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Charles Glenn

Ashley BernerBlog GuestCommentary and OpinionCourse ChoiceCustomizationEducation EquityEducation ResearchFeaturedParental ChoicePrivate SchoolsSchool Choice

Why curriculum matters for private schools

Ashley Berner April 28, 2020
Ashley Berner

Editor’s note: This commentary from Ashley Berner, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, is the third of a four-part series that examines the importance of high-quality materials for state leaders, schools, and parents.

Family background dictates a hefty portion of students’ academic outcomes (samples from the voluminous literature here, here, and here). It isn’t a shock to find out that kids from well-resourced homes out-score their less advantaged peers on standardized tests and high-school completion rates.

We all hope for schools that nullify the predicted trajectory, that push against the odds and facilitate social mobility. But because these schools are sadly a rarity, the field debates whether we should put our education reform eggs in the school-improvement, charter, and choice baskets, or rather into funding to diminish economic and social disparities.  

But two factors lie more firmly within schools’ control: curriculum and school culture. The two previous columns focused on current research and policy with respect to curriculum, with an emphasis on state leadership. I want to focus in this column on why curriculum should matter to private schools, particularly those with a religious framework.

Why should private school leaders take a fearless inventory of their curriculum, with a focus on the knowledge-building it offers and the quality with which it does so? For some leaders, learning that a knowledge-rich curriculum manifestly benefits students is a persuasive reason. They’re all in and want to know if their own school’s curriculum measures up. Others are not convinced, and to them, I offer at least three reasons why the exercise is worth undertaking.

First, they would be joining the most forward-looking and effective district and charter schools, many of which are surging ahead in achievement as a result. Progress is uneven, of course, but many state and district leaders are placing big bets on high-quality curriculum and instruction. Look at Duval County’s implementation of Eureka Math, Core Knowledge Language Arts, and Expeditionary Learning; Baltimore City Public Schools’ adoption of Wit & Wisdom; and Chicago Public Schools’ success with International Baccalaureate.

A knowledge-rich curriculum is a signature of high-performing charter networks, too, from Success Academy and Public Prep in New York, to Great Hearts, IDEA, and BASIS in the South and Southwest. These district and charter school systems offer potentially life-changing educational experiences to some of our nation’s least advantaged children. Even in states with generous private-school scholarship funding, do private schools want to fall behind, perhaps forever?

Second, parents really do care about academic content. It is true that first-generation families care first and foremost about school safety. But that is not the final word.

Patrick J. Wolf, distinguished professor of education policy and 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, is the scholar of record on the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in Washington, D.C. – a voucher plan that helps a modest number of families send their children to private schools. His five-year study (here and here) found that what parents wanted for their children changed over time. Initially, they wanted a safe school that their children enjoyed. Over time, however, they came to want more: academic attainment, college preparedness and intellectual depth. Their vocabulary and focus changed. A better environment alone does not suffice.

 That parents care about academics comes out in other studies, too, such as a 2018 national survey conducted by Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities (FADICA). The organization found a link between parents’ perceptions that some Catholic schools did not provide sufficient intellectual heft, and low enrollment rates. And when Education Next’s 2019 nationally representative survey asked, “How much should schools focus on student academic performance versus student social and emotional wellbeing,” parents from all demographic backgrounds gave a resounding preference for academics – in some groups, by a ratio of 2:1.

Finally, and critically for religious schools, a robust worldview and a challenging curriculum need not stand in opposition. This is a point of contention in some religious circles. The debate comes down to whether knowledge that lies outside of a tradition’s sacred text(s) is viewed as part of the sacred order (and therefore good), or outside of it (and therefore damaging).

This is a complex issue. There is substantial variability between and especially within religious traditions. Most religious traditions celebrate the pursuit of the mind and view “reason” as a divine gift (for a small sample of a vast literature, see here, here, here, and here). This becomes a priority that influences these communities’ schools and accrediting bodies. Many religious schools, in other words, take a “high” view of intellectual formation and emphasize a rigorous liberal arts approach.

Other religious groups and their schools do not. As Mark Noll famously put it in 1994, “The scandal of the Evangelical mind is that there is not much of an Evangelical mind.” (He wrote not only as an eminent scholar but also as an Evangelical.) This skepticism can translate into a belief that non-Biblical, non-sacred texts are inherently wicked, or even to an overt rejection of academic success.

As a person of faith and a scholar of educational systems, it pains me to see religious “worldview” as an excuse for academically thin curricula and instruction. Our institute at Johns Hopkins reviews English, social studies, and soon science, materials for their depth and rigor. Among the explicitly religious curricula we have examined are some resources that we find poorly written and shockingly weak on academic content. What will be the consequences for children who graduate from institutions that choose these curricula?

Research suggests that many of them will be helpful contributors to society and law-abiding citizens. But what opportunities will have been foreclosed to them along the way? Which doors will have remained not only closed, but not even perceived? Religious school leaders, I would submit, have an obligation to provide not only spiritual formation but access to beauty, profundity, excellence – alongside the capacity to debate and critique artifacts that are deemed unworthy according to their particular tradition.

Most religious schools in other countries do this as a matter of course. In the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, most provinces of Canada, Indonesia, Israel, Sweden and France (to name a few), governments fund non-state schools generously and hold them accountable for academic results. These pluralistic systems separate schools’ ethos, which vary profoundly, from academic content, which should not. The most significant scholar of educational pluralism, Boston University Wheelock College of Education professor emeritus Charles Glenn, describes how school systems around the world thread the ethos and content needle here.

Of course, curricula are not morally neutral; all information is learned and interpreted through specific lenses, whether explicit or tacit. Some plural systems (the Netherlands is the most obvious example) fund curricular materials that are worldview specific and that also convey content deemed necessary for an educated citizenry.

Unlike many of our democratic peers, the United States will never have a common curriculum at the national or even at the state level. This does not mean, however, that religious schools should de-value intellectual knowledge-building, explicitly or implicitly. There are reasons (including religious reasons) to take knowledge seriously.

Read Ashley Berner’s previous posts in this series here and here. 

 

April 28, 2020 1 comment
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Charter SchoolsSchool Choice

Why America is behind Europe on educational freedom

Charles Glenn December 22, 2015
Charles Glenn

ChoiceAroundTheWorld_FINALThe United States ranks among the lowest of Western democracies in governmental support for educational freedom, and particularly for the right of parents to select schools that correspond to their own religious convictions.  This principle, explicitly included in the international human rights covenants, is supported through public funding of faith-based schools in dozens of countries, including almost all members of the European Union. Despite voucher, tax credit, or educational savings account programs in a number of states, educational freedom is by no means the norm in the United States as it is in most comparable nations.

Although the rate of religious practice is considerably higher in the United States than it is in Europe, we have been much slower to recognize in a practical way the religious-freedom right of parents to make decisions about the schools their children attend, and to do so without financial penalty. School choice, a luxury for most American families, is taken for granted by Danish or French or Swedish or Spanish families. In the Netherlands, for example, only about 30 percent of children attend what we would call “public” schools, while the majority attend Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, or Hindu schools that are fully funded by government. 

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December 22, 2015 0 comment
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Blog AdministrationCatholic SchoolsCourtsPrivate SchoolsReligious EducationTax Credit ScholarshipsVouchers

Guest post: States shouldn’t be forced to fund religious schools

Special to redefinED June 28, 2013
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: Alex J. Luchenitser is associate legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and lead counsel for the plaintiffs challenging New Hampshire’s tuition tax-credit program.

Luchenitser

Luchenitser

In a June 24 blog entry, Charles Glenn attacks a recent New Hampshire state-court decision declaring the state’s tuition tax-credit program to be unconstitutional to the extent that it funds religious schools. Dr. Glenn argues that this ruling amounts to “religious discrimination” that should be struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. His arguments, however, reflect a misreading of history, and they have already – and rightly – been rejected by the Supreme Court.

The New Hampshire Constitution strictly prohibits the diversion of tax funds to religious education. Well aware of this, the New Hampshire legislature passed the tax-credit program in an effort to circumvent the constitutional prohibition. The state court saw through this scheme, correctly concluding that there is no practical difference between using direct appropriations to fund private-school scholarships and using tax credits to do so.

Dr. Glenn contends the 1877 constitutional provision on which the state court relied was motivated by anti-Catholic animus. But the historical record belies this claim. The same constitutional convention that approved the constitutional provision in question also approved the removal from the state constitution of two clauses that had discriminated in favor of Protestants and against Catholics.

Regardless of what may have happened a century and a quarter ago, the New Hampshire constitution today neither allows anti-Catholic discrimination nor has such an effect. The state constitution was amended in 1968 to make clear that discrimination among religious groups is prohibited. And only 15 percent of scholarship applicants under New Hampshire’s tax-credit program wanted to use their scholarships at Catholic schools.

Dr. Glenn attempts to bootstrap his unsuccessful allegation of anti-Catholicism to support a significantly different argument – that allowing public funding of secular but not religious education “discriminates” against religion. This argument has been soundly and repeatedly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, however. In a 2004 decision, Locke v. Davey, a quite conservative Supreme Court ruled by a 7–2 vote that a state can constitutionally prohibit the use of university scholarships for theological study, while allowing them to be used for secular education. The high court issued four similar rulings between 1972 and 1974.

What Dr. Glenn seeks is nothing other than a complete reversal of one of our most fundamental constitutional traditions.

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June 28, 2013 5 comments
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Blog AdministrationEducation ResearchPolicy WonksReligious EducationSchool Choice

It’s the school, not the curriculum, that fosters real citizenship

Charles Glenn July 17, 2012
Charles Glenn

Editor’s note: Critics often suggest that expanding school choice to include private, faith-based schools will erode democracy. But noted school choice expert Charles Glenn says the evidence shows the opposite – that students are more likely to become engaged citizens if they attend schools where they feel a sense of belonging.

Jan De Groof and I are just finishing up the new edition, in four volumes, of “Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education,” with chapters on 60 countries by experts from those countries. The first volume will consist of essays by a number of authors, each looking at one theme across the many nations. I just finished my contribution, on government-prescribed values in curriculum (it’s attached below), and thought I would share a somewhat surprising finding:

They seem to make very little difference.

It is very common, I found, for governments to prescribe in detail how schools should promote citizenship and human rights. It is also common (though not universal) for governments to make provision for religious education in public schools, usually with an opt-out provision and sometimes with a choice between different religious traditions.  When I compared these requirements with the results of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study of 38 countries, however, I found little indication that they had an effect on the attitudes of the adolescents surveyed.

To get specific: In the Czech Republic, “at secondary school considerable attention may be given to topics such as citizenship, European citizenship, globalization, environmentalism and multiculturalism.” In Malta, there are unusually extensive curriculum requirements, insisting that “schools should serve as a testing ground for democracy in keeping with the declarations and treaties signed by Malta in the past, and with the constitutional obligations of the country. As key institutions within civil society, schools should foster among their students respect for others, and for the right of other people to enjoy freedom, peace, security and the benefits of a society governed by law and order. In a society that is increasingly becoming multi-cultural, the educational system should enable students to develop a sense of respect, co-operation, and solidarity among cultures.” In Latvia, schools are expected to foster “the development of a responsible, tolerant and democratic citizen of the state and Europe, as well as instilling the opinion that human life is the highest value.”

But countries that articulate such standards are not necessarily those in which human rights are most consistently respected. The ICCS survey found eighth graders in the Czech Republic, Latvia and Malta were considerably less likely than the average of other countries to express support for equal rights for ethnic and racial groups.

The same disconnect is evident when we look at countries like England that mandate religious education in public schools and yet have far lower rates of religious belief and practice than do the United States, which forbid it.

In short, the prescription, by government, of value-laden curriculum objectives does not seem effective, and indeed I argue in my essay that government control or intrusive oversight can work against its intended purpose, by cultivating a passivity on the part of teachers and students alike that is anything but a model of engaged citizenship.

Let me explain that a little.

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July 17, 2012 0 comment
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Blog AdministrationPolicy WonksReligious Education

In America and abroad, no reason to fear faith-based schools

Charles Glenn June 29, 2012
Charles Glenn

Editor’s note: America isn’t the only place where school choice raises questions about not only education, but pluralism, citizenship and social integration. Noted school choice expert Charles Glenn, a Boston University professor and American Center for School Choice associate, writes that European countries with far more evolved choice systems continue to wrestle with these issues – but have no reason to fear faith-based schools.

Early in June I was one of the speakers at a conference on educational freedom in The Netherlands and Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). It is no exaggeration to say these are the poster children of “school choice,” the two areas where its implications have been worked out most fully over the past two centuries (see my Contrasting Models of State and School, Continuum, 2011). Today, upwards of two-thirds of pupils in this area of some 23 million inhabitants attend non-government schools with full public funding.

Much of the discussion among the participants was about the details of how schools have been able – or not – to preserve their independence in the face of government regulation. I will not try to summarize that discussion here, except to note that as always the devil is in the details and we can learn a great deal from the experience over many decades of the interaction between schools seeking to maintain a distinctive religious or pedagogical character and government officials seeking to impose common standards. (The updated 2012 edition of Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education will include, in four volumes, detailed descriptions of how this relationship plays out in nearly 60 countries, most of them written by leading education law experts from each country, including these two.)

My own contribution at the conference was to raise openly what is beginning to be debated in Belgium and The Netherlands: is educational freedom still relevant, given changing circumstances? Is there still a need for schools not owned and operated by government and promoting worldviews that are in contrast with that of the societal majority? And, is the growing societal pluralism created by immigration an argument for or against such schools? Some, in fact, have claimed that the justification for non-public schools no longer exists because (a) some of them have ceased offering a truly distinctive education as a result of secularization, and (b) to the extent that they actually distinctive, they are a barrier to the social integration required in the face of the growing presence of Muslims in Western Europe.

My paper confronted head-on the widespread fear, among European elites, of strongly-held religious views, and argued that in fact “communities of conviction” make an essential contribution to the health of civil society. I cited research on faith-based schools in the United States to show they have by no means had a divisive effect or made their students unfit for active and positive citizenship.

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June 29, 2012 1 comment
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Blog AdministrationEducation and Public PolicySchool Choice

A look into Constrasting Models of State and School Choice

Adam Emerson November 23, 2011
Adam Emerson

RedefinED contributor and American Center for School Choice associate Ashley Berner has reviewed Boston University professor Charles Glenn’s newest book and look into comparative school choice policy, Constrasting Models of State and School Choice. Berner, the Oxford-educated co-director of the Moral Foundations of Education Project, takes to The Hedgehog Review, where the full review can be found:

Educational philosophy asks four distinct but related questions: What is the purpose of education? What is the nature of the child? What is the role of the teacher? And, finally, where does authority about these matters rest? Charles L. Glenn’s book focuses on the fourth question, that of the political philosophies that underwrite distinctive educational systems. Hovering in the background of Glenn’s work, of course, are the first three questions—those that concern the nature of the child, the aims of education, and the teachers’ authority—for it is disagreement about these things that necessitates the political arguments in the first place.

November 23, 2011 1 comment
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Blog AdministrationCatholic SchoolsEducation and Public PolicyPolicy WonksReligious EducationSchool Choice

As in the 19th century, the language of passion takes over the language of reason

Adam Emerson October 26, 2011
Adam Emerson

Among the newest contributors to redefinED is Boston University professor Charles Glenn, an expert on educational history and comparative policy who last summer served as a witness in the court challenge to Douglas County’s school voucher pilot. His testimony showcased not only the 19th-century American history of providing public educations funds to religious schools and institutions, it notably shined a spotlight on the attacks Catholics faced when Colorado adopted its Blaine Amendment.

In direct examination and in a chapter from his forthcoming book introduced as evidence, Glenn points to the perceived “Catholic menace” in Colorado as the state convened its Constitutional Convention in 1875. The scaremongering of that time led some Catholic leaders to call not only for a Catholic voice in the convention, but a voice for reason and deliberation. And no one made that plea more eloquently than Bishop Joseph Projectus Machebeuf.

Machebeuf, who insisted that Catholics would remain loyal to the State of Colorado and that their rights as citizens should be respected, sent a message to convention delegates urging them to let future legislatures deal with the question of “separate schools and denominational education,” not engrave the answer into a constitutional clause. His reason: emotions were running too hot:

… the question itself has never been fully and dispassionately discussed in this country, and can not be said to have been discussed at all in Colorado. We have had, so far as I am informed, nothing said on our side of the question in your honorable body … So far, both in this country at large and in Colorado, the language of passion has been more often uttered than that of reason … The present is no time for the exposition of the arguments in favor of denominational schools. But we look forward hopefully to the future. A day shall at last dawn – surely it shall – when the passions of this hour will have subsided; when the exigencies of partisan politics will no longer stand in the way of right and justice, and political and religious equality shall again seem the heritage of the American citizen.

That day has not yet come. Indeed, the hearing during which Glenn testified resulted in a permanent injunction against the Douglas County voucher effort. Glenn writes, “Were he alive today, Bishop Machebeuf would no doubt be surprised and disappointed to learn that (unlike every other Western democracy) the United States still maintains barriers against reasoned deliberation about the merits of schooling that responds to the choices of parents. It is striking how, whether in Massachusetts, or Colorado, or in federal court litigation, opponents of making faith-based schooling available to parents without financial penalty seek to remove this issue from the sphere of democratic decision-making.”

October 26, 2011 0 comment
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Blog AdministrationEducation and Public PolicyJack CoonsParent EmpowermentSchool Choice

A new era, and a new partner, for redefinED

Special to redefinED October 11, 2011
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: As redefinED enters its second year of publication, it has joined an alliance with the American Center for School Choice. Its first post comes from Fawn Spady, the Center’s chairwoman, and Stephen D. Sugarman, its vice chairman.

Today the American Center for School Choice begins its exciting partnership with redefinED in a joint effort to focus attention on the importance of empowering parents with the authority to educate their children. The mission of the American Center for School Choice, advocating expansion of public support for families to choose the schools they believe will best serve their children, is rooted in two basic propositions:

  • The education of the child is a fundamental responsibility of the family
  • Enabling parents to choose the school that will best help them to fulfill this responsibility will strengthen families, schools, and communities

The American Center supports the work of the many fine organizations advocating for education reform based on expanding the power of consumers in the educational marketplace and the need for greatly improved academic outcomes. The movement has won significant political victories, but also experienced many defeats.

Our organization’s name was intentionally selected because we believe a strong political center and consequently a broad coalition for school choice exists in a focus on parental empowerment. In placing families first, the Center’s perspective creates a unique and powerful opportunity to expand support for school choice to include greater numbers of political centrists, religious leaders, social justice advocates, and ordinary citizens who are either uninformed or uninspired by current educational reform debates.

Ultimately, we need to create and support good schools of all types to serve the diversity of our population’s needs. We want to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities, including inter- and intra-district choice of public schools, choice through public charter schools, and choice of private and religious schools through publicly funded scholarship and tax credit programs. The American Center for School Choice believes that expanding support for families to choose public, private, or religious schools for their children is a civic and moral imperative.

The Center’s primary activity is education. All families, but especially low-income parents and students who have not been well served historically, benefit when they select the school that they believe will best serve their children. The Center has utilized a variety of media and forums to provide information and analyses to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities. In partnering with redefinED, we have found a kindred spirit where great synergy exists.

Our board, associates, and staff will be regularly contributing their thoughts on where we are, where we hope to go next, and how best to get there. In addition to us, you will hear from Jack Coons, Charles Glenn, Gloria Romero, Terry Moe, Darla Romfo, Alan Bonsteel, Rick Garnett, and others in our network. We all look forward to joining and stimulating ongoing thoughtful and respectful exchanges that have marked redefined since its beginning.

October 11, 2011 0 comment
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