Joy Pullman writes for The Federalist website about a form of instruction that stands apart from Common Core public school standards.
Ridgeview is a classical school, where children learn phonics, traditional math and science, Latin, and the Western and American heritage. They study the great books and receive explicit instruction in art and music. In other words, they study the real liberal arts: what centuries of Western leaders, including America’s founders, have considered necessary instruction for free men who govern themselves.
Because it’s a public charter school started and managed by a board of local parents, students attend for free—if they can get in. U.S. News and World Report consistently ranks Ridgeview’s high school among the best in the state and nation, based on test scores faculty consider a joke because the tests measure disjointed collections of factoids.
“We went the charter route [instead of starting a private school] because we believed everybody should have access to a good public education, and is capable of it,” said Peggy Schunk, a mother who helped found the school and who now runs the school’s admissions and human resources.
As the true liberal arts evaporate from college campuses, they are blooming within younger soil. Terrence Moore, Ridgeview’s founding principal, now travels the nation starting other schools modeled after Ridgeview for an initiative spearheaded by Hillsdale College (my alma mater). The newly released third edition of “Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America” succinctly details classical education and its recent boom, which includes the Hillsdale-supported charters and others, as well as a spike in classical private and home schools.
In the Common Core era, many parents have taken to classical education for respite, opening new schools public and private and flocking to homeschooling organizations such as Classical Conversations (disclosure: my son attends a CC co-op, and my husband ran one for two years). Catholics, Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelicals have in recent years started and expanded societies for classical learning that offer teacher training, curriculum, publications, and seminars.
