afraid of, when you"re already familiar with the times and places? Also, when she was taught astronomy in the second grade, she already knew the story behind the crab-shaped constellation, from last year when she saw Hercules toss him into the sky in her mind"s eye.

I was looking at a book from a series aimed at second-graders, called Junie B. Jones. It is listed on reading lists for this age group- yet it has sentences starting with conjunctions and fragments on every page. It has adjectives like bestest. It frequently says me and her. On a whim I looked up classical literature for this age group. I found rough breakdowns of classical literature by grade level. One example was The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. The first five sentences in The Velveteen Rabbit had an average of 29.2 words in each sentence. The first five sentences of Junie B. Jones and her Big Fat Mouth had an average of 5.4 words per sentence.

An example of one of the more complex sentences which I found in JBJ & her Big Fat Mouth was "Eating things that you find on the ground is very, very dangerous." I gave it another try and found "That"s because I had tingling excitement in me about Job Day." In addition to using more complex sentence structure, Williams does not pare down her vocabulary to meet the child reader. Look how this sentence from The Velveteen Rabbit teaches the meaning of the word superior: "The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real." JBJ is so full of incorrect grammar and simple sentences because it is written from the point of view of a modern first-grader, who would actually speak like that (unfortunately) and have simple interactions. However, there are quite a few older books, written in a different time, from the point of view of a five-year-old (Heidi, Little House series). They are also more complex and descriptive and are much preferred to modern books written for our young people.

Another difference found in the Classical Education model is the emphasis of the use of whole books instead of readers. In public schools today, segments of books are printed in textbooks with summary questions at the end. The publisher chops the most exciting or pertinent portions of a work out, puts it in the textbook, and asks directed questions which can be answered by that portion. Then we wonder later why kids can"t dig through a whole book and find themes when it is not spelled out to them!

I encourage you to challenge your child"s reading level by not feeding them Goosebumps or Sweet Valley High, Babysitter"s Club, or such books. Yes, your child is reading, but she is not really being challenged when she only reads about familiar locales in familiar phrasing. Always read what is a little difficult, not playground conversation in written form. When I was in middle school I really enjoyed the Sackett series by Louis L"Amour. A few of them are written from the point of view of a young girl. They give excellent images of early backwoods Eastern America. They encourage determination, hard work, overcoming obstacles, honesty, trustworthiness, gumption, and a host of other excellent qualities.

Those are virtues I would hope that any parent would like to see cultivated in their child. But because educating at home is solely the responsibility of the parents, these are especially crucial. As homeschoolers, we have great freedom to

-do our schoolwork wherever we want
-wear whatever we want
-go at whatever pace we choose
-drop work we already know
-spend extra time on topics we love
-do our work whenever we want
-take breaks or work through

But these freedoms give us responsibilities that families with children in regular schools don"t carry. They aren"t held accountable for what is (or isn"t) learned. They don"t have to be personally disciplined to cover the material or lessons themselves. They have an outside authority taking care of all that, who will be held accountable in a public forum. As home educators, we have to force ourselves take care of the objectives. We meet the goals which we set for ourselves, or we don"t. No one else will come in and check on us. We have to be responsible for our own education, and that means getting the work done and then doing the playing. So traits like persistence, responsibility, determination, honesty and the ability to do hard work are instilled in each work day, as much as math, science, history or English skills are. Unlike those who defer the education of their children to others, we are able and willing to drop the spelling lesson and address the poor attitude. We can put the multiplication drills on hold until the whining is under control. We can give time to grieve a lost grandparent before expecting academic performance to continue on uninterrupted. There are many, many reasons why we have chosen to educate our children at home. These are just a few.

New private Christian college seeks to revolutionize Christian higher education | South Florida Times

Religion News Service

BOSTON – Sattler College, a Christian university founded in 2016, has opened enrollment for its inaugural class, which will begin studies in Fall 2018.

Sattler College is on a mission to dramatically transform the Christian higher education system by providing students with rigorous academics and Christian discipleship at a fraction of the cost of most colleges.

Located in the heart of Boston, the private Christian college has faculty that were previously trained at some of the most prestigious universities across the nation including Harvard and Stanford.

“During my time as an advisor and instructor at Harvard, I saw many students leave unprepared for life beyond academics and others lose their faith,” said Dr. Finny Kuruvilla, founder of Sattler College. “Realizing this occurs at universities across the nation, I felt led to start Sattler College as an alternative education option for Christian families.”

In addition to his work with Harvard, Kuruvilla received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from the university.

He also holds a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Furthermore, Kuruvilla is the cofounder, managing partner and a portfolio manager at Eventide Asset Management, LLC.

Together with the Sattler College board, Kuruvilla modeled the four-year Christian college after classical Christian education principles. In its introductory year, the college is offering bachelor"s degrees in biblical studies, human biology, business, history and computer science.

In addition to course studies specific to their major, students will be required to take Bible courses including Old and New Testament, apologetics, biblical Greek and Hebrew, as well as church history.

“We want our students to be well-rounded and see this as an opportunity to help them grow in their faith through study and mentorship,” said Kuruvilla. “Our goal is to train the next generation of students to be great disciples of Jesus.”

In addition to being committed to providing students with a quality education, Sattler College is making higher education more affordable and accessible than other universities.

Tuition at Sattler College is around $9,000 per year, a fraction of the $33,480 on average required to attend other private universities. Additionally, the school is offering its inaugural class one year of no tuition.

“We have been blessed to start with no debt, which allows us to in turn bless our students. Many college students graduate from schools not only poorly prepared for their career but with over $37,000 in loans, making it impossible for them to be successful,” Kuruvilla said. “We want students to graduate with strong job skills and not be saddled with debt.”

Those interested in applying can find out more at SattlerCollege.org/apply.